Energy

Growing up in West Texas, Larry Martin became well accustomed to the challenges of living off the land. Raised on a cotton farm outside the small town of Sweetwater, he recalls defending his family's crops from sandstorms after a hard rain. More often, he hoped the region's brutal droughts would not burn the cotton to death.

Cotton farming in West Texas is a constant battle against the elements. "In college, I saw a lot of farms were going broke," Martin said. "A lot of people work all their life and didn't have much to show for it."

As gas prices climb and electricity prices follow, people looking for alternatives are turning to the wind. The popularity of wind energy is growing, but the turbines themselves are shrinking in size and cost, making affordable, personal wind power a reality.

Is wind power right for you? Absolutely, if you have the space and the resources, say Mike Bergey and Andy Kruse, co-founders of Bergey Wind Power and Southwest Wind Power, respectively.

by Eric de Place

Taking a three-day weekend for the planet.

From the Beehive State, a gratifying way to reduce energy use (and carbon emissions): taking Fridays off. And it's mandatory. In part to deal with rising gas prices, Utah's republican governor John Huntsman introduced the measure for state employees. The move, of course, instantly reduces commutes by 20 percent.

The remaining four work days get longer -- state offices will now stay open from 7 a.m. until 6 p.m. -- so that the total number of hours worked remains the same.

I'll bet there's a civic benefit too: the change may actually makes government offices more accessible by extending open hours beyond the tight 9-to-5 window that most citizens still work.

Former Intel CEO Andry Grove recently wrote an interesting piece on energy. His angle is not totally green, but it's worth reading. Here's a good quote:

"New technology often shows up in this manner: it is not completely satisfactory in the beginning, but good enough to get going. The first personal computers, for example, were little more than toys. They fascinated cognoscenti and hobbyists, but compared to the mainframe computers that were the workhorses of that time, they were limited. PCs quickly grew in capability and eventually reached parity with mainframes and then surpassed them in efficiency and computing power. Such approaches, of starting low and moving up, have been nam...

photo by Tim Duckett

Gordon Brown recently announced that a £100 billion government investment in renewable energy would be “the most dramatic change in energy policy since nuclear power”. Such an investment will allow Britain to generate 30-35% of its electricity from renewables by 2020. Based on recent statements in Paris, we now know more clearly about his commitment to nuclear energy.

New Plants Required to Replace Existing Aging Ones

Imagine if every window in a skyscraper was a solar concentrator.

MIT Solar Concentrator Innovation: More Bang for your Buck
Solar concentrators do what you might expect, concentrate solar light. Usually they are large mirrors or other devices, but the goal of any solar concentrator is to concentrate the light that falls on a large area to a smaller one. The idea is that the (usually cheap) solar concentrator increases the efficiency of the (usually expensive) solar cell, getting more energy for input of money. Recent advances in this technology have focused around better performance of the solar cell, like the IBM's

Robert Seamans is best known for his role in the Apollo Program, but he was also appointed by President Gerald Ford in 1974 to be the first administrator of the Energy Research and Development Administration, which was a precursor of the Department of Energy, to deal with the effects of the Arab oil embargo.

According to the New York Times, on his first day in the job he said “There is no way we can become self-sufficient in 10 years or any time in the future if we keep increasing the use of energy.” Important elements in energy conservation, he said, would be the development of automobiles that get more than 40 percent better gas mileage and the design of buildings that wo...

It's exciting to witness development of increasingly efficient wind power technologies (to see Popular Science's geek-worthy eye candy on that front, click here and here). But what can we do with our old wind power equipment as the early models become outdated?

U.S. company Aeronautica Windpower has a solution. As Renewable Energy World reports, the Massachusetts-based firm plans to recycle wind turbines that have been rendered obsolete by newer models.

This year's Tour to the Shore fuel economy competition had the goal of beating the previous record: 75 MPG in a Honda Insight hybrid. That might seem hard to do, unless you are Jack Martin, a member of the Triad Electric Vehicle Association in Burlington and teacher of Sustainable Transportation at Appalachian State University. He squeezed out 124 miles out of one gallon of gasoline in his unmodified Insight hybrid (and he has one passenger).

He did it by using

59.3% -- Albert Betz calculated in the early 20th century that the maximum theoretical efficiency of a wind turbine is 59.3%.

50% -- Currently, modern wind turbines are efficient at about 50%, a very impressive number.

15% -- According to GE, when it entered the wind turbine market in 2002, the average wind turbine was out of commission about 15% of the time.

3% -- Nowadays, wind turbines are down only about 3% of the time. That helps drive the cost of wind power down and get the most out of each turbine. Uptimes can probably be improved even further.

8 -- Electricity produced by a m...

Most of us know that tornadoes are unpredictable, uncontrollable, and dangerous. But a Canadian engineer thinks they could be the future of electricity generation. He wants to make electricity from artificial tornadoes.Louis Michaud, a retired petroleum engineer in Sarnia, Ontario, plans to use the waste heat from conventional power plants to create an "atmospheric vortex engine" - a small, controlled tornado that would drive turbines and generate electricity. "I'm confident that we could control these things," he says. Michaud also thinks solar powered tornados generated using the sun's heat could also work.His latest design is a circular wall 200 meters across and 100 meters high without a roof.

