(Fortune Magazine) — It’s been a century or so since Britain ruled the waves, but Queen Elizabeth II will soon reign over the wind. Earlier this year the Crown Estate, which manages royal property worth $14 billion and controls the seas up to 14 miles off the British coast, agreed to purchase – for an undisclosed sum – the world’s largest wind turbine.
It’s a 7.5-megawatt monster to be built by Clipper Windpower of Carpinteria, Calif. Now the Royal Turbine is getting even bigger: Clipper has revealed to Fortune that Her Majesty’s windmill has been supersized to ten megawatts, producing five times the power generated by typical big turbines currently in commercial operation. The giant’s wingspan stretches the length of two soccer fields. At 574 feet, the turbine soars over Big Ben and roughly equals 111 Queen Elizabeths (the actual queen) plus one corgi stacked on top of one another.
The Queen’s turbine will displace two million barrels of oil as well as 724,000 tons of CO2 over its lifetime. This prototype will be the flagship for Clipper’s Britannia Project, an effort to create a new generation of massive-megawatt turbines to be placed on deep-sea floating platforms. When the windmill goes online in 2012 somewhere off the British coast, it could power 3,700 average homes.
We don’t know how much it cost her, but word is that the Queen of England has put down some mega-bucks to buy the world’s largest wind turbine. The 10-megawatt monster machine built by Clipper Windpower of Carpinteria, California will have a wingspan larger than two soccer fields and will stand 574 feet tall when completed. The windmill is expected to displace two million barrels of oil as well as 724,000 tons of CO2 over its lifetime. It will also serve as the flagship for Clipper’s Britannia Project, an effort to produce massive new turbines on deep-sea floating platforms. If all goes as planned, the Queen’s windmill will light up thousands of British homes starting in 2012.
The envelope, please—the California Clean Tech Open, the Oscars of the green business world, took place at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts last week. Standout clean-tech startups in six categories received $100,000 “startup in a box” packages to help bring their sustainable visions closer to fruition. Here’s a glimpse at some of this year’s luminaries.
Winner of California Clean Tech Open! We would like to give a special thanks to the CCTO Green Building category sponsors: Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. President and CEO Michael Looney speaks to ABC News.
BottleStone is a beautiful, new green surface material made of 80% post-consumer recycled glass. BottleStone provides a green alternative to stone slabs offering the same warm aesthetics of natural stone materials.
Winner of the Transportation Award at the 2008 California Clean Tech Open, ElectraDrive is commercializing an invention to enable the mass conversion of existing cars and light trucks to electric drive.With ElectraDrive, you can benefit from the size and functionality you need from your vehicle, without being tied to the pump.
Mile-for-mile, electric power is less than one-tenth the cost of gasoline.
We are already energy-independent when it comes to electricity production.
An ElectraDrive conversion will liberate your vehicle from foreign oil, and reduce pollution.
At a Glance
ElectraDrive replaces a vehicle’s gas drivetrain.
All-electric traction provides instant torque.
Drive electrically around town, plug in to recharge.
Never worry about running out of juice on longer trips: an onboard generator charges the battery pack.
Fill up only six times a year.
Improve reliability, extend vehicle life.
ElectraDrive will adapt to cars and light trucks of all sizes.
Configure the system to meet your driving needs: performance, efficiency or a blend.
Viridis means green. Located in the San Jose Environmental Business Cluster, Viridis Earth Technologies seeks innovative solutions that encourage human activities with minimal impact on the fragile environment.
Currently, we are developing simple but environmentally effective technologies to reduce the energy consumption of air conditioners. Please contact us for more details.
Solar Hot Water and Steam Generation for Industrial Applications
Competitions
2008 Renewables Winner
Address
1450 Koll Circle, Ste. 105
San Jose, CA 95112
Contact
Taber Smith
1450 Koll Circle, Ste 105
San Jose, CA 95112 Please login to see email and phone information
Description
Focal Point Energy is making a solar hot water and steam generator for industrial applications. In the western US alone, roughly 18 Billion Dollars is spent heating hot water and steam for industrial applications, such as pasteurizing milk. Most of the time, the sun is blaring down on a nearly empty rooftop. Heating water and steam with the sun is very efficient, which can provide the short payback necessary for many of these low-margin businesses. But these industries need large roof systems that are easily installed, maintained, & repaired. Focal Point Energy has developed a roof-mountable, large-scale, high-temperature solar water and steam heater that is low-cost, light-weight, and easily connected into existing industrial boiler systems to provide clean heat without interruption or contamination. Focal Point is changing the way industries generate heat!
