Category Archives: water conservation

Coal Is Dead – Well eventually maybe sometime well maybe

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I mean what can you expect? Coal was sitting at the table as was oil and gas. But at least they heard the words for a change.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/08/04/only-one-loser-in-obamas-clean-power-plan/

James Conca Contributor

Energy 14,666 views

Only One Loser In Obama’s Clean Power Plan

President Obama announced EPA’s new Clean Power Plan at the White House yesterday, citing the need to reduce carbon pollution from power plants as an historic step in taking real action on climate change.

Natural gas, renewables, nuclear and efficiency are the winners. Coal is the loser.

The President stated that the final Clean Power Plan is fair, flexible and designed to strengthen the fast-growing trend toward cleaner and lower-polluting American energy.

“With strong but achievable standards for power plants, and customized goals for states to cut the carbon pollution that is driving climate change, the Clean Power Plan provides national consistency, accountability and a level playing field while reflecting each state’s energy mix. It also shows the world that the United States is committed to leading global efforts to address climate change.”

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(hip hip hurray, oh) Go there and read. More next week.

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Little Kids Can Save Energy – Would this shame the adults into following suit

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Nico the Ninja told them to save energy and they do.

https://www.saveonenergy.com/kids-learning-center/saving-energy/

A Ninja’s Quest to Save Energy

Nico loves saving energy and natural resources and wants to share his knowledge with you! Join Nico and learn the best practices of saving energy.

dot dot dot Unfortunately the actual site is graphics heavy and I am no good at copying such things, but I am going to put up the Teacher Guide. I think you will get the idea. dot dot dot

The Kids’ Guide to Saving Energy is a useful resource to incorporate into your elementary classroom’s curriculum to help students understand the importance of saving energy. Have your students complete the guide during class or as an extra credit homework assignment. Discuss the guide in class and have your students present to the class ways they saved energy at home. Below are some suggestions on how to incorporate each page of the guide into your lesson plan:
Page 2:
SaveOnEnergy.com® created Nico as a fun way to teach students about energy. As your students connect with Nico, be sure to tell students to check out the other kids’ guides and continue to explore with Nico!
Page 3:
Ask students to volunteer to read aloud the reasons why conserving energy is important. Then, review the following discussion questions with your class.
1. Do you think saving energy is important?
1. What is energy conservation?
2. What is energy efficiency?
3. How do you think we can conserve energy in the classroom?
Page 4:
Have the students define renewable and nonrenewable energy. Then have the students place each renewable energy source under the proper category. If students are unfamiliar with certain energy sources, have them look up and define the words. Then, have your students brainstorm ways in which we can use renewable resources for energy and discuss the advantages of renewable energy.

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I also love that Nico is half of Nicodemus. Go there and read. More next week.

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I Finally Found The Water Walled House – In a very weird way

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I saw this article on Digg.com a couple of weeks ago and tried to post it. When I went back to Digg to get the article and I could not find it, so I put up an older example. But then I put into Google “recent energy efficiency in the residential market” and there it was. So here it is.

http://news.discovery.com/tech/alternative-power-sources/water-house-slashes-energy-needs-150209.htm

 

Alternative Power Sources

‘Water-house’ Slashes Energy Needs

 Feb 9, 2015 12:00 PM ET // by AFP

 

As UN climate negotiators gather in Geneva this week, one Japan-inspired Hungarian inventor believes he has found a revolutionary and inexpensive way to construct buildings that could slash humanity’s energy needs.

And the magic ingredient for Matyas Gutai’s invention is simple: water. It was launched after a long process of testing and patenting and a decade of research and development at a Japanese university.

“Imagine a building without insulation, yet with a perfect indoor thermal balance, thanks to the properties of water,” the 34-year-old told AFP.

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Public Art Generates Renewable Energy, Beautifully

Play Video
Solar Panel Tech Hits Huge Efficiency Milestone
While fossil fuel energy represents the most common class of power generation, solar power just made a big leap forward, hitting 46 percent efficiency.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Sharing An Article About The Sangamon River – It is a mile from my house

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Normally I do not run purely local environmental articles, but this is pretty cool. I hope this actually happens.

