I just signed an online petition, addressed to Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren, suggesting that he reconsider his company’s relationship with Donald Trump, arguably the single most repulsive person on the planet. The reasoning is below, for anyone who may be interested. (more…)
I just got off a Skype session with Teddy Bamford, a hip and super-bright student at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Teddy wanted my opinion on investing in clean energy, based on his belief that the Obama administration will be supporting this industry. “From your lips to God’s ears,” as they say.
Teddy’s a college student, so we’re understandably not talking about a huge sum of money, but he wants to make a prudent decision nonetheless. He needs something publicly traded; he’s not a candidate for one of my clean energy investment opportunities in the start-up space. So I directed him where I’ve sent countless others over the years: to AltEnergyStocks.com, run by my friend Tom Konrad, and I told him that, last time we spoke anyway, Tom was especially bullish on New Flyer Industries, a manufacturer of buses with a variety of alt-fuel drive trains.
Good luck, Teddy!
The election season in the U.S. heightens our awareness of government, and saddens us that our leaders cannot or will not act according to the will of the people they serve. The vast majority of Americans favor a progressive energy policy, as well as universal health care and a whole slew of other humanitarian concepts. Yet the public volition is frustrated by a government that responds to its base of lobbyists and big corporate donors.
So along come the tea party and the Libertarians who want to dismantle Washington; it’s sure easy to sympathize with their being so aggravated. But they need to understand that without the power of government, we’d still be spraying DDT, using lead-based paint and asbestos, and driving cars with no seat belts. Unfortunately, despite the campaign rhetoric, there are no easy answers here.
It’s the birthday of theologian Martin Luther who, when he became disillusioned with the bureaucracy and corruption of the Catholic Church, wrote up his attack and published the famous 95 Theses. Luther’s ideas led to the Protestant Reformation, arguably the biggest single transformation that humankind had ever experienced.
It’s easy to see that the sustainability movement has the potential to rival the Reformation in terms of the sheer magnitude of its impact, though perhaps it’s a stretch to compare religious and secular undertakings. Nonetheless, I believe we are undergoing an enormous paradigm shift in what we perceive to be our responsibilities to one another and the way we conduct our lives accordingly.
Yet the sustainability movement possesses one remarkable difference: it has no leader. While there are a few famous authors and speakers, their presence is dwarfed by the tens of millions of individual contributors; in fact, there are over 200,000 groups on Earth today whose mission is sustainability and social justice.
In our discussion of energy storage, frequent commenter Gary Tulie writes from the UK:
You forget the added value of storage where an uninterrupted power supply is needed anyway! How about installing energy storage at hospitals, data centres, military facilities and such like where some storage is needed anyway? That way, you just add extra energy giving a longer time off grid permitting peak shaving.
D’oh! Of course, you’re right. That’s kind of like listing the Founding Fathers of the United States and forgetting George Washington.
I’m reminded of my trip to visit the (currently) 2 megawatt solar photovoltaics facility at Fort Hunter Liggett in Central California, now the largest solar array on a military base in the U.S. It’s soon to be a micro-grid, as they plan to install several megawatt-hours of battery storage.
Out there in the middle of nowhere (rural Monterey County, Central California), they experience several power outages (sometimes five or six) per year. No more!
Here’s a very solid and accessible article on population growth and sustainability from the World Future Society, though I’m not sure it provides any “new news.”
Yes, we’re consuming resources at an unsustainable rate, and that rate will only increase for the foreseeable future. Right now, we’d need an Earth about 1.6 times the size of our own to provide the resources that our population consumes annually. And as each year passes, the number becomes larger.
Put another way, there was a moment during a day this past September at which humankind had consumed all the resources that would be naturally renewed in the entire year of 2012. Soon, that moment will be in August; a decade or so later, July.
So what to do? (more…)
A reader sends this and writes:
When, not if, a wind turbine’s torque causes O ring and seal lubrication problems, the turbines catch on fire. Each of the large wind turbines have 500 gallons of petroleum lubricant trying to keep up with the rotation. Petroleum is a terrible lubricant, and when the seals crash, most of the petroleum is burned but much remains and the soil is contaminated. Each site is a toxic hazmat site. The attachments are only samples. I am very happy that the wind turbines were not installed in the bays around Cape Cod. Sandy would have taken each one to someplace other where they were supposed to be. With the crash of the grid in much of New England, the failure of electricity to control the direction and rotation of the blades, would have spun them helplessly out of control. The turbine blades would become propellers without aircraft.
Interesting. (more…)
Even though Germany has recently cut their national feed-in tariff scheme between 20-30 percent from April this year, the solar industry has flourished in the first nine months of 2012.
The nation`s utilities say the capacity of solar power has grown by 50% from January to September in 2012. The total annual capacity has risen to 25,000GWh from 16,500GWh last year.
About a week ago, Reuters reported “nearly 1 gigawatt (GW) of new solar power generating capacity was installed in September alone”, which is a far more than the 2.5 to 3.5 GW a year the German government aims for. (more…)
In today’s discussion on energy storage, senior energy analyst Glenn Doty writes:
As far as who should pay for storage, that’s easy… the storage facility should pay for itself by the value that it adds to the grid. If it cannot do that, then the storage is clearly not worth the benefit.
So, you’re suggesting that storage become a brand new stake-holder in the electricity supply chain? Create a new entity and compensate it according to the value it provides? (more…)
Frequent commenter Garth writes:
Remember ANY successful business that runs a supply line for their product must have storage or they face shortages and customer loss – energy is no different and storage is the answer. I just can’t explain why the wind industry has been in denial over this fact. Reality is on its way.
You are most certainly right about the lack of storage in the energy industry. As my friends at Eos Energy Storage (breakthrough zinc-air batteries) have been known to quip, “even sushi has better storage.” Having said that, I’m not sure the wind industry is “in denial” here. In fact, one of the clean energy investments that I support is a 25 mW project that will deploy CAES (compressed air energy storage). (more…)
