We have choices to make in the books we read to our young children, and it’s interesting to see how these options have developed and changed over time. Many of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales and dozens of other stories that were published in the 19th Century are generally considered unnecessarily gruesome by today’s standards, and have come to be replaced by lighter, more uplifting writing that has become popular since. (more…)
When I speak on the subject of renewable energy or sustainability more generally, I normally mention that making an investment in cleantech is among the most patriotic things that an American can do. In particular, clean energy will be the defining industry in the 21st Century, and it hurts to see the U.S. sitting on the sidelines while China and dozens of other countries go roaring past us in the market space. And even more important are the national security issues that include the costs, both financial and human, of running the world’s largest military, held in place largely to assure access to oil.
That’s why it’s so painful to see regressive steps (more…)
Senior energy analyst and frequent 2GreenEnergy commenter Glenn Doty wrote something the other day that I find interesting:
….The thing is, our end-use electric consumption is likely never going to decrease. We’ve more or less stopped the rapid increase in our nation’s energy consumption through improvements in efficiency, but every time someone better insulates their house, or switches from incandescent light bulbs to CFL’s (or still rarely LED’s), someone else upgrades their TV to a 90″ plasma monster TV, or just moves to a McMansion. (more…)
I’m looking forward to Monday afternoon, when, at 2 PM, I’ll be interviewing John Perlin, author of the definitive treatise on the history of solar energy, “Let It Shine: The 6000-Year Story of Solar Energy in a Nutshell.”
Lester Brown, Founder of Worldwatch Institute, says, “Let It Shine is the solar bible.”
“John Perlin is the historian of solar energy,” says Daniel Yergin, a guy who knows more than a little bit about energy on this planet.
I haven’t added too much to the 2GreenEnergy YouTube channel recently, and this should give me tons of material for a series of short videos that I can put online. Should be a great afternoon.
Allocating funds for sustainable progress is fast becoming a mandatory survival parameter for companies worldwide. With the climate change concerns mounting heavily by drastic weather conditions (consider the polar vortex), companies are realizing that they should shift to the green gear while there is still time. With the global fossil fuel supply running out every second in heavy consumption, full investment in alternative energy options is only a matter of time. From automobile manufactures to telecom services, everyone has to go green or perish. (more…)
If you want to read a thoroughly misleading piece of garbage, let me suggest this article on renewable energy and nature, published in the EnergyCollective. Check this out:
“The renewable energy paradigm requires an unprecedented industrial re-engineering of the landscape: lining every horizon with forty-story wind turbines, paving deserts with concentrating solar mirrors, girdling the coasts with tidal and wave generators, and drilling for geological heat reservoirs; it sees all of nature as an integrated machine for producing energy…… Ultimately, if we want to save more nature we must leave more of it alone, not harness it to power a human population of 7 going on 9 billion.”
Please, no more. I just had lunch, and that is really nauseating. At the risk of stating the obvious: (more…)
A very senior businessman I’ve known for a long while has asked me to serve as a panelist for a conference his group is putting on next September in San Diego. He writes, “I assume (your expertise) falls into two areas — what are investors looking for, as well as any of the topics related to energy.”
I respond: Sure, I’ll do it. Yes, I would say discussions related to clean energy, the environment, and sustainability are all fairly strong for me – at least from a high level.
I don’t claim to have any unique insights as to what investors want. I would simply say what the audience, I’m sure, already knows, i.e., that investors want low risk and high returns in a very short period of time. Of course, that’s the problem we face here in renewables, which are longer-term and capital intensive by nature, and they compete against forms of energy that are extremely inexpensive, because, in general, we don’t seem to care that they are ruining the planet. This is one of the reasons we’re having trouble making headway here.
I really enjoy working with our interns here at 2GreenEnergy, in my capacity as, I suppose we could say “coach.” My role is to direct them into researching areas that I think will be a good fit for the individual’s interests and abilities, point them in directions that I believe will be fruitful, and then finally, help then edit their writing. (more…)
My colleague Jim Boyden (PhD, physics, Cal Tech, 1960) was kind enough to brief me on the highlights of the meeting of the American Physical Society at the University of California at Berkeley last weekend. The core of the meeting, apparently, was an update on climate change (what can we expect, and when can we expect it), and the status of the major technologies that may come to bear to help us migrate away from fossil fuels while there is still time to avert catastrophe. (more…)
I’ve recently made another addition to my list of renewable energy investment opportunities: the development of a smallish wind farm in Sardinia. In a recent call I had with a colleague in Europe, I learned something interesting, and quite important for potential investors: in order to encourage distributed generation from small and medium-sized devices, the power coming onto the grid from wind turbines on Sardinia that are rated under 60 KW is rewarded with a huge feed-in tariff (more than 26 Eurocents per KWh over 20 years), where power from anything over that rating receives less than half that amount. (more…)
