Clean, renewable, sustainable energy, winning locally

As the Sierra Club points out

Known for being the hometown of President Harry S. Truman, the city of Independence is now leading the shift to cleaner energy in Missouri - eliminating coal power by 2016 and tripling its clean energy goals.


As Independence, Missouri's own Examiner newspaper covered the story:

Council solidifies renewable energy goals

With a resolution Monday, City Council threw its support behind a future of increased renewable electric energy in Independence.

The resolution, introduced by Council Member Scott Roberson, identifies the Council’s goals regarding renewable energy and provides direction to the city manager for policies and programs related to that.

“This gives a whole new direction to energy in Independence,” Roberson said during the end-of-meeting comments. “Leon Daggett at Power & Light, the city manager, all of us have working really well together on this.

“I think this will bring all sorts of new possibilities.”

The resolution states the Council’s goal to have 10 percent of IPL’s energy supplied by sources that are not carbon-based (coal and natural gas) by the year 2018, which would conform to a state standard for investor-based utilities; as well as to increase that goal to 15 percent by 2021.

It also notes the city’s recent conversion of its streetlamps to LED lights, as well as future plans to remodel an office building for IPL’s administrative offices.

The resolution directs City Manager Robert Heacock to:

• Assure the new IPL offices are designed to minimize energy use and incorporate renewable energy.

• Develop a feasibility study for options such as solar, wind and geothermal energy at city-owned facilities.

• Develop a study to evaluate incentives and sustainable programs regarding renewable energy that can be provided to customers.

• Provide a status report by November on those projects.

• Do a rate study for residential, commercial and industrial customers, including provisions for renewable energy programs, and report back to the Council by May 2015.

Other directions include shutting down the coal-fired Missouri City Power Plant and phasing out coal at the Blue Valley Power Plant by January 2016 – both plans that have been in the works – and producing a report by next July outlining options and costs for disposing the Missouri City plant.

It's enough to give a person hope.

On American energy independence

"There is enough wind West of the Mississippi to supply three times the amount of power you currently use." --Dr. Helen Caldicott on American electrical power and possible energy independence. Link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAKZGse5SCw&feature=relmfu; Information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Helen_Caldicott

A great idea from the president they'll want to shoot down

If President Obama comes up with it, there will be lines of people--mostly Conservative and/or Right-wing and/or Republican and/or Tea Party, etc.--that will be staunchly against it.  This is just one more:

Obama wants to curb U.S. oil imports by a third

By Alister Bull – Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama will set an ambitious goal on Wednesday to cut U.S. oil imports by a third over 10 years, focusing on energy security amid high gasoline prices that could stall the country's economic recovery.

Obama will outline his strategy in a speech after spending days explaining U.S.-led military action in Libya, where fighting, accompanied by popular unrest elsewhere in the Arab world, has helped push gasoline prices toward $4 a gallon.

Discussing the speech, the Democratic president said the country must increase its energy independence.

"What we were talking about was breaking the pattern of being shocked at high prices and then, as prices go down, being lulled into a trance, but instead let's actually have a plan," Obama told party activists in New York late on Tuesday.

"Let's, yes, increase domestic oil production, but let's also invest in solar and wind and geothermal and biofuels and let's make our buildings more efficient and our cars more efficient. Not all of that work is done yet, but I'm not finished yet. We've got more work to do," Obama said.

The White House says this is a deliberate turn toward energy security and will be followed by other events to highlight his strategy.

So come on, who could be against this?  We know we need to reduce our energy dependence, particularly that that comes out of the looney-filled Middle East, what with their dictators, insanity, 2000-year-old wars and terrorists.

Yet against it they will be, whoever they are.  

The oil companies will most assuredly be against this because they're making ga-zillions from the oil in the Middle East and they like what's coming in so naturally, they'll give money--probably in the range of $2000.00 to $5000.00--to their Senators who will, in turn, then, say it's a crazy idea and imprudent and we should go another way.

Man, I hope we've learned we need to do this.

And if we haven't learned already, I hope we do shortly.

Link to original story:  http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_obama_energy

Germany leads the way in intelligence and good, wise decisions

First it is the way they set up their employment laws and now this:

Germany set to abandon nuclear power for good

By JUERGEN BAETZ, Associated Press

BERLIN – Germany is determined to show the world how abandoning nuclear energy can be done.