 

http://www.sj-r.com/article/20141119/NEWS/141119436/-1/json

 

Study urges better use of Sangamon River

  • By Tim Landis
    Business Editor
    Posted Nov. 19, 2014 @ 10:00 pm

The Sangamon River is a major untapped resource for tourism, recreation and Abraham Lincoln history in the region.

A just-completed state study of an 85-mile section from Petersburg to Decatur also concluded the river is in need of a major image upgrade, including acknowledgement of the role it played in the life of Lincoln, improved boat access, bike and hiking trails, more public facilities, scenic driving routes, conservation incentives, and stepped-up efforts to reduce fly dumping.

Public presentation of the report — “Lincoln Heritage Water Trail” — at a policy breakfast of the Citizens Club of Springfield on Friday is timed to the 50th anniversary in 2015 of the Lincoln Heritage Canoe Trail.

Gov. Otto Kerner approved creation of the original 65-mile river trail in 1965

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Tear Down That Wall Mr. President – From the flood plains of the Mississippi

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To the deserts of Texas, there are so many places that humans want to live in the United States  that they should not. In particular where they could not under normal circumstances build houses. Especially someplace like Las Vegas.

So I think that most of Southern California should be torn down. You say, are you crazy? That is one of the nicest places to live on the planet. But it is not if you have to live on the resources available directly in the area. By that I mean Energy and Water.

…

Lawn Dude was unveiled Thursday by the Southern California Water Committee, a nonprofit advocacy group, and Clear Channel Outdoor CCO +0.80% as part of a campaign to get southern Californians to conserve water during the state’s protracted drought.

The new mascot will be popping up on billboards donated by Clear Channel Outdoor across the parched region, spouting catchphrases like “Don’t hose me man!” as reminders to refrain from overwatering lawns. On another billboard, Lawn Dude carries a martini glass holding a daisy and says, “I only drink 2 days a week”—a nod to limits on outdoor irrigation to twice a week in some communities.

Lawn Dude’s debut came two days after California’s emergency restrictions on residential water use went into effect Tuesday—the same day, incidentally, that a water main burst on Sunset Boulevard here, gushing 20 million gallons of the precious resource into city streets and flooding much of the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles. City officials said the wasted water represented 4% of the city’s daily use.

The new restrictions ban residents from washing off driveways and sidewalks, and from watering landscapes or lawns in a way that causes “excess runoff.” Rule-breakers could be fined up to $500 a day.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Water Is Precious – Why would we mix it with toxics and then pump it under ground

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The whole United States is drought prone now. We dirty up to much fresh waster. We drink alot through inefficient drinking water systems. Springfield’s ancient system wastes as much as it delivers and we just came through a serious drought. Now we want to waste water on fracking? Really? No Way!

 

Today (Friday, 11/29/13) is Day 15 of the IDNR Comment Period on Fracking.  Please don’t miss making a comment today on the very important topic of water!

Topic – Inadequate Water Plans and Local Control of Water in Permitting Process

  • Click the button: Subpart B:  Registration and Permitting Procedures
  • In the “Section” dropdown box, click:  245.210 Permit Application Requirements
  • Submit your comment/s (below)
  • Click “Submit”

Subpart B:  Regulations and Permitting

Section 245.210 Permit Application Requirements

Section 245.210 requires permit applicants to submit: a Water Source Management plan: “If fresh water is anticipated to be used in the high volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing treatment, a water source management plan that shall include the following information:” (source of ground or surface water, how much water to be used, months of use, methods to minimize fresh water use, methods used to minimize adverse impact to aquatic life).

Problems with this section:

  1. While there is a required water management plan, this plan does not require application to local municipal, water district or other governmental control units requesting use of their ground or surface water resources.  In fact, if fracking is allowed, local government has no authority to deny water to a frack well operator, even in the case of drought.
  2. There is no process for sharing the frack operator’s water plan with other state or regional agencies responsible for water usage (e.g. Illinois EPA, East Central IL Regional Water Supply Planning Committee) for their input on whether the plan is adequate, and how usage relates to possible drought situations.
  3. There are no minimum regulatory thresholds regarding the amount of water to be used, the impact of water use given drought situations, actual impact on aquatic life, impact on existing human, industrial and agricultural water immediate needs, and potential future impacts.

