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Category Archives: Going Green

Village Women, Solar Engineers – The Barefoot Movement

23 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by EngineerChic in Development, Going Green, Sustainability

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Solar Engineers

I absolutely LOVE  http://www.TED .com

This is my pick of the week:

Bunker Roy: Learning from a barefoot movement

The speaker shares the idea of a barefoot college in India – where the students are the teachers, and the teachers are the students – where there are no degrees or certificates – where community knowledge and wisdom of the people is shared and utilised – where illiterate women are solar engineers – these echo my experiences with working in communities in South Africa.

People living in the worst conditions, on under a dollar a day are some of the most ingenious, creative and inventive people you will encounter…because they have to be! They will surprise you with the solutions they come up with to things we take for granted.

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Smart-grid whiz kids wow DC

24 Sunday Apr 2011

Posted by EngineerChic in Engineering Research - Yummy Yummy!, Going Green, Sustainability

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Engineer-Chic is going GREEN today.

I absolutely love hearing about young engineers achieving amazing technological advances. Without a doubt, energy is the HOTTEST topic in the engineering world right now and will be for a while to come. With peak oil looming and the remainder of the world’s fossil fuels reserves becoming increasingly difficult to extract (and of course the effect of fossil fuels on global warming), developed and developing nations alike have been scrambling for alternate fuel sources to ensure their prosperity into the future.

We’ve all heard of solar, wind and other forms of renewable energy, but simply switching over to these is highly impractical (costly and risky as these depend on weather conditions etc.). Engineers have realised that we will need a combination of these alternate energy sources to supplement our existing energy grid as we gradually (as technology advances), switch over to full renewable energy sources. Also, new technology is able to monitor the energy usage of your home and turn off certain appliances that you never use, channeling it elsewhere in the grid for more efficient usage! The problem comes in controlling all of this.
Enter the smart-grid!

So, remember a few posts back I mentioned the Ecohawks and that AWESOME and super-sexy smart-grid they were building? This group of students from the university of Kansas’s  smart-grid (above) has a solar panel, wind turbine and battery pack attached to a popcorn maker. The grid is designed to prioritise the renewable energy-source that is most effective at the time, (wind when its windy, solar when the suns out) and charge the battery when the device is resting. Itsincredibly complex system of control is the true heart of this project. The great things is that this device may well be the future of energy for most of us worldwide! (Canada is already using it).

The Ecohawks they presented their project at the P3 (People, Prosperity and Planet) finals in Washington DC last week and got an honourable mention!

______________________________________________________________

WELL DONE ECOHAWKS! 

Engineer-Chic LIKES Green Initiatives that are 

SUSTAINABLE, INNOVATIVE

and most importantly

PRACTICAL!

Don’t you just love people who are changing the world? 
______________________________________________
Check this out: P3 Video (the 1st guy talking is an EcoHawk)
and
Ecohawks power up small scale smart grid

Note to possible investors: this project needs funding to continue the amazingly advanced research these young engineers are doing. Smart grid is the future of energy usage in developed countries and perhaps the world. Contact me to get in touch with them.

 