Foster City, CA 94404 Please login to see email and phone information
Description
Solar hardware costs scale with volume and innovation, while installation costs do not. Because of this, installation will soon become the dominant cost of residential PV systems. The current trend is to lower installation cost by making small evolutionary changes to the existing process. Solar Red disrupts the residential and small installation ecosystem by cutting the cost of installation in half.
Scientists funded by Japan’s Atomic Energy Research Institute are developing a nuclear reactor so small that it would fit into the basement of a block of flats.
The reactor, known as the Rapid-L, was conceived of as a power source for colonies on the Moon, New Scientist magazine says. But the 200 kilowatt reactor measures only six metres (20 feet) by two metres (6.5 feet).It uses molten lithium-6 as a coolant in a system which the researchers hope will automatically shut down if it overheats.Planning trouble“In future it will be quite difficult to construct further large nuclear power plants because of site restrictions,” Mitsuru Kambe, head of the research team at Japan’s Central Research Institute of Electrical Power Industry (CRIEPI) told New Scientist.“To relieve peak loads in the future, I believe small, modular reactors located in urban areas such as Tokyo Bay will be effective,” he said.Conventional nuclear reactors use solid rods to control the rate at which the nuclear fuel releases energy and thereby control the temperature of the reactor.
Liquid solution
The rods absorb neutrons, the subatomic particles which keep the nuclear chain reaction going.
But they have to be lowered in and out of the reactor to control it. The Japanese researchers aim to make the process automatic by using molten lithium-6 instead.As the temperature rises in their reactor, the molten liquid expands and rises through tubes into the reactor core, absorbing neutrons and slowing the chain reaction to a safe rate.Mr Kambe was both optimistic and realistic about the future of his team’s work.“Rapid power plants could be used in developing countries where remote regions cannot be conveniently connected to the main grid,” he told the magazine, adding:“The success of such a reactor depends on the acceptance of the public, the electricity utilities and the government.”The reactor would still face the problems of waste transport and disposal associated with larger power stations.
Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.
The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.
The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. ‘Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world,’ said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. ‘They will cost approximately $25m [£13m] each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $2,500 per home.’
Deal claims to have more than 100 firm orders, largely from the oil and electricity industries, but says the company is also targeting developing countries and isolated communities. ‘It’s leapfrog technology,’ he said.
The company plans to set up three factories to produce 4,000 plants between 2013 and 2023. ‘We already have a pipeline for 100 reactors, and we are taking our time to tool up to mass-produce this reactor.’
The first confirmed order came from TES, a Czech infrastructure company specialising in water plants and power plants. ‘They ordered six units and optioned a further 12. We are very sure of their capability to purchase,’ said Deal. The first one, he said, would be installed in Romania. ‘We now have a six-year waiting list. We are in talks with developers in the Cayman Islands, Panama and the Bahamas.’
The reactors, only a few metres in diameter, will be delivered on the back of a lorry to be buried underground. They must be refuelled every 7 to 10 years. Because the reactor is based on a 50-year-old design that has proved safe for students to use, few countries are expected to object to plants on their territory. An application to build the plants will be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission next year
The price of oil this morning is $72 a barrel — half of what it was three months ago. Ashley Milne-Tyte looks into some factors influencing oil markets, including the disappearance of some speculators.
Countries like Russia, Venezuela and Iran that were flush with rising oil revenue saw that change reflected in newly aggressive foreign policies. But some unexpected countries reaped benefits, as well as costs, from higher prices. Consider Germany. Although it imports virtually all its oil, it has prospered from extensive trade with a booming Russia and the Middle East. German exports to Russia grew 128 percent from 2001 to 2006. The high price of gas became an important issue in the presidential campaign. Senator John McCain in particular made energy a focus, proposing to suspend the gas tax during the summer. He also made fervent calls to expand domestic drilling for oil, while his opponent, Barack Obama, emphasized the need for alternative fuels. The surge in prices hit automakers hard, as sales of the truck-based models that had been Detroit’s most profitable product dropped sharply. Mass transit systems across the country reported a sharp increase in riders. As prices fell in the fall, the question facing Opec and car makers alike was whether those shifts would reverse, as they had in previous downturns, or whether a tipping point had been reached.
Normally I stick to the light commercial/ residential energy consumer markets and grass roots environmental issues. This blog will occasionally address industrial issues especially involving large power generators. The Space Shuttle is so way past industrial that well it’s hard for this blog to comment. I am also very conscious of the 2 we collectively blew up. I lived through both of them and the fire aboard the Apollo 1 space flight testing. That said I think NASA needs to keep flying the Shuttles until they have an effective replacement for it. NASA argues that they don’t have the money or the manpower to do both. I think that is sissy talk myself. The Hubble needs them and so does the International Space Station. We are never leaving this solar system of ours. That’s a fact Jack. Even Asimov said it would take us 100 years to have the infrastructure in place to go to Mars so let’s slow down and get this one right. The first thing we need to do is create an integrated space command so that everyone is flying together.