Why these are problems:

  1. The IDNR report The Drought of 2012, March 2013 identified:
  1. In 2012, the 12 counties of southern IL–where the majority of fracking leases have been obtained–experienced “D4 drought – exceptional”, the most severe drought rating.  From July to December 2012 the area was in continuous drought.
  2. Two of three local areas identified as “at risk public water supply” are in potential frack operation counties (Macon, Johnson, IL).  These counties were identified in an IL EPA 2012 drought report as having Community Water Systems most stressed by the drought.
  1. A report by the East Central IL Regional Water Supply Planning Committee identified:
  1. Springfield has a greater than 50% probability their water system will be unable to meet projected water use with a drought of record.
  2. By 2020, Bloomington and Decatur’s water systems will be inadequate to meet demand.
  1. The average water use by a frack operator is significant and will have an impact on water usage.  According to federal EPA, the average frack uses 4.4 million gallons of water.  And wells can be fracked multiple times.

Needed changes:

  1. Any governmental unit that involves itself in local or regional water issues must review the frack operator water source management plan with the power to affirm, reject or modify the plan.
  2. If a county or geographic area is identified as being in a drought, frack operations will cease.
  3. IDNR must develop scientifically based high minimum, specific standards of water usage protecting existing human, agricultural and industrial use.  A frack operator’s water source management plan must adhere to these formal standards.

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The Swedish continue to dominate in the housing industry – They put America to shame

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This house is air tight and over powered. These are 2 things that really turn me on. A night in that house would be a continous orgasm. Oh and did I mention that the house is in Sweden.

http://www.mnn.com/your-home/remodeling-design/blogs/villa-%C3%A5karp-a-super-efficient-home-that-scores-an-a-in-surplus-ene

Villa Åkarp: A super-efficient home that scores an A+ in surplus energy production
…
After construction wrapped up in 2009, Villa Åkarp’s energy-plus ambitions have come true: The super-insulated Swedish home’s rooftop solar system generates an excess of 600kWh annually.
…
Tue, Sep 11 2012 at 5:36 PM
…
Keeping up with today’s mini-trend of (shockingly) non-IKEA-related housing news coming out of Sweden, I thought I’d revisit a notable residential building project located outside of the city of Malmö that I first made mention of way back in November 2009.
When I intially caught wind of said project, Villa Åkarp, it was under construction with the lofty ambition of becoming an energy-plus (or positive) home. In other words, the three-bedroom, two-bathroom home is not only influenced by stringent Passivhaus building standards that focus on energy recovery and conservation (high amounts of insulation, triple pane windows, thermal recovery, strategic building orientation, etc.), but energy generation as well. Thanks in part to a 32-square-meter rooftop photovoltaic array, the now-completed residence produces significantly more energy than it consumes. In all, the airtight home’s solar panels produce around 4,200 kilowatt hours (kWh) of juice per year (mainly during the summer months) with a surplus of around 600kWh annually that’s fed back into the grid in a partnership with local green utility provider E. ON. That’s enough energy to power another energy-efficient home for two months.

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Go there and then to the original to read. More tomorrow.

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Rockspan – A sustainable farm in Missouri

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Carol Kneedler, who runs CES’ website, forwarded this to me and I thought it was a good way to plug her business. Thanks Carol for all you do.
  • O3 Internet Consulting
    Owner · Jul 2007 to present
    I create websites that are beautiful, practical and functional. In short, they work.

http://ksmu.org/article/small-ozarks-farm-provides-innovative-example-sustainable-living-50451#.UNoqJWCh7_Y.facebook

Small Ozarks Farm Provides Innovative Example For Sustainable Living

 Article | | By Shane Franklin

One farm in the Ozarks is the location of a series of unique experiments in sustainable living.  If these experiments prove successful, it would greatly affect the future of sustainable technologies and how people think about building their homes. KSMU’s Shane Franklin had the opportunity to tour the farm, and has this story.

Rockspan Farm, the home of Dan and Margy Chiles, is unique in so many ways. They wanted to build a farm that could be an example to others, and a test lab for experimental technologies they’ve been personally developing over the years.