The world's fourth-largest economy stands alone among leading industrialized nations in its decision to stop using nuclear energy because of its inherent risks. It is betting billions on expanding the use of renewable energy to meet power demands instead.

The transition was supposed to happen slowly over the next 25 years, but is now being accelerated in the wake of Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant disaster, which Chancellor Angela Merkel has called a "catastrophe of apocalyptic dimensions."

Berlin's decision to take seven of its 17 reactors offline for three months for new safety checks has provided a glimpse into how Germany might wean itself from getting nearly a quarter of its power from atomic energy to none.

And experts say Germany's phase-out provides a good map that countries such as the United States, which use a similar amount of nuclear power, could follow. The German model would not work, however, in countries like France, which relies on nuclear energy for more than 70 percent of its power and has no intention of shifting.


Then, before anyone thinks this can't be done or that we, the US, can't or shouldn't do this for one lazy, lame-brain reason or another, check out this quote:


"If we had the winds of Texas or the sun of California, the task here would be even easier," said Felix Matthes of Germany's renowned Institute for Applied Ecology.


And then there's this--this is their plan:


The Environment Ministry says in 10 years renewable energy will contribute 40 percent of the country's overall electricity production

And then there's the additonal benefits:

Last year, German investment in renewable energy topped euro26 billion ($37 billion) and secured 370,000 jobs, the government said.

At what point does America learn?

At what point does America get back to leading the world in intelligence and intelligent decisions and technology?

Now would be a good time.

Link to original post:  http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110323/ap_on_bi_ge/eu_germany_abandoning_nuclear_power;_ylt=AhX_iDMGyi3giJdFyiwYN.FH2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTNubnUxb202BGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTEwMzIzL2V1X2dlcm1hbnlfYWJhbmRvbmluZ19udWNsZWFyX3Bvd2VyBGNjb2RlA21wX2VjXzhfMTAEY3BvcwM5BHBvcwM5BHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcmllcwRzbGsDZ2VybWFueXNldHRv

We need clean, green, renewable energy, folks--and here's why

We need clean, green, renewable energy--and as soon as possible, badly, for the following reasons: --First, the country who masters this (particularly--almost solely--photovoltaic cells) will rule the next several decades, if not the next century; --Second, because we're throwing away a TON of money and giving it mostly to the Middle East AND IT'S BANKRUPTING US; --Third, because we have a lot of enemies in the Middle East; --Fourth, we need it so we can have much cleaner air, water and soil; --We need it so we get out of burning fossil fuels and fowling our air, water and soil; --We need it so we get out of coal mining which is so bad for the miners, even when they aren't killed; --We need it so we stop--and as soon as possible--"mountaintop removal", particularly in West Virginia but all over Appalachia; --We need it so we gain more independence from power companies; --We need it so we more our citizens into more, better, cleaner and smarter employment; --We need it so we also have clean, "green" electic transportation that is also run on solar power so it is also far less polluting; --It really would create a great deal of new work for the country and they really would be much cleaner, smarter jobs for a lot of us. Those are the bare minimums. The benefits of this one move, for the country, would be so vast it's almost dazzling that we don't all realize them and why we need to make this happen. It would be far more beneficial than, by comparison, President Kennedy's challenge to get us to the moon within a decade, as he challenged us so many years ago. We need to do this. Have a great weekend, y'all.

Insanity, defined

There is an article out right now on the internet, at alternet.org, asking the question of whether or not it makes sense for California to switch to ethanol for fuel, instead of using so much oil.

Far from it.

Back in the 70's, when I was in college, my professor pointed out that it was insane--and he's right, think about it--to tie a country's food supply (corn, whatever) as an energy source.

Once you do, guess what happens?

Two things, really: 1) the price of that food crop goes up, at minimum, and people don't want that--hell, can't afford it and 2) if/when there is ever a drought--and there invariably are droughts, if we wait long enough, we know that--people starve.

Not go hungry.

People starve. As in no food.

Ethanol is insane.

Using corn to create fuel for cars is in no way a good, intelligent, useful answer.

Ironically, too, ethanol also doesn't solve our problems because you're still burning things--in this case corn and/or corn stalks--to create the energy so it's both polluting and adding to possible climate change. It also doesn't solve anything because the scientists have shown that ethanol doesn't put out as much energy as it takes to create it. Finally, if those 2 points aren't enough, if you haven't seen or read anything online, on TV or in a newspaper or magazine lately, we are running out of water, folks. Ethanol adds to that use of and reduction in water supplies.

