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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Geothermal

This article on geothermal makes an important point: geothermal produces baseload power, just like coal or nuclear.  That’s the good news. 

The bad news is that exploration is expensive, and its success is hard to predict.  When I was listening to the presentations at last fall’s Renewable Energy Finance Forum, I was surprised that Ormat CEO Dita Bronicki didn’t sugar-coat this in the slightest.  Neither did company spokesperson Paul Thomsen when I interviewed him for my first book: “Renewable Energy – Facts and Fantasies.”

The issue is the cost of finding the resources, drilling, and hoping that you’re going to find sufficient temperatures in the underground reservoir – and porosity between two different points. 

The upside, again, is the consistency of the power when you’re successful – along with the cleanliness and availability of the energy.  The Earth won’t be running low on geothermal energy for one heck of a long time. 

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Efficiency

You’ve decided your next car purchase will be one of those hybrid vehicles everyone’s been talking about for its eco-friendliness and fuel efficiency. But right now, you just can’t afford one. In the meantime, is there anything you can buy for your current car that can immediately help the environment and save on gas? Yes! By purchasing eco-friendly tires.

Green Tires For All

Once only an option limited to hybrid vehicles, green tires (not literally green) can be purchased at many tire retailers and in many sizes for most vehicles. (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Solar Thermal

There’s good news and bad news if you’re a homeowner who’s bracing yourself for the annual rise in winter heating costs: The bill won’t hurt more this year, but it won’t hurt much less.

The Energy Information Administration forecasts that the average household heating fuel expenditures this winter will decrease to $928 per household, down from $947 last year. This is the first price drop since the winter of 2001-2002.

If you hope to save more than the projected $19, there are many steps you can take.

Tip 1 (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

Question:  Where is (by far) the largest rainforest in Asia? 

Answer: Can be found at http://2greenenergy.com/cool-guess-answers/8732 .

Relevance:  Rainforests shoulder a huge responsibility for providing the oxygen we animals breathe.  The Amazon, for instance, generates more than 20% of the planet’s oxygen (and provides more than 20% of the world’s fresh water).  Yet it is being chopped down and burned, converted into farmland at the rate of 1.5 acres per second.

As readers will learn when they view the answer to today’s question, there are 39 species of very special birds in the incredible Asian rainforest mentioned above.

 

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Frequent commenter and 2GreenEnergy supporter Tim Kingston sent me this article from POWER Magazine called Political Correctness Trumps Energy Policy, pointing out the lack of fairness and common sense in the way the city of San Francisco provides its citizens electrical power.

Thanks for this, Tim.  There is no doubt in my mind that the regulation of our power utilities is the bogeyman behind a great number of our energy woes. It’s extremely complicated, especially in California, and it doesn’t provide incentive for doing the right thing, i.e., encouraging efficiency and load shifting on the part of the customer, and integrating renewables, storage, and smart-grid on the part of the utility.

It would be terrific to rethink this from the ground up, to make the whole system easy, fair, understandable, uniform, and motivating for everyone to reduce the consumption of electricity from the dirtiest sources.  Having said that, I see too many lawyers and too much cross-breeding between the industry and its regulators.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Wind Energy

Here are two clean energy ideas that deal with bringing power to cell towers in off-grid locations, where diesel generators are the norm.  Before I present them, let’s think about the obvious drawbacks of diesel:

• Needs to be trucked in

• Can be stolen (very common problem in the developing world)

• Carries high maintenance cost of equipment

• Creates pollution (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

Here’s a beautiful piece on environmentalism – climate change in particular – written within the context of holiday gifts.  The author, Rebecca Solnit, celebrates the gifts we received, like the Sierra Club’s success with its Beyond Coal campaign, which, she notes, “helped prevent 168 coal-powered plants from opening and retired 125 dirty coal plants.”  She also points out that some of the greenest gifts look like….

“…Nothing.  The mountaintops that weren’t blasted by mining corporations, the children who didn’t get asthma or mercury poisoning from coal emissions, the carbon that stayed in the Earth and never made it into the atmosphere.” 

Fabulous writing, Rebecca.

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

As I mentioned recently, Christmas Day happens to also be the birthday of Rod Serling, creator of the iconic mid-20th Century television program “The Twilight Zone.”  According to the Writer’s Almanac, “Serling believed it was the writer’s job to ‘menace the public consciousness’ and considered television and radio as a means for social criticism.”

If I had to explain this in brief, I would point to a single episode called “The Shelter.”  Here are Parts One, Two, and Three. I hope you’ll take 30 minutes and check this out; you won’t be disappointed.

Our Western Civilization comes from a long line of social critics, dating back at least as far as the ancient Greek playwrights.  Having said that, I’m betting that our indignation is just starting to heat up, along with the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere.  When we come to grips with the long-term damage to our health and the environment that is in process, we’ll see the dawning of a new age of unparalleled anger directed against the forces that will have brought us to that terrible point.

Of course, let’s remain hopeful that we can obviate the need for all the feelings of hatred and blame.  We have the technologies at our fingertips right now to put our civilization on a path towards sustainability.  All we need is the political will to demand that the implementation of these technologies supersedes our addiction to cheap but lethal fossil fuels.

Let’s make that happen in 2013.  Happy New Year, everyone.

 

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Wind Energy

What is marketing?  As I like to define the subject, marketing creates the environment in which profitable sales are most likely to occur.  Obviously, this has dozens of ramifications, and raises dozens of different questions, including:

• What do we know about the workstyles and playstyles of certain groups of potential customers, and the unmet needs associated with those people and their activities? (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Photovoltaics

A friend sent me this article  on “peel and stick” solar PV, and asked what I thought.  In particular, he wanted to know if it has implications for transportation. 

I think the future will bring us all manner of applications for PV that we don’t have today, including:

• Building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV), where roofs, and even the walls and windows, are made with PV, as opposed to solar panels being installed on top of traditional construction materials.  (more…)

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