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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

PhotobucketI was just editing my book’s chapter on media, which features an interview with Sustainable Business’s Rona Fried, which made me think about sustainable agriculture — one of her favorite subjects. No sooner had a saved the file did I note an email from another person I respect greatly, Tom Blakeslee, discussing the same subject.

Tom writes:

I’m flying to Denver Saturday to be with Abe Collins, who is starting a company to sequester carbon by rehabilitating degraded land by grazing cattle on it. Here is the site of a charity spreading the word about the method, called holistic management. It turns out that undoing the damage man has done to the land is by far the cheapest way to sequester carbon quickly. The carbon is in the biotic community that we have poisoned with nitrogen fertilizers and other bad farming methods, particularly since the “green revolution.” They have a 3-D computerized way to guide people through the process created by Alan Savory, whose son is on the staff.

This is quite powerful stuff; I urge everyone to come up to speed on the latest technologies here. Here’s Tom’s latest column on the subject.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

If there is contract enforcement and money to do a Green Energy project in Turkey or Mali, it makes good financial sense to do it. Of course, as an American, it is more than embarrassing to have a government reluctant to act, and a system with disincentives in its corporate tax structure and patent laws. The patent law issue is separate, but it makes a lot of sense to get that law changed to promote innovation without hindrance. And the government should not use corporations to raise revenue. Corporations should simply pay those fees which compensates public action on their behalf, including infrastructure, security (including courts), and whatever environmental cleanup costs there are, if any. But these are political matters, which should not be relevant to immediate business decisions. But the current situation in the USA is that the most rational business decisions will be about projects in Turkey or Mali.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

PhotobucketIn addition to my work at 2GreenEnergy, I’m a partner in two companies related to electric vehicles. One is the largest website on Earth dedicated to EVs — an 11-year-old website with 225,000 unique vistors a month — EVWorld.com. I’ve very proud of the work that Bill Moore, my fine friend, has done through the years in forwarding the cause of clean transportation.

Another partnership of which I’m happy to be a part is its subsidiary, EV World Associates. I’m trying to create a video to tell our story there, the first vesrion of which you can see below. You’ll see at a glance that the images are too low-res and that it needs help in a million different directions. But I think that the basic message is clear: we’re here to serve.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu1QATNg4c0&w=425&h=344]

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Wind Energy

In recent times, there has been a lot of attention being given to usage of green and clean energy. The governments of different nations are bent upon adoption of green and less polluting energy options. The International Energy Agency (IEA), the European Commission (EC) and other national governments back up the economic models of energy policy decisions. In the process, they tend to ignore the risks involved such as fuel price risk, supply risk and political risk.
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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

PhotobucketYesterday, I wrote a post featuring a video on our driving habits and how they’re likely to change, given our newfound spirit of environmental stewardship. It seems that more and more of us every day are ceasing to define ourselves in terms of the cars we drive, as we’re realizing that our love for the zoom and sex appeal of internal combustion engines is a selfish and shallow thing — and not a part of who we really are.

I compared this phenomenon to wearing fur coats. They feel good, they keep you warm, and they tell the world that you can afford the best. But they come at the expense of incredible cruelty to the animal kingdom. One morning a few decades ago, we woke up, smacked our palms against of collective foreheads, and decided that this was simply not acceptable behavior for civilized people.

I believe the same epiphany is right around the corner in transportation. Here’s the video.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

I started to write a blog post on this subject: how our appreciation for clean energy will cause a shift in our relationships with the cars we drive.  Then I decided to make short video out of the concept. I hope it’s of some value.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfS5oSR54r4&w=425&h=344]

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

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My colleagues here at 2GreenEnergy — particularly Bill Paul — are constantly reminding me that the greatest potential for renewable energy lies outside of US borders, and that this is largely due to regulation. So, to stimulate a bit of discussion on the topic, I just posted this piece on Renewable Energy World called Renewables and Regulation.  

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

Guest blogger Garth Barker writes:

… wind developers are finding it harder to finance projects due to curtailment potential of that variable renewable.

I just completed the last interview for my book on renewables with Dr. Peter Lilienthal, CEO of Homer Energy. This whole subject of integrated variable energy sources, like wind and PV, is a very interesting one – and it will obviously grow in importance as these sources begin to occupy a larger percentage of our overall energy supply. Fortunately, there are technological solutions in the form of software, along the lines of that offered by Homer Energy – originally developed at NREL. And as you can imagine, the situation is even more acute for small grids, e.g., some island in the Aleutians, versus a larger grid, e.g., the West Coast of the US.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

PhotobucketGuest Blogger Geoff Nicholson writes:

I’d like to comment on your recent post about public sector support of renewables. 

I spent the better part of my aerospace career in R&D. My experience was that private entities couldn’t plan for longer than one product development cycle. For aircraft and jet engines that tended to be about 5 to 10 years. Their ability to create a basic research vision and hold to a technology development plan was not very good, except for corporate research groups that had lots of research ideas but couldn’t care less how or when the technologies were introduced into real world products.

 If it weren’t for government funding of critical, long-term research projects/programs, we would still be flying propeller airplanes. All of yesterday’s and today’s jet engines/aircraft were really developed under military government contracts from the ’40s through the ’80s. The commercial sector didn’t have the capital to individually or, for that matter, collectively fund the myriad of technology development programs necessary to field a jet aircraft. It was too big a hurtle for the private sector.

 Since the end of the cold war, government R&D funding for aircraft has all but dried up compared to before. And, arguably no revolutionary product innovation has occurred since — only incremental improvements. The most noteworthy development has been a painfully slow and halting move toward composite airframe structures to reduce weight. No wholly new propulsion schema has been innovated. No truly revolutionary airframe schema has succeeded. We still suck, burn and blow air in engines that have the same basic design since the 1940s. We still fly tubes with wings on them. We just do it more efficiently than before while trying to drive the cost of manufacturing down. In other words, aviation has slumped into the mature end of the product life cycle curve without the impetus of government R&D funding.

 And, the rest of the world has substantially caught up to us. What used to be dozens of US aircraft manufacturers have consolidated into less than a handful. Airbus, Embrear, Bombardier and others have taken market share from US companies, hand over fist.

So, is there a need for government involvement? Yes. Should the government fund basic R&D? Yes. Should government fund end product development? Maybe, but only for a few pilot programs but not for the vast majority of end products since the government doesn’t care too much about market demand for product features and functions and the various combinations of desirable product features.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

PhotobucketI encourage readers who may be interested in electric transportation to sign up for Paul Scott’s blog. Paul is a spokesperson for Plug-In America, and one the great forces for progressive environmental policy. He also happens to be a terrific writer.  I notice that he gathered a number of rave reviews to a recent post in which he concluded:

I don’t I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait till the day when it’s rare to see an internal combustion car. At some point, they’ll be anachronistic reminders of a day when people didn’t think twice about spewing poisons into the common airshed. Like smoking in line at the grocery store, you won’t believe people used to do it everywhere.

I responded:

Paul, I agree with the others — you really are one of the great writers on the subject. For what it’s worth, the analogy I use is women wearing mink coats — all the rage in the mid-60s, but completely gone from our culture a few years later, when we all gasped in the collective recognition that it was simply wrong. And this is exactly what I expect will happen with internal combustion engines: they will become regarded as something we used to do – something that no longer has a place in our world.

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