The 'Wind Kids'

When local high school teacher Andy Swapp and his students set up their first met tower and started measuring the wind resource in Milford, they had no idea they were paving the way for a 200MW wind farm, but thats what happened! Watch the story of how the 'Wind Kids' helped bring a major wind project and all the benefits of wind power to their town revitalizing the local economy and providing power to tens of thousands of households in Southern California.

Working Towards Greener Glassblowing

Eco-Friendly Ornaments

Blown Glass Ornament Ball - Tomato Orange Red

This glass was blown in an environmentally conscious manner in our Low-Energy Consumption 'Hot-Shop' powered in part by Renewable Wind Energy through our Power Company's 'Green Works' Program. We ship using Recyclable cardboard and Bio-Bubble, a 100% Bio-Degradable bubble wrap.

Hand blown glass ornament by Dean Wolf of Wolf Art Glass, Austin, Texas. Beautiful transparent tomato orange red swirled ball 3.75 inches in diameter. Lovely for your tree, to hang in a sunny window, or as a thoughtful gift! Each ornament is beautifully gift boxed and ready to ship to the glass lover on your holiday gift list!

View more of our ornaments here:
http://www.etsy.com/shop/wolfartglass?section_id=6185422

‘Green’ Jobs Await Returning Vets

Marine veteran Ben Noland installs a solar panel at Flannagan’s bar in Dublin. After an 18-month job hunt, he was hired by a company using only veterans for installations.

By: Andy Brownfield

December 4, 2011

Ben Noland served in the Marine Corps for eight years, then spent 18 months looking for a job. “I’ve probably put my resume in to 300 places in the past year,” said Noland, who is 33. “The farthest I’ve ever got was a phone interview.”

Noland, who lives in the northwestern Ohio town of Kenton, finally landed a job installing solar panels at Tipping Point Renewable Energy, a Columbus-based solar-power company that is hiring only military veterans for its installation crews at a time when unemployment among former service members is higher than among civilians.

Tipping Point’s efforts echo those of companies and groups nationwide to hire veterans in the “green energy” industry. The Denver-based nonprofit organization Veterans Green Jobs is one of the largest, having trained or placed 370 veterans in the past four years. And a pilot program by five of the country’s largest energy providers, called Troops to Energy Jobs, provides training and credentials to veterans, plus college credit for their military training and experience.

About 240,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have returned to the U.S. and are unable to find work. They make up a growing chunk of the 850,000 veterans who are out of work.

Veterans’ unemployment rate in October was 12.1 percent, higher than the overall rate of 9 percent. Among veterans ages 18 to 24, the jobless rate was 30.4 percent.

The renewable-energy industry is growing fast — solar and wind energy have grown more than tenfold in the past decade — and veterans often make good fits for green jobs.

In Ohio, the number of new renewable-energy projects approved by the state in the first 10 months of 2011 was more than triple that in all of 2010.

The idea for Tipping Point’s Solar by Soldiers program, which started in the summer, was inspired in part by chief technical officer Darin Hadinger’s father, a Vietnam War veteran. Hadinger said a clerical error on his father’s honorable discharge made it hard for him to find work.

Tipping Point has hired as many as six veterans for work-site staffs of nine and plans to hire at least 10 more veterans.

Visualizing The U.S. Electric Grid

Visualizing The U.S. Electric Grid

The U.S. electric grid is a complex network of independently owned and operated power plants and transmission lines. Aging infrastructure, combined with a rise in domestic electricity consumption, has forced experts to critically examine the status and health of the nation's electrical systems.

Interactive Grid Map (Click on link)

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=110997398&sc=emaf
                          
Source: American Electric Power, American Wind Energy Association, Center for American Progress, Department of Energy, Edison Electric Institute, Energy Information Administration, Electric Power Research Institute, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Western Resource Advocates

Credit: Producer: Andrew Prince; Designer: Alyson Hurt; Editors: Avie Schneider and Vikki Valentine; Supervising Editors: Anne Gudenkauf and Quinn O'Toole; Additional Research: Jenny Gold; Database and GIS Analysis: Robert Benincasa

How GOP Should Engage Climate Science

How GOP Should Engage Climate Science

By: Bob Inglis
 
Texas Gov. Rick Perry's recent assertion that the science of climate change has been politicized is almost certainly true. Environmental groups (the kind that always gave me F's on my congressional report cards for voting against bills such as cap-and-trade) decided a while back to run this play on the left side of the political field. But perhaps the strongest proof of Perry's assertion is what we conservatives are doing now.

Aided by energized climate deniers on talk TV and radio, we're driving a powerful wedge that divides God-fearing, red-meat eating Republicans from the arugula-eating bed-wetters we see on the left. Wedges work. And yet we aspire to bring America together?

Perry asserts, and many conservatives believe, that the flow of grants have produced a corresponding flow of studies indicating human causes of climate change. Skepticism is warranted, but it's relieved by an observation: Scientists become famous by disproving the consensus, not by parroting it. You don't get a theory named for yourself by writing papers that say, "Yeah, like he said." You become famous (and, for the pure of heart, you advance science) by breaking through with new understandings.

Grasping at outliers

In the zeal of our disproof, many conservatives have latched on to the outliers to create the appearance of uncertainty where little uncertainty exists. Accordingly, only 15% of the public knows that 97% of climate scientists have concluded that the planet is rapidly warming as a result of human activity.

Perhaps we could be forgiven for this data manipulation if we were attempting to deliver the nation from some greater ill. Many conservatives believe that, even if climate change is caused by human activity, the costs of correction outweigh the benefits. What does that calculation say about our objectivity, our commitment to accountability and our belief in free markets?

But at what cost?

Conservatives say that free enterprise, not government mandates, can deliver innovation. But we've been waiting since 1973 to be freed from foreign oil. Maybe that's because all the costs aren't "in" on petroleum — the national security risk, the costs of protecting the supply lines out of the Middle East, the cost of the pollution from tailpipes and the cost of tax subsidies for petroleum. If those costs were paid at the pump and not out of sight, we'd be aware of our need, and America's entrepreneurs would meet our need with new fuels.

But markets can't respond when some fuels escape accountability. If the coal industry, for instance, were held accountable for all of coal's costs — including health effects — we'd build emission-free nuclear power plants instead of coal-fired plants. Electricity rates would rise because we'd be paying all of coal's cost at the meter, but health insurance premiums would fall. In such an all-costs-in scenario, the profit motive would drive innovation just as it drove innovation with the Internet and the PC — without clumsy government mandates.

