Environmentally friendly, green ways of living
There are 363 posts filed in Green (this is page 10 of 37).
This is almost certainly a sham. Much is unknown about this World Eco Energy company.
TEHRAN – A US company has signed a preliminary agreement to invest $1.175 billion 864 million euros in Iran, in a rare joint commercial project to turn rubbish and human waste into electricity.
California-based World Eco Energy said it plans to produce 250 megawatts daily by burning trash and by processing algae and salt and waste water into power.
Iran will match the US investment, the company said.
Astonishing.
Last week, for the first time in memory, the wholesale price of electricity in Queensland fell into negative territory – in the middle of the day.For several days the price, normally around $40-$50 a megawatt hour, hovered in and around zero. Prices were deflated throughout the week, largely because of the influence of one of the newest, biggest power stations in the state – rooftop solar.
“Negative pricing” moves, as they are known, are not uncommon. But they are only supposed to happen at night, when most of the population is mostly asleep, demand is down, and operators of coal fired generators are reluctant to switch off. So they pay others to pick up their output.
That’s not supposed to happen at lunchtime. Daytime prices are supposed to reflect higher demand, when people are awake, office building are in use, factories are in production. That’s when fossil fuel generators would normally be making most of their money.
For the new issue of Forbes Magazine I wrote an article about David Crane, the visionary CEO of NRG Energy. When I met Crane for lunch a couple weeks ago, no sooner had we sat down than he began singing the praises of this new contraption he had in his basement. The machine — which can generate 10 kilowatts of continuous power, fed by Crane’s natural gas line — is a new iteration of an old creation, the Stirling engine. This version, called the Beacon 10, was created after a decade of engineering by famed inventor Dean Kamen.
With the Beacon 10, says Kamen, “you don’t have to feel guilty heating up the pool.” That’s because of the highly efficient nature of the Stirling engine. First conceived in 1816 by Scottish minister Robert Stirling, the device in its simplest form consists of applying an external heat source to a closed cylinder where the cyclical expansion and compression of air inside the cylinder drives the pistons up and down. Unlike your car, where fuel is combusted inside the engine, the Stirling is an external combustion engine; it can work with any external heat source.
via Segway Inventor Dean Kamen Thinks His New Stirling Engine Will Get You Off The Grid For Under $10K.
The News and Observer wrote an editorial about the need for a downtown summit. I’ve been pondering it for a while and have a few comments.
Revitalization has been a success, to be sure. But with that success comes challenges the city now must address. Yes, the City Council is doing so in working on a “downtown plan,” but a broader effort is needed, because the boom has brought up some issues.
Therefore, council members can lead the way in calling for a downtown summit of sorts, bringing in not just the dedicated advocates from places like the Downtown Raleigh Alliance, but residents from North, South, East and West Raleigh, people who perhaps, even now, don’t come downtown all that much. Even with all the hoopla, it’s still not uncommon to meet North Raleighites who have never been downtown, period.
Actually, some people will never visit downtown and it doesn’t matter what you try to do to change this. There are suburbanites who don’t “get” downtown and likely won’t ever. And you know what? That’s okay. Raleigh is a big city now and offers something for everyone – for downtown fans and others. You can get by just fine if you never go downtown.
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This is a wonderful read in OutsideOnline.com about this spring’s temporary unleashing of the Colorado River. Our food choices and environmental decisions have consequences, folks.
This story makes me want to strap on a backpack and head west.
Back in the era of massive dam building, farmers and city planners were only too happy to see the wild Colorado transformed into a domesticated delivery system. Denver, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, San Diego, Mexicali, and many more municipalities drink the Colorado every day.
As do you. Most of America’s winter veggies are grown in the irrigated valleys of Southern California and Arizona. Your fridge is filled with Colorado River greens. Your beef was fattened on Colorado River alfalfa. Even your milk may well be the Colorado transformed. We all nurse from the mother river.
via The Day We Set the Colorado River Free | Nature | OutsideOnline.com.
Ring Around Raleigh
My experiment proved easier than I expected. The streets taken are quiet neighborhood streets with little traffic and the vast majority of riding is along Raleigh’s beautiful greenways. It seems so easy and fun I thought I would help get the word out to my cyclist friends so they could begin riding it, too.
If you’d like to join us, be at Lions Park (1600-ish Bennett Street) at 8 AM Sunday morning. We’ll leave the park promptly at 8:15 AM and spend the next three hours or so working our way clockwise around the city. The weather’s shaping up to be great, too: with a sunny, breezy day and a high of only 84 degrees.
Hope to see you tomorrow at Lions Park!
Our Route:
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By BigBuzzMedia
One-way streets have been the bane of downtowns everywhere, turning streets which should be serving the businesses and homes around them into miniature highways. One-way streets prioritize commuter traffic over local traffic and that’s not how our modern-day downtown works. My only complaint with this decision is that the city didn’t fix the rest of the one-way streets along with these four.
Why is the General Assembly so up in arms? Who knows? Could it be that two-way streets threaten their cushy, legislators-only on-street parking on Jones? Could it be their worry about the schoolchildren who cross Jones at the front of the Legislative Building? Could it be that our right-wing state leaders don’t want Jones Street ever moving to the left? Or could this simply be our legislators’ desire to micromanage every goddamn municipality in the state?
Here’s an idea, legislators: why not let the experts be the experts and not try to butt in on every decision anyone in the state makes? Let professional educators decide how education should be run and let the traffic engineers decide how traffic should work. While we’re at it, how about letting Charlotte leaders run Charlotte and Raleigh leaders run Raleigh? You can focus on important stuff like legalizing opossum abuse and denying climate change.
Trust me. You’ll feel better. And we’ll be much happier when we drive past the Legislative Building. Both ways.
Our family attended the Green Tie Awards and dinner of the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters as guests of Bill and Bett Padgett. It was great seeing so many familiar faces in the crowd, so many I couldn’t possibly talk to them all.
The highlight, though, was the speech Hallie gave to the crowd at the end of the program. She marched right up to the podium and gave a heartfelt speech on why conservation matters to her. Kelly and I were justifiably proud of her and her speech generated a lot of positive comments from the attendees.
Afterwards, I had to chuckle at the spectacle. When I was Hallie’s age, there wasn’t enough money in the world to get me to speak in front of a crowd. I would have died on the spot, or nervously mumbled my way through it yet our daughter can belt out a passionate speech to a roomful of strangers without even breaking a sweat. That’s a pretty powerful skill for a kid. It took me until the age of 30 to even get close to that.
So, even though my attention is drawn in dozens of directions right now, it’s great to have the opportunity to cheer the accomplishments of our kids.
Noisy, smelly generators are bad, mmmkay?
A ridiculous letter to the editor from local curmudgeon George Sharpley prompted me to pen this response:
George Sharpley thinks that investments in renewable energy have not shown “exceptional gains.” On the contrary, solar PV prices have dropped 97.2% since 1975 and ten states have now reached “grid parity” where renewable energy costs equal that of coal. But why stop there? The same market forces that make our smartphones ubiquitous and affordable are destined to make renewable energy cheaper than other energy sources.
No wonder the Koch brothers are worried. If I were in the dirty energy business I’d be worried, too.
I submitted it to the N&O today. Hope they run it.
Oh, and Sharpley mentions that China’s renewable energy production has dropped to %0.23 from a high of 40% in 1971? While that may or may not be true, China’s entire energy production in 1971 was only 3% of what it is today. It wasn’t until Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit that China’s growth began in earnest.
In case Mr. Sharpley doesn’t remember who Richard Nixon is, I’ll give him a hint: he’s the president who created the Environmental Protection Agency.
