Solar panels are inexpensive, reliable, require little maintenance, and are a small cost as part of building codes compliance. It's sensible to require them as part of building codes for new construction.
"Ultimately, Amish engagements with nature cannot be reduced to a simplistic trope. Rather, they reflect a complicated mix of historical experience, economic pragmatism and cultural and religious understandings. The sooner we can move beyond an idealistic image of the all-natural Amish, the easier it will be to find common ground between Amish and non-Amish communities."
"The Census Bureau has a long history of protecting the confidentiality of respondents to the census and the American Community Surveys. As part of current confidentiality protection, the Census Bureau “adds noise” to data products in ways they cannot release. The proposed new disclosure avoidance system using differential privacy is purported to be more open and transparent to users. But the new system may come with a significant trade-off in data accuracy, making the public data useless for many applications. We are following this conversation, and we will share relevant information from the Census Bureau and others as it is released."
For the lighting in my apartment, I'm using a 12 volt power supply, as that's what the LED strips are fed because they put 3 in series times 3.6 volt drop or 11 volts plus a 220 ohm resistor. That's fairly efficient.
The problem is the Arduino or ESP board uses 5 volt or 3.3 volt power, and to get that right now I'm using a linear regulator, which "discards" the excess voltage as heat -- a device that draws 75 mA @ 3.3 VDC or a 0.24 watt, ends up drawing 75mA @ 12 VDC or 0.9 watts, with the linear discarding 0.66 watts as heat -- even when things are idling and doing no useful work.
Now, throwing 0.66 watts into a head won't exactly heat a room up, but that still a waste of 5.7 kW/h a year. But until now I hadn't found a small, inexpensive switching regulator for 55 cents a piece, which will cut into a lot of waste, although switch mode regulators still have some waste.
"The Day and Night World Map shows the Sun's current position and where it is night and day throughout the world at that point of time."