Conservatives can restore our objectivity by acknowledging that Americans are already paying all the hidden costs of energy. We can prove our commitment to accountability by properly attaching all costs to all fuels. We can prove our belief in free markets by eliminating all subsidies and letting the free enterprise system sort out winners and losers among competing fuels.

Or, more cynically, we can attempt to disprove science, protect the fossilized and deprive America of a muscular, free enterprise, no-growth-of-government alternative to cap and trade.

Old Plastic Bottles Bring Light

Old Plastic Bottles Bring Light

By: Debra Atlas

Millions of people in the Philippines live in (relative) darkness. The cost of electricity is beyond the means of many, so residents of poorer communities resort to candles or kerosene lamps, which pose serious health and fire hazards.

Using electricity 24 hours per day, something most of us take for granted, raises a household’s expenses by approximately 40 percent. In a country where the average income ranges from minimum wage to less than $1 a day, this added expense isn’t seen as crucial.

However, there’s an incredibly simple solution that’s both greener and safer.

The Solar Bottle Bulb was originally developed by students at MIT and spearheaded by Mac Diaz, the innovative founder of MyShelter Foundation. It uses plastic water bottles and a little bleach to bring light to the darkness.

To create the bulb, developers fit 1.5 liter plastic bottles containing water and bleach snugly into holes in a metal roof. Sunlight refracts through and off the water, creating free solar lighting equivalent to 55 or 60 watts of clean white light. The bleach inside the bottles prevents algae from forming inside them. The bottles don’t heat up, and are designed to produce clear light for approximately five years.

The MyShelter Foundation is currently distributing thousands of these lights to homeowners across the Philippines, where oftentimes homes are built so close together that little to no light can get through the windows.

The Isang Litrong Liwanag Project (“A Liter of Light”) is a sustainable lighting project whose aim is to bring light to low income communities. The organization envisions lighting one million homes by 2012. So far, they’ve distributed 10,000 solar bulbs.

The installation of these bulbs is brightening more than the homes they light. They’re helping create a better quality of life for entire communities.

Base Stop Motion ReDriven Wind Turbine

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AIR Breeze is the most powerful AIR turbine made, creating more energy from less wind and with less noise to show for it.

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We are passing along these great savings as we extend this one-time only end of the year offer to you. Coupled with the 30% tax incentive currently being offered through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, wind is now the most affordable and environmentally responsible option for individuals looking for a sustainable form of energy production.

Purchase offer valid until December 30, 2011.
Send product inquiries to: altwinds@gmail.com

Update! Solar and Wind Powered Mobile Device Charger

Green Gadget: Solar and Wind Powered Mobile Device Charger

The K3 Wind and Solar Charger from Kinesis Industries of Scottsdale, Ariz. is a rechargeable Lithium-ion 3.7-volt cell that can collect and store power created by wind, solar or AC power sources. The device is priced just under $100, but certain adapters cost extra, including the one for iPhone and certain iPods, which costs $14.99.

According to Kinesis, one hour in the sun or wind will create enough power to give your mobile phone about 30 minutes of talk time or your MP3 player more than 300 minutes of run time. When fully charged, a K3 can charge a mobile phone about five times and an MP3 device more than 10 times, according to the company.
K3 is weatherproof, and it comes with multiple adapters so that you can charge a number of different types of electronics gadges. You can store the tips you’re not using in a compartment within the device. Read the full article at ZDNet.

Power Your iPhone With iFan Wind Energy!

If your iPhone runs out of battery quite often when you are nowhere near a power source then you may find the iFan helpful. The little fan-like device is attached to the iPhone to power it with wind energy. The fan looks like a conventional PC fan, with the difference that it does not need electric power to rotate, that’s taken care of by the wind! This obviously works best if there is wind around at the time.

It took about six hours to charge the iPhone fully which means that the iPhone can be used indefinitely for as long as there is wind around. Think of the possibilities. Maybe you are in the mountains, or at the beach. Situations with no power plug in sight. The iFan can supply you with enough energy to power the work with the iPhone all day long.

Air Breeze In The Arctic

Air Breeze In The Arctic
By: Chris Bray

Gliding from behind an iceberg with her beautifully tanned, junk-rigged sail, you’d be forgiven for thinking the “Teleport” was a simple boat, with simple needs. You’d be wrong, however, and as the stainless steel stern arch slid into view - bristling with antennas, radar domes, solar panels and topped with a quietly purring Air Breeze wind turbine – you’d definitely know something serious was going on. But what?

While cycling around Tasmania in 2008, my girlfriend Jess Taunton and I heard of this little yacht going cheap in a carpark on the other side of the world in Halifax, Canada. By the time we got there in the summer of 2010, she was in a sorry state – rot had spread throughout the cockpit and side deck, a delaminated section of keel bulged with water, and the roof itself leaked when it rained.

“You’re going to sail that, where?” Our plan to sail her home to Australia, over the top of Canada through the Arctic’s infamous Northwest Passage, was ambitious to say the least. More people have been into space than have sailed through there. But together we worked like zombies for three months, ripping out the rotten wood, re-fiberglassing the deck, and fixing the keel, the wiring, the ropes, the insulation and even the prehistoric single-cylinder engine. Not only did she float, but she survived several white-knuckle sea-trials before we had to fly home and keep saving.

In May 2011 we returned for the final preps – wiring her up with enough technology to make a yacht twice her length blush: A radar; an AIS Watchmate system; a GPS chartplotter; radios; an electrically-controlled diesel furnace; two laptops running ‘xGate’ that could connect to the internet and download weather GRIB files and update our website via two Iridium satellite phones; a Solara tracker linked to a live Google Earth map online; and no less than seven cameras! How were we going to keep all those things charged? The answer, as it turned out, was blowing in the wind!

I grew up sailing around the world with my family for five years, and back then, wind turbines were noisy, inefficient and downright dangerous: During one gale, I remember the entire spinning hub – blades and all – actually broke free and ninja-starred off into the night. My dad never bought another one. Researching for this trip however, I knew technology must have improved, and it didn’t take long to hear about the awesome AIR Breeze wind turbine from Southwest Windpower. I had to get one!

I needed to build an arch to mount my radar and antennas anyway, so it was easy to make one of the uprights a little higher and clamp the Air Breeze on, neatly running the wires internally back to a switch beside my batteries. Flicking this ‘ON’, a grin spread over my face as - even in the light breeze - the blades began to spin. Turning it ‘OFF’ they stopped – a feature I became very thankful for in the months ahead when working near the turbine, or stopping alongside a wharf. Amazingly, if the wind becomes too strong - or if it detects that your batteries are already full – it simply turns off automatically!

