Are "Good Ideas" in Energy Necessarily "Big?"
On my piece: “Good Ideas in Clean Energy Are Actually Quite Rare,” longtime 2GreenEnergy supporter “BreathOnTheWind” notes:
We seem to expect renewable resources to be a plug and play replacement for fossil fuels. On the contrary, renewable energy gathers energy from and depends upon the local environment and our current age. It is fossil fuels that are an ancient concentrated source of energy that is simply imported and made to work in almost any environment. That was part of their attraction and they have made us lazy so that we no longer wished to look at the local situation. Too often we are simply away from the practice of actually seeing our environment. We hope for a “global” or “cookie cutter” solution. There are hundreds of “good ideas” but they tend to be local. Perhaps what you are looking for is a “big” idea.
It’s true that “big” is part of our paradigm in “new energy,” though I’m not so sure that this is misguided, given that we’re dealing with 15 terawatts (current total power usage), more than 80% of which comes from burning hydrocarbons, and this process is rapidly destroying our planet. Having said that, I very much support localized solutions that directly or indirectly help to reduce energy consumption or clean up the energy supply chain.
A good example of the latter is the work done by my friends at the Turimiquire Foundation. You will not find the word “energy” even once on their website, but consider their activities in bringing services in sustainable agriculture, education, and family planning to hundreds of thousands of rural and low-income people in Northeastern Venezuela over the past 36 years.
When they arrived, these people’s only form of energy was slashing and burning the local forests, a practice that’s been virtually eliminated in that part of the world. As a result of their work, these folks are far more productive, better educated, and tuned into what they can do to have smaller, stronger, and better nourished families.
The Foundation is fond of presenting their numbers, and it’s hard to blame them for being proud of such a fabulous accomplishment. For example, they note on the page regarding family planning:
From our startup in May 1997 through December 2014:
⇒ We have delivered 79,543 “Couple Years of Protection” (CYPs) – the metric by which USAID measures family planning achievement – to the rural and urban low income populations that we serve.
⇒ To achieve this, we have served more than 35,200 women and their families with birth control methods, including 4,154 tubal sterilizations, the most popular method for mature women here in Venezuela.
⇒ To reach the critical younger populations who are coming into reproductive age, we have offered 2,543 Workshops in Sexual and Reproductive Health to 48,779 participants, primarily students and teenagers, but also to personnel in public service and educational institutions.
⇒ We have done all this on an average budget of less than $50,000 a year dedicated to family planning.
IMO, that’s pretty impressive stuff, and it has a far greater reach than meets the eye.
