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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

At this holiday season, while we’re all in such a festive and generous mood, it would be wrong of me not to mention The Turimiquire Foundation, by my wits the best bang for the buck you’ll ever find in terms of raw humanitarian horsepower.  Originally aimed at establishing sustainable agricultural practices with the community of subsistence farmers in Northeastern Venezuela, Turimiquire has branched out into family planning and education, helping hundreds of thousands of those most desperately in need, while doing a fantastic service to the planet in terms of maintaining a healthy, forested environment in that part of the world.  I know they’d appreiocate any contribution.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Maybe this little sweetheart is asking Santa for peace and harmony in the human community.  Well, perhaps not. 

In any case, the season really is a time for reflection, and pondering the things we truly want. 

I’m always shocked when I hear someone remark, “Oh, let’s not try to achieve world peace,” as if that’s something unattainable to which only idiots aspire. 

Let me offer this holiday felicitation: We can have the world we want.  

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Efficiency

I had the good fortune to speak with my gradeschool friend Bruce Wilson the other day.  Bruce, a contractor in building energy efficiency, had found me online, and was clearly pleased that one of his classmates is involved with sustainable technologies.  Yet while I tend to be somewhat guarded in my optimism on the subject, Bruce is all over this.  “The world is swimming in opportunity,” he gushed as we spoke on the phone.  “There are dozens of mature, stable technologies that will bring an amazingly positive effect to the world of energy consumption and the problems associated with it.”

In fact, that seems to be what everyone is saying.  We’ll get to renewable energy in a big way over the coming decades.  But the easiest way to make a difference today is simply to use the tools at our disposal — largely summarized in the LEED standards — to cut energy consumption where we live and work. 

Bruce has promised to put up a few guest posts; I certainly look forward to seeing them.

 

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

The results of political compromise — maybe by definition — are seldom satisfactory to anyone.  But hasn’t this whole process recently gotten worse than ever before?  The healthcare reform bill that the Obama administration put through was the product of a hammer and tongs fight from the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, and the enormous money and power that they and their partners brought to the battle.  Supported by a political machine that benefited from convincing voters that the whole idea of reform was tantamount to socialism, the bill that was ultimately passed is an utter disappointment — and may ultimately fall apart for any number of reasons, one of which is as basic as a successful constitutional challenge.

Closer to my home in the energy sector, I have to say that cap and trade legislation is a similar sort of disaster in the making.  Anyone sincerely wanting to use the public sector to lead the way to a sustainable approach to energy has extremely clearcut tools at his disposal.  How about the simplicity of a carbon tax?  A feed-in tariff?  What’s the matter with just pulling the subsidies on oil?  If you really want clean energy, there are abundant and crystal clear ways to do it — instantly.   (more…)

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Photovoltaics
Using diffuse light - the tower is virtually always operating. Source: Kilohn limahn, Creative Commons

The groundworks for the construction of the world’s first commercial solar updraft tower may be little more than two years away. Solar updraft towers use the power that lifts hot air balloons into the air to generate electricity.

The Australian company, EnviroMission has filed land applications in Arizona for two 5,500 acre sites, suitable for development of two 200MW Solar Updraft power stations. The company has negotiated a power purchase agreement, approved by the Southern California Public Power Authority. EnviroMission has appointed ARUP as its design engineer. The detailed design of the towers is expected to take between 9 months and a year, when EnvironMission will move to the financing stage. (more…)

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

When you consider the rising price of gas, as well as other economic factors which are taking a toll on your bank account and wallet, you may want to consider a device that will help you save money while getting you around town. Most people know what a moped is and have probably seen one at one time or another in their lives. Basically, a moped is a scooter that has pedals on it, and an electric moped is just that, a moped that is run by an electric motor.

Now, electric mopeds are not much different than electric bicycles in and that they have their motor located on the rear wheel “hub” of the unit. In other words, there is an electric motor on the back rear wheel of the vehicle, which gives it the power it needs to travel. Over the last several years, the electric motors and electric mopeds have improved drastically due to the large demand for these vehicles worldwide. Electric motors on the moped are now self-contained, which means that dirt and water cannot get inside of the electric motor and cause damage to it. Also, there are fewer moving parts on the newer electric models that are being sold today and this is good because the electric mopeds will now need less maintenance than they have in the past. (more…)

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

I’m at LAX, heading back East for the holidays.  Wishing everyone smooth travels and best wishes for a lovely holiday season.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

For those of you wishing to reconnect from old friends from highschool and college, I most certainly recommend setting up a website like 2GreenEnergy. It brings long-lost, but much loved old friends out of the woodwork.  Perhaps the best aspect of all this new communication is that these folks seem so much more optimistic about our prospects for a bright future than most of the people I run into on a day-to-day basis.

Here’s a post from Bruce Wilson, with whom I attended kindergarten (just the other day, in 1960), and graduated from the same school 13 years later, who commented on a recent post:

Apollo Alliance as an organization that asks us to make a national agenda that is based on sustainability. They use the Apollo program as an example of how much we can achieve when we set an ambitious national agenda. Kennedy aimed for us to get to the moon in ten years and we got there in nine! A national agenda of achieving a sustainable energy future will produce innovation we can not imagine.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

I can understand that certain issues break down along liberal/conservative lines: abortion, health care reform, the death penalty, same-sex marriage, etc.  But conservatives almost universally reject the theory of global warming, and, for reasons I’ll get to shortly, that surprises me. 

I hope you’ll read the article I’ve linked here, explaining how Robert Hurt, who won Tom Perriello’s House seat in Virginia, says clean-energy legislation would fail to “do anything except harm people.” The tea party’s “Contract From America” calls proposed climate policies “costly new regulations that would increase unemployment, raise consumer prices, and weaken the nation’s global competitiveness with virtually no impact on global temperatures.” (more…)

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

Here’s a conversation I’m having with a reader in Chile that I thought others may find interesting. Francisco Gajardo, who gave me permission to publish this, writes:

Hi Craig,

First of all, I must congratulate you for such a great job on Renewable Energy Facts and Fantasies, and the 3 Brass Tacks.

Although I’m a chemical & software engineer, I actually live on a farm in southern Chile, and I want to share with you some issues that might be interesting to you.

First, as a country we are net importers of fossil fuels and the largest copper exporter of the world, strongly linking the exchange rate with the copper (and obviously, oil, since copper is quoted at the London Metal Exchange) price: copper goes up, dollar goes down. The bad news is that we are an exports-based economy (copper, molybdenum, lithium, fruits, wine, salmon, fishmeal, lumber, cellulose, etc.) so although a high copper price is great for the government because of taxes and royalties, it’s at the cost of slashing the rest of our economy which, barring rocks, is made of renewable stuff. (more…)

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