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2007 ENERGY TOUR: Day 22 July 16, 2007
Lots of driving today and talking to people at every opportunity. We fueled up the Energy Aware Express this morning in Imlay, Michigan at Al Parsch Oil Company. We had a great visit with them and met some other great people that love biodiesel. One of the people we met told us about a biodiesel retailer in Canada, Topia Energy www.topiaenergy.com. It is a Canadian company out of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and they have a pretty cool concept going. Check them out.
We stopped in Michigan at a blueberry farm and we all picked a bunch of blueberries (7.5 pounds!). They were delicious! We are headed for Madison, Wisconsin where we will fuel up with B100.
While at the Cleveland Solar Convention last week we observed that there are lots of different providers of thermal solar, PV solar, inverter technology and monitoring systems. Here were a few things we found interesting. Most of the thermal solar involves vacuum technology; the purpose of the vacuum is to prevent heat transfer to the heat absorber. The heat from the absorber can be put into a water heater or other heat transfer device. Interestingly, all but one of these technologies used a fairly flat heating absorber inside of a vacuum tube or chamber, however one company uses a curved heat absorber that is parallel to the cylindrical wall of the tube. When asked about this the vendor explained that the curved shape provides greater surface area and better heat transfer. For information on this you could contact Doug Norton of Grand River Boiler and Hydronic Supply Co. 208-359-8170 or www.heaterup.com
SEI is a non-profit organization that offers personal and online training sessions for solar installations (both thermal and PV). If you are interested in training to install solar installations check them out at www.solarenergy.org.
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