Ed Ring

About two months ago we challenged what we perceive to be a bias in favor of ultra high density, subsidized housing on the part of urban planners who should be engineering cities but often seem to want to engineer society while they're at it.  These comments culminated (for now) with our Critique of New Urbanism (also known as "Letter from Wingnuttia") posted back on December 13th, 2007. Want to plant a big tree? Not so fast... The original inspiration for our critique was a listserve sponsored by www.treelink.org, where urban foresters swap advice on how to manage and expand urban forests.  We warned these people who love trees that there is an inevitable conflict between their desire to expand...

That they are pioneers in "BIPV" technology (building integrated photovoltaics) makes Los Angeles based Solar Integrated a very interesting company.  But what makes Solar Integrated really, really interesting is they very likely have the most inexpensive photovoltaic solution in the world today. Solar Integrated's flexible PV panels being installed on the CocaCola plant in Los Angeles. Large scale photovoltaic installations are still very expensive.  Even when you get up into the 500 kilowatt or 1.0 megawatt range, which spreads the "balance of plant" costs (the inverter, the power management system, the utility interties) over a higher quantity of photovoltaic panels, you...

In his January 2008 column for GreenBiz.com, Brad Allenby penned an essay entitled "Climate Wise - The Dangerous Rise of Carbon Fundamentalism."  In this essay, he provides examples of how carbon metrics are becoming pervasive in areas of life - and within ideological frameworks - that never had anything to do with the environment. It is possible to love the earth but reject carbon fundamentalism. (Photo: US EPA) To name a few, he mentions a proposal in Sweden to charge "carbon credits" per child and pay carbon offsets to people who get sterilized, an article in the New Scientist suggesting obese people are using an abusive amount of carbon through their immoral gluttony, another suggesting men use more than their fair share of carbon...

No survey of utility scale solar thermal power companies is complete without mention of Solel Solar Systems Ltd., headquartered in Israel with operations in Spain and the USA.  In December 2007 Solel's purchase power agreement (PPA) with Pacific Gas & Electric Co. was approved by California's Public Utility Commission for a solar thermal plant with 553 megawatts of output.  Even without thermal storage to optimize the solar energy, the "Mojave Solar Project" is expected to produce 1,388 gigawatt-hours of power per year. A Solel parabolic trough faces due west, capturing the last energy of the day. (Photo: Solel) Solel has experience supplying components for the solar thermal installations at...

Although we've been pretty much as outspoken as one can be - given this supposedly is not our passion - we haven't been outspoken enough.  In spite of the fact we believe in the ideals of unions, and their courageous legacy, we have criticized the pernicious influence of public sector unions over and over again, most recently earlier today in a piece entitled "CEQA is Hijacked" where we reported on a recent Sacramento Bee editorial taking the unusual step of exposing how unions use environmental laws to stop development of environmentally beneficial projects. Here is one of the comments on this story, as posted on the Sacramento Bee's website:  "Environmental groups should be concerned that construction unions are blocking solar projects by exploiting the state's environmental laws. Last summer the electrical workers' union (IBEW) in Fresno objected on environmental grounds to a large solar panel...

On Sunday February 2nd the Sacramento Bee released an editorial entitled "CEQA's being hijacked, where are the enviros? "  In the editorial, the Bee states: "With shameless abandon, lawyers and monied players are abusing the state's premier environmental law – the California Environmental Quality Act," and "Labor unions are an even larger abuser of CEQA.  In recent years, labor groups have used environmental lawsuits, or the threat of such suits, to stop or slow down power plant construction, hospital expansions and housing developments. The unions' lawyers always seem to disappear once a developer has signed an agreement to hire only union labor.  Critics call this practice 'greenmail,' a polite term for legal extortion." The Bee is on to something, but it is the Bee and other members of the press who need to wake up just as much as "enviros."  Because all laws can be hijacked, and it is the press whose sacred trust...

Innovative business models and innovative technology are both necessary to usher in the electric age.  Imagine the gigawatt-hours we'll need just to power the commuter miles for millions of new electric cars.  But along with new sources of electricity, we can increase the supply of electricity from existing sources by retrofitting our grid to the lighter and far more energy efficient touch of new "HVDC light" electricity transmission cables!  This technology allows 1.0+ gigawatt transmission cables to be buried underground, without magnetic fields.  These super efficient cables - that only lose about 1% of energy for every four-hundred kilometers - are far less costly than the current grid...

The sporadic nature of renewable energy, wind and solar in particular, poses a great challenge to wider adoption.  Storage systems, even in stationary applications, are not sufficently developed.  But rather than depending on creating a massive battery industry to facilitate a decentralized electricity grid reliant on wind and solar sources, why not develop thermal storage?  Check out "Gigawatt-Hours per Million Commuters" for more on why we need to store more decentralized energy, even if the sun shone 24 hours per day. The science of exploiting the temperature differential between thermal masses to manage temperature and generate power is well understood, but to-date applications are usually at the utility scale, such as with geothermal power plants, or co-generation units at utilities with high power consumption.  Why not engineer a thermal circulation system into a building, and store hot and cold thermal mass...

We had a comment a few days ago from someone taking us to task for letting up on Biofuel.  Yet haven't we been beating the drum the loudest?  In our post "Reforesting vs. Biofuel" the reader will see links to just a few among dozens of reports posted here, warning how carbon credits fund rainforest destruction which causes climate change.  Here is an excerpt: "Our concern for what we consider to be a global catastrophe is well documented, in posts such as Deforestation Diesel, Brazilian vs. Californian Ethanol, Biofuel Monocultures, Biofueled Global Warming, Biofuel is NOT Carbon Neutral, Biofueled Deforestation, Ethanol & Water, Biofuel or Biohazard?, When Green is Brown, Is Biofuel Water Positive?, and many others.  Check all our posts in the Biofuel category, or the posts in our Global Warming category.  We haven’t wavered." Reforest the tropics, and scrub soot & aerosols from smokestacks. A feasible agenda for...

There is a 9 minute video on www.youtube.com entitled "Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See," posted by a "johnq5" back in Sept. 2007, and already viewed by over 3.3 million people. A spectre of rising seas can awaken primal fears in even the most rational among us. In the video, a very articulate man with a white board presents a clever argument based on the precautionary principle, applied to a discussion on Global Warming. The gentleman politely makes his case, claiming that nobody has been able to dispute his reasoning. Comments are disabled on the video. Basically his case is as follows: He sets up two dichotomies, (1) Climate change is real and we can do something about it - true or false, and (2) Humanity takes urgent action...