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Boiling Point

02 Thursday Dec 2010

Posted by EngineerChic in Going Green

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So I have been known to get quite stressed out at times, and I must admit, I am not fun when I do! The thing that stresses me out the most though, is getting Visa’s. I don’t know why, but something about the complicated process, ridiculous documentation and varying waiting times just gets works me up into a frightful mess. Do you remember this post? Travel Trauma wow.
But you’ve got to understand, I have had to get four different visa’s this year, plus a replacement passport for my lost one! USA, UK, Australia and Canada. Not only were these really expensive and most of them were valid for only 6 months (Australia gave me a 1month visa and USA gave me a ten year), I have a habit of leaving things a little late. At one stage, I had 3 weeks to get a passport, a USA and a UK visa! (I must applaud Home Affairs for their awesome new passport process). 
A few weeks before I left for Vancouver, right in the middle of possibly the most stressful phase of my thesis project, I applied for my Canadian Visa. There was a huge mix-up with the courier company collecting my documents. I had specifically told the operator to call me before coming to fetch them, since I was working late at camps that week and couldn’t guarantee where I would be. So the courier comes for my documents, and I wasn’t home and he leaves. The next day I call back, and ask them to come back and this time, to PLEASE CALL ME! Around 4pm there was still no call so I race home only to find that the courier was just there and had left. Again. Now with the clock ticking on the visa-processing, I panicked. I called the courier office, insisted that the driver return immediately. I was so angry, I think I may have even tried to lodge a formal complaint against the driver.
So this skinny dude arrives at my gate, and honestly, I am not proud about the massive earful I gave the poor guy! *Rhea, breathe, one, two, ok* (is what I should have said. I’m not going to tell you what I actually said)  To be fair, it wasn’t really his fault since he hadn’t even got the message to call me in the first place. 
So today, after a sweaty gym session I was cooling off in the shower when the door-bell rings. The book I’d ordered had arrived. Crap, I’d forgotten about that! So I race out in a bath-robe, with a towel on my head, leaving pools of water all over my floor. I fling open my door, clutching my towel around me, and my jaw drops! Standing in front of me is THE SAME DELIVERY GUY that I’d been so inexplicably rude to a month ago! For a moment I was lost for words, then I half close the door, pretend like I don’t recognise him and proceed to sign for my parcel from behind the door. It was really ridiculous but I just couldn’t face him! (By the way, to make matters even worse, I got my visa more than a week before I left for Canada! Cringe!)
Moral of this story: Don’t lose your cool in stressful circumstances. Treat people well, even strangers, because the world is way smaller than you think! On that note…
By the way, the book I got is called ‘Boiling Point’ by Leonie Joubert. I’ve wanted it for ages…It follows the lives of people in Sub-Saharan Africa, showing how their lives are so severely turned upside down by the effects of climate change. Let me quote something from the intro:

“When you tug on a single thing in nature, said the conservationist John Muir, you find it is attached to the rest of the world. Nowhere is this more evident than in the climate crisis. Tugging on a thread of our shared atmosphere in China or the U.S., for example, by shunting pollution into the skies, causes the fabric of local weather patterns to unravel half a world away.

Climate change is the biggest moral problem of our time, as people who have contributed little to the pollution responsible for global warming are increasingly understood to be most vulnerable to the shifting environment around them. In Boiling Point, Leonie Joubert embarks on a journey in which she explores the lives of some South Africans affected by this phenomenon: a rooibos tea farmer in the Northern Cape, a traditional fisherman in Lamberts Bay, a farmer in the center of the Free States maie belt, a political refugee in Pietermaritburg and a sangoma in Limpopo mining country. Most of these communities live on a knife-edge because of poverty and their dependence on an already capricious natural environment. Boiling Point considers what might happen to them as normal weather trends are amplified in a hotter world.”

I know this is going to be a good one! Enjoy! 

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Clever Little Bag

19 Monday Apr 2010

Posted by EngineerChic in Engineering Research - Yummy Yummy!, Going Green, Sustainability

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One quick thought that came to me in an email this morning: PUMA, in an attempt to cut it’s carbon footprint, is coming out with “A Clever Little Bag“; a new way to package shoes.

Here’s what PUMA say:

‘Sustainability necessary’

According to Puma the move will save 8,500 tonnes of paper, and mean a reduction of 60% in water and energy used during the production process.

It will also mean a reduction in transportation, due to the lighter packaging which does away with much cardboard, tissue paper, and various forms of plastic wrappings.

“Sustainability in business is no longer negotiable, it is absolutely necessary, and we companies are overdue in taking responsibility,” declares Jochen Zeitz, Puma’s youthful-looking 47-year-old chief executive and chairman.
Business is part of the environmental problem; and we need to do what we can to fix it – companies need to lead the way.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8619165.stm

I say, “Well Done PUMA”. Although we know that this ‘clever little bag’ is probably just a ‘clever little PR move’ (considering the current consumer trend of “going green”), Ole to you none the less. Maybe you’ll start a trend in the sports-gear world!

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