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Archive for Energy
November 22, 2006 at 8:12 pm · Filed under Energy, Home
Thomas Kemp, a local attorney and friend, posted an excert from a Washington Post article by Joel Achenbach, who visited an eco-village in North Carolina called Earthaven (post here). His quote from the article gets to the heart of where we find ourselves:
We live in a world we didn’t make, by rules and customs and laws we didn’t invent, using tools and technologies we don’t understand.
This is truth. Our culture, in large part, is focused on consumption. It is the purchase, the checkout, the finish line that matters. The foundations, history, and the true accounting of our technological triumph in retail sales and electric and fuel distribution is for scholars, retirees, or the coffee table.
Thomas has spoken on this topic, with Chris Hardie of Richmond News Review, as it applies to the food we eat and specifically concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). He asks if we need “industrial farming to meet our nutritional needs?” I don’t believe we do, but it certainly distances us from the process of production (that is unless you live next door).
It is partly because our production systems are so efficient that we are so removed from them. Unfortunately, if we allow ourselves too much separation from the pork we eat or the electricity we use, we lose the big picture. We stop valuing the energy, engineering, and effort that gave us the end-product. And we lose the biological connection between the life of the pig and our need for nourishment. We lose the ecological connection between the land stripped for coal and the power line running to our house.
We don’t all need to go back to building water wheels and killing what we eat. We can be more intentional about our choices and examine why we make them:
On the official Earthaven tour, a banker with a small farm who was taking the tour just to get tips on animal husbandry, shook his head at the thought of living by consensus with lots of other people. “That’d kill me,” he said.
What the visitor realizes at Earthaven is how much energy is expended in mainstream culture just keeping other people out of our hair. There’s a reason everyone on the block drives separately to the grocery store. It’s a waste of energy but, arguably, a rational purchase of independence. For the most part, we don’t use energy to be powerful; we use it to be alone
[emphasis added]
November 20, 2006 at 3:56 am · Filed under Energy, Home
Last Sunday after meeting, Phil Seybold talked to an audience of 20+ at First Friends Meeting Richmond about sustainability, green building, saving energy and the environment. Click HERE for the mp3. It should play in your browser.
Phil (and the audience) provide a lot of information but a couple of things really stick out: 1) Reducing the energy requirements of your house, i.e. conservation, through the use of compact flourescent light bulbs, effective use of storm windows, and insulation will pay for itself very quickly - on the order of a year. 2) When accompanied by conservation, alternative energy solutions such as solar panels and wind turbines, are much more cost effective than you might think. I have heard a figure of $9/watt installed for solar panels. Looking at our last electricity bill, we used 860 kWh for the month. Divide that by 30 days = 28.6 kWh per day. If the avg. number of peak sun hours is 5 then we would need to harvest 5.7 kW during each hour that sunlight is available. Multiply that times 1.43 to account for system losses** and we come up with 8.2 kW per hour. $9/watt times 1000 watts = $9,000/kW times 8.2Kw = $73,788. A second mortgage! But if we can find ways to reduce our energy use by 2/3rds that figure goes down to $24,571. A new car!
If that is the simple cost of sustainability, and we know it isn’t always simple, then we have a starting place. There is no risk to going down this path. The technology is proven. It is reliable. It makes use of a limitless energy source. There _is_ risk to continue down the path of burning coal to power our homes.
I’ve wanted to upload this for a week now. Thanks to Phil Seybold (Phil, if you have a website send me a link and I’ll add it here), Doug Gwyn and First Friends Meeting Richmond, and the Cope Environmental Center for allowing me to record this. I hope you’ll give it a listen because I think it’s really important to make this a regular conversation.
**Real Goods
[technical details]
The podcast is stored using the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Ask me for more details.
October 31, 2006 at 12:58 am · Filed under Energy
October 26, 2006 at 8:09 pm · Filed under Energy
Yesterday the South Bend Tribune covered an announcement by Indiana Michigan Power to explore wind energy sites in east-central Indiana:
I&M announced Wednesday that it would place meteorological test sites in east-central Indiana to explore the economic and technical feasibility of building a wind farm in the area.
A specific test site has not been selected in east-central Indiana, Mayne said. East-central Indiana includes areas such as Jay, Randolph and Wayne counties.
I&M will locate two or three 200-foot towers that will collect long-term wind data to determine the profile of wind resources in the area.
The towers will have instruments that can measure wind speed and the consistency of the wind in the area. The company will analyze whether there is sufficient wind to generate electricity economically.
This announcement comes on the heals heels of two others [1] [2] by companies planning wind farms in Benton and Allen counties. I learned through a conversation with Phil Seybold, local owner of a green building company and consultant with CEC, that RP&L has sponsored a meteorological study of wind in northern Wayne county by placing wind measuring equipment on the Kicks96 towers on Tingler Rd. This is great news. The genie is out of the bottle. Will this push Indiana lawmakers to enact a Renewable Energy Portfolio? Who knows, but the prospect of hundreds of millions of dollars in wind energy investment should get their attention. The road map for these companies to develop wind project seems to be:
- Find some investors
- Identify potential wind sites
- Petition the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission
- Meet with landowners to negotiate terms for building testing towers
- Build towers with wind measurement equipment and monitor data for a year or two
- Analyze the data
- If the wind speed and power density are sufficient sign a long-term contract with a power company to purchase the power generated
- Petition the county government for tax abatements
- Erect 50-75 1.5MW turbines at a cost of $2-3M apiece
- Collect 1.9 cents per kWh subsidy from the Federal government
- Sell the power to people
Is this accurate? I don’t know. I do know that local government should take notice. There are lots of good reasons to support projects like these. Climate change happens to be #1 on my list. Others include the potential for economic development and offsetting rising energy costs. There is real possibility here to invest in a better future.
October 18, 2006 at 9:36 pm · Filed under Energy
I stumbled across an interesting story while scanning my bloglines feeds. One of the blogs I read pretty infrequently, A Networked World, is written by a guy down under name Earl Mardle. I find his posts interesting and informative and this one was no exception. The idea, from this Sydney Morning Herald article is that individuals in the UK will be given a yearly allotment of carbon credit with which to purchase goods (e.g. fuel, groceries, electricity) and services. At the end of the year individuals will be either charged for more carbon credits or given the opportunity to sell their credit to others.
[Sidebar: When I followed the link to the SMH article smack dab on the middle of the articles was an ad for the new BMW 3series coupe (an amazing car BTW, but not headed for the top 10 fuel efficient list any time soon) AND to the right of the articles was a link advertisment to win $10k in free petrol (gas)!]
The idea of individuals being given carbon credits sounds like a reasonable approach to putting reponsibility where it should be. I imagine it will be very difficult to get buy-in from the average person who cannot be bothered to think about environmental footprint.
September 21, 2006 at 9:06 pm · Filed under Energy
This just in. From my BBC RSS feed it was announced that the UK billionaire Sir Richard Branson would donate all profits from his Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains to renewable energy development. This is a very interesting pledge considering that train travel in the UK and air travel between Britain and the US are huge contributors to greenhouse gases - a majority of which is caused by the burning of coal and jet fuel (oil) respectively.
Today, Bill Lockyer, attorney general of California announced the state is suing 6 carmakers over their contributions to greenhouse gases. The lawsuit says, “Right now, global warming is harming California.” Lockyer said, “Global warming is causing significant harm to California’s environment, economy, agriculture and public health.”
How might these two events be related?
January 27, 2006 at 1:03 am · Filed under Energy
I recently set up a mailing list for Wayne Co. Indiana folks interested in alternative energy solutions. The public web page is at:
Go there to find out more about the list and join if you wish.
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