Ed Ring

Modern urban centers from Manhattan to Hong Kong now boast neighborhoods that house well over 100,000 people per square mile, while providing their inhabitants an excellent quality of life. As world civilization voluntarily and inexorably urbanizes, new megacities will be built everywhere. It is estimated that within the next few decades the number of megacities on earth - defined as an urbanized area with over 10 million inhabitants - will increase from around 20 today to over 400. So what innovations being pioneered today will enable cities like this to provide a high quality of life, and how will cities of such size and density reduce their vulnerability to economic or physical...

Still absent from much of the discussion regarding state and local government budget deficits is an attempt to properly assess rates of worker compensation. But if one performs this exercise, normalizing for all present and future benefits, it immediately becomes clear that the true compensation of public employees is significantly higher than is being commonly reported, and this fact should be taken into account when arguing what may be the most effective and equitable way to eliminate deficits and avoid public sector bankruptcies. It is common when considering how much one is paid by their employer to reference the annual gross income as the primary measurement - the number that...

The trend towards infrastructure decentralization is well understood with respect to energy production. Since humanity's collective energy requirements will double in the next generation - even with extraordinary improvements in energy efficiency - thousands of new utility scale energy developments will compete with, for example, millions of solar arrays deployed on rooftops. Another example of infrastructure decentralization is in the many waste-to-energy technologies under development. These solutions have utility scale applications, but also onsite applications, as reported in our recent post "Onsite Waste-to-Energy." In both of these areas, energy production, and disposal of municipal solid...

While decentralized sources of power, such as harnessing solar and wind energy to generate electricity, are well understood opportunities, there are additional fundamental areas where we are moving inexorably towards an infrastructure where being on the grid is an option, not a necessity. A recently announced new waste-to-energy system that turns trash into clean energy from IST Energy is an exciting example of this trend. There are several credible companies developing ways to convert municipal solid waste (MSW) into energy, such as Ze-Gen, Plasco Energy Group, Rentech, Bluefire Ethanol, Coskata, Enerkem, and many others. But unlike these companies, which are developing technologies for centralized plants to convert thousands or, even more...

Something we don't hear often enough amidst this era's turbulent convergence of cultures and challenging disruptions of technology is this: Humanity is destined within a tantalizingly few decades to achieve a level of prosperity that can scarcely be imagined today. The ongoing conflicts of nations, continued destruction of the environment, heartbreaking poverty, ruthless injustice - these all constitute a dark fog of tribulations that can appear inpenetrable. But this fog that can seem so thick and toxic is actually disappearing with breathtaking speed. It is often easy to overlook the many positive forces of history, forces that can be identified with Euclidean precision, immutable...

A question of more than passing interest to vehicle owners is at what point the price of gasoline becomes so high that owning an electric vehicle becomes a compelling investment. How that question is answered has implications not only for the emerging EV industry, but cleantech in general. To what extent will low energy prices combined with a slow economy result in entire sectors of cleantech slipping into dormancy, if not oblivion? Here are three factors worth considering: (1) Hybrids never made sense economically, and probably never will unless they cost virtually the same as conventional automobiles. Even when gasoline cost nearly $5.00 per gallon, a high mileage hybrid vehicle was...

Last month one of the leaders in providing enabling technology for the smart grid, GridPoint, Inc., conducted a public demonstration of their "smart charging" software. This took place at an EV conference sponsored by the Electric Drive Transportation Association. As we reported in an earlier feature "Smart Grid Enablers - GridPoint," the move to a more electricity centric automotive fleet depends on transformative innovation and massive investment occurring not only in the automotive industry, but in the utility sector. Moreover, these developments have to occur in a closely coordinated manner, in order to yield a new paradigm where a smart grid interacts virtually continuously with smart cars. David Kaplan, VP of Electric Vehicle Management at GridPoint, described...

As we quite rightfully expose and attempt to rid our society of corruption in the corporate and financial sectors, and as we support legislation to root out the excessive influence they have exercised in politics, it is a mistake to allow such efforts to blind us to the reality of corruption in other areas. Over the past 25 years, and especially in the last 10 years, the public sector of the United States has been increasingly controlled by labor unions. At the local and state level, in many cases the power of public employee unions has become near absolute, as they use often mandatory dues from their members to decisively influence political campaigns. The idea that workers in the...

On nearly the eve of the new year, a couple of noted industry observers have already gone public with their greentech predictions for 2009. On December 4th, Cleantech Group Executive Chairman Nicholas Parker published their "Nine clean technology predictions for 2009," which, briefly stated, are the following: (1) Energy efficiency infrastructure boom initiated, (2) Global climate talks bog down—no serious deal until 2011/12, (3) U.S. passes national RPS, but cap & trade bill only in 2010, (4) Wind stocks come back; thin film PV shakeout, (5) Clean technology VC stabilizes at $7B globally; Private Equity more active, (6) Failure rate of cleantech startups doubles, (7) IT turns to the energy opportunity, (8) R&D stagnates...

Washington Post correspondant Juliet Eilperin, in her 12-26-08 report entitled "New climate change estimates more pessimistic," dutifully surveys the latest bleak findings of the climate change community. Her primary source is a recently released survey comissioned by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program - expanding on the findings of the 2007 4th IPPC Report on Climate Change. Apparently this "new assessment suggests that earlier projections may have underestimated the climatic shifts that could take place by 2100." One of Eilperin's primary examples of alarming new data is reported as follows: "In one of the reports most worrisome findings, the agency estimates that in light of recent ice sheet melting, global sea level rise...