We need to create reuseable space stuff too. Our orbit is starting to look like a flying garbage dump. We have our stuff scatterred willy nilly over 4 planets besides our own. We have even thrown something out into the galaxy. But throwing stuff away, like Burning Behavior will take several posts.
Incoming president Barack Obama must decide the shuttle’s fate soon if he wants to keeps its replacement on schedule, the Government Accountability Office says (Image: NASA)
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US president-elect Barack Obama will need to decide soon whether to retire the space shuttle in 2010 or extend its life, a government oversight office said on Thursday.
The space shuttle is one of 13 ‘urgent’ issues that face the next US president, according to a US Government Accountability Office (GAO) list. “These are issues that will require the attention of the President and Congress early on in the next administration,” says GAO spokesperson Chuck Young.
Deciding the fate of the shuttle is particularly time-sensitive, Young says. If the government decides to fly more shuttle missions, it could impact how quickly NASA can move forward with a shuttle replacement, set to be ready to fly by March 2015.
The replacement, the centrepiece of a NASA programme called Constellation, would end a five-year gap in the US’s ability to transport astronauts to space. During the interim, astronauts will have to hitch rides to the International Space Station on Russian Soyuz capsules.
Interdependent programmes
Extending the shuttle’s lifetime means that if “NASA’s budget doesn’t change, it will put Constellation off”, says Cristina Chaplain of the GAO.
But even with more money, NASA may not be able to close the gap in its access to space. That’s because the shuttle and Constellation programmes are interdependent, Chaplain told New Scientist.
The agency needs to free up facilities and personnel that currently maintain the shuttle fleet for work on the replacement vehicle, an Apollo-inspired capsule called Orion that will launch atop the Ares I rocket.
Congress built in time for Obama to decide the shuttle’s fate. NASA is not allowed to take any actions before 30 April 2009 that would prevent the shuttle from flying safely after its scheduled retirement in 2010, according to the agency’s new authorisation act, which passed in October.
Combining all predictions, the current forecast is that this is 30% likely to happen (unchanged in last 1 day)
The addition of an extra mission to NASA’s space shuttle flight manifest could significantly reduce the chance of retiring the orbiter fleet in 2010 as planned, possibly to as low as 5 percent, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said in a report released Monday [Nov 3, 2008].
The CBO studied risks associated with delaying the space shuttle’s retirement and how that would affect work on the replacement system – consisting of the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle and the Ares I launcher – which is expected to debut in 2015.
The report concluded there was a 20 to 60 percent chance NASA would be able to fly all of the 10 scheduled shuttle missions in the next two years. The addition of an 11th mission to transport the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the space station, as Congress has directed, would reduce that probability to between 5 and 30 percent, the CBO report said.
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Then again the way the Orion and the Constellation are going they may have all the time in the world:
The gap between the shuttle’s retirement and the first flight of Orion and Ares I could widen if NASA cannot keep Orion’s mass from growing during development. Other issues that could delay Orion and Ares I include a longer-than-expected development of Ares I’s J-2X upper-stage engine, difficulties with the Orion’s heat shields and excessive thrust oscillation in Ares 1’s first stage, the CBO report said.
The report also said a $577 million reduction in NASA’s 2007 funding prompted NASA to forego some robotic lunar surface exploration missions, which could delay plans to return astronauts to the Moon by 2020.
The gap between the shuttle’s retirement and the first flight of Orion and Ares I could widen if NASA cannot keep Orion’s mass from growing during development. Other issues that could delay Orion and Ares I include a longer-than-expected development of Ares I’s J-2X upper-stage engine, difficulties with the Orion’s heat shields and excessive thrust oscillation in Ares 1’s first stage, the CBO report said.
The report also said a $577 million reduction in NASA’s 2007 funding prompted NASA to forego some robotic lunar surface exploration missions, which could delay plans to return astronauts to the Moon by 2020.
The gap between the shuttle’s retirement and the first flight of Orion and Ares I could widen if NASA cannot keep Orion’s mass from growing during development. Other issues that could delay Orion and Ares I include a longer-than-expected development of Ares I’s J-2X upper-stage engine, difficulties with the Orion’s heat shields and excessive thrust oscillation in Ares 1’s first stage, the CBO report said.
The report also said a $577 million reduction in NASA’s 2007 funding prompted NASA to forego some robