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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

Here’s 2GreenEnergy Associate and transportation visionary Dan Sturges giving a talk on the future of mobility.  He’s most certainly right about a lot of things:

• Our current transportation paradigm (the car) has been with us for over 100 years, and it’s far too wasteful and expensive, both financially and environmentally, for the 21st Century.  The average car has 1.1 occupants, and is in use 3% of the day.  Roughly than 1% of the gasoline our cars consume goes into moving the occupants; 75% is wasted as heat, and 24% is used in moving the car.   (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Efficiency

Energy efficiency in light bulbs has a range of 5 – 90 percent depending what technology is used. The average building uses 15% of its energy on lights, leading many private companies to make the conversion to efficient technology on their own, and some nations to implement regulations forcing this change. Most of the focus has been on consumer lighting but a major opportunity exists in municipal streetlights. (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

I’ve been having good luck recently in meeting strangers at social events with super-relevant backgrounds and interests.  Sunday night’s wine-tasting event with friends was another terrific example.  I sat next to Bill Klipstein, Ph.D. in physics, who heads a team of about 20 people at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory out here in Pasadena, CA that will soon send two missiles into space to help us learn more about global warming.  (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Wind Energy

When a speaker at yesterday’s CleanTechLA event presented what Deutsche Bank calls its “three pillars of a successful market,” I could see some of the main challenges associated with the migration to renewable energy.  Abbreviated “TLC” (something that everyone and everything needs to receive), they are Transparency, Longevity, and Certainty.

With the clean energy industry, we have a combination of events that serve to destroy, or at least, greatly reduce these three items.  (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

A friend and I were talking about one of the key progenitors of the sustainability movement, Donella Meadows (pictured here), and the legacy she left us, perhaps the most tangible is the Donella Meadows Institute.  Here a radio show on which Linda Wheatly, Director of the Vermont Leadership Institute, and contributor to the Institute, discusses the imperative to identify what matters most to us, and to create a world in which the amount of that – whatever it is – is maximized.

The point, obviously, is that we tend to measure GDP and implement whatever public policies will grow that figure.  (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

I was honored to meet Dr. Cheryl Martin, deputy director of ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy at the CleanTechLA event yesterday.  As I pointed out when I introduced myself, she and I have at least two contacts in common: (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Uncategorized

Here’s an article on a brilliant new business model for renewable energy, being implanted in the Philippines: install PV on people’s roofs, and let them pay you via the cell phone infrastructure for their use.  It’s illustrative of a key point made at the CleanTechLA conference I attended yesterday: the real market for clean energy and other cleantech solutions lies not in the US, nor the other OECD countries, but in the developing world.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

I can’t count how many times I’ve been asked about crowdfunding.  Is it effective for cleantech start-ups? Precisely how does it work?  Is it worth the hassle of having a large number of small investors?  How has the JOBS act, i.e., the SEC’s recent lifting of the ban on general solicitation, affected all this?

Though I’m certainly not an expert on any of this, I have run across people who have greatly impressed me: CrowdFunder.com.

If you’re at all interested in the subject – one which has driven incredible amounts of investment capital to exciting early-stage companies, please check them out via the link above.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

In a comment to a recent post, guest blogger Cameron Atwood reminds us of something Socrates told us:  “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”

This has such terrific relevance here in the renewable energy / sustainability space.  There are 200,000 groups in the world today whose mission is social and environmental justice. That’s a huge amount of effort going into building a new world: new ways to generate and consume energy, new ideas in preserving our natural resources, new concepts in sustainable architecture, and so forth.  And let’s not forget private enterprise, where cleantech is growing into a $5.7 trillion per year market.

These are people who aren’t complaining; they’re simply making it happen — what a powerful lesson for all of us.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

We in the U.S. and Europe do business all the time with people we really don’t like.  If we have a legally binding contract with a person or business entity whose character we abhor, we normally tell ourselves, “His money is just as green as anyone’s.”

I’m not sure that this represents any sort of ethical compromise; I remember trying to mollify my business partner of 20 years, when she’d scream about a certain client: “Let’s get rid of them!  They’re insane!”  (more…)

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