Don’t worry. This is not another Steorn free energy story . This is about free energy that you can have today, without breaking any laws of physics.

Yesterday I was driving home and I noticed this banner:

Interesting.. Jodan’s first international expo for renewable energy. It is being held, as part of the Global Conference on Renewable Energy Approaches for Desert Regions, which is currently being held in Jordan*.

The market is responding quite quickly to the fact that fossil fuel prices in Jordan have gotten more expensive.

So today, I ran away from the office for an hour and headed over to Le Royal hotel, where the expo is being held. Tomorrow, September the 21st will be the last day.

I arrived there around 5 pm and the mood was sleepy. I was told by one of the exhibitors that its busier between 11 am and 2 pm.

In any case, the expo was pretty interesting. There were a number of companies with electrical engineering and air condition solutions, which have little to nothing to do with renewable energy. But there was also a good number of companies who were selling or promoting solar and wind solutions.

The label ‘international’ is a few sizes too big for this expo. But to be fair there was one German company, Voltwerk AG, which had impressive looking brochures promoting their service. They implement, finance and operate large scale photovoltaic, wind and bio-energy facilities.

The Japanese where also there, with Sharp promoting solar energy solutions. The company, represented in Jordan by the Haidar Murad company, are about to introduce Sharp photovoltaic products in Jordan. I intend to call them up and get more info soon.

There was also a Russian-Jordanian joint venture, which was exhibiting a water heating system of its own development. The company, which says it will start production soon, says its technology was tested by the Fraunhofer Institute labs in Germany and the Renewable Energy Bureau at the University of Jordan. The founder of the company also showed me a battery that runs on metal electrodes on salt and water (which he calls a desert battery). “If you don’t have salt or water around, you can use the salt in the human body”. Which means you can urinate into the battery to make the attached light go on (I am not making this up)

But the most obvious commercial aspect of the expo, targeted at consumers like me, was water heating through vacuum tubes systems. The various promotes (I saw 3 companies) showing such system are claiming their systems are much more efficient than the traditional solar water heating systems that have been used in Jordan for decades.

These systems are used for heating water as well as supporting diesel based heating systems. One company representative told me that saving of 50-70% of your diesel fuel bill can be achieved. Fitting a house of 300 sq meter with such a system costs around JD 4000 (AROUND US$ 6000).

It was really good to see renewable energy solutions from various companies offered to people in one place. I collected brochures from half a dozen or so companies as I intend to research this further. In any future house I will build, I would definitely want to incorporate both water heating as well as solar electricity solutions in it.

Getting completely off the electricity grid seems to be a far fetched option for now (one would need batteries to store electricity for cloudy days). But it would be cool if I could save 50% or more of my energy bill every year.

* The conference is organized by the University of Jordan’s Renewable Energy Bureau, and is being supported by the King Abdullah Design and Development Bureau (KADDB), International Research Centre for Renewable Energy e.V. in Deutschland (IFEED), European Commission DG Joint Research Centre (JRC), UL-University of Limerick , New & Renewable Energy Authority, Egypt (NREA).