Let me say one more time--the only thing that makes sense as a replacement for oil is solar power through photovoltaic cells.

It solves all the problems and answers all the questions.

It's nearly infinitely renewable (until the sun disappears), it's almost completely clean in that it doesn't pollute and doesn't emit carbon dioxide so it doesn't contribute to either pollution or climate change, we don't get it from the Middle East so it doesn't contribute to the insanity that is the Middle East war, lo these thousands of years and, finally, it stops the transfer of wealth from here--the US and the West--to that backwards, ignorant, mostly fundamentalist region of the world.

Ethanol is decidedly not the answer.

Solar power isn't perfect but it comes darned close.

Link to story:
http://www.alternet.org/environment/137578/will_california_say_no_to_ethanol/?cID=1195532#c1195532

Energy and power

Energy and the sources for energy and electricity in the United States--and the world, really--need to change.

Our old power structures used to work but they don't any longer.

The whole idea of having an electric company that creates the power, only to dole it out to all of us is extremely outdated, particularly here in America, where corporations own and run the power-generating facilities and they exploit their customers with whatever charges and price increases they want to put forward, just because they want it and because they have the government officials in their own financial pockets.

That's one reason it no longer works.

The other reason the old way doesn't work is because the way of creating the electricity--having turbines moved by water, usually--is so damaging and polluting to the environment.

Added to that the global warming, it's just a recipe for needing replacement.

And the thing is, we have a solution for this.

The fact is, we need to have photovoltaic cells on our commercial and residential buildings so each facility can create its own energy.

There's no reason this can't happen, technically.

It would solve the problems of people not being able to afford energy for heating and cooling, along with the environmental and global warming problems.

But the fact is, we have the power structures in existence now, in our governments and society, that want and need--for their own existence--to keep things just the way they are.

In Missouri, right now, for instance, the Kansas City Star reported that, even if you wanted to put solar panels on your home, you legally can't get insurance to cover it, thus making it virtually impossible to do.

Corporations are aligned against this advance in technology for our society.

It's probably much more possilbe in Europe, where they don't let corporations have a stranglehold on the citizen's actions and lives.

This is why I've said here that, with this new President, we have work ahead of us--a great deal of work--and we have to keep pushing and take our country and society back from the corporations.

A New Direction--for the US, the World (and this blog)

Rather than staying negative and emphasizing what a screw-up Presient George W. Bush is and has been for and to the United States for his 8 years in office in so many ways--and besides, he's winding down to his last days, thank God--I've decided I'm going to emphasize solutions to the United States' and the world's problems of war, war for oil, the intractable Middle East conflicts, pollution and climate change.
Pointing out what's going right in technology and, specifically, solar power, is one of the best ways to do that. It helps that we are, seemingly, on the verge of significant, seemingly revolutionary and affordable answers to our problems.


Promising Solar Power Technologies

New cost effective solar energy products are on the near horizon. Let's take a look at some of the promising ones.

MIT reports prototype solar dish passes first tests.

A team led by MIT students this week successfully tested a prototype of what may be the most cost-efficient solar power system in the world--one team members believe has the potential to revolutionize global energy production.

The system consists of a 12-foot-wide mirrored dish that team members have spent the last several weeks assembling. The dish, made from a lightweight frame of thin, inexpensive aluminum tubing and strips of mirror, concentrates sunlight by a factor of 1,000--creating heat so intense it could melt a bar of steel.

MIT Sloan School of Management lecturer David Pelly, in whose class this project first took shape last fall, says that, "I've looked for years at a variety of solar approaches, and this is the cheapest I've seen. And the key thing in scaling it globally is that all of the materials are inexpensive and accessible anywhere in the world."

Pelly adds that "I've looked all over for solar technology that could scale without subsidies. Almost nothing I've looked at has that potential. This does."
Raw Solar

The website Raw-Solar has this diagram explaining the practical application.

A solar thermal dish reflects the rays of the sun onto a small receiver using specially curved mirrors, concentrating the sunlight 1000 times. The high concentration increases the efficiency of the energy collection by reducing the surface area for thermal losses. A robust tracking system keeps the dish pointed directly at the sun all day, maximizing the available sunlight.