We set off mid-June, sailing up the spectacular coast of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, and then endured twelve days across the Labrador Sea to Greenland. About half way across we were caught in a nightmare storm during which several things onboard failed (including the engine and alternator), but our wind turbine – out in the worst of it - just kept on merrily humming power into our batteries, sometimes as much as 15 amps! It was brilliant - what with all the icebergs along the Greenland coast, the lack of charted depths through much of Northwest Passage, the unpredictable winds, and the hungry wildlife (like the polar bear that chewed my camera) – we had more than enough to worry about on this unforgettable adventure, so it was great not having to stress over battery levels too – it was so simple, it just worked, and kept working.

We finished this season in Cambridge Bay, Victoria Island – lifting Teleport clear of winter’s crushing sea-ice into a cradle we built, ready to return June 2012 to continue the adventure!

GM-Backed Bright Idea Plug-In Hybrid Van To Be Built By AM General

Bright Idea Plug-In Hybrid Van

By: John Voelcker

Green Car Reports

How times change.......

Startup Bright Automotive announced last week that, once the company completes its funding, its advanced plug-in hybrid Idea delivery van would be assembled under contract by AM General.

That’s the outfit that built the Humvee and Hummer, and spawned the now-defunct HUMMER brand, including the HUMMER H1 and HUMMER H2–which AM General also assembled.

Bright wants to put its Idea van into production by 2014, for sale to commercial and government fleets, and its projected sales volumes make contract manufacturing feasible.

GM invested in Bright more than a year ago through its GM Ventures unit, and the company also has several other private investors.

But Bright still awaits a verdict from the Department of Energy on its application for low-interest loans under the DoE’s advanced technology vehicle manufacturing program–which previously granted loans to Ford, Nissan, and Tesla, and then Fisker.

The Bright Idea delivery van is built to be exceptionally lightweight, and an electric motor powers the rear wheels–providing a very low load floor inside the van body.

It offers up to 40 miles of electric range from a 13-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack, after which a front-mounted four-cylinder engine drives the front wheels through a conventional transmission–an arrangement known as a “through-the-road hybrid.”

Running on the engine, the Bright Idea is projected to return 36 miles per gallon, and provide a total range of about 400 miles.

But over a blended daily route of 80 miles, the last 40 miles would use roughly 1.1 gallons of gasoline, making the effective overall gas mileage an impressive 70 mpg. A 60-mile route would boost that number above 100 mpg.

That’s far higher fuel economy than any light-duty delivery vans today. The 2012 Ford Transit Connect small delivery van, which uses a 2.5-liter gasoline engine, is rated by the EPA Mat 22 mpg city, 25 mpg highway.

And running costs are the main interest of fleet managers, who make far more rational purchase decisions based on overall total cost of ownership than do retail car buyers.

Those fleet buyers will pay more up front if there’s a payoff in lower running costs down the road. That’s the promise of the Bright van, whose cost to recharge overnight for those first 40 miles of electric range is just a small fraction of the cost-per-mile of running on gasoline.

Granted, Bright Automotive has many miles to go before its Idea van will roll into distributors for commercial sale.

But we rather like the idea that the plant in Mishawaka, Indiana, that formerly saw HUMMER H1s rolling off the lines may one day build plug-in hybrids with fuel efficiency perhaps 10 times as good as those HUMMERs.

There’s karma in there somewhere.

Veterans Support Clean Energy

Posted by Richard Matthews
THE GREEN MARKET
Nov. 11, 2011

A 2010 Lake Research Group poll found that 73 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans support the passage of clean energy and climate legislation. The same poll found that 79 percent of these veterans believe that ending our dependence on foreign oil is an important step for our national security, 67 percent of veterans indicated they support the argument that such legislation will help their own economic prospects.

Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan also support a comprehensive clean energy and climate bill that invests in clean, renewable energy sources in America and that limits carbon pollution. These veterans believe that such a bill would help create jobs that will help vets’ economic prospects after leaving the service, reduce the amount of oil purchased from hostile nations, and cut funding for terrorists from oil producing nations. Veterans do not believe that the answer is just more drilling.

These results are particularly interesting given that respondents were 45 percent Republicans, 25 percent Independents, and 20 percent Democrats. See the poll results by clicking here.

VoteVets.org ran television and online ads, nationally, and in Alaska, Florida, Indiana, Ohio and North Dakota supporting energy reform policies as a matter of security. The ads are co-sponsored with Operation Free. The ad can be viewed at BillionDollarsADay.com

The ad features Iraq War and US Army Veteran Christopher Miller, who earned a Purple Heart as the result of an explosion from an Improvised Explosive Device (IED). Miller then highlights the destructive potential of a newer and more powerful explosive device, the Explosively Formed Projectile (EFP), which was brought to Iraq from Iran and then used against our troops. Photos and news clips show the deadly capability of the weapon.

The ad concludes by telling our leaders, “It’s time stand up for America’s Security.”

VoteVets president and Iraq War veteran Jon Soltz says:

"This poll confirms what we always knew was true - veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan know, first-hand, the destructive effect our dependence on oil has on our national security, and on the battlefield. They are well aware of arguments made in favor and against bi partisan clean energy and climate change legislation, and firmly fall into the group of Americans supportive of passing that comprehensive legislation. Veterans of the wars we're fighting want legislation passed now."

If you agree with Jon Soltz and the vast majority of Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans, click here http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5604/signUp.jsp?key=1948, "sign your name next to theirs and stand strong with the men and women who have put their lives on the line for our security."

Happy Veteran's Day! 11-11-11

Celebrate this Veteran's Day by taking a few moments in remembrance of those brave individuals who have given their very lives to protect our precious freedoms that make this country so great! Also, consider thanking those who are actively serving in our armed forces, putting it on the line everyday! THANK YOU ALL FOR MY FREEDOM!!! :)

Your Carbon Footprint

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Share your efforts with us!

More Than Trash to Cash!

Recylebank: It’s not just trash to cash

By: Marc Gunther
October 16, 2011

Recyclebank is on a roll.

The New York-based company that rewards people for recycling their household garbage last week announced a $20 million strategic investment from Waste Management, the nation’s largest trash hauler.

As part of the investment, Waste Management said it expects to provide access to Recyclebank’s green rewards program to its nearly 20 million customers in North America.

Currently, Recyclebank has about three million members, so this is a big deal.


But there’s more to the story, as I learned last week when I interviewed Jonathan Hsu, Recyclebank’s CEO, at the GreenBiz Innovation Forum in San Francisco.

Recyclebank has bigger ambitions than turning trash to cash. It’s seeking to become a Internet marketing platform that will reward people for engaging in more environmentally friendly behavior. Its members will be able to earn rewards points by using energy more efficiently at home, reducing water usage, by buying greener products, even by walking to work instead of driving.

