energy

51 Articles

ESP32 Powers DIY Smart Energy Meter

December 2, 2024 by 20 Comments

Energy is expensive these days. There’s no getting around it. If, like [Giovanni], you want to keep better track of your usage, you might find value in his DIY energy meter build.

[Giovanni] built his energy meter to monitor energy usage in his whole home. An ESP32 serves as the heart of this build. It’s hooked up with a JSY-MK-194G energy metering module, which uses a current clamp and transformer in order to accurately monitor the amount of energy passing through the mains connection to his home. With this setup, it’s possible to track voltage, current, frequency, and power factor, so you can really nerd out over the electrical specifics of what’s going on. Results are then shared with Home Assistant via the ESPHome plugin and the ESP32’s WiFi connection. This allows [Giovanni] to see plots of live and historical data from the power meter via his smartphone.

A project like this one is a great way to explore saving energy, particularly if you live somewhere without a smart meter or any other sort of accessible usage tracking. We’ve featured some of [Giovanni]’s neat projects before, too.
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Waves crash near a rocky shore. Large, SUV-sized blue "floaters" sit in the water perpendicular to a concrete pier. The floaters look somewhat like a bass boat shrink wrapped in dark blue plastic and attached to a large piston and hinge. A grey SUV sits on the pier, almost as if for scale.

US Is Getting Its First Onshore Wave Power Plant

November 28, 2024 by 60 Comments

Renewables let you have a more diverse set of energy inputs so you aren’t putting all your generation eggs in one basket. One type of renewable that doesn’t see a lot of love, despite 80% of the world’s population living within 100 km (~60 mi) of a coastline, is harnessing the energy of the tides. [via Electrek]

“The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that wave energy has the potential to generate over 1,400 terawatt-hours per year,” so while this initial project won’t be huge, the overall possible power generation from tidal power is nothing to sneeze at. Known more for its role in shipping fossil fuels, the Port of Los Angeles will host the new wave power pilot being built by Eco Wave Power and Shell. Eco Wave’s system uses floaters to drive pistons that compress hydraulic fluid and turn a generator before the decompressed fluid is returned to the pistons in a nice, tidy loop.

Eco Wave plans to finish construction by early 2025 and already has the power conversion unit onsite at the Port of Los Angeles. While the press release is mum on the planned install capacity, Eco Wave claims they will soon have 404.7 MW of installed capacity through several different pilot projects around the world.

We covered another Swedish company trying to harness tidal power with underwater kites, and if wave power isn’t your thing but you still like mixing water and electricity, why not try offshore wind or a floating solar farm? Just make sure to keep the noise down!

Trees Turned Into Wind Turbines, Non-Destructively

September 18, 2024 by 57 Comments

Trees and forests are an incredibly important natural resource — not only for lumber and agricultural products, but also because they maintain a huge amount of biodiversity, stabilize their local environments, and help combat climate change as a way to sequester atmospheric carbon. But the one thing they don’t do is make electricity. At least, not directly. [Concept Crafted Creations] is working on solving this issue by essentially turning an unmodified tree into a kind of wind turbine.

The idea works by first attaching a linear generator to the trunk of a tree. This generator has a hand-wound set of coils on the outside, with permanent magnets on a shaft that can travel up and down inside the set of coils. The motion to power the generator comes from a set of ropes connected high up in the tree’s branches. When the wind moves the branches, the ropes transfer the energy to a 3D printed rotational mechanism attached to a gearbox, which then pumps the generator up and down. The more ropes, branches, and generators attached to a tree the more electricity can be produced.

Admittedly, this project is still a proof-of-concept, although the currently deployed prototype seems promising. [Concept Crafted Creations] hopes to work with others building similar devices to improve on the idea and build more refined prototypes in the future. It’s also not the only way of building a wind energy generator outside of the traditional bladed design, either. It’s possible to build a wind-powered generator with no moving parts that uses vibrations instead of rotational motion as well.

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Open-Source Solar Modules

February 5, 2024 by 13 Comments

As the price of solar panels continues to fall, more and more places find it economical to build solar farms that might not have been able to at higher prices. High latitude locations, places with more clouds than sun, and other challenging build sites all are seeing increased green energy development. The modules being used have one main downside, though, which is that they’re essentially a black box encased in resin and plastic, so if one of the small cells fails a large percentage of the panel may be rendered useless with no way to repair it. A solar development kit like this one from a group called Biosphere Solar is looking to create repairable, DIY modules that are completely open source, to help solve this issue.

