I was watching "Medium" on TV Monday night, a very well-written show. The DuBois family has been going through a rough patch this year. Joe, the father, lost his job as an aerospace engineer and has been on unemployment. Allison is persona non grata with the new DA. In this most recent episode, their middle daughter, Bridget, has a school assignment to use a solar electric panel to power a Christmas tree light, a stupid idea, as Bridget rightly complains, because who needs a light when the sun is shining? Joe tries to help her by using the solar cell to power an old boom box but he can't get enough juice through the cell.
Then he has a dream.
He invents a mirror-based power boost for solar cells that not only powers Bridget's school project but also may have real potential to power much more. Who knew? Photovoltaics as a plot point in a network TV drama. Now that's market penetration.
And that's not the only TV show featuring solar and green ideas.
On the Science Channel, there's a show called "Invention Nation" which follows three guys in their grease-powered bus as they travel around the country visiting people who are working on green technology. I watched a block of these shows one night and really enjoyed the episode where they built and installed a modified breadbox solar water heater in the Southwest. It consisted of an insulated box shaped like a parabolic trough with a recycled hot water heater tank at the focus and insulated glass to seal it. Neat design. The company producing it wants to market kits for around $400. Another episode included a visit to MA biotech firm that had installed one of John Todd's Eco Machine systems to treat their wastewater. The Eco Machine is a series of transparent tanks that support a series of different ecosystems that clean the water progressively and produces edible and ornamental plants and water cleaned to tertiary standards, one step below drinking water. Most of the municipal water treatment plants clean water to secondary standards. Having followed John's work since before the beginning of this idea, it was gratifying to see it featured on mass market TV. Someday I'll have to digitize my videos of his earliest installations and put them online, just for historical purposes.
One show that I haven't seen yet is from BBC America and is called "Dumped." This is a show in which a group of people stay in a dump in England and live off what other people throw away. From the promos, they build shelters, including one shot of a home-made windmill, and may even scavenge the dump for food. I guess the Fregan ethic has crossed the Pond. It looks like an interesting show.
I have my own idea for a solar TV show, but nobody has been interested in producing it - yet:
Your Southernmost Window
Previous entries in this series:
Solar, As Seen on TV (6)
Solar, As Seen on TV (5)
Solar, As Seen on TV (4)
Solar, As Seen on TV (3)
Solar, As Seen on TV (2)
Solar, As Seen on TV