As I walked along Maurach by the Achensee (Tirol, Austria) on a break from teaching classes (did I already say, 'somebody pinch me?') … I notice all the massive wooden beams on the large volume houses here. There are no small <3,000 sf buildings here. There are opulent vacation homes for the rich and famous (Porsche CEO has second home here), but most homes are for multi-family dwellings, hotels, stores and working farm homes. All of them are built with heavy timbers and masonry walls. Most of them have multiple solar hot water collectors at all kinds of angles. There have to be thousand’s of these solar collectors in this area alone – it’s a commodity. Makes my 4x6, 20’ long beams at WinSol3 look downright puny along with my ‘small’ 12' roof overhangs.
I find it curious that most large buildings have solar hot water arrays and yet all lighting is incadescent - including night quartz spotlights. After asking the owner of the hotel where I was staying, his answer was too obvious: Biogas or propane is way more expensive than local generated hydro electric power. Ahh.... yes, the dominance of local energy supply. But what happens with global weirding, melting glaciers, and future droughts?
All those SHW collectors are inspiring me to get even more free hot water when I return to WinSol3. I am thinking about some custom stand-alone? copper pipe draindown arrays with thermosiphon storage tanks above the collectors. Freeze protection would still be attained through a draindown scheme.
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Blog on the Japan disaster aftermath:
It's amazing how quickly global energy supplies have been pushed into the mainstream. I think we will be studying this worse case scenario for some time to come. Even in Germany, 9000km to the west of Japan, people here have cleaned out local stores’ radiation counters and iodine tablets. There are 1,800 radiation measuring stations in Germany alone – a normal precautionary system - since Chernobyl. They haven’t measured any additional radiation - yet - from Japan, although there is still some cesium hangin' around in it's last 30 year half-life. There are huge crowds of demonstrators railing against keeping Germany’s 30 nuclear power plants open – if I am close to one, I will join in. Just the idea of having 1,800 radiation monitoring stations continuously monitoring the air that the citizens breathe tells me that people here are both protective and a bit necessarily paranoid. I guess that comes from too many wars and interesting neighbors.Or as Andy Grove said 'only the paranoid survive'.
The students here were born before Chernobyl and most of their parents have totally different views of the Japan nuclear crisis. So I wonder why everyone is so freaked out about nuclear radiation and meltdown. The worse case scenario is that a huge dose of radiation gets in the atmosphere and that people develop some form of cancer over the next 20-30 years. Chernobyl accounted for around 30,000 deaths - totally. There are more than 35,000 deaths a year from coal. Our foods, our air, our flame retardant doused furniture, our toiletries also can cause cancer. We are afflicted with lung cancer from cigarettes, diabetes from corn syrup, etc.. Yet we don’t see people protesting around the factories at Kraft, Procter Gamble, Monsanto or Dow Chemical that make these things. I think the relationship between nuclear energy and nuclear bombs, the memories of WWII, and the general hideousness of radiation poisoning, not to mention Hollywood are part to blame.
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