Tag: geothermal

By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Green Business, Innovation, Shel's Personal Life, Technology Tagged with , , , , ,

Yesterday, I got into a heated discussion with a very conservative neighbor about the potential for clean energy in this country. He doesn’t think it’s practical to power the whole country through solar, wind, small hydro, etc. I do—but only if we first reduce our energy loads, and I argued that we can easily cut energy use in half or more with today’s technology.

So I appreciated the timing of these two articles on Triple Pundit that crossed my desk this morning.

First, deep conservation can save us 50 percent on existing buildings, 90% if incorporated into the design of new buildings. I know of a solar house built in 1983, long before solar and conservation  technology evolved to today’s sophistication, that was pretty darn close to net-zero energy. If we’d mandated this in the early 1980s, we wouldn’t be facing the climate crisis we have today. And second, the price of solar continues to fall.

I live in a house built in 1743, which we solarized. It has both solar hot water and a small PV system–and we hope to tie in to the cow poop-powered methane generator that our farmer neighbors are building for their farm that was established in 1806. My neighbors across the street from the farm put geothermal in their 1747 home and use it for heating, cooling, and hot water.

My solarized 1743 Saltbox farmhouse. The three panels at the top are for hot water; the four at the bottom produce 1KW of electricity.

And we live in Massachusetts, a much cloudier and colder place than many other parts of the US, and the world. Similarly, cloudy, cold Germany is a world leader in solar. If we can do it—so can you.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship Tagged with , , , , , , ,

The latest stimulus proposal, announced this week by Barack Obama, will put $50 billion into the hopper for improvements to “the nation’s roads, railways and runways,” as the Associated Press story alliteratively noted.

And certainly, those improvements are needed. Europeans and east Asians laugh openly at our rail system. Our roads and bridges need shoring up. And plane travel in general has become a chore.

But before we go off improving more roads (which seemed to be where the bulk of the first round of stimulus went), shouldn’t we be looking at energy? How about a program to deep-energy retrofit many existing buildings, become a world leader in nonpolluting renewable energy, and reinvent public transit in ways that encourage its use. A massive program to cut fossil fuel and nuclear dependence by, say, 75 percent would have these extra advantages:

  • Immediate economic stimulus, in the form of dollars saved on energy costs that become available for other uses
  • Tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of new jobs: in production, installation, weatherization, analysis, and more
  • Reduced dependence on foreign energy sources, thus freeing up foreign policy decisions to be made on other criteria than protecting our oil interests
  • Ability to curtail unsafe deepwater oil drilling until the bugs are worked out
  • New life for existing residential, commercial, government, and industrial buildings
  • Drastic reductions in prices for solar, wind, geothermal, and small-scale hydro, as larger markets enable economies of scale
  • Reduced air and water pollution
  • Reduced carbon footprint and maybe even the potential to reverse catastrophic climate change
  • Far less energy wasted in transmission losses, because more of it will be generated at the point of use and won’t need to be transported
  • Conversion of energy from a constantly rising ongoing cost to a fixed one-time cost amortized over many years
  • Elimination of any possible argument in favor of extremely dangerous and/or highly polluting power sources such as nuclear or tar sands

    • And those are only a few among many.

    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 (after Rosh Hashana is over).

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