Welcome!

How do you build a better power supply for a city?

Over the next 100 years the consequences of unchecked Global Warming will devastate large parts of our planet. The burning of fossil based carbon fuels is a major contributor to this effect with electrical power generation facilities being major players.  Our cities will require new green power supplies built using technologies which have ultra low or no fossil carbon emissions. These new power supplies can be both centralized and dispersed. Solar panels on urban rooftops and small wind turbines are two forms of dispersed power generation. When they are combined with building upgrades that increase efficiency, the demands upon a city’s new centralized power supplies decrease or remain constant as the city grows. What are the reasonable estimations that future engineers can make for local power generation and efficiency increase for an older house in the Greater Toronto Area? The Ravina Project provides some of these data.

What is The Ravina Project?

The Ravina Project is a privately funded green energy research project in Toronto Canada located at 43.68 N and 79.34 W. We have used our own resources to turn our home into a science experiment. We want to provide power generation data for the public and do green power research. See our Project Goals page for more information. We fervently hope that access to our data will be a factor in giving people the confidence to press forward with their own green power projects. 

What have we done?

We have worked to upgrade our 1920s era house so that it is much more energy efficient. We use a boiler to heat the house and to provide domestic hot water. We have insulated the house, replaced windows and doors, swapped out all the light bulbs with more efficient ones and use power bars on all 'instant on' devices. We installed 1.5 kW of solar panels on a tiltable structure, batteries to run the house in times of blackout, and the interface to the power grid. We have built this WEB site to publish our papers and data.

Our Research and Data Collection

Our Solar Project began on November 1st 2006. The database containing the household carbon energy use begins in 2003. We are tracking our energy use and solar energy generation on daily, weekly, monthly and yearly bases. We have written and continue to write formal papers on a variety of topics including but not limited to: solar power generation techniques and insights, household thermodynamics, the War on CO2, and the policy implications of what we discover in our data. Periodically we will go off-grid for special events, to test our solar energy generation and battery capacity assumptions. We publish our work/data here on the WEB for others to use. See the Project Papers page for the currently available papers. Much of our data are published on the Solar Data and House Data pages.  Data specific to papers we write will be found on the Raw Data Page. We are now on Twitter. Get our daily generation tweets at: @ravinaproject with the hashtag #citizenscience.

What's New: Our new 2013 paper on household cooling using little or no air conditioning is available on our Project Papers page or here.

Humanity's Post Global Warming Epitaphs: "We could not afford to save ourselves. It would have cost too much."

It is our opinion that humanity's relationship with Global Warming can best be summed up by: Prometheus in the Anthropocene, where his cognitive limitations come face to face with a strange new planet he once called home.

Upon refection and integration of much into our thinking, we have come to the conclusion that a global future that is safe for women, that is, a future that allows women to thrive is the best future. In a real sense, women are the 'canaries in the coal mine' such that, a global future where women cannot thrive is a future where humanity is doomed. This works on so many levels; we are baffled as to why this metric is not more widely understood and used.