I came. I saw. I presented.
And I did a good job too!
The conference was pretty cool. I was a little like a kid in a energy techie's candy land. It was less of an academic university level conference and seemed more on the industry and commercial side of things. I thought that was great since I get to see academic stuff all the time, but I don't really know what's going on commercial-wise. There was mostly solar businesses, and I've never seen so many photo-voltaic cells and solar water heaters in one hall before.
So here's a highlight of the really cool available to the public technologies right now:
Photo-voltaic cells are not exactly ground breaking, but they are definitely cheaper than they used to be. While using them to create electricity in Arizona, even on a private home scale, does save money, it's only because of tax subsidies offered by the federal and state government. At this point, prices for the private homeowner can be as low as $2.50 per Watt and the industry is still trying to push it to that $1 per Watt mark before it becomes close to being cheaper than the grid. Typical solar panel energy conversion efficiency currently hovers around 15%.
FAVORITE:
Solar Heaters and Coolers: I knew you can use solar energy to heat water. Two things I didn't know:
One, some of these nifty water heaters, which are in fact definitely a cheaper alternative to electrical water heating, look like awesome long clear-blue-ish tubes with a metallic spiral thing on the inside. Like some sort of sci-fi futuristic energy cell to power a spaceship. Easily and readily available to the public, and I'd say the perfects geek's cool-factor addition to the roof.
Two, apparently, while nobody has built this thing for small scale private homes, they have these heating/cooling equipment, where the water is solar heated to very hot steam (a couple hundred degrees Celsius), and correspondingly, I guess a working fluid or refrigerant, is cooled to provide cooling and air conditioning to large halls and buildings (large as in stadiums, indoor malls, etc.) I will not get thermodynamically technical here, as this blog is just a quick fun overview. Though I can explain in a simple way if you're interested.
The awesome-ness of this idea is (if someone could in fact economically shrink it down to small scale residential possibilities, that someone would become very very rich with an appropriate patent) that you can use all that summer heat and sun to cool down your house, alleviating the need for electricity. This is incredible, because what exactly needs the most electricity around the house: Water heaters, washing machines, dishwashers, A/C and refrigerators. The first three, use a lot of electricity mainly to heat water, with a solar water heat, problem solved. Scratch that off the bill. With this little piece of technology, it would also be possible to remove the need for electrical consumption in A/Cs and refrigerators because you no long need it to cool stuff. All that would be required at the home scale, is a small amount of supplemental electricity to run some fans or motors in machines here and there, maybe a pump and to run your TV's and computers. A solar panel, or the grid can easily supplement that. I find this even more important for countries like Lebanon, where the grid is not very dependable and there's plenty of spring, summer, and fall sunshine.
A very big hot-topic at the conference presentations, though not in the technical/business fair, is thermal/energy storage, which happens to be the topic of my thesis. There around 3 different sessions just for thermal storage, and that wasn't the only kind of energy storage there was!
All in all, it was kind of nice to meet and talk with some professionals and engineers in the field, and get a feel for what is it really that I keep studying and working on. I suddenly find myself thinking, I want to stop studying, go out there, and DO useful things like that.
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