Royalties from this title will help fund the installation of low cost solar systems providing refrigeration and lighting to communities and individuals in South Asia and Africa.

6th July 2015 - Greenstream Publishing will launch its exciting new title, Introducing Renewable Energy following the success of a Kickstarter campaign aimed at revolutionising the way we think about and use renewable energy. Royalties from this title will help fund the installation of low cost solar systems providing refrigeration and lighting to communities and individuals in South Asia and Africa.

Written by industry expert Paul Matthews, the book is an accompaniment to an exclusive and original suite of online and mobile applications designed to help with the installation of small scale renewable systems, found at www.introducingrenewableenergy.com and also going live on the 6th July.

The title is the ideal introduction for anyone wishing to learn more about renewable energy, from students and researchers to homeowners, and is particularly aimed at those wishing to install their own small scale systems with solar, wind or hydro power, from homeowners to architects and project managers. The website offers a comprehensive suite of practical tools developed in-house using NASA data. Following the world-wide success of the solar tools at Greenstreams www.solarelecticityhandbook.com, the new site will offer further solar installation tools, wind power tools including a wind turbine performance calculator, and a hydro performance calculator that also calculates the average rainfall in any given region.

Author Paul Matthews wrote the book to inspire others to install their own small-scale systems and to show that renewable energy can be scalable, beneficial and accessible to all. In fact, he believes we need renewable energy, for without it we cannot hope to maintain our current standard of living. About the book he explains:

‘There are a lot of badly written books out there on renewable energy, that are either poorly explained, inaccurate or inaccessible. I wanted to be able to put something together that the average man-in-the-street could understand.

Paul Matthews originally trained and worked as an electronics engineer, and retrained as a technician installing small scale wind turbines in late 2006 before he went back to University and emerged with a degree in Energy Engineering. He has since designed a small household solar energy system for Indian homes to supplement unreliable grid electricity, replacing generators and kerosene lamps with a greener alternative; a solar energy system designed to provide remote African communities with electricity; worked with a team designing a hydro-electric system that could be installed on a weir and contributed to the design of a small tidal energy system that will be undertaking trials off the coast of Scotland in 2015 and 2016. Today, Paul is working on an off-shore wind project in Sweden and consulting with a charity installing solar in remote African villages.