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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

I just had a long and interesting conversation with a woman in Columbia who will be doing a bit of volunteer writing for us here; I’m certainly looking forward to reading her stuff.

We talked about what it takes to get paid to write about clean energy and sustainability more generally.  This isn’t an easy question to answer.  My best guess regarding the most direct path here, as I told her, is offering services to the private sector and their myriad of sustainability initiatives; (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

What was I thinking not buying stock in Tesla when the company turned profitable?  I was telling my daughter earlier this morning that missing this opportunity made me feel like a world-class chump.

What to make of this whole phenomenon?  Obviously, the market sees pent up end-user demand for electric vehicles that has been fantastically under-served by the fits and starts of the auto industry and the many failed start-ups that hoped to become part of it.

Congratulations to the folks up there in Palo Alto for a job well done.  May your success continue – even without me on-board as a shareholder.   Grrrr.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

Many potentially profitable renewable energy projects are never developed because of the difficulty in quantifying the project risks. The problem is that the projects are dependent on local wind rates, sunshine or rainfall levels, plus the local geography, as well as the normal considerations for a fossil fuel development, such as property rights and the market rates paid for power. In other words, renewable energy projects are not easily replicable and that adds extra uncertainty to project development.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has published a Project Management Guide for renewable energy developers. It provides step-by-step guidance for anyone considering  a renewable energy development. You can read an article on the NREL guide, or download the NREL report.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

Fire is a regular, but often tragic, occurrence. Whether started in a family home, a commercial environment or outside, both accidental and deliberate fires can be potentially devastating. One of the most destructive types of fire, though, is forest fires and these can wipe out entire communities and their homes, habitats, wildlife groups and timber and, as a result, are one of the main causes of deforestation.

Some experts suggest, however, that periodic forest fires can be beneficial, serving as an instrument of renewal and change. So what are the effects on the environment and what are the causes and consequences of forest fires? (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

In his response to my post on eating less meat, frequent commenter and really smart guy Glenn Doty writes:

….the average American burns 2 gallons of gasoline (72 kWh) per day in transportation. The production and distribution of is ~88% efficient, so this works out to ~82 kWh worth of energy required to transport us around. We Americans used ~35 kWh/day of electricity between home, work, and leisure.  The average fossil electricity on the grid is ~34% efficient, so this works out to ~103 kWh worth of energy to satisfy our lifestyle. We eat ~3 kWh, we drive ~82 kWh, and we live, work and play in ~103 kWh…  Yes eating meat is more energy intensive than eating salad, and yes animals fart… but in the grand scheme of things this is NOT the bigger issue.

Glenn appears to be comparing the energy intensiveness of our food with that of our transportation.  I don’t see the validity of this comparison, and point to this analysis of the resources (energy, water and land use) required to grow beef vs. vegetables.  In summary, growing a calorie of beef takes 20 – 25 times more fossil energy, 200 times more water, and about 9 times more land than growing a calorie of vegetables.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

I’m what could be called a “compulsive guesser.”  When someone asks me something – it could be the outdoor temperature or the latitude of Sri Lanka — I always take a guess before looking it up.

When I came across this article called The Real Obstacle to Halting Climate Change, I characteristically took a guess.  “OK, this is TruthDig, a progressive news source, so I’m going to say it’s essentially man’s inhumanity to man, the fact that we’re a fat, dumb, corrupt and selfish civilization.” (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Wind Energy

Those keeping track of the Atlantic Wind Connection and its dreams to build out 60 gigawatts of off-shore wind in the shallow waters off the mid-Atlantic coast will want to check out this article.  The analysis suggests that the cost per kilowatt-hour will be approximately twice that of nuclear, yet I find this hard to believe, given recent events that include outrageous budget overruns on nuclear projects, and ever-growing public outcry over operational safety and waste-disposal issues.

I’m reminded of a breakfast meeting I had with an eco-journalist a couple of months ago.  He’s a proponent of nuclear, and, as most of them do, he points out that today we have 4th or 5th generation nuclear.  But, he quips, “We also have 4th or 5th generation anti-nuclear protesters, as well.”

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Yesterday I finished Gore’s new book THE FUTURE: 6 DRIVERS OF GLOBAL CHANGE. Overall a good read. But Gore pushes mostly centralized political policies and corporation-led mostly high-tech changes to reach his proposed solutions to so many interrelated problems. He correctly cites global rising energy usage and wants more energy efficiency and renewables, but says nothing about substantially reducing overall energy use, including how to start a global trend to lower the rates of energy usage growth.

Gore seems to believe RE and EE technologies are the only answers, which is FALSE and certainly MORE EXPENSIVE, maybe unaffordable in most peoples’ down-to-earth budgets. He correctly describes the anti-democratic trends in USA where only our largest corporations and most wealthy individuals now have most and sometimes only access to most of our media and political speech arenas. (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

I hope everyone is enjoying this day on which we thank our mothers for being the wonderful and kind people they are, and express our gratitude for the numerous sacrifices they made on our behalf.

The way Mothers’ Day is celebrated in the U.S., with its cards and flowers, is a relatively recent phenomenon (early 20th Century). Yet the basic concept goes back many thousands of years, at least to the ancient Egyptians, who set aside a day in the springtime to pay homage to the goddess Isis, regarded as the “ideal mother and wife as well as the patroness of nature.”

Ah, now you see where I’m going with this, don’t you?  And you thought momentarily that I might overlook a perfectly good opportunity to put in a plug for our Mother Earth. Not a chance. We need to respect Her, just as we do the great women who brought us into the world.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Hydrokinetics

Here’s a video on ocean current/tidal hydrokinetics that I don’t claim to understand fully.  It’s very professionally made, it comes from Siemens, one of the top five players in the industrial energy space, and its spokesperson is a kindly older “professorial” type of fellow (Peter Fraenkel — pictured here) with all kinds of credibility.

But does it have to be so short on meaningful content?  OK, it wasn’t made for scientists, but aren’t even garden-variety humanoids interested in things like:

• Can this be cost-effective?

• What are the challenges?

• What are the fantasies?  I.e., in a perfect world, how much energy can we get, and what is the real potential to offset our consumption of fossil fuels?

Maybe that last one’s not a bad question to ask on the very week that the concentration of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere just crossed 400 parts per million.

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