This makes Recyclebank a very interesting company to watch, because it is betting big on the green consumer–a risky but promising strategy.

“We want to reward people for taking everyday green actions,” Hsu said last week. He described Recyclebank not as a recyling company but as “the largest consumer-facing engagement platform for all things sustainability.” That explains why he was chosen as CEO a year ago–before joining, he spent 11 years at 24/7 Real Media, a digital media and marketing firm. He also put in a couple of years at J.P. Morgan after earning degrees from Harvard and Wharton.

Formed in 2004, Recyclebank has two distinct revenue streams. First, it makes money by forming partnerships with cities, counties and towns–about 300 in total–that are designed to drive up recycling rates. Homeowners receive credits based on the amount of recycling they do; their recycling bin has a chip attached that measures its weight. Governments then save money, by generating income from recycling and cutting down on their landfill costs. They share those savings with Recyclebank. (See my 2007 Fortune.com story, Turning Trash to Cash.) According to Jonathan, cities see their recycling rates improve by 15 to 100% after bringing in Recyclebank, and a big city can save $1 million or more a year.

That’s a nice business which will get a boost from the Waste Management deal, but it’s limited. Many cities don’t have recycling infrastructure. Signing them up is labor intensive.

The company sees more growth potential coming from advertising and marketing–essentially, connecting brands to environmentally-minded consumers, including those who don’t or can’t recycle. You can go to Recyclebank’s website now and earn rewards points just for taking quizzes or watching educational videos–all of them sponsored, of course–or by buying “greener” products, like Kashi Cereal or Suave.

See the possibilities? Consumers show up to earn points which can be redeemed with hundreds of retail partners or brands. The brands pay for the opportunity to display their green cred, induce people to sample their products and drive sales.

Jonathan told me that the rewards aren’t actually the primary thing driving consumers, although they are the gateway to Recyclebank. Consumers, he said, want to take actions to show they care for their family, and to be part of a like-minded community.

“The social context, the sense of constant achievement the understanding the full context of one’s action—that actually is the motivating factor,” he said. “Day to day, I think all of us want to feel we’re part of something bigger.”

Soon to come from Recyclebank is a new application that will reward people for making “greener” transportation choices. Any day now, the company will announce a partnership with a big city to encouraging biking and the use of public transportation. Jonathan explained: “People will be able to log on when they start their journey, and they’ll be able not only see the points they earn along the way but all the requisite health benefits and green benefits that come along with that.”

And, just as frequent-flyer programs started by airlines have expanded into rental cars, hotels and restaurants, Recyclebank will make its rewards program available to other business on the Internet. So, for example, you may be able to earn points by renting a car from Zipcar or using Evite instead of an invitation printed on paper.

“We’re sprinting. We’re a mission driven company,” Jonathan said. “We can do good and do well simultaneously–at scale.”

Investors in Recyclebank include Generation Investment Management (the investment fund started by Al Gore and Goldman Sachs alum David Blood), Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers (where Gore also plays a role), Paul Capital Investments, Physic Ventures, RRE Ventures, Sigma Partners, and The Westly Group.

Living Homegrown

Living Homegrown: What We Learned From Our Year Without Groceries
By: Farm Aid and Homegrown.org
10/24/11

My friends in college used to call me a Renaissance woman. I was always doing something crafty, creative, or utilitarian. I still am. My focus these days, instead of arts and crafts, has been farming as much of my urban quarter acre as humanly possible. With my husband, we run Dog Island Farm in the SF Bay Area. We raise chickens, goats, rabbits, dogs, cats, and a kid. We’re always keeping busy. If I’m not out in the yard I’m in the kitchen making something from scratch. Homemade always tastes better!

I can’t believe it’s been a year now since we started our year without groceries. We learned a lot in that year. We are definitely healthier, but also we’re happier. Our relationship with each other is stronger as we’ve had to learn how to really work well together.

When we first decided to do a year without buying food from the grocery store, convenience stores, box stores or restaurants we thought the challenge was going to be really difficult. And it kind of started out that way. We had difficulties getting local milk, even though we live near a lot of dairies, and our goats hadn’t been bred yet so we had to wait for them to start producing. We had an order on part of a steer that almost didn’t come in, and our first monthly co-op order was missed.

But as time continued onward we started to get into the groove of things. After a lot of research I had found a milk delivery service that actually came to my town. We made do that first month without our co-op order and the steer finally came in. We visited the farmers’ market every Saturday and if something came up and we couldn’t make our local one, we were able to always find another one in a nearby town that we could go to. Our little urban farm started to become more productive and eventually we were able to provide all of our own dairy from our two goats.

We met a lot of great small family farmers and built relationships with them. They answered our questions, gave us tours, and we relied on them for our food. We learned that you don’t have to produce your own food to give up the grocery store, you just have to get out there and meet the people that do produce your food. Not to mention that we saved money on food while buying higher quality products.

About 6 months into our year we realized that it was pretty easy and that we wanted to have more of a challenge. We decided to go the last three months of our challenge without buying any food. We would have to rely on what our little lot could provide us along with anything we had on the shelf.

We were so far behind on planting due to Mother Nature refusing to cooperate that I was worried we wouldn’t have anything to eat fresh. We got lucky and our first big harvest was the day we started the three month challenge. For those first few weeks we were limited to cucumbers, green beans and zucchini. That was probably the hardest part of the challenge – having such a limited diet. And because of our less than stellar weather during the first part of the year, our fruit trees were a complete failure.

On the plus side though we learned first hand what we should have in storage in case of emergencies. We also developed a bartering system with friends which helped strengthen our community.

After a year of being free from grocery stores we decided to continue this journey indefinitely but we’ll allow ourselves one restaurant visit a month. We met a lot of great people along the way and we learned a lot about ourselves.

Rachel blogs regularly at the Dog Island Farm blog.

The Business of Cooling The Planet

The Business of Cooling The Planet

 By: Marc Gunther
October 17, 2011

Climate scientists and their billionaire backers, like Bill Gates, are trying to turn down the global thermostat - and make money doing it.

FORTUNE -- One of the cool things about being Bill Gates is that if you are curious about something, you can find smart people who will teach you whatever it is that you want to know. About five years ago Gates decided that he wanted to learn about climate change, so he arranged for two of the world's leading climate scientists, David Keith of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution, to organize a series of seminars. Since then, Keith and Caldeira have recruited scientists, energy experts, economists, and policy wonks to deliver about a dozen detailed presentations to Gates. He prepares by doing hundreds of pages of reading, some quite technical; the ensuing discussions, which last three or four hours, can be intense. "Bill has the intellectual curiosity of a very bright graduate student," Caldeira says, "but a graduate student whose time you are not supposed to waste."

