When it comes to energy saving tips for your home, there are a lot of options to choose from. Between conducting an entire home renovation or replacing the washer and dryer, how do you choose what will make the biggest impact on your energy consumption usage? (more…)
One of the challenges facing solar and wind energy is capacity factor, i.e. the ratio of the total energy generated by a device to the total energy that it’s potentially capable of generating (multiplied by 100, to make a percentage). One of the points of value of baseload power plants, e.g., coal and nuclear, is that they have enormous capacity factors, i.e., that they run at optimum capacity almost constantly. (more…)
Frequent commenter Marco Polo offers this suggestion to a reader who’s weighing her options re: cleantech: Like most consumers, you will decide on the technology’s convenience and value for money first and ideology second. That’s not wrong, it’s just common sense; the rest is just arrogant nonsense by ideological advocates seeking to impose their own philosophies and lifestyles on others.
A couple of notes: (more…)
Even if the water temperatures were enticing, which they’re not, you still wouldn’t want to swim in the channel north of Scotland that separates the Atlantic from the North Sea (pictured). The tides are fearsome, characteristic of all ocean shorelines on Earth at extreme latitudes.
That’s what enabled our friends in the land of kilts, bagpipes, haggis, and single malt whiskey to set a record in August, generating 700 megawatt-hours of electricity from tidal generators. Great going.
Sorry if this sounds like splitting hairs, but if the author is discussing climate change and using “should” and ‘Trump” in the same sentence, he needs to make statements like: (more…)
Here’s an article in The Economist that pays the homage that is due to the internal combustion engine, which, since it came on the scene 124 years ago, has systematically changed virtually every aspect of human life on this planet. To find an innovation that has had more profound impact, I suppose you’d have to go to germ theory, which, coincidentally, was also developed in the late 19th Century. (more…)
As we celebrate Van Morrison’s 72nd birthday, let’s take a look back at a post I wrote five years ago.
By the time I’ve driven my rental car off the Avis lot in any particular city, I’ve usually found a radio station that I think will speak to me. During the day, it’s normally the local NPR affiliate, but after hours, the choice becomes more interesting. Last night, it was WXYC, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose late-night DJ “Riley” had a sweet and unaffected charm in her presentation of some terrific music. At her repeated suggestion, I called in a request. I knew it would make her evening to know that someone was listening, and I could tell by the sound of her voice when she took my call on the first ring that I was right. (more…)
The demand for green infrastructure grows by the day with the increasing threats humans pose to the environment. Building a sustainable culture should begin at the community level. Households will be motivated to adopt green living when they already reside in a community that prioritizes sustainability. Community-scale waste disposal, power, and water sources are some of the infrastructures that can benefit from a clean and sustainable building. Besides being environmentally-friendly, green infrastructure must be resilient and cost-effective and next is a look at a few ideas. (more…)
In our ongoing effort to keep 2GreenEnergy readers informed on developments in the electric vehicle space, here’s a new entrant from a company called Sondors.
The essence of the trike form is that it circumvents NHTSA (National Highways Traffic Safety Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Transportation) testing and standards; in the U.S., three-wheeled vehicles are treated as motorcycles. The downside for the owner is the new driver’s license, helmet laws, and, of course, the safety factors that NHTSA would have required, of which there is a very long and important list.
For those wishing to understand the relationship between climate change and hurricanes, here’s a wonderful piece from Yale University that describes precisely the role that warmer oceans play in all destruction we’re seeing. (more…)
Here’s an 