Water is pumped through the receiver where the high intensity sunlight heats it to 212-750F (100-400C), making steam. The steam can then be piped into an existing steam system, such as a district energy system or food processing plant.
What makes this system special vs. its competition is that it can use small flat flexible mirrors that can bend in exactly the right shape to concentrate the reflected sunlight on a precise spot. The materials are all easily produced and the team could put this dish together by hand.

Inquiring minds will want to consider this MIT video demonstration of their solar power dish.

Hot Thin Roofs

Let's now turn our attention to Hot Thin Roofs.

A new solar energy product, thin enough to be built into shingles, may finally make the technology competitive.

With energy prices soaring, affordable solar power would be welcomed by any entrepreneur looking to trim the electric bill. Trouble is, power generated by the most widely available technology - panels covered with photovoltaic (PV) systems, which translate sunlight into AC current - still costs two to three times more than electricity generated from coal and other fossil fuels. That may be about to change.

Several startups, including HelioVolt in Austin, Miasolé in Santa Clara, Calif., and Nanosolar in Palo Alto, are working on a new technology called flexible thin film that's on the brink of making solar more competitive. Nanosolar has just begun to ship its thin-film solar systems to a German utility.

Made from pliant sheets of foil, the solar panels can be molded onto roof shingles, which are at once more attractive than clunky, heavy glass panels and less expensive to produce. In fact, the cost of making thin film is so much lower than traditional solar panels that experts say it could produce electricity for about the national average of 10.4 cents a kilowatt hour.
Selling Green

CNN Money is reporting on Selling Green - Making Solar Pay.

Solar energy may be hot these days, but it still costs two or three times more than the power your local utility provides. SunEdison, a Beltsville, Md., startup, has created a new financing model that allows solar to make financial sense for businesses.

The roof of Sea Gull Lighting Products' distribution center in Burlington Township, N.J., is covered with solar panels that the lighting maker did not pay a cent for. They are installed, operated, and maintained by SunEdison. The company acts as a bank, soliciting investors interested in a return on solar energy. SunEdison's investors own the solar panels, and Sea Gull agrees to buy the power.
The problem with the model above is that it requires subsidies to be cost effective. The winning products in this space will need no subsidies.

Algae Power

Another in the series of innovative technologies in the CNN Money report is on Algae Power.

Isaac Berzin, who founded GreenFuel Technologies in 2001, is working with Arizona Public Service to scale his process to commercial levels. He has built a small algae farm next to one of the utility's natural-gas plants. The algae, which grow in racks of plastic bags, feed on the carbon dioxide in the exhaust of the power plant. The system not only reduces the greenhouse gases coming from the power plant by 40% but can also produce biodiesel and animal feedstock as a byproduct without competing with the global food supply.
I find these products exciting and at least two of them seem commercially viable. All of them might be. And the higher oil prices get, the more economically viable some of these and other products become.

Raw-Solar's beauty is a simple design using basic components, without the high cost of custom designed parabolic mirrors. There are plenty of desert areas in the US with huge percentages of cloudless days where such a system could be commercially viable.

Interestingly, the Bush administration halts solar energy projects on federal lands.

The Bush administration has put a two-year stop to solar energy projects on federal lands in Arizona and other Western states while it studies their environmental impact.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Department of Energy will study the impact of solar energy production and other facilities that could be developed on public lands in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, California, Colorado and Nevada.

There are 125 applications by solar energy companies to build facilities on public lands in those states.

The final analysis will show that the cure for peak oil is high enough energy prices.

Instead, the government sponsored solution was ethanol from corn. That "solution" was a complete disaster. US biofuel plants are going bankrupt as fuel prices rise at the pump and grain and fertilizer costs soar. Producing ethanol from corn makes no sense. To make matters worse, ethanol producers receive a taxpayer subsidy. And finally, tariffs make importing ethanol 3 times as expensive as it should be.

See the original post--with pictures of some of the technology--from Mike "Mish" Shedlock here:
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Looking backward, going forward

It's an old concept and it's hard to shake but too many of us--individuals, sure, but whole societies and our governments, federal, state and local--seem to be trying to go forward but are doing it by looking back. That is, we're using rules from the last 100 years or even more, thinking old rules and laws apply to current problems and situations.

Nowhere is this more true than in our wars. The saying is that the beginning of the war today, paraphrased, is always fought in the last war's terms. It is especially true now, with what must always be referred to as "Bush's War". The thought was, however much it's denied, that we need to go in and take over their oil, since we need it so badly into the future.

If you operate in the past, this is certainly true. We have used cars and combustion engines, etc., to propel our society forward, to increase our productivity and even for something as simple as recreation. Sure.

