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Pumped Hydro Power Storage
Last weekend, looking for someplace new to explore, my wife and I drove down to Northfield, Massachusetts, to check out the cross-country ski center. The skiing was great, and it…
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LED Lighting — Efficient Illumination Without Mercury
Light-emitting diodes, better known as LEDs, are all around us — those little red or green indicator lights that blink at us from our stereo equipment, most new traffic signals,…
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An Overview of HID Lighting
Three recent columns provided a brief history of lighting, an overview of fluorescent technology, and a look at the challenges of improving streetlights. Following a side trip into the issue…
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Making Houses Resilient to Power Outages
The ice storm a week-and-a-half ago illustrated, all too clearly, the vulnerability of our homes. Hundreds of thousands of homes in New England lost power in the storm, which deposited…
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Mercury Vapor Lighting
Last week we took a look at fluorescent lighting, which is dramatically reducing our energy use for illuminating indoor spaces. This week we’ll cover mercury vapor lighting, which is the…
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A Look at Fluorescent Lighting
Last week, after an overview of lighting history, we examined incandescent lighting—the lamp technology invented by Thomas Edison. Until the mid-1900s incandescent lighting dominated both commercial and residential lighting applications,…
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A Short History of Lighting
Light is one of our most important energy needs. Historically—before the advent of electric lighting—the need for illumination governed architecture. Buildings were designed to facilitate natural daylighting. My office is…
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Just Say No to Idling
The easiest energy savings come from little changes in our behavior that don’t cause any hardship—or even result in ancillary benefits. Such is the case with reducing the amount of…
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Generating Electricity from the Sun
Almost all of our methods for generating electricity are fundamentally the same. Coal-, nuclear-, and natural-gas-fired power plants boil water to produce high-pressure steam that spins a dynamo in a…
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Solar Water Heating
Brattleboro, Vermont is fortunate to have a long history with solar water heating. When I moved to the area in 1980, the company Solar Applications had been installing solar hot…
