From Canada comes the rather amazing story of Cansolair, a company that reuses soda cans to make solar panels. Once installed, this soda/solar unit can provide up to 30% of the heating for your house. All this in the cloudy, foggy Labrador region. All without adding another CO2 particle to the environment. Maybe Coke knew it was onto something when they introduced this new flavor last year.
Check out this video to see how it’s done.
In the last week of February, the Ontario legislature presented the Green Energy Act. The Act includes renewable energy development plans that could generate as many as 50,000 jobs for the Canadian province. Amongst the other parts of the bill is a provision that makes it mandatory homes for sale in Ontario have an energy rating attached to it.
This rating will be generated by a home inspection using standardized evaluation criteria yet to be finalized. The controversy is around what a negative rating might do to home prices throughout Ontario.
The appliances we put in our house all have energy ratings and we certainly pay attention to these when we make consumer choices. Could a ratings for the whole house be far behind? An informal survey of local real estate agents… [view entry]