“We are trying a number of new technologies here to make houses more efficient and to make a livable space without having to burn a lot of coal.

 

http://www.danchiles.macmate.me/rockspan/RockSpan/Home.html

RockSpan maps and overview

RockSpan is the name for our 12 acre farm and house in western Greene County, Missouri.

 

The project is the West end of Division street, 11 miles from Springfield, Missouri.   The colorful plan below shows the family farm: approximately 227 acres outlined in red with a possible land use plan.  Our 12 acres are inside the larger farm.

 

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Go there, read and see all the pretty pictures. More tomorrow.

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Bristle Cone Pines – The oldest things on Earth

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The more things change the more they stay the same. This Blog for instance will change at the beginning of the year. I am going to seek full time employment after working on Community Energy Systems for 6 years. I do not really know what that means. It could mean as little as 1 post a week. In an emergency like Katrina or the Gulf Oil Spew it could mean daily for awhile. Today I leave you with something I have seen up close and personal, the ancient Bristle Cone Pine tree.

http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/oldest-living-tree-tells-all/

Read My Rings: The Oldest Living Tree Tells All

November 13th, 2012

By Hunter Oatman-Stanford

n 1964, a geologist in the Nevada wilderness discovered the oldest living thing on earth, after he killed it. The young man was Donald Rusk Currey, a graduate student studying ice-age glaciology in Eastern Nevada; the tree he cut down was of the Pinus longaevaspecies, also known as the Great Basin bristlecone pine. Working on a grant from the National Science Foundation, Currey was compiling the ages of ancient bristlecone trees to develop a glacial timeline for the region.

“Bristlecones are slow-growing and conservative, not the grow-fast, die-young types.”

Currey’s ring count for this particular tree reached backward from the present, past the founding of the United States, the Great Crusades, and even the Greek and Roman Empires, to the time of the ancient Egyptians. Sheltered in an unremarkable grove near Wheeler Peak, the bristlecone he cut down was found to be nearly 5,000 years old, taking root only a few hundred years after human history was first recorded. How could a half-dead pine barely 20 feet tall outdo the skyscraper-height sequoias, commonly thought to be the oldest trees alive?

The longevity of Great Basin bristlecones was first recognized in the 1950s by Dr. Edward Schulman, who shocked a scientific community that believed in a correlation between long lifespan and great size. Schulman systematically sampled Great Basin bristlecones in California and Nevada, and published his findings in a 1958 National Geographic article, which revealed several of the trees to be more than 4,000 years old. Schulman’s analysis supported the idea that “adversity begets longevity,” or that the severe conditions in which the bristlecone pine evolved actually helped extend its lifespan.

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Go there and read. More tomorrow.

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The Future Of Solar Is Uncertain – At least at the utility level

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Not much to say about this. Conference summaries are always difficult to interpret. You miss all the personal conversations, updates, and sense of the future. Still it is a snapshot.

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Utility-Scale-PV-Developers-Confront-Future-of-Solar-Project-Business

Utility-Scale PV Developers Confront Future of Solar Project Business

They want the “doable renewables.”

Herman K. Trabish: November 1, 2012

Building utility-scale PV solar projects is getting tougher. Greentech Media’s U.S. Solar Market Insight conference concluded with a discussion between experienced developers about the challenges and opportunities.

Moderator and GTM Research Senior Analyst Shyam Mehta asked them to first review the last year.

“In summer of last year, the IOUs issued RFPs, the first in over two years,” 8minutenergy CEO Martin Hermann recalled. “More than 70,000 megawatts of applications were submitted. They shortlisted about 2,500 megawatts.”

The ISO queue has dropped from 80,000 megawatts to 50,000 megawatts and utilities are “looking very diligently to see if there are any show stoppers” before signing contracts. In this “tough competition for PPAs,” Hermann said, developers are “monetizing or cancelling their portfolios.”

In three years, explained SunEdison (NYSE:WFR) General Manager Attila Toth, the U.S. solar market will be 50 percent distributed generation and 50 percent utility scale projects. But about 85 percent of the 3.5 gigawatts to 3.8 gigawatts of utility projects “is already spoken for, in the queues and has company’s names written on it. There is a very limited opportunity in the utility segment.”

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Go there and read. More next week.

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