The creation an efficient, effective and fair U.S. climate policy is utterly important, and overdue. But, argues Dynamic Cities Project founder Bryn Davidson, unless we take Peak Oil into consideration, we may end up in a situation that pits energy security against climate change concerns.

www.cascadiagbc.org/lbl

The argument about whether or not the tremendous challenges our planet faces - now and in future years - can be reversed by proactive human action falls short. We have enacted the planet’s decline, and together we can and must move to affect vital regeneration. Yet the heated debates over defining how and the means by which this action will take place wage on.

Amid the politics and global chatter that translate to more talk and less action, a few enlightened groups around the world are engaged in leading a straight-forward, inspired charge with impacting vision.
In the heart of the United States’ Pacific Northwest, a veritable hotbed of sustainable development and leader in the op-timization of natural resources, a movement is emerging that has the potential to rival anything else of the sort in the world with respect to its aggressive approach, and potential lasting impact for change.

Photograph:- The Daybreak Residential/Commercial Community in South Jordan, Utah features Energy Star homes.

Energy efficiency has been a consistent part of America's energy security policies and increasingly become an essential framework for abating carbon emissions. In fact, the federal government now offers several tax credits for everything from green home improvements to fuel cells.

But the effectiveness of energy efficiency does not go undisputed.

Skeptics such as the Energy Tribune's Robert Bryce point out that total energy use in the United States co...

Residential wind power is the too often forgotten little brother of the wind power industry that builds turbines on the scale of jumbo jets. But it's starting to grow up and come out of the shadow of its bigger sibling. "improved generator technology [lighter magnets in the generators, blades that adjust to wind conditions, and units that wirelessly report how much power they're making], more financial incentives, rising electric rates, and energy-security concerns have opened the way for small-wind power to bloom in unlikely places."

That's right, they aren't just for the farm anymore. You should see more and more small wind turbines in suburbs and urban s...

Our post about harnessing truck traffic to generate electricity has itself generated quite a bit of electrical signals in our readers' brains, as well as many thoughtful comments.

Here are some further thoughts on Terry Kenney's project and your comments: It is indeed a good point that the estimates on how many houses this could power is overly generous, to say the least. One thing we don't know, though, is if the 'Dragon Power Station' is only a prototype/proo...

While the Japanese are trying to produce electricity from train station gates (!?), entrepreneur Terry Kenney is going after a bigger target: Trucks.

It took him eight years to get a working prototype, but now there's one working at the Port of Oakland which Kenney calls the "Dragon Power Station". Special plates are set on the road, and as big trucks drive over them (about 2,500 of them per day at the port), they compress a tank of hydraulic fluid under the road, which in turn creates a series of pumping actions that turns a generator to produce electricity....

Empty Houses, Buffalo, New York Times

That is what the census says. Andrew Leonard in Salon notes that it is a bit misleading, that "4.7 million are for "seasonal use" only, the Census tells us -- unoccupied vacation homes, in other words. 4.1 million are for rent, 2.3 million are for sale, and the remaining 7.5 million "were vacant for a variety of other reasons."

The census also lists the total number of homeless in America as 759,101, so there are 24 empty houses for every homeless person in America. What a shocking misallocation of resources, materials and energy.

Our friends at MoJo are giving you a chance to ask a question to about nuclear power. So whether you are pro, anti, or in between, we encourage you to join the dialogue by leaving a comment over there for one of the experts on their panel (Stewart Brand, Judith Lewis, Jonas Siegel, and Harvey Wasserman). The starting point for the dialogue is: "What is nuclear energy's place in the future mix of energy sources?"

You can also leave comments over here on TreeHugger or on the TH forums to discuss the issue with fe...

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Climate crisis. While alternative energy options grow, the nuclear option is also back on the table. In spite of the complexities of permitting, hazards of nuclear energy and challenges that the investment and construction timelines pose in the race for solutions, humanity's growing energy hunger may require reliance on this well-established greenhouse-gas-emissions-free technology.

One problem looms above all others, though, every time the nuclear question is raised. What ab...

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As we reported before, many solar power farms are planned in the province of Ontario, Canada. Major players include SunEdison of Baltimore and Skypower of Toronto, who just broke ground on a solar project, and OptiSolar, a California manufacturer of thin-film silicon solar cells (the composite image above is of their Sarnia project).

The Toronto Star reports that the province now has contracts for 407 megawatts, while it initially predicted that it would get 88. We suppose that's enough to call their progr...

We asked in a recent survey if you thought you would be driving in thirty years; now economist Jeff Rubin thinks gas prices could be $7 to $10 per gallon in just four years, and that this is going to cause massive changes in the way we live and work.

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That's not a typo in the headline. The meters are running backwards and they're exporting the 23% extra.

Rock Port, Missouri, is a small city of 1,300 people, and they just made history by being the first city in the US to be 100% powered by the wind, also making them #1 in the US for percentage of renewable energy. The Loess Hills Wind Farm, built by the Wind Capital Group, employing 500 workers from 20 states for about a year, is expected to produce about 16 million kilowatt hours annually, while Rock Port only uses 13 million. The excess wind power will be sold to other communities in the area....