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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

Lean manufacturing, an important component to sustainability, has been applied by many companies since then and even the successful Toyota auto production is a product of this. Lean manufacturing makes use of an effective system that was developed years agoin the United States – the Training Withinthe Industry system (TWI). This training deals with how the supervisor must act in terms of training its workers to achieve consistent results. The system is now being transferred and communicated all throughout the world via Lean manufacturing. (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Photovoltaics

Here’s a fairly bullish article on solar energy, but it takes an unusual twist, and ends up confusing readers.  The levelized cost of energy that Goldman Sachs projects for PV-based energy 2030 is $0.20/kWh, which is far more than it is now, but that figure includes enough battery storage to completely remove the customer from the grid. 

I’m not sure how relevant that is, as a) few consumers and businesses have an interest or need to do so, and b) it’s hard to imagine that the materials to do all this exist at that scale.

Having said that, the author makes a good point:  it is very likely Elon Musk and his Tesla Motors’ “Gigafactory” will play a very important role in our energy future.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

I just received this:

Today, Ford announced its decision to use GE charging stations for its workplace charging network. Ford plans to install the GE WattStation™  at more than 50 of its facilities throughout 2014. The stations will be networked together, allowing Ford to gather information such as the number of hours vehicles are charging and the amount of carbon dioxide reduced.

I’m always amused when people who should know better make statements to the effect that they know how much CO2 is reduced as they charge their EVs. (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Biomass

Of all the clean energy investment opportunities I’ve come across in the last year, I have to put this in my top two or three.  It’s a project that will generate electricity from a municipal solid waste site (one plant initially, with two more to follow soon) in Panama.  To those who follow this blog closely, this may not sound like something new, since it’s certainly not the first WTE project that has gotten me excited.  But check this out: 

According to Accenture and PricewaterhouseCoopers, both of which have crunched the numbers, each plant will operate at approximately 50% profit margins, and produce EBITDA of $26 million annually.   Best of all, the key–and most challenging– elements to build the facility are already in place; at this point the group needs a small bridge loan to push it across the goal line, in exchange for which they’re offering a huge, extremely generous chunk of equity. (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Energy Storage

A happy consequence of humankind’s progress in energy technology is that all the major components associated with the generation, transmission, distribution, and consumption of energy are improving simultaneously.  Here at 2GreenEnergy, we tend to talk mainly about generation, perhaps because it’s the sexiest of the four, but generation alone will only get us so far in terms of reducing the environmental damage associated with providing power to a civilization that is soon to exceed nine billion people. (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

You and I have a great number of features in common, one of which is obvious: neither of us wants to die.  But, though we try to keep the thought of death out of our immediate consciousness, in the back of our minds, the question is quite present for both of us — and for anyone with an IQ greater than that of a stalk of celery: How  much longer will we be on this planet? 

For us environmentalists, the question has an additional dimension: (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Photovoltaics

Sundays are normally hiking day for me. Last weekend, a friend and I walked from our little town (Santa Ynez, CA) over the mountains to the south of us and down to the beach, a total of 10.8 miles, with a decent (~1200 foot) altitude gain.

The point? As I captured here with my phone, (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Much has been written about the recent Wall Street Journal article asserting that the U.S. grid is vulnerable to a terrorist attack which could have a crippling and long-lasting (18-month) effect. 

This, of course, is another good reason to push our energy infrastructure away from the centralized utility model, and more in the direction of distributed generation in the form of rooftop solar, mid-sized wind, run-of-river hydro, biomass, and, to the degree to which it’s feasible, geothermal.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Wind Energy

A colleague sent me this piece from New York Magazine on the so-called “wind-turbine syndrome,” a name given to the health effects that some people say are caused by living close to wind farms.  This syndrome is not accepted by scientists and doctors, and my colleague, a practicing psychologist, notes:  “The psychology of fulfilling the prophesy, i.e., getting the symptoms after reading about them, is so true.”

In any case, this is a terrific article on the subject.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Fossil Fuels

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…)

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