This is no academic exercise. Gates has been convinced that the risk of global warming is worse than most people think. He can see that the world's governments have failed to curb the emissions caused by burning coal, oil, and natural gas. In June 2010 he put together a coalition of business leaders, including GE's (GE) Jeff Immelt, to urge Congress to invest more in clean-energy research, but that's not happening.

So the Microsoft (MSFT) billionaire and philanthropist has stepped into the breach to become the world's leading funder of research into geoengineering -- deliberate, large-scale interventions in the earth's climate system intended to prevent climate change and its repercussions. Since 2007, Gates has given about $4.6 million of his money to Caldeira and Keith for geoengineering research. Intellectual Ventures, a private company funded in part by Gates, has explored such technologies as building an 18-mile-long hose, tethered by balloons, that would spray tiny particles into the stratosphere to block the sun's rays. Gates has even attached his name to a patent application for ocean-churning technology designed to sap the strength of hurricanes, which appear to be getting fiercer because of global warming.

Unlike Gates' other passions -- improving the health of the global poor or reforming America's schools -- geoengineering is scary and maybe even a little nuts. (Or a lot nuts: Some enthusiasts talk about exploding nuclear weapons on the moon to shift its orbit to block more of the sun's rays.) The idea isn't new. The first White House report to talk about global warming said that "deliberately bringing about countervailing climatic change," i.e., geoengineering, should "be thoroughly explored." That was back in 1965. But people are paying more attention now because efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions are failing, miserably. Despite the UN climate negotiations and the Kyoto Protocol, the growth of solar and wind power, and all the talk about the Prius and the curly light bulb, global emissions have risen by 40% -- yes, 40% -- since 1990.

The best-known set of geoengineering technologies fall under an umbrella (pun intended) known as solar radiation management. They are designed to shield the earth from sunlight by injecting particles into the stratosphere or spraying seawater into marine clouds. The trouble is, such planetary-scale tinkering would be bound to have side effects. "The concern, really, is the unknown unknowns," says David Keith. Besides, the governance problems would be daunting. Which nations would get to decide how to cool the planet? Who would control the global thermostat?

Lately another approach to cooling the planet, with far fewer risks, has attracted the attention of a handful of prominent scientists and several wealthy investors, Gates among them. It's a straightforward, albeit audacious, way to deal with the threat of global warming: Build many thousands of big machines to remove carbon dioxide from the air.

Three startup companies are working on capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air. Carbon Engineering is run by Keith, an MIT-educated physicist, out of offices in Calgary, the nerve center of Canada's oil and gas industry. Gates is an investor, as is his friend Jabe Blumenthal, a former Microsoft executive who is passionate about climate issues. So is N. Murray Edwards, an oil and gas billionaire whose company, Canadian Natural Resources (CNQ), extracts oil from Alberta's tar sands.

Global Thermostat, another startup, was formed by two Columbia University professors: Peter Eisenberger  a physicist who founded Columbia's Earth Institute and formerly ran research labs for Bell Labs and Exxon (XOM), and Graciela Chichilnisky, an economist, mathematician, and entrepreneur who helped create the world's first carbon-trading markets. Their primary backer is Edgar Bronfman Jr., the Warner Music CEO and heir to the Seagram's fortune. At SRI International, a well-regarded Silicon Valley research institute, Global Thermostat has built a small demonstration plant that today is sucking carbon dioxide from the air.

Finally, there's Kilimanjaro Energy, which was started by another Columbia professor, Klaus Lackner, and initially financed with $8 million from Gary Comer, the founder of Lands' End. An avid sailor and philanthropist, Comer grew concerned about climate change after he sailed a yacht through the normally ice-bound Northwest Passage in 2001. (Comer donated $50 million more for climate change research before his death in 2006.) Last year Kilimanjaro raised another $3.5 million in venture funding.

These supersmart Ph.D.s and their billionaire backers started their companies because they were worried about the threat of global warming. But as they dug into the question of what to do with all the carbon dioxide they want to mop from the air, the entrepreneurs stumbled onto what they say is a big business opportunity. Like some other forms of waste, they say, CO2 has value. Carbon can be combined with hydrogen to make gasoline or diesel fuels, eventually replacing oil. "If we close the carbon cycle," Eisenberger says, "we can do hydrocarbons forever."

No one doubts that carbon capture is technically feasible. The chemistry is so simple that a child can do it, as we'll see. The questions that these companies face are all about cost. For their businesses to work anytime soon, they will need to drive the cost of pulling carbon out of the air well below $100 per ton of CO2 and most likely below $50 per ton.

Many scientists think carbon capture will cost far more, as much as $600 a ton, although no one really knows because the first commercial-scale carbon-capture machine is years away from being built. The startup companies say they have found ways to bring costs down, of course, but if they do, and if they can scale up to a massive level -- there's no other way of having a significant climate impact -- they'll face the problem of what to do with all that carbon dioxide. Use it to extract oil and gas from the ground? Feed it to algae? Make fizzy drinks? Dry ice? Turn it into low-carbon fuels? Or bury it?

Well, actually, all of the above. In fact, there's substantial unmet demand for CO2 at prices that can top $100 a ton. There just might be a real business here.

Pulling CO2 out of the air

The first scientist to think seriously about capturing carbon dioxide from the air was Klaus Lackner, a German-educated physicist who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in the late 1990s. He had been researching technology to capture CO2 from the flue gas of power plants -- technology in which the U.S. government has invested hundreds of millions of dollars so far, with little to show for it -- and he had begun to think bout how it could be scrubbed from the atmosphere. So when his 12-year-old daughter, Claire, needed an idea for a science project, he asked her, "Why don't you pull CO2 out of the air?"

Chemical engineers have known for decades that sodium hydroxide, a caustic base also known as lye, will bind with CO2, an acid, to make carbonates. That's basically how CO2 is removed from the air in submarines or spaceships. Claire accomplished the same thing by filling a test tube with a solution of sodium hydroxide, buying a fish-tank pump from a pet store, and running air through the test tube all night. By the next day some of the sodium hydroxide had absorbed CO2, creating a solution of sodium carbonate.

"I was surprised that she pulled this off as well as she did," Lackner recalls, "which made me feel that it could be easier than I thought." (Claire, at it happens, was no ordinary 12-year-old. She became valedictorian of her class at Columbia University, and she's now pursuing a Ph.D. in astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.)

Duly inspired, Klaus Lackner set off on a quest to design a machine to pull CO2 out of the air. He wrote scientific papers on air capture with colleagues at Los Alamos and took a teaching job at Columbia, where he met Gary Comer, the Lands' End founder. In 2004, Comer agreed to finance a startup called Global Research Technologies to study air capture.

GRT set up shop in Tucson, hired a CEO, and developed a device called an air extractor after testing various materials to see which would most efficiently mimic the leaves of trees. Trees absorb CO2 from air, of course, but growing enough of them to have a meaningful impact on the climate would require setting aside vast amounts of arable land.

GRT discovered a sorbent that, when dry, absorbs CO2 from the air and, when moist, releases it. The company began to design machines that will rely on the wind to move air past large, flat filters until they are loaded with CO2; the filters will then be lowered into a closed, humid chamber where the trapped CO2 will be released from the filter, generating air with a 5% to 10% concentration of CO2 This enriched air can be used to feed algae or in greenhouses, or it can be further processed to create a stream of nearly pure CO2.

Last year the company relocated to San Francisco and renamed itself Kilimanjaro Energy. "We're going to try to make fuels, while simultaneously saving the snows of Kilimanjaro," is the way Nathaniel "Ned" David, the company's president, explains it. A Harvard- and Berkeley-trained Ph.D., David, who is 43, was installed as president by Arch Venture Partners, which invested about $3.5 million in Kilimanjaro last summer.

David sums up the company's mission like this: "The single largest waste product made by humanity is CO2. Thirty gigatons a year. It's immensely valuable, and today we just blow it out the tailpipe. What if there were some way to actually capture it, use it, and make money?"

Demand for CO2, it turns out, far exceeds the supply. CO2 has many commercial uses. It provides the bubbles in soda. It's used in greenhouses to make plants grow faster. It's made into dry ice. Companies like Linde and Praxair (PX) deliver pure liquid CO2 to customers in the U.S. for between $100 and $200 per ton.

The greatest demand for CO2 comes from the oil industry. Oil companies inject CO2 into reservoirs to squeeze out stranded oil, a proven technology called enhanced oil recovery, or EOR. The U.S. government estimates that state-of-the-art EOR with carbon dioxide could add an astounding 89 billion barrels of oil to the recoverable oil resources of the U.S. That's more than four times current proven reserves.

Today oil companies are operating about 114 EOR projects, and they pay as much as $20 to $40 per ton of CO2, depending on the price of oil and how far CO2 has to be shipped via pipeline. About three-fourths of the CO2 comes from natural deposits, and the rest is waste from coal, ethanol, and chemical plants. "The single largest deterrent to expanding production from EOR today is the lack of large volumes of reliable and affordable CO2," says Tracy Evans, president of Denbury Resources (DNR), an oil company based in Plano, Texas, that specializes in enhanced oil recovery.

The business opportunity is immense, Ned David argues. "The prize is nearly 100 billion barrels of U.S. oil if you can economically capture CO2 from air," he says. "That's $10 trillion of oil, or about 14 years of U.S. oil independence if you don't import a single drop."

But what about those snows of Kilimanjaro? As David explains it, the CO2 used to extract the oil will be sequestered underground, thereby offsetting some of the emissions generated when the oil is burned. Oil recovered that way would have about half the carbon footprint of conventional petroleum. That's the short-term business plan for the company -- generating lower-carbon transportation fuels.

In the long run, as the costs of carbon capture come down and oil reserves are depleted, Kilimanjaro's technology could be used to feed CO2 to algae to make clean biofuels. David knows algae. He helped start Sapphire Energy, an algae company, and it was a desire to discover new sources of CO2 that led him to Lackner. "Algae is the most efficient creature for making fuels, and it can't harvest enough CO2 from the atmosphere," he says. Capturing carbon from the air to feed algae makes possible, at least in theory, a closed-cycle fuel -- one in which the CO2 released when the fuel is burned is offset by the CO2 absorbed when it is produced. "And these fuels won't run out," David says.

Two tons of CO2 a day

When they're not teaching at Columbia, Peter Eisenberger and Graciela Chichilnisky retreat to a glass-walled home perched on a cliff above the Pacific Ocean in Mendocino County, Calif. Waves crash below them, and hiking trails run through a redwood forest behind the house. There's not another dwelling, road, or person in sight.

"The Bambi view of nature is the wrong view," Eisenberger tells me as we settle in for a long conversation on his porch, looking at the ocean below. "On a longer time scale, nature is very violent. It operates by creation through disruption -- asteroid impacts, super-volcanoes, giant tsunamis that totally reset things." These disruptions created beautiful places like the Mendocino coast or the Grand Canyon. "There's this whole correlation in nature between violence and beauty," Eisenberger says. He pooh-poohs the idea of preserving the earth in its "natural state" because there's no such thing. "If we just leave nature alone, nature will not leave us alone," he says. "We should manage nature." This, of course, is what Global Thermostat is all about.

Global Thermostat's demonstration plant at SRI International, the Silicon Valley research institute

Eisenberger, who is 70, has devoted much of his life to energy issues. He led a renewable-energy lab for Exxon in the 1980s, where he became enamored of solar thermal technology; he continued to work on solar thermal after becoming a professor, first at Princeton and now at Columbia. Chichilnisky, who grew up in Argentina, is his friend and business partner. After earning Ph.D.s in math and economics, she pioneered the idea that governments should pursue "sustainable development," as opposed to just maximizing GDP; she also wrote the plan for the European Union carbon market that came out of the Kyoto climate talks.

Eisenberger and Chichilnisky both have a knack for spotting young talent. He hired a young Steven Chu as a researcher at Bell Labs and told the future Nobel Prize winner not to be content with anything less than "starting a new field," Chu wrote in his autobiography. She gave Jeff Bezos his first job out of college at Fitel, a global financial communications network that she started and sold to a Japanese firm. Global Thermostat is a family affair: Peter's son, Harvard-trained lawyer and clean-tech entrepreneur Nicholas Eisenberger, Graciela's daughter, Natasha Chichilnisky, and Edgar Bronfman's son, Benjamin, all advise the firm.

Global Thermostat has found a way to use chemicals known as amines to bind with CO2 from the air; the CO2 is then separated from the amines in a process that uses low-temperature heat. Relying on low-temperature heat keeps costs down because it is widely available at little or no cost as a waste product from power plants or energy-intensive factories. Global Thermostat has retained Carmagen Engineering, a New Jersey firm led by former Exxon engineers, to design its carbon-capture machines, which are envisioned as tall, narrow structures through which air flows. Corning helped the company develop honeycomb-like structures called monoliths on which the carbon is trapped, and BASF is working to develop the required sorbents.

Global Thermostat opened a demonstration plant last October at SRI International. It captures about two tons of CO2 a day; a commercial module, which is the next step, would capture four to five tons a day. A midsize car emits about six tons of CO2 per year.

Summit Power, an established developer of power plants, is considering using Global Thermostat's process in conjunction with a "clean coal" project in Texas that has been awarded $450 million in grants and loans from the U.S. Department of Energy. "We believe that GT has a really great promise of being able to capture CO2 at an economical price per ton," says Eric Redman, Summit Power's president. Global Thermostat is also talking with a Chinese partner about building a pilot plant in China.

Eisenberger and Chichilnisky say they have even bigger things in mind: They want to make gasoline from air and water and the sun. Yes, you read that right. Global Thermostat has formed a joint venture with a startup that they won't name that claims to have found a way to produce hydrogen from water at a lower cost than was previously possible. That's potentially significant because hydrogen extracted from water can be combined with CO2 captured from the air to make renewable, low-carbon transportation fuels, and the process can be powered by solar energy. "It has enormous potential to become a transformative technology," Eisenberger says. Every country in the world could become an oil producer.

Hydrocarbons without Big Oil

Carbon capture on a scale that matters requires thinking big. Building the coal and gas plants, factories, cars, trucks, planes, and ships that have delivered more than a trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere has cost many billions of dollars and taken more than a century. Something comparable will be needed to get the carbon out. "If air capture is going to succeed," David Keith says, "it's going to take industrial might." It will also take time: "There's no way you can do a useful amount of carbon dioxide removal in less than a third of a century or maybe half a century."

For Keith, who is 47, the climate-change issue is personal; it threatens places close to his heart. As a young man he spent four months with a biologist tracking walruses on a small island north of the Arctic Circle; while he was there he learned, via short-wave radio, that he'd been accepted to graduate school at MIT. He has returned to the high Arctic for three long ski trips and a kayaking trip, shutting down his cellphone and Internet access for weeks at a time. "I love big wilderness," Keith says.

A rendering of Carbon Engineering's "slab" air contactor, designed to ingest air and remove CO2 from it.

A prominent climate scientist and early advocate of research into geoengineering, Keith formed Carbon Engineering in 2009 with $3.5 million from Gates and other private investors and $2.5 million in Canadian government grants.

Carbon Engineering is designing a standalone plant that will be powered by natural gas and produce high-pressure CO2. The company, which has eight full-time employees, is drawing upon established technologies used in cooling towers, sewage-treatment plants, and the pulp and paper industry. "This is a big, ugly industrial process that uses at almost every step hardware you can buy commercially today," Keith says. By relying upon proven hardware, Keith hopes to limit technical risks and drive down costs.

Carbon Engineering's business model revolves around what Keith describes as "physical carbon arbitrage." The company plans to build its first carbon-capture plants in places where there is cheap gas, cheap labor, cheap land, and, ideally, strong demand for CO2. "If we can find all those at once," he says, "we're printing money." That's unlikely, but there are places in the Middle East where stranded gas -- meaning gas not connected to a pipeline -- is very cheap, and oil companies will pay $50 per ton or more, depending on oil prices, for CO2 for enhanced oil recovery.

Like Global Thermostat, Keith envisions carbon-capture plants built in the desert that would be powered by solar energy. They could combine the captured CO2 with manufactured hydrogen to make gasoline or diesel fuels -- carbon-neutral hydrocarbons for cars, trucks, ships, or planes. The product, he says, would be a "hydrocarbon fuel that has all the benefits of hydrocarbons -- energy density and compatibility with the existing infrastructure -- but is not coupled to the oil business." In August, Carbon Engineering began operating a small prototype plant.

Eyes on the prize

On a February morning in London in 2007, Sir Richard Branson and Al Gore, flanked by scientists and environmental activists, announced the Virgin Earth Challenge. They promised to award a $25 million prize to whoever can come up with a commercially viable plan to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

Said Branson: "Something radical has got to be done to turn back the tide of global warming."

Four years and 2,600 written submissions later, the prize remains unclaimed -- but Carbon Engineering, Global Thermostat, and Kilimanjaro Energy are among a half-dozen finalists.

I call Alan Knight, a geologist who is director of the Earth Challenge, to ask whether four years of thinking about negative-emission technologies have made him more or less optimistic about their practicality. He understands business as well as science, having worked as an executive at SABMiller and the Kingfisher Group, a big British retailer.

He told me that he's come to believe that carbon capture is an important technology, and that the work being done by the startups is "very exciting and very original." He is going to provide them incentives to work together. "We don't want to create just one winner and make the rest losers," he told me. "We would like them to act as a community."

Whether carbon capture will eventually work, at scale and at an acceptable cost, is impossible to know. But it's time to find out. As Knight put it, "We shouldn't give up. If anything, we should be giving these crazy scientists more support."

A Thought For The Day

"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children." ~ American Proverb

NEW Skystream Hybrid 6

NEW Skystream Hybrid 6:

Six panel tracking system delivers more energy from Skystream 3.7

The Skystream Hybrid 6 wind-solar system increases energy production of the solar array by up to 35% compared with a fixed mount system. This helps offset changes in weather through the seasons and delivers more overall energy in many locations.

Wind Turbine Specifications - Skystream 3.7

Energy Potential Up to 400 kWh/month*
Rated Capacity 2.4 kW
Energy Monitoring Skyview™ wireless communication & monitoring system
Weight 205 lbs (93 kg)
Rotor Diameter 12 ft (3.72 m) Swept Area: 115.7 ft² (10.87 m²)
Type Downwind rotor with stall-regulation control
Direction of Rotation Clockwise looking upwind
Blade Material Fiberglass reinforced composite
Number of Blades 3
Rated Speed 50-325 rpm
Tip Speed 213 ft/sec. (66 m/s)
Alternator Slotless permanent magnet brushless
Yaw Control Passive
Grid Feeding Southwest Windpower inverter 120/240 VAC 50-60 Hz
Braking System Electronic stall regulation with redundant relay switch control
Cut-in Wind Speed (power production starts) 8 mph (3.5 m/s)
Rated Wind Speed 29 mph (13 m/s)
User Control Wireless 2-way interface remote system
Survival Wind Speed 140 mph (63 m/s)

*Based on preliminary data measured at 12 mph average annual wind speeds. Actual output will vary based on site conditions & tower heights.

