Project Kamp is basically a Solarpunk community that is living the Solarpunk life. They built a sustainable village on some abandoned land in central Portugal that a group of friends got together and bought. This is a recap of what they've accomplished in the past five years.
The plasma is splitting N2 (nitrogen gas, which is notoriously hard to split because it is triple bonded) and causing nitrogen bearing compounds to form and remain in solution in the water. In agriculture, reactive nitrogen is a serious nutrient bottleneck. All the proteins in all of biology depend on biological access to reactive nitrogen.
Reactive nitrogen (as opposed to nitrogen in N2, which is inaccessible for chemical reactions for most of biology and is for the most part unreactive) is typically produced in ecosystems when certain microbes split nitrogen to produce ammonia and nitrate, which then get used to make amino acids, which are then used to make all proteins. These nutrients are recycled in the process of decomposition, but a good portion of it returns to the atmosphere as N2 in the process of denitrification, which is used by certain microbes as a source of energy. Natural production of nitrogen and the enriching of soil can be done organically and in low-tech fashion by doing crop rotation with plants such as legumes that are symbiotic with nitrogen-fixing microbes, but in applications where nitrogen is a real bottleneck, being able to produce your own fertilizer would be a huge benefit.
The industrial production of nitrogen fertilizer is a massively polluting industry, and is highly concentrated by big players, which are usually connected to the petroleum industry. The Haber-Bosch process that is currently used to produce nearly all of the nitrogen fertilizer used throughout the world uses natural gas as one of its main reagent feed stocks. The development of this inexpensive and open source method of using plasma to form a reactive nitrogen solution is a breakthrough that not only decentralizes the production of fertilizer, but enables it to be powered by renewable electricity rather than natural gas.
Storing intermittent renewable energy is the critical development needed to end our dependence on fossil fuel base load systems without waiting for large centralized solutions such as geothermal power. Unfortunately, the home battery systems used to store energy from rooftop solar are effectively only useful for homeowners, not renters and condo dwellers, which constitute about half the market. Installed home battery systems are expensive, require substantial modification of the house (which are also expensive), are difficult to upgrade, and if you move, you can't take them with you.
A company called Pila Energy invented new concept in home batteries: batteries that your appliances plug into, which use smart software to precisely time when they store energy from the wall outlet, drawing energy from the grid or from your rooftop PV array when intermittent renewables are abundant. These batteries then provide electricity to your most power-hungry appliances when they need them. And when electricity codes (which are currently being revised) eventually permit such devices to feed electricity back through the outlets to power the rest of your house, they have the capability to power the parts of your house by distributing energy right back into the wall outlet. If you have multiple units, they can coordinate their activity over an local mesh wireless network that remains operational even if there is a power outage or if the internet is down. These Pila battery systems can even check for upcoming bad weather disruptions to solar or wind power and store up renewable energy for a rainy day.
This system has some extremely compelling advantages that makes it a total game changer for the storage of renewable energy from intermittent sources:
I occasionally have to use citric acid to clean out the mineral buildup in my various pots and appliances that heat water. I have also heard of old water heaters losing efficiency due to substantial buildup of lime scale. Why do vessels that heat water end up precipitating out mineral deposits? Aren’t minerals supposed to be more soluble in water as temperature increases? Why is calcium carbonate an exception to this rule?
How to reproduce: Messages icon indicates one unread message when all messages are unread.
When I filter by unread messages, it shows a single message I read and responded to.
The behavior is inconsistent; sometimes the icon indicates one unread message, sometimes it doesn't.
I checked whether this bug appears on other platforms. It does not appear on the iOS Reddit app. Filtering by unread messages does not show anything unread in iOS Reddit.
The price of photovoltaics has dropped faster than anyone could have imagined, and the adoption of solar power has been on such a sharp upward trend that it exceeded the projections of many of the agencies tasked with figuring out likely trends in energy development. At the same time, the price of serious battery storage has dropped sharply and is projected to continue to drop. The maturation of EVs along with solar energy and batteries forms three cyclically reinforcing developments which are poised to win the competition for the supply of our energy, beating fossil fuels.
