Now available on sponsored basis as an offline 8xDVD set to Third World/Developing Countries - 5700 Electronic Books online and offline with Practical Technical Development Information for the Third World. Agriculture, Health, Education, Small Industries

Installing a Solar Energy System Like many of you reading this article, I am fairly new to the realization that our future may not turn out the way we originally planned. A little over two years ago, after the financial turmoil set in, I began to wake up from my comfortable, relatively uncomplicated life and take a closer look at what was going on around me. I was first introduced to the Crash Course by an attendee at the 2009 CPAC Liberty Forum in Washington, DC where I had gone to hear Ron Paul speak. Little did I know how dramatic an impact that one conversation would have on my life. 42 New Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed No doubt your summer celebrations this weekend will leave you little time to catch up on reading. To help you out, we've compiled a handy roundup of this week's most helpful, informative and inspiring stories. We've celebrated iPhone's birthday, we've pondered celebrity impact on social good, and we've laughed over geeky gadgets.

how to convert a chest freezer to a fridge « John's Running and Living My chest fridge conversion uses an average of only 8 watts, down from 100 watts (peak of 224), a 92 percent reduction of electricity use. Here’s how you can do the same thing. MATERIALS temperature switch $16.78 from Ebay push on connectors – $1.70 Home Depot three wire extension cord, or wall box and plate you will need to use the 14 gauge wires either way micro screwdriver – $1 Dollar Store or Harbor Freight new or used 5 to 7 cubic foot chest freezer $50 to $200 WIRING with extension cord Cut a 6 inch section out of the middle of the extension cord.

The Emerging Climate Technology Consensus Update (Jul 16, 2010): Expanding on a Washington Post op-ed, Vinod Khosla delineates his argument "about the deficiencies of an isolated cap-and-trade or carbon-pricing bill," and joins the climate technology consensus. Khosla writes, "If we want to make a significant difference, we need to get on the path to reducing carbon worldwide by 80 percent now by focusing on what I call "carbon reduction capacity building" -- in other words, we need to develop radical carbon-reduction technologies. A utility cap (or a carbon price) won't build capacity -- it will just increase our utility costs and decrease our manufacturing competitiveness without any increase in our technological competitiveness. Update (Jul 14, 2010): Other observers have reached similar conclusions about the faltering pollution paradigm. Walter Russell Mead and Clive Crook weigh in on "The Big Green Lie" but can't agree on what it is.

Solar energy giants discovering Ontario A coming green-energy law and the promise of long-term incentives for producers of renewable power have put Ontario on the radar of some big-name solar companies looking for certainty in a volatile marketplace. This month alone, Tempe, Ariz.-based First Solar Inc., one of the world's leading suppliers of next-generation solar modules, and solar power supplier Recurrent Energy Inc. of San Francisco have acquired and plan to develop multi-megawatt solar projects in Ontario. Meanwhile, San Jose, Calif.-based Nanosolar Inc. tells the Toronto Star that it is seriously eyeing Ontario as the location of a regional assembly plant for its thin-film solar modules. Update! 15 PowerPoint Slides That Shook the Earth : Greentech Media If you attend enough cleantech events or are pitched by enough startups, you start to see the same few PowerPoint slides over and over again. Here is a collection of the best or at least the most notorious and historically significant slides in our industry. This collection has been one of our most popular pieces and I'm taking the opportunity to update some of the charts and add some additional commentary. After publishing this list to an overwhelming response, we heard from the original architects of some of these iconic greentech slides and we made sure to give them their overdue credit.

Motions of the Sun Simulator - Calculating Solar Potential in Portland, Maine February 15th, 2010 by ReVision Energy We stumbled across an incredibly useful tool that allows you to calculate the path of the sun on any given day of the year based on your latitude. This tool, part of the The Nebraska Astronomy Applet Project (NAAP), will even give really geeky data like the sun’s altitude and azimuth, and allows you to animate the cycles of the sun! Using the tool, we can plug in our latitude (roughly 43N here in Portland, Maine), program the day to February 15, set ourselves facing south and voila! We have a beautiful view of what the sun is going to be doing today: This illustrates beautifully why all we suggest for solar is a roof that is relatively unshaded from 9AM – 3PM… look at all that sun!

How I built an electricity producing wind turbine Several years ago I bought some remote property in Arizona. I am an astronomer and wanted a place to practice my hobby far away from the sky-wrecking light pollution found near cities of any real size. I found a great piece of property. The problem is, it's so remote that there is no electric service available. That's not really a problem. No electricity equals no light pollution.