Sustainablog

Want to put solar panels on the house? Start saving… solar power is a great investment, but it is an investment… often a hefty one. If you’d like to get started with something a little less ambitious (but more affordable), you’ll find a number of good sources out there for a whole range of solar DIY projects. Voltaic, best known for its solar backpack, has joined more well-known sites such as Gary Reysa’s Build It Solar and Mother Earth News with its own collection of do-it-yourself projects.

So far, the collection is small… but there are already some really cool projects available:

The Mother Nature Network has just published their list of the ten greenest cities in the United States.

There is as yet no official criteria set by the EPA for determining a city’s “greeness,” MNN considered key areas to measure the effectiveness of a municipality’s efforts at carbon footprint reduction, including air and water quality, efficient recylcling and management of waste, percentage of LEED certified buildings, acres of land devoted to green space, use of renewable energy, and easy access to green products and services.

And the MNN winners are:

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By Stacy Feldman, originally published June 24, 2009, at SolveClimate.com

Washington is starting to wake up to something that’s been obvious to marine scientists for years. The winds blowing off U.S. waters could be a key to a national clean energy and green jobs revolution.

On Tuesday, the federal government awarded five leases to three companies that want to develop wind turbines off the New Jersey and Delaware coasts for the production of renewable energy.

They’re the first such leases the Department of Interior has ever issued for the Outer Continental Shelf. If this official statement is any indication, they won’t be the last:

“We made the development of offshore wind energy a top priority for Interior. The technology is proven, effective and available and can create new jobs for Americans while reducing our expensive and dangerous dependence on foreign oil.”

The declaration comes as the U.S. Congress is in the midst of a debate over a proposal that would create a costly long-distance “transmission highway” to carry land-based wind energy (among other clean and dirty sources) from the Great Plains to the power-hungry cities of the American East.

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You may have gotten your fill of the phrase “energy independence” with last year’s election: both parties and presidential candidates touted the idea repeatedly. It’s a compelling concept…  it’s also contentious. For some, energy independence means harvesting solar, wind, and geothermal power; for others, it’s the motivation behind “Drill, baby, drill!” Either way, it’s a challenging goal at the national level.

At the local level, though, energy independence may be realistic… and numerous communities around the United States are exploring available renewable resources, and the technology necessary to harness them. Here’s just a handful of towns creating models for clean energy production… and good old fashioned self-reliance.

By Leslie Berliant
Originally published on June 17, 2009, at SolveClimate

By the middle of next year, the nine campuses that make up the nation’s largest community college system plan to be completely energy self-sufficient.

It’s a huge step, and it will begin saving money immediately.

The Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) started down this path in 2001, the year voters approved the first part of $5.7 billion in bond funding to renovate the campuses.

The LACCD Board of Trustees was thinking about much-needed modernization work and its first new construction in 35 years, but it was also thinking ahead. It passed a sustainable building policy mandating that all new buildings that use 50% or more of bond funding be LEED certified. The board had previously developed a renewable energy plan that aimed for a minimum 10% renewable energy standard.

At the time, the trustees were afraid that anything beyond that would be too costly, says Larry Eisenberg, executive director of Facilities, Planning and Development for the LACCD.

The system’s chancellor and the implementation team saw greater potential, though.

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Talk about a recipe for potential disaster.  Combine a down economy, changing agriculture practices, rising unemployment and the end result looks grim.  But here’s the secret ingredient  revitalizing and greening our countryside:  young people under 35.

Profiled in the new book, Renewing the Countryside: Youth, this new generation is making their mark on rural areas, from starting new farms to putting out their own entrepreneurial shingle in small towns. Renewing the Countryside: Youth showcases fifty case study stories, one from each state in the United States, cooking up a super-size serving of inspiration for what can be done in similar communities throughout rural America.

Renewing the Country (RTC), a Minnesota-based non-profit organization, specializes in championing such stories, telling the story of the small-scale but big impact individuals and organizations that are creatively crafting livelihoods that positively impact their rural communities. While other RTC books focus on stories within specific states such as Wisconsin, this latest book project, published in partnership with the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE), uniquely celebrates rural youth.

In addition to the case study stories themselves, the engaging writing and photography also came from a team young artists across the nation. But beyond the inspiring read, this book serves as a starter blueprint for others looking to either return to or plant new roots in rural America, no matter one’s age.  Looking at these case study stories collectively, five themes emerge that identify why this particular group of young people are succeeding in the countryside: Read the rest of this entry »

Thinking about installing a wind energy system, but not sure if the payback period on your investment meets your financial needs? I began thinking about this question last week when our old friend (and my real old friend) bobbyb sent me an article about a couple who’d installed a wind turbine at their home in Great Britain. He noted that the numbers provided in the article (a £20,000 initial outlay for £500/year energy savings) didn’t make financial sense: “That’s a forty-year payback period!”

He’s right… that kind of cost-benefit analysis doesn’t really work. If you’re going to put up tens of thousands of dollars for a wind system (or a solar energy system), you probably want to see a return on that investment in years, rather than in decades. I got so interested in the topic that I wrote a post about things you should consider before putting your money down on a renewable energy system at SUNfiltered. Wind energy systems have their own requirements, so here are a few of the things you’ll want to take into consideration.

Will wind energy work on my property?

As with any renewable resource, some areas are better than others for home wind energy. Some of the questions you’ll need answers for include

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By David Sassoon. Originally published May 28, 2009, at Solveclimate

If Florida embraced its solar and wind power potential and got 20 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2020, it would create 37,000 new jobs, generate more than $16 billion in economic activity by 2025, and cut greenhouse gas emissions by 319 million tons, a new study commissioned by the state Department of Environmental Protection shows.

The just-released report examined 28 policy measures in Republican Gov. Charlie Crist’s 2008 Climate Action Plan, including the 20 percent by 2020 renewable electricity standard.

In all, it found that implementing the full Climate Action Plan could add almost 150,000 new jobs and bring almost $40 billion in increased economic activity to the Sunshine state.

Unfortunately, the Florida legislature undermined the governor’s efforts to turn that renewable energy standard into law this spring during what longtime observers of the statehouse said was one of the most dysfunctional and depressing legislative sessions in memory.

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If you’ve spent any amount of time in buildings with historical significance (and you probably have), you recognize that such structures are more than the sum of their physical parts. The confluence of design, material, and human action that occurred in those buildings allow you to step out of time momentarily, and experience how past generations imagined the combination of form and function as they created a built environment.

Now, imagine those same buildings with solar panels on the roof. Does that take away from the experience?

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Written by Stacy Feldman. Originally published May 14, 2009, at SolveClimate

Solar photovoltaics (PV) in the UK will be as cheap as grid-sourced fossil fuels much sooner than expected, a new study by Solarcentury finds.

For homeowners, PV will cross the “grid parity” mark in 2013. For commercial customers, it will occur around 2018. The magical parity date for PV is generally assumed to be 2020 in the UK. Says Solarcentury:

“The proximity to parity heralds the prospect of PV being a compelling investment for the individual, without subsidy, in only a few years time.”

The 14-page report by the UK’s largest solar firm is described as the most “up-to-date and accurate analysis on the investment case for PV in the UK.”

Its main point is that solar PV has precisely what it takes to move beyond a British niche and into the energy mainstream: Its energy potential is massive. It’s getting cheaper all the time. And it’s fast-approaching the holy grail of the solar sector, grid parity.

Time to tap it.

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