Over the next 100
years the consequences of unchecked Global Warming will devastate large
parts of our planet. The burning of carbon fuels is a major contributor
to this effect with electrical power generation facilities,
transportation and household heating being major players. As the dangers
from CO2 pollution become even more apparent, we are on the cusp of a
grand human project to decarbonize our civilizations. Where household
winter time heating consumes fossil fuels, a clean, low CO2 production grid
can supply households which have been converted from fossil fuel to
electrical heating. Such a conversion drastically reduces the
household's carbon footprint from heating. Grid expansion is not
limited to replacing fossil fuelled heating though, it must also
energize transportation. Our cities will require new
massive
power supplies built using
technologies which have no carbon emissions. These new and larger power
supplies can be both centralized and dispersed. In a plan to decarbonize
our city, what are the reasonable estimations that engineers can make
for electrical energy usage for household heating, solar PV generation and efficiency increases for an older house.
An older house
which is identical in many ways, to hundreds of thousands of other
houses
in the Greater Toronto Area? The Ravina Project provides some of these
basic data.
What is The Ravina
Project?
The Ravina Project
is a privately funded green energy research project in Toronto Canada
located at 43.68 N and 79.34 W. We have used our own resources to turn
our home into a science experiment. We want to provide energy use and generation data for the public and do
green energy research. See our
Project Goals
page for more information. We fervently hope that access to our data
will be a factor in giving people the confidence to press forward
with their own
green energy projects.
Upgrades and
Efficiencies
We
have worked since 2007 to upgrade our 1920s era house so that it is much more
energy efficient. We use a natural gas boiler to heat the house and to
provide domestic hot water. We have insulated the house, replaced windows and doors, swapped out all the light bulbs with more efficient
ones during the non heating months and use power bars on all 'instant
on' devices. We installed 1.5 kW (now 2.8 kW) of solar panels on a
tiltable structure, batteries to run the house in times of blackout, and
a bidirectional interface to the power grid. We have built this WEB site
to publish our papers and data. In short we have modified our house to
be a well insulated, Grid resilient, Amory Lovins inspired house.
Our Research and
Data Collection
Our Solar Project
began on November 1st 2006 and upgraded on September 18th, 2013. The database containing the household carbon
energy use begins in 2003. We are tracking our energy use and solar
energy
generation on daily, weekly, monthly and yearly bases. We have
written and continue to write formal papers on a variety of topics
including but not limited to: solar power generation techniques and
insights, household
thermodynamics (focused both on winter and summer time demands), the War on CO2,
modeling the future effects of decarbonization upon the household and the policy implications of what
we discover in our data. Periodically we will go off-grid for
special events, to test our solar energy generation and battery
capacity assumptions. We publish our work/data here on the WEB
for others to use. See the Project
Papers page for the currently available papers.
Since June 1st, 2018
we have been integrating the energy usage from a Tesla Model 3 into our
household data. We are treating the car like it is an electrical
appliance ... which it is. TeslaFi.com provides us with a huge amount of
data from the car. After a year of data we will be publishing a paper
providing an extensive analysis of the energy implications of this added
load.
What's New: See
us at Bain Co-op on September 7th for their Fall Faire.
Upon
reflection and integration of much into our thinking, we have come to the
conclusion that a global future that is safe for women, that is, a
future that allows women to thrive is the best future. In a real sense,
women are the 'canaries in the coal mine' such that, a global future
where women cannot thrive is a future where humanity is doomed. This
works on so many levels; we are baffled as to why this metric is
not more widely understood and used.
A
possible inscription on humanity's gravestone, "We wouldn't save
ourselves; it would have cost too much".