Tag: energy conservation

By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Greenwashing, propaganda, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Some exciting news from north of the border (and driving distance from me): Quebec shut down its only nuclear power plant, the 675-megawatt Gentilly 2, yesterday. Quebec now joins Germany and Italy, among other places that have abandoned nuclear power.

I’m not familiar with this particular plant, but according to the article, it’s had a history of troubles.

What’s especially interesting is that this plant’s license was very recently renewed.

As someone who’s been using what influence I have to help shut down Vermont Yankee, whose license was renewed by the federal government in violation of both Vermont state law and the earlier promises of plant owner Entergy, this gives me hope. Vermont Yankee has been operating illegally since March 2012, and immorally and unsafely since Vermont Yankee first opened in the 1970s.

Sooner or later, as a society, we will figure out that not only don’t we need nuclear, but relying on nuclear power poses huge risks—not just the catastrophic failures like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, but in routine operation. There are risks to our health, from radiation releases…risks to our freedom, because of the security apparatus necessary to protect not just the plants themselves but the entire infrastructure at every step along the very complex path to splitting atoms—starting with mining the uranium and continuing through the milling, processing into fuel rods, transportation across great distances, use in the reactor, and then storing the waste for tens of thousands of years—and risks of putting so much trust in a few large generating stations and being unprepared to cover their absence when they suddenly go off-line. And don’t even get me started on the economic consequences of nuclear power.

Oh, and if you believe the nuclear power industry’s propaganda that nuclear is a “green” technology because the actual moment of splitting atoms doesn’t produce greenhouse gases—think about the carbon footprint AND the energy cost of all those other steps in the process.

The good news: we already have all the know-how to get rid of nuclear and phase out fossil fuels. Clean and renewable energy alternatives exist, and their technology is improving all the time. By designing intelligently to lower demand, and switching to sources like solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, even magnetic and tidal energy, we could maintain and improve our quality of life, reduce greenhouse gases, have more money in our pockets, etc., etc. A good place to start exploring is the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Reinventing Fire page, which shows how countries like Denmark have boldly embraced a safe energy future, and how we could too. Yeah it’s a bit technical—if you want something easier, try this infographic about the potential for renewable energy in the US (note that this chart includes biofuels, some of which are not necessarily clean).

My own view:

  • The greatest potential for energy is in designing and retrofitting for conservation and in changing our use paterns; in the US, we could easily slash energy consumption 50 percent, and with a deeper effort, 80 percent or more. After all, northern European countries like Germany and Denmark use half the US’s per capita energy and achieve comparable lifestyle quality.
  • The clean renewables like solar, wind, and geothermal supply far more energy than we use; we just have to capture it efficiently.
  • It makes the most sense to capture that energy in small systems close to where the power will be used, rather than building huge centralized, environmentally risky solar and wind farms and then wasting a huge percentage of the energy in transmission losses.
  • We have the technology. We just need the will. Let’s do it.
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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Demographics/Psychographics, Energy & Sustainability, Technology Tagged with , , , , ,

The new planned city of Masdar, just outside Abu Dhabi, only welcomed its first residents in 2009. Designed from the get-go to minimize the effect of desert heat, and keep motor vehicle traffic out of the city center (replacing them with a system of underground minicars), this green city is very much an experiment in progress, according to this article on Triple Pundit. Considering how many cities in the United Arab Emirates are showplaces of out-of-control energy consumption, Masdar is pretty exciting.

Already this experiment is bearing fruit. Hot desert cities have a lot to learn from this model—and so do the rest of us. Read the article.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

Even though I’ve been in favor of legalizing marijuana since the 1970s and have been in the environmental movement  just as long, it never occurred to me that the continuing prohibition on pot actually has negative consequences for the environment.

But this fascinating article shows a number of negative environmental effects from the prohibition, ranging from highly toxic pesticides used both by growers and by law enforcement authorities on down to greater energy usage because the plants are often grown indoors and therefore need artificial light. If I counted right, the article offers six environmental benefits of legalizing pot. Who would’ve thunk it?

What are the other arguments that convinced me decades ago that pot should be legal? Here are two different choices that list a few of the main reasons to legalize marijuana, in some depth (the first, and I think better-argued one, is from High Times, the second is from the advocacy group Norml. And here’s a brief list of 101 reasons to legalize pot, some a bit tongue-in-cheek.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , , ,

Recently, I suggested that Obama do a massive solar/sustainable stimulus package. And I wrote,

The really good news? Such a plan could be put into place with surprisingly little capital outlay, because creative financing structures already exist that can let private investment step to the plate. I’ll talk more about this in my next post.

OK, so I squeezed a couple of posts in between. But I’m getting back to it.

And I think the answer is the deep-energy work by people like Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who looks holistically at problems and comes up with amazingly intelligent solutions. I profile him in my book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green; here’s a little excerpt:

Though he lives in the Colorado Rockies, where it often goes well below zero Fahrenheit (–18ºC) on winter nights, his house has no furnace (or air conditioner, for that matter). It stays so warm inside that he actually grows bananas. He uses about $5 per month in electricity for his home needs (not counting his home office). Whether your company is looking for a huge competitive advantage, a more responsible way to do business, or both, the Lovins approach may be the answer.

Lovins built his luxurious 4,000-square-foot home/office in 1983, to demonstrate that even then, when energy technology was much less evolved, a truly energy-efficient house is no more expensive to build than the traditional energy hog—and far cheaper and healthier to run.

The payback for energy efficiency designs in Lovins’s sprawling, superinsulated home was just 10 months. The sun provides 95 percent of the lighting and virtually all the heating and cooling, as part of an ecosystem of plants, water storage devices, and even the radiant heat of the workers in his office.
Noting that energy-efficiency improvements since 1975 are already meeting 40 percent of U.S. power needs, Lovins claims a well-designed office building can save 80 to 90 percent of a traditional office building’s energy consumption.

Conventional building logic, says Lovins, says you insulate only enough to pay back the savings in heating costs. But Lovins points out that if you insulate so well that you don’t need a furnace or air conditioner, the payback is far greater, “because you also save their capital cost—which conventional engineering design calculations, oddly, don’t count.”

“Big savings can cost less than small savings,” Lovins says—if designers learn to think about the overall system, and how different pieces can work together to create something far greater than the sum of its parts. The trick is to look for technologies that provide multiple benefits, rather than merely solving one problem. For instance, a single arch in Lovins’s home serves 12 different structural, energy, and aesthetic functions.

The profile in the book goes on to talk about a house in the California desert that not only cost $1800 less to build, but saves $1600 a year in maintenance…and hydrogen cars that compare favorably on every criterion and use far less energy. Lovins’ company just completed a deep-energy retrofit on the Empire State Building that will save over $4 million every year. And Lovins is only one of the practical visionaries with real-world solutions you’ll encounter in the book.

In other words, we have the technology NOW. Combine this with such strategies as lease-to-own programs, or programs where the solar company fronts the cost of installation and pays it back to the homeowner out of energy savings, and we can easily get off the fossil-nuclear treadmill, or at least cut it back by 80% or so. Especially since a stimulus program would bring in economies of scale and lower the cost of the installations.

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