Solar Panel Specifications

Solar Panels 235 W PV panels
Rated Capacity 1.41 kW (Skystream Hybrid 6™) or 470 W (Skystream Hybrid 2™)
Size, tracking module 44” (112 cm) h x 24.1” (61 cm) diameter
Weight, tracking module 125 lb (57 kg)
Mount High strength steel
Operating Environment All weather
Temperature operating range -6 F to 149 F (-21C to +65C)
Controller power consumption 0.982 Wh/day typical consumption
Sleeping Mode: 0.018 Wh/day
Active Mode: 0.964 Wh/day
Grid Feeding Microinverters (included)
Sun Tracking Microprocessor-based true position sun tracking. GPS enabled for automatic initialization. No batteries.
Sun Tracking Range Horizon to horizon
User Monitoring Enphase Envoy monitoring system
Survival Wind Speed 90 mph (40 m/s)
Warranty 5 year limited warranty

Tower Mounting Southwest Windpower 45-19 HD towers for new systems; retrofit options are available for some existing Skystream 3.7 installations.

So how much energy will it produce?

It all depends on the weather and site conditions where you live. Here are a few examples that show how the wind and solar energy production complement each other across the seasons:

Get a Free Personal Wind Energy Assessment with Sitelook.

At Southwest Windpower, we provide you with the most accurate remote wind energy assessment available, and it only takes a few minutes.

We’ll walk you through some basic questions to determine your wind energy potential, what wind power solution is right for you, and what kind of tax credits you can expect.

This is the first of 4 easy steps to powering your home with personal wind power.

Take the Wind Energy Assessment:

http://www.windenergy.com/sitelook/consumerTB.html


Your proposal will include:

Wind Energy

Potential Financial Savings

Environmental Impact


What you will need:

- Your last 1-12 monthly energy bills
(12 is recommended for best results)

- Address of installation site

*Note: Sitelook is currently available for utility-connected properties in the United States.

House Rejects EPA Oversight of Coal Ash

House Rejects EPA Oversight of Coal Ash

By: Puneet Kollipara
October 15, 2011


WASHINGTON — The House voted yesterday to approve a bill that would block the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from restricting how utilities dispose of coal ash and would let states regulate it like municipal waste.

The bill passed 267-144, with all but three Republicans voting in favor and 37 Democrats joining them.

Republicans said the bill would prevent the EPA from issuing a rule that an industry group has said would cost up to 316,000 jobs.

“These are real jobs at stake. It’s that simple,” said Rep. David McKinley, R-W.Va., adding that bill opponents “clearly have an anti-coal agenda.”

The agency has proposed subjecting coal ash to a federal hazardous-waste-management law or requiring states to regulate it as nonhazardous waste. The proposal comes in the wake of coal-ash spills, including a billion-gallon spill in 2008 in Kingston, Tenn.

The bill would allow states to regulate coal-ash disposal no less stringently than municipal waste. The EPA could run similar programs for states that don’t regulate it.

Coal ash — the residue of coal combustion at electricity plants — contains toxic metals, including chromium, arsenic and lead. Environmental groups, which want the EPA to regulate coal ash as hazardous waste, say those chemicals can get into groundwater when ash-disposal structures fail, putting people at risk of death or serious disease.

Rep. Pete Olson, R-Texas, said the bill would “provide certainty for state regulators as well as the manufacturers that rely on coal ash as building materials ... and prevent unnecessary hikes in electricity rates.”

Democrats such as Rep. James P. McGovern of Massachusetts cited a study from Tufts University in Medford, Mass., that said the industry group’s assertion of job losses is based on flawed use of data from an unpublished academic study. The Tufts study found that the EPA rule actually could create 28,000 jobs.

“These jobs will not happen if we pass this bill. This bill basically preserves the status quo,” McGovern said.

Top House Energy and Commerce Committee Democrats such as Rep. Henry Waxman of California contend that letting states regulate coal ash like municipal waste wouldn’t ensure the safety of coal-ash sites.

The Environmental Integrity Project, an environmental-advocacy group in Washington, has said the bill also would allow for coal-ash sites that could leak up to five times more arsenic than allowed by current law.

McKinley’s bill faces tough odds in the Democratically held Senate. The Obama administration opposes it.

Major Automakers Agree to Develop Universal Charger For EVs

Major Automakers Agree to Develop Universal Charger For EVs

By: Ami Cholia
Oct. 13, 2011

In an effort to streamline the process of charging electric vehicles, seven major automakers - Audi, BMW, Daimler, Ford, GM, Porsche and Volkswagen - have agreed to a single rapid charging system.

At an announcement made at the Society of German Engineers’ 15th International Electronic Systems for Motor Vehicles Conference yesterday, the car companies signed the Combined Charging System — which will give all upcoming EVs the same charging interface. The interface will be capable of one-phase AC charging, rapid three-phase AC charging, at-home DC charging or ultra-fast DC charging at public charging stations. This essentially means that there won’t be a separate wire for rapid charging, or home/wall outlets.

The automakers also agreed to use HomePlug Green Phy as the communication protocol. This method will facilitate the integration of electric cars into smart grid applications.

According to Green Car Congress, “The harmonized electric vehicle charging solution is backward compatible with the J1772 connector standard in the US. Backward compatibility also has been achieved in Europe where the system is based on the IEC 62196 Type 2. The approval of the J1772 standard has given electric vehicle owners the comfort of knowing they can charge at all Level 2 charging stations. Prior to standardization an EV owner had no way of knowing if the charge port they were pulling up to was compatible with their vehicle.”

In the end, the universal plug will help both owners and manufacturers by lowering costs and accelerate the rate of charger installation — making the car more accessible for everyone.

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Wind: An Essential Medium For Kinetic Artists

Rooster Rings

Artist- Anthony Howe
Born 1954, Salt Lake City, UT

Lives and works on Orcas Island, WA

Anthony Howe's kinetic sculpture 'Rooster Rings' moves with swift elegance when activated by the wind.

 Both light and strong, this polished and refined stainless steel and Fiberglas sculpture is asymmetrically balanced and built on a three-point axis. The complex action achieved by this multiple axis causes the work to appear to move independently of the apparent direction of the wind.

Early in his career, Howe experimented with abstract painting, and later became interested primarily in the shapes and forms that emerged in these early works, many of which continue to inform his sculptural projects.

Howe taught himself welding and metal work while employed in a Manhattan warehouse, where he began to create three-dimensional works out of sheet metal. The artist's work from this period includes furniture made of welded rods and coiled steel, freestanding welded metal sculptures, massive mobiles with resin-impregnated fabric or fiberglass of varying colors, and kinetic fountains and musical sculptures incorporating gongs, bells, piano wire, and tumbler drums. 'Rooster Rings' is representative of Howe's most recent work, which consists of more refined and polished kinetic sculptures and mobiles. See it in action below!

Each section of this elegant kinetic sculpture rotates independently and the effect is mesmerizing. It is located at DeCordova Museum Sculpture Garden in Lincoln, Mass., outside of Boston.