Monthly Archives: Monday September 7th, 2009

No car

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Translation in progress

If you have visited this website before you might have seen the articles about my test drives in electric cars. That might give the impression that I love cars. That’s not exactly true, and in this article I’ll explain why.

I was raised in and around cars. Our family car was never far away; parked in front of our house, used for daily shopping, family visits, day trips and holidays and sometimes we even went for a drive just for fun. Of course I started with driving lessons when I was 18 years old, and when I was given (!) my first car I drove like there was no tomorrow. I can remember a wonderful feeling of freedom. Although… was that freedom real? Does a car really provide as much freedom as the TV commericals would like you to believe? How often do you drive your car along dusty desert roads over rough terrain into the setting sun?

In this article I will try to analyse, point by point, which influence the car, and not having a car, had and has on my freedom:

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Column on New Energy TV

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About three weeks ago Roelf van Til invited me to do a video column for his internet television station New Energy TV. It took me a while to come up with a suitable subject, but after a few tips I wrote a short piece. This is the result (in Dutch, obviously):

Statistics

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August is over, time to look at the statistics. We used much electricity in August, more than 80kWh, and I know exactly why. Every day the weather was good enough, I cycled to work (22 km) and that’s why I washed my clothes more often. The solar panels performed very well, producing 142,2kWh, because August was a very sunny month with about 20% more sun hours than the long-term average. De production of the 100Wp solar awning lagged behind because at spent two weeks indoors due to painting works. The surplus over August was 62,2 kWh, which we fed back into the grid. Both natural gas and water consumption both were a bit higher than average, I showered a lot more because of all the cycling, and also the water consumption was increased because the washing machine was run more often. There were relatively few website visitors in August, mainly because I wrote few new posts because I am very busy at work. I hope to be able to write a bit more in the near future, especially for the World Solar Challenge pagina page.