OliNo

Since WEO-2008, the economic downturn has led to a drop in energy use, CO2 emissions and energy investment. Is this an opportunity to arrest climate change or a threat that any economic upturn might be stifled at birth?

What package of commitments and measures should the climate negotiators at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 15) in Copenhagen put together if they really want to stop global temperatures rising? How much would it cost? And how much might the developed world have to pay to finance action elsewhere?

How big is the gas resource base and what is the typical pattern of production from a gas field? What does the unconventional gas boom in the United States mean for the rest of the world? Are we headed for a global gas glut? What role will gas play in the future energy mix? And how might the way gas is priced change?

All these questions and many others are answered in WEO-2009. The data are extensive, the projections more detailed than ever and the analyses compelling.

Read more…

As I own several hundreds of megabytes of digital photographs, documents, spreadsheets and letters, the urge to use a good backup solution raised over time. I do not want to wait and see on one day a fatal harddrive crash…

In search of a solution (besides backup procedures to CD-ROM/DVD (optical media, which last for 3-5 years before degradation kicks in), I used an external USB harddisk drive. Really easy and simple to use. But a crime when you make manual backups. With the Apple Mac Mini and OS/X 10.5 Leopard, Time Machine will take care and backup the necessary files.

Read more…

The Apple Mac Mini is a small and efficient computer for domestic use.  By default, there are nowadays (August 2009) 3 different configurations available: all 3 based on Intel Pentium Core2Duo processors, but all vary in the range of harddisk capacity and memory capacity.

Read more…

Since January 2008,  we are busy in our household trying to reduce our energy consumption. We succeeded in this task quite well. We reduced our gas consumption with 30% and our electricity consumption by a staggering 90%.  Are you curious how we did this?

Read more…

As far as I know, this is the first existing home in the Netherlands, which is converted to a “zero energy” home. The electricity generated by solar panels and the heating is done by a heat pump, total net costs of subsidies: € 15,000.

Read more…

In this article I would like to show you how to convert a 300W Halogen torch lamp into a 56W lamp for less than €12 in about half an hour.

Read more…

Dear readers and visitors of the OliNo.org website, I would like to share a part of my experience as a Dutch visitor, when I was travelling in the warm and deep South of the USA during October until January of 2009. In December I spent some time in beautiful Sedona (Arizona) where I encountered a dome house in a rural area.

Read more…

On a cold day, I was on the (non heated) attic of my house where the central heating pipes are running. When I touched the insulation around the pipes, I noticed they were feeling warm. This means despite the pipe insulation, warmth is escaping from the central heating pipes.

Read more…

The energy consumption of an electrical doorbell is very inefficient. It uses energy 24 hours/day while being used only a few seconds per day. In this article, I describe how I reduced the energy consumption of my doorbell.

Read more…

This article shows that you can save energy by converting an old freezer into a refrigerator. The result is a refrigerator that is more economical than the most efficient A + + refrigerator (This is an indication of the most efficient appliances on a European efficiency scale).

Read more…