Skip to main content

Solar Store-y

This is the first of a series of new posts on how the electricity we use and the we use it is up for disruption, loosely termed Power 2.0 to stay in the trend of the 2.0 boom.

For some time I have been looking to build a house here in Thailand and I am very keen to generate as much of our own power needs as possible. The emergence of alternative energy in Thailand is not very strong as today power is quite cheap. Thailand is blessed with an average of 12 hours of sunlight year round, yet the country still heavily relies on oil for electricity production.
There are quite a few hydro electric dams in the country, mostly place by the King.

One energy source, the Sun, is up for some changes as EGAT (Electrivity Generating Authority of Thailand) now agree to buy back any surplus energy. This change in the economics means that you could now recover the costs within 10 years opposed to the potential 20 to 30 years before. You can tell then that solar today is cost prohibitive.

One of the key challenges of solar is how to effectively store the energy. Batteries are improving and one of the best uses for solar energy is hot water or pumped water so you can use a gravity fed water supply over the more common pumped supply.

MIT, via the Technology Review, are working on a system that use photosynthesis. The basic process is to use algae and encourage them to grow with sunlight. You can then use this to release hydrogen. Some years away from a practical application but worth keeping an eye open.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

In the overlap of technology, marketing and social media the QR Code is critical

Outside of consulting on telecommunications, CIO advisory, and the business adoption of technology I also completed an MBA.  One of the projects was on the potential use cases of two dimensional barcodes. Today the QR Code , one of many types of 2D codes, is seen as being a critical component of any good marketing plan.  As a natural integration between social media and devices I would extend VMob Bob's question " What can a mobile operator learn from Facebook ?" and also ask how can they step and start to make innovations with the extensions to social media that already exist today?

Access as infrastructure, what does this mean for Telco 2.0?

Having recently attended a seminar by Catherine Middleton from Ryerson on Australia's NBN initiative it got me thinking about "access as infrastructure". The Australian Government is investing $B's of public and private capital in a national broadband network that is a fibre to the premise platform, although for distant and remote sites it will most likely be a fixed wireless solution.  The proposition from Dr. Middleton is that ubiquitous access will create a platform for services that separates competition from access, sounds like Telco 2.0. The question I posed was if the idea is a common platform but close to 10% of that access will be at 12Mbps rather than 100Mbps (fixed wireless versus fibre) then surely the lowest common denominator will prevail and services will be designed for 12Mbps.  You would then question the rationale of FTTP or FTTH when you could go fixed wireless.  Over time LTE and similar technologies will see an increase in speed that will of...

A Phone or a Swiss Army Knife?

It's getting to that time when I should start looking for my new handset. I choose the word carefully as today you are very lucky to find just a phone. Most handsets today are either a phone and media player, a phone and a camera (sometimes video), a phone and a PDA the list of combinations goes on and on. Now this might be great in the marketing room "what can we do next?" but the point that is lost on many of the manufacturers is this; people want a phone first the rest is secondary. Many of the hybrid handsets look good, can have great MP3 playback but suffer in size, ease of use of the main function (phone calls) or have poor battery life because of all the other gadgets hanging off of it. It's very similar to the Swiss Army Knife, the knife is often too small to be used for much over opening your letters, the screwdriver is hard to use because the size of the body means you can't get to a lot of the screws on objects, the pliers have little leverage because t...