Cangro – an upside down way to look at growing veggies

Hooray! It’s unashamed cronyism time! My friends Jody & Di have started a fantastic initiative – Cangro, where they are using upside plants to educate the young and old on how easy it is to grow fruit & veg under your own steam.  They sell an urban farming kit which can then be hung with a plant facing downwards.  It’s great for plants like tomatoes or beans, where the fruit/veg doesn’t normally do well when planted straight in the soil, because they tend to get nibbled by critters on the ground. 

They’ve also run a bunch of competitions where kids see who can grow the biggest and/or most impressive tomato plants, and they’ve seen these kids get SO excited at how wonderfully rewarding the experience can be (as well as how wonderful it is to win a bicycle…)

Contact details here for more info:

083 403 3394 & info@cangro.co.za

 Bit of history from their website:

Cangro was founded by siblings, Jody and Diane Kramer. With a little bit of environmental and sustainable knowledge and some forward thinking, they discovered the “magic” of the upside down can.

It all started with a tomato growing in the back garden and a thought…

“How can we grow tomatoes in a fun and practical way?”

… A few days later, Diane and Jody came across 30 000 redundant paint cans earmarked for the dump and so their journey began.

From their very humble beginnings at the Irene farmers market, in which they sold out before they could unpack the trailer, Jody and Diane knew they were onto something special… It was soon realized, from the children’s and teacher’s enthusiasm that this could become a wonderful teaching aid, something that could replace the “old bean and cotton wool”.

With Diane’s exuberant personality and Jody’s practicality, they have formed a very compatible and effective team.

“Everybody has been so enthusiastic and helpful towards the project, we often find we have no control over where this can is taking us. It has been an incredibly rewarding experience!” Jody Kramer

Energy storage really the talk of the RE town at the moment

Following on from my post on electricity storage from yesterday, the Renewable Energy World site included three articles on storage in their mailer this morning.

Sitting at the Tip of the Iceberg: The Huge Potential of Energy Storage (found here), where they estimate that “the U.S. energy storage market will grow to 1.7 gigawatts in 2017 and should hit 2.5 GW by 2020.”  This is largely driven by targets set in California where it has been mandated that “the state’s utilities procure 1.325 GW of storage by 2020.”

In Hawaii’s Solar Conundrum: Can Energy Storage Save the Day? they describe how Hawaii is alsolooking into storage quite actively (article found here), where they have “opened bidding for one of the largest energy storage projects in the country: a 60- to 200-megawatt storage project to help manage solar power within the Oahu island grid by 2017.”

And finally, Energy Storage: A Different View from Germany (found here) talks on how Germany is looking into “three main categories: power to heat, power to gas (specifically hydrogen) and power to power, which can utilize a range of storage technologies, including electrochemical (batteries), mechanical or thermal.”

It’s no surprise that all three of these articles focus on areas where there is a high penetration of solar technologies, and there is likely to be even more interest in solar going forward.  

It’s good news for South Africa that R&D in the States and in Germany is a priority at the moment.  Innovations and breakthroughs in this field can have massive implications for a country with solar irradiance like ours, where baseload is considered to be so important.

A quick intro to electricity storage technologies by Arup

With renewables becoming more prominent in many countries’ energy pictures, the issue of intermittency is become more and more relevant. As Steve Saunders from Arup points out in his Thoughts article “*Storing electricity evens out the intermittency in supply that comes with technologies such as wind or solar. Without it, a grid is limited to around 18% renewables – a point Germany has already reached and the UK is close to*.”

I found this guide, put together by Arup, quite interesting and handy. It
summarises the key characteristics of some storage technologies, and the
full doc can be downloaded here

The following technologies are explained at a very high level, with info on

the advantages, disadvantages and possible applications. A nice intro into
energy storage.

– Sodium Sulphur (NaS) Batteries
– Flow Batteries
– Lead Acid Batteries
– Lithium ion (Li-ion) Batteries
– Sodium Nickel Chloride Batteries
– Liquid Air Energy Storage
– Compressed Air Energy Storage
– Pumped Hydro Energy Storage
– Pumped Heat Electricity Storage
– Flywheels
– Hydrogen
– Superconducting Magnet Energy Storage
– Super Capacitors

Some healthy responses to an unhealthy world

Two years ago I watched a video about these large sea birds (think they
were albatrosses) in the Pacific that were feeding their chicks bits of
plastic that they picked up. The baby birds were dying from malnutrition
and were stuffed full of pen lids, lighters, bottle caps and the like. It
was a ten minute video that left me crawled up in a ball on my bed with a
boyfriend who didn’t know what had just happened (“but why are you
CRYING?”). For all the wracking sobs that this inspired I have changed my
behaviour in less ways than I am brave enough to admit. It does, however,
sit on my mind heavily.

What we are doing to the world is horrendous, overpowering, and shocking in
nearly every aspect of life; every industry, every meal, every journey,
every purchase. I am not very good at processing these emotions into
something productive and for me, this frequently translates into a
crippling and debilitating sense of shame, and a horrible feeling of ‘well
then, what’s the point of it all.’

I think most of us are well aware of how much is going wrong and I’m not
about to re-hash what a bad job we do of everything, but to give a couple
of examples of people who see the same things that I do, and somehow react
in a way that is healthy, positive, inspiring, and has more chance of
actually doing something than rocking backwards and forwards mumbling
incoherent sentences about factory farming. I also think it’s nice to
remember that I am not the only one who is bothered by these things; and
that some people are making an impact.

A young man called Boyan Slat has taken on the problem of waste in the
oceans, and has come up with “an anchored network of floating booms and
processing platforms that could be dispatched to garbage patches around the
world.” So far, they have raised over $610k from crowd-funding, and aim to
clean up almost half the north pacific garbage patch in the next ten
years. More info can be found here: http://www.theoceancleanup.com/

Closer to home, Michael Suttner, has taken a coke bottle and turned it into
safe, affordable and renewable lighting. It uses flexible PV solar panels,
wrapped up in an acrylic housing, with a battery, that sits under a
standard spec bottle cap. This then screws onto a soda bottle neck. The
idea is to provide this lighting to households for less than $10, without
any continuous energy costs as they’re rechargeable, and they make use of
waste bottles. More info can be found here: http://thelightie.com/

“*In December 2007, Annie Leonard and her friends at Free Range Studios put
a 20-minute movie about the way we make, use, and throw away Stuff on the
internet, unleashing a torrent of pent-up demand for honest conversation
about the impacts of our consumer-crazed culture on people and the planet.
In the six years since The Story of Stuff was released, Annie’s ‘cartoon
about trash’ has been viewed more than 30 million times worldwide*.” It is
incredible, how powerful these movies are. They’ve done so much to raise
awareness around consumerism and how we use stuff, without giving through
to where it comes from or where it goes. Find out more here:
http://storyofstuff.org/

I don’t know what it is that motivates these people. Where they find the
energy, or the strength of character to see the things that are wrong and
pull out the resolve to still try to do something. I do know that I need
to remind myself of them though, often. Because who wants to live as a
shivering, quivering mess?