Unlike Other Power Sources, Wind Turbines Still Useful When They Stop Working

- Adam Clare

wind turbine

Wind turbines produce renewable energy from air with a small footprint on the ground. This means they can get placed in various locations and offshore they can be massive (and therefore more efficient), but when the wind turbines reach the end of service their blades take up a lot space in landfills. Thankfully the blades can be reused to build bridges!

Even when they are no longer useful to produce electricity wind turbines live on in useful ways – another reason to build more turbines.

Originally a metals recycling company, Anmet started exploring ways to repurpose wind blades about seven years ago. Since then, it developed a small commercial business making outdoor furniture out of discarded wind turbine blades. Bridges, Sobczyk says, are the next area it would like to expand into commercially.

The company’s first blade bridge took about three years to test, permit, and build. After harvesting decommissioned blades from a wind farm in Germany, the blades were subjected to a battery of engineering tests in partnership with Poland’s Rzeszów University of Technology before being cut up to create the primary support structures for a pedestrian footbridge. In October, Amnet installed that bridge over a river in Szprotawa, the small town where the company is headquartered. 

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Insulation is Better Than Oil

- Adam Clare
tree with climate knowledge

Insulation is a boring solution to the deadly consumption of oil inside your home. If you have a gas furnace or other fossil fuel heater then you can start reducing your consumption of the dead dino juice by better insulating your home. You can also go a step further and replace planet-killing heating solutions with a heat pump.

In the United Kingdom a simple policy change to encourage homeowners improve their insulation and/or install heat pumps can eliminate the need for Russian gas. The time to this is right now so it cuts off the market desire for oil from a state waging war on its neighbour.

If you’re a homeowner then improve your insulation and get off of gas.

An analysis by the think tank notes concludes that the deployment of insulation and electric heat pumps in 6.5 million homes by 2027 could reduce UK gas demand by four per cent, which is roughly equivalent to UK imports of Russian gas.

By enabling citizens to use less gas to heat their homes, a policy focused on heat pumps and insulation could also curb energy bills and protect millions of households from volatile international gas prices, it said.

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Make People Feel Ignorant So They Listen To Experts

- Adam Clare
Argument analysis flowchart
Figure 1 from Cook, Ellerton, and Kinkead 2018. CC BY 3.0

The rise of disinformation by organizations big and small means the role of experts is even more important. We have seen how people have been manipulated around elections to vote against their interests and even to deny a well-documented global pandemic. The notion that people deny reality isn’t new, we’ve seen it with climate change. So how do we address this knowledge problem?
Making people realize that they don’t know everything is the solution. People are more receptive to the knowledge of experts when they themselves realize they don’t know everything – and opinions aren’t knowledge.

While they usually should, people do not revise their beliefs more to expert (economist) opinion than to lay opinion. The present research sought to better understand the factors that make it more likely for an individual to change their mind when faced with the opinions of expert economists versus the general public. Across five studies we examined the role that overestimation of knowledge plays in this behavior. We replicated the finding that people fail to privilege the opinion of experts over the public across two different (Study 1) and five different (Study 5) economic issues. We further find that undermining an illusion of both topic-relevant (Studies 2–4) and -irrelevant knowledge (Studies 3 and 4) leads to greater normative belief revision in response to expert rather than lay opinion. We suggest one reason that people fail to revise their beliefs more in response to experts is because people think they know more than they really do.

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This Book Can Give You Power

- Adam Clare
Solar Panel School

Oil prices are rising again and oil is yet again at the centre of international conflict, it’s time to get off of oil. Sustainable energy is peaceful energy. Solar power is one such renewable energy source that can work anywhere the sun shines. Setting up a solar rig can be a challenge and intimidating for the average person. A freely available book, To Catch The Sun, provides the current knowledge you need to setup solar power generation of any size.

This is a book for people looking to build a better future together, that includes:

  • Inspiring stories: Real life accounts of building solar power in communities.

  • Technical details: Straightforward descriptions of solar components and diagrams of systems, replete with real examples (many from the systems described in the stories).

  • Math and science: Easy-to-follow math that allows readers to size small photovoltaic systems for all types of environments and uses.

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Thanks to Trevor.

Gender Pay Gap Bot Made an Impact on IWD

- Adam Clare

Yesterday a wonderful little bot made a big splash during International Women’s Day (IWD). The Gender Pay Gap Bot on Twitter called out deceptive companies which “celebrated” IWD and advertised how much they care. The bot retweeted each corporate IWD tweet with a simple message revealing the median pay gap between male and female workers.

The bot is possible because the British government requires companies to publicly disclose average pay; you can see the data here. The more workers talk about pay the more likely they are to get paid better.

Follow the Gender Pay Gap Bot.

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