But we've known we need to ween ourselves off the "oil fix" since the 70's? Remember? Our President at the time warned us about it. You know, Jimmy Carter? And he was right, of course. We should have been turning down our thermostats in the winter and driving less and driving more fuel-efficient cars and giving tax breaks for truly beneficial, alternative energy sources.

We did it for a little while, it went away, so we voted in Ronald Reagan and walked away from it all, fools that we are.

So instead of looking and moving forward, we looked and moved backward. We made and drove ridiculously large automobiles (the kind we used to make fun of) and kept importing oil. And that's where we are today.

In the meantime, our government, acting on our behalf, looked in the rear view mirror and attacked another sovereign nation, quite against international law, as I've written here before--and refuse to forget.

So that's why we're in this huge mess we're in. We're in a war we shouldn't be in, losing soldiers we shouldn't be losing, sending money and materiel to another country--and in the Middle East, no less, where so much of the world's money is going, for great irony--and so on.

What we should do, for the world's and our own benefit, if we were to start looking forward--hey, I can be hopeful, can't I--is sponsoring a huge scientific effort to harness solar power, specifically with photovoltaic cells. The benefits are so great and plentiful it should be obvious to us all--even the "little guy" on the street.

First, we take all the pressure off the Middle East. That would take at least several minutes off the "doomsday clock". (Remember that? If not, Google same). It would ratchet us down from nuclear annihilation significantly. It would take ugliness out of relationships between the United States and the former Soviet Union--another big benefit--and so much more.

Additionally, it would take carbon dioxide production out of our existence, in a very real way. With efficient electrical power, created from photovoltaic cells, entire countries could and would power their homes and businesses this way. There would be no reason we couldn't have and use this as a source of energy for our automobiles. Those two switches alone would put us on phenomenally improved paths to energy independence and far cleaner air and atmosphere.

This would, of course, have the effect of reducing Global Climate Change in a very real way. This would help put off the radical change of the world's living spaces. The benefits are great and almost immediately tangible.

If we were looking forward, the "war" we should and would wage would be on ourselves, to do this very thing--perfect solar energy, specifically with photovoltaic cells. Keeping in mind the truism that "the greatest battle is the battle within", it seems like this is the new, forward-thinking war we should be in, if we should be in one at all. Battle ourselves to be more conservation-minded, more creative, more "new-thinking", if that's a word. Not to sound like a politician, God forbid, but we need to truly challenge ourselves to be and to do everything we can to bring about this specific change on this planet as soon as possible, for all our many benefits.

Sure, the current electrical power companies would have to lose out, as would the oil companies since we would need neither any longer but we've got to go forward, for all our survival.

The country that does this, that perfect solar power, will actually, truly win "the war". They will be the country that is far ahead technologically and so, reap the financial benefits. They'll be the big winners in this world--and not a shot will have been fired.

It's the same way with newspapers, technology, the paper industry and news, all wrapped in one. If we keep looking backward, we'll keep asking the question, "what's going to become of the newspaper?" But if we look forward, we'll realize we have to do away with newspapers for obvious reasons. First, we can no longer afford to keep cutting down trees to create them. Face it, the forests are the lungs of the planet (not my original thought) and we can't keep cutting them down so we can keep up on one- and two-day old news. The computer and the internet are far faster. Newspapers are failing anyway. We have to go on to this next medium. (Of course, we'll also have to force ourselves, as citizens of our countries and the world, to open our eyes and minds to news--some of which we won't want to hear or believe and this will be difficult, at least--but it's got to happen.

The same is true for the enitre paper industry. We really need, worldwide, to start going paperless. It was predicted years ago and we aren't even remotely close to it but we have to. We need to go paperless for the our own existence and the existence of the planet. Again, we're cutting down trees but can't afford to continue to do so. We've had paper for thousands of years but we really do, frankly, need to give them up. Face it. It's too obvious and too obviously true if we don't just continue to look back.

I'm convinced that the solutions to man's biggest problems--electrical energy, oil and the use of it, the automobile and the internal combustion engine, Global Climate Change, war and wars, war over energy, the seemingly intractable problems in the Middle East and so much more--are just beyond our grasp. The answers aren't that far away. We can reach and grab them, with effort. And we should--but we have to look forward--we have to stop looking back. We have to look at our situation now and into the future.

And we need to start very soon.