The modular solar panel is made from a 3D printed holster which can hold a number of individual solar cells. With the cells placed in the layout and soldered together, they are then sandwiched between a few layers of a clear material like acrylic or glass with a seal around the exterior to prevent water intrusion. Since the project is open-source any number of materials can be used for the solar cell casing, and with the STL file available it’s not strictly necessary to 3D print the case as other manufacturing methods could be used. The only thing left is to hook up a DC/DC converter if you need one, and perhaps also a number of bypass and/or blocking diodes depending on your panel’s electrical layout.

The project is still in active development, and some more information can be found at the project’s website. While the “recyclability” of large-scale solar farms is indeed a problem, it’s arguably one which has been overblown by various interests who are trying to cast doubt on green energy. A small build like this won’t solve either problem anytime soon, so the real utility here would be for home users with small off-grid needs who want an open-source, repairable panel. It’s a great method to make sure solar technology is accessible and repairable for anyone that wants it, and in a way this approach to building hardware reminds us a lot of the Framework laptops.

Kites Fill Electricity Generation Gaps

January 22, 2024 by 48 Comments

Looking at a wind turbine from first principles, it’s essentially a set of wings that generate lift in much the same way an airplane wing does. Putting the wings on a rotor and calling them “blades” is not a huge step away from that. But there’s no reason the wing has to rotate, or for that matter be attached to a fixed platform, in order to generate electricity. Anything that generates lift can be used, and this company is demonstrating that with their kite-powered wind generators.

Like other wind energy producers that have used kites to generate electricity, this one is similar in that the kite is flown in a figure-8 pattern downwind where it can harness energy the most efficiently, pulling out a tether which is tied to a generator. When fully extended, it is flown to a position where the wind doesn’t strike the kite as strongly and the tether is reeled in. Unlike other kite generators we’ve seen, though, this one is offered as a turnkey system complete with battery backup and housed in a self-contained shipping unit, allowing it to be deployed quickly to be used in situations where something like a diesel generator would be impossible to get or where the fuel can’t be obtained.

The company, called Kitepower, does note that these aren’t replacements for traditional wind turbines and would be used more for supporting microgrids. There are still some advantages to using kites over fixed turbine blades though: kites can reach higher altitude where the wind is stronger, and they require less materials for a given amount of energy production, often making them even more environmentally friendly and possibly more economical as well. Surprisingly enough, kites can also be used to generate energy even in places where there’s no wind at all.

Solar Chimneys: Viable Energy Solution Or A Lot Of Hot Air?

January 15, 2024 by 89 Comments

We think of the power we generate as coming from all these different kinds of sources. Oil, gas, coal, nuclear, wind… so varied! And yet they all fundamentally come down to moving a gas through a turbine to actually spin up a generator and make some juice. Even some solar plants worked this way, using the sun’s energy to heat water into steam to spin some blades and keep the lights on.

A solar updraft tower works along these basic principles, too, but in a rather unique configuration. It’s not since the dawn of the Industrial Age that humanity went around building lots of big chimneys, and if this technology makes good sense, we could be due again. Let’s find out how it works and if it’s worth all the bluster, or if it’s just a bunch of hot air.

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Monitoring Energy Use And Saving Money

November 29, 2023 by 23 Comments

On the surface, the electric grid might seem like a solved piece of infrastructure. But there’s actually been a large amount of computerized modernization going in the background for the past decade or so. At a large scale this means automatic control of the grid, but for some electric utility customers like [Alex] this means the rates for electricity can change every hour based on demand. By keeping an eye on the current rate, you can extract the most value from these utilities.

[Alex] is located in the United Kingdom and has an energy provider whose rates can change every half hour. This information is freely available well enough in advance to download the data and display it visibly in with a NeoPixel LED ring around a clock. The colors displayed by the LEDs represent an increase or decrease in price for the corresponding time and allow him to better plan out the household’s energy use for the day. The clock uses a TinyPICO ESP32 module to gather the data and handle the clock display. A second wall-mounted device shows real-time energy readings for both gas and electricity using two old analog voltmeters modified to display kilowatt-hours.

While not everyone has a utility which allows this sort of granularity with energy pricing, having one can make a bit of a difference as electricity rates under this system can sometimes go negative. [Alex] estimates that using these two displays to coordinate his energy usage has saved around £50 a month. Even if your utility offers minimal or no price adjustments for time-of-use, it’s still a good idea to monitor energy use in your home. Here’s a fairly comprehensive project that does that without modifying any existing wiring.