EcoTechNews

Burning Crop Waste for Power — Why a School in Ghana Is Doing Something Worth Paying Attention To Every harvest season in Ghana's Savannah region, something predictable happens. Maize cobs and groundnut shells accumulate across farmland faster than anyone can use them. The standard response is to burn them in open fields — quick, cheap, and common. The smoke carries across communities that are already short on electricity and often running diesel generators to keep school lights on. At Tuna Technical Senior High School, a project called REFFECT AFRICA has been doing something different with those residues. The school hosts a biomass gasification plant that takes groundnut shells and cashew husks — the most available agricultural waste in the district — and converts them into electricity. The system runs a 20 kilowatt-electric downdraft gasifier paired with a 24 kilowatt-peak solar array and a 70 kilowatt-hour battery bank. It operates in both grid-connected and off-grid modes...

What Actually Happens to an EV Battery After the Car Is Done With It Most people assume that when an electric car goes to the scrapyard, the battery goes with it. In practice, the battery is often the most valuable thing on the vehicle, and the decision about what to do with it is more complicated — and more interesting — than it might look. When an EV battery degrades to around 80% of its original capacity, automotive manufacturers consider it no longer suitable for the demands of driving. The reasoning is straightforward: a battery at 80% gives a driver noticeably less range and begins to affect performance under the kind of high-discharge conditions that acceleration and motorway driving require. The battery isn't broken. It's just no longer well-suited to that particular job. What happens next depends on who owns the battery, which country it's in, and whether anyone has set up a system to assess and redirect it. In many cases, batteries are still going straight...

Your Air Conditioning Bill Is Getting Bigger. There's a Reason Your Grandparents Didn't Have One Summer used to be manageable. Now, in much of Europe and North America, it isn't — and the energy bills that come with running air conditioning through July and August are becoming a fixture of modern life that nobody budgeted for a decade ago. There is an irony buried in this. The buildings going up right now — lightweight timber frames, thin walls, large glass surfaces — are some of the worst performers in summer heat. Meanwhile, older stone houses, thick brick buildings, and traditional earthen structures built centuries before electricity existed stay genuinely cool through the hottest days of the year. Not slightly cooler. Noticeably cooler. No mechanical help required. The reason is thermal mass. And it is one of those ideas that seems almost too simple to be useful until you realise that most modern construction has quietly abandoned it in the name of speed and cost. ...