Mike’s ramblings

Researchers from the German university of Kassel have linked together several wind, solar, biogas and hydro power plants to explore the possibility of satisfying Germany’s electricity needs only from renewable sources. The problem they are trying to solve is that wind and sun can not be controlled.

If the power from these plants would go into the grid without any precautionary measurements they could take out the whole system. There have to be mechanisms to react to too much or not enough power going into a grid. With the addition of storage through hydro plants and controllable biogas plants, these problems seem to be solved. The researchers say their study shows, that Germany could be powered by 100% of renewable energy.

Nanosolar a company started by German founder Martin Roscheisen recently shipped its first CIGS solar panels. They have developed a technique to print their light active ink onto all kinds of materials. The thin-film panels produced this way come out at price of $1/watt for a total installation cost of around $2/watt. This makes the technique comparable to coal energy (which costs about $2.10/watt)!

In this price included is a nice margin for Nanosolar. They report that the costs to produce the panels are around 40 cents/watt. These numbers are amazing. What is even better is the fact that this company is already mass-producing these panels. If they continue to drive down the costs, we can soon cover all kinds of surfaces with these panels. These are truly exciting times in my opinion.

Today I’ve installed Defensio because the spam was getting a little bit too much to deal with by hand. I chose Defensio over Akismet mainly because I did not want to create a Wordpress.com account to get an API key.

To use Defensio you can register on their site to get a free API key. The installation is as easy as it could be. I did not run into any problems. I’ll see over time how good it is doing its job.

Does anyone have any numbers for comparison of the two competitors?

Obama just won Iowa ahead of Edwards in second and Clinton in third (!) position.

The speech he gave was pretty nice in my opinion. The best line is around 13:30: “…we are not a collection of red states or blue states. We are the United States of America.”