There's actually even more reason to be optimistic, because this doesn't even take into account the development of other forms of renewable energy such as wave, tidal, swarm hydroelectric, wind power of various forms, geothermal, etc.
Solar power can even be geographically offset by having solar energy be sent eastward as the sun sets so that areas that are still sunny can power areas which are facing their evening power demand surge as local solar power stops producing if we build out our transmission infrastructure.
Sometimes you may find mineral looking residue on your IP’s liner pot that resists washing off. The method I found that reliably and easily removes these stains right off the pot is to sprinkle in about ½ to 1 teaspoon of citric acid granules (I got a jar of citric acid off of Amazon), followed by just enough boiling water to dissolve it to form a strong citric acid solution. I poured in about half a cup of boiling water.
EDIT: the water doesn't have to be boiling. Warm water will suffice, or even cold water with some extra stirring. The acidity is what does the work, not the heat. /EDIT
Swirl this acid solution around, making sure to get it on all the mineral residue stains. The acid will rapidly dissolve it all. Then just give it a rinse, and it should be as good as new.
I prefer hot citric acid to vinegar because it doesn’t have a smell, and when wetted with just enough boiling water to make a really strong solution, it instantly dissolves any mineral stain on contact. At the same time, citric acid isn't strong enough an acid to harm stainless steel, so it is safe to use on the liner pot.
The great thing about this concept for generating renewable energy is that it is an alternative way to generate hydroelectric power without the use of dams which harm river ecosystems. Plus, it is much less infrastructure intensive and scales gently. More modules can be added as demand goes up, and can be spaced out to minimize the impact on the river.
The amount of money being poured in to AI data centers is truly insane.
The pace and scale of the data center buildout has been so intense that more money has been committed to it in 6 years than the combined costs of the Marshall Plan (to rebuild Europe after World War II), the Manhattan Project, the entire Apollo program, and the International Space Station, with $120 billion left over. (3:39 into the video) We could have solved healthcare, housing, food insecurity, and who knows how many other problems multiple times over with that money if investors were to have different priorities.
And all of this incurs ongoing harm to the environment from energy and water usage of individual data centers matching that of large cities, and 24/7 infrasound pollution. AI data centers have also driven up the price of electricity for consumers to a shocking extent.
All of this is starting to catch up, with a supermajority of the public opposed to building data centers near them. The AI bubble looks like it is about to pop, at least for the kind of AI that uses huge data centers.
Generated with Google Gemini/ Nano Banana 2.
Original comment in a post titled "At least 60 people following RFK Jr.'s advice ... are sick from drinking raw milk. The campylobacteriosis infections could have easily been avoided by pasteurization."
In a solarpunk world, more environmentally friendly ways of mining would need to be developed in order to minimize the environmental impact and energy intensity of resource extraction and conversion. Electromining has the potential to accomplish the production of metalic iron from iron ore, or even black iron oxide waste materials such as mill scale, at a fraction of the energy requirements and emissions of traditional coal based reduction of iron ore.
One of my favorite maker YouTubers, Nighthawk in Light, just released a video on using electrochemistry to mine iron metal from magnetite iron ore. Incidentally, the same device, used differently is also an iron flow battery. The energy used for these processes could be provided from solar panels or wind turbines, and could produce metallic iron from magnetite surprisingly efficiently compared to charcoal or coal based methods such as those demonstrated by Primitive Technology, where he smelts iron from bog ore and creek sand using massive quantities of charcoal to reduce iron oxide ores down to metallic iron.
Ask them to pronounce “unionized”.
It is really hard to pick stocks so well that you consistently beat the market. These folks seem to be really good at picking stocks, so why not imitate the pros? IYKYK.