This is a Sneak-Peek of Plan 731, an off-grid, super efficient, small luxury home that is ideal for arctic, sub-zero temperature climate locations. With its 10″ thick, dual exterior wall system, it will be very easy to maintain warm or cold temperatures inside the home depending on the season and your location.
This small luxury home is ideal for single persons or young couple just getting started or active senior couples wanting to downsize, or looking to build an affordable get-a-way home that is off grid and super energy efficient. The construction plans will be available in our online store in the next couple of weeks.
These are 3 different exterior wall stud options that will soon be available for Plan 630. The current version of the plan in our online store features 2″ X 4″ exterior wall studs, but we’ll also offer a 2″ X 6″ exterior wall studs version, and a double 2″ X 4″ exterior wall studs version. The two new version will have a higher cost to construct than the current version because of the larger footprint, and additional material cost, but your savings on your utility bills or off grid batteries will be significant. With the double wall version below, which will have insulation in each wall section, and drywall in between the two walls, will make it so much easier to heat and cool the home, which can be a real challenge with off grid living.
We can do wider wall versions for any of our plans, just send us an email from the contact tab and let us know what you have in mind.
Amazon’s newest, largest wind farm – Amazon Wind Farm Texas – is up and running, adding more than 1,000,000 MWh of clean energy to the grid each year. To date, we’ve launched 18 wind and solar projects across the U.S., with more than 35 additional projects to come.
Together, these projects will generate enough clean energy to power over 330,000 homes and will support hundreds of jobs, while providing tens of millions of dollars of investment in local communities across the U.S.
Amazon Wind Farm Texas includes more than 100 turbines – each over 300 feet tall with a rotor diameter more than twice the wingspan of a Boeing 787. Amazon Wind Farm Texas is built, owned, and operated by Lincoln Clean Energy (LCE), a leading developer of wind and solar projects across the U.S.
To thank and support the local community, Amazon is donating $50,000 to the Snyder Education Foundation to provide students and teachers with STEM learning opportunities.
“Investing in renewable energy is a win-win-win-win – it’s right for our customers, our communities, our business, and our planet,” said Kara Hurst, Amazon’s Worldwide Director of Sustainability. “We now have 18 wind and solar projects across the U.S. with more than 35 projects to come. These are important steps toward reaching our long-term goal to power our global infrastructure using 100% renewable energy. We’d like to thank the leaders at LCE, the Scurry County community, and our partners across the country who are helping us continue to bring new renewable energy online.”
“We’ve made a lot of progress on this commitment. AWS (Amazon Web Services) exceeded its goal of 40% renewable energy by the end of 2016, and set a new goal to be powered by 50% renewable energy by the end of 2017.”
In 2015, AWS announced the construction of Amazon Solar Farm US East, Amazon Wind Farm Fowler Ridge, Amazon Wind Farm US Central and Amazon Wind Farm US East, located in Virginia, Indiana, Ohio and North Carolina respectively. Amazon Wind Farm Fowler Ridge became operational January 1, 2016, and Amazon Solar Farm US East went into operation in October, 2016.
In 2016, AWS announced the construction of Amazon Wind Farm US Central 2, a 189 megawatt wind farm in Hardin County, Ohio. We also announced five additional solar farms: Amazon Solar Farm US East 2, Amazon Solar Farm US East 3, Amazon Solar Farm US East 4, Amazon Solar Farm US East 5 each have a capacity of 20 megawatts and are located in New Kent, Buckingham, Sussex, and Powhatan counties in Virginia. Amazon Solar Farm US East 6 is a 100 megawatt facility in Southampton County, Virginia.
These ten renewable energy projects will deliver a total of 2.6 million MWh of energy annually onto the electric grid powering AWS data centers located in the AWS US East (Ohio) and AWS US East (N. Virginia) Regions. The electricity produced from these projects is enough to power the equivalent of over 240,000 U.S. homes annually, which is approximately the size of the city of Portland, Oregon.
See-through solar materials that can be applied to windows represent a massive source of untapped energy and could harvest as much power as bigger, bulkier rooftop solar units, scientists report today in Nature Energy.
Led by engineering researchers at Michigan State University, the authors argue that widespread use of such highly transparent solar applications, together with the rooftop units, could nearly meet U.S. electricity demand and drastically reduce the use of fossil fuels.
“Highly transparent solar cells represent the wave of the future for new solar applications,” said Richard Lunt, the Johansen Crosby Endowed Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at MSU. “We analyzed their potential and show that by harvesting only invisible light, these devices can provide a similar electricity-generation potential as rooftop solar while providing additional functionality to enhance the efficiency of buildings, automobiles and mobile electronics.”
Lunt and colleagues at MSU pioneered the development of a transparent luminescent solar concentrator that when placed on a window creates solar energy without disrupting the view. The thin, plastic-like material can be used on buildings, car windows, cell phones or other devices with a clear surface.
The solar-harvesting system uses organic molecules developed by Lunt and his team to absorb invisible wavelengths of sunlight. The researchers can “tune” these materials to pick up just the ultraviolet and the near-infrared wavelengths that then convert this energy into electricity (watch a demonstration of the process here).
Moving global energy consumption away from fossil fuels will require such innovative and cost-effective renewable energy technologies. Only about 1.5 percent of electricity demand in the United States and globally is produced by solar power.
But in terms of overall electricity potential, the authors note that there is an estimated 5 billion to 7 billion square meters of glass surface in the United States. And with that much glass to cover, transparent solar technologies have the potential of supplying some 40 percent of energy demand in the U.S. – about the same potential as rooftop solar units. “The complimentary deployment of both technologies,” Lunt said, “could get us close to 100 percent of our demand if we also improve energy storage.”
Lunt said highly transparent solar applications are recording efficiencies above 5 percent, while traditional solar panels typically are about 15 percent to 18 percent efficient. Although transparent solar technologies will never be more efficient at converting solar energy to electricity than their opaque counterparts, they can get close and offer the potential to be applied to a lot more additional surface area, he said.
Right now, transparent solar technologies are only at about a third of their realistic overall potential, Lunt added.
“That is what we are working towards,” he said. “Traditional solar applications have been actively researched for over five decades, yet we have only been working on these highly transparent solar cells for about five years. Ultimately, this technology offers a promising route to inexpensive, widespread solar adoption on small and large surfaces that were previously inaccessible.”
The work is funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education.
Lunt’s coauthors are Christopher Traverse, a doctoral student in engineering at MSU, and Richa Pandey and Miles Barr with Ubiquitous Energy Inc., a company Lunt cofounded with Barr to commercialize transparent solar technologies.
This shower water conservation video is by Steven Harrell, who launched Tiny House Listings about 6 years ago. His website was instrumental and inspiration in Texas Tiny Homes formation in 2012. This video features a low flow shower head that can save thousands of gallons of water each year depending on the setting you chose. We have selected six water saving shower heads in our online store.
Water conservation is so critical these days, but it’s also a requirement when living small, or off grid when water is hard to come by, and safely disposing it if your tiny and small home is not tied to a city sewage system, or if you are using a grey water filtering system. Texas Tiny Homes is looking at all the black and grey water disposal options for the new homes we are going to be build on our lots in Granbury, Texas and the less amount of water coming out the home the better. Water conserving shower heads will be an important and necessary feature in some of new home we build.
