Tag: wind

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

It sounded like a good idea from the blurb posted on the International Network of Social-Eco Entrepreneurs LinkedIn discussion board:

Ever wanted an energy question answering by the world’s leading experts?!

For all of you reading this, here is a rare opportunity to ask your toughest energy-related questions to the world’s leading energy scientists, including Dr Clement Bowman, Tom Blees, José Goldemberg, Marta Bonifert and Ambassador Pius Yasebasi Ng.

Simply click the link to this feature, and submit your questions by next Friday 26th November!

But when I got to the article, I was so appalled by some of the panelists’ credentials that I posted this:

Why are advocates of dirty technologies like tar-sands extraction and nuclear power judging energy prizes for a group called Eco-Business? If you look at the entire production cycle, including externalized pollution factors, these are among the dirtiest of all energy sources.

I believe our real energy future lies with much cleaner, fully renewable technologies like solar, wind, and hydro–all on a human scale and generating power at or near the point of use–and especially with what Amory Lovins calls “negawatts”: slashing energy consumption in existing buildings, vehicles, etc. Energy savings of 50 to 80 percent are achievable in many cases, thus removing the need to build more centralized power plants in the first place.
–Shel Horowitz, primary author, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, https://GreenAndProfitable.com

What do YOU think? Please use my comment field below, and then post it on the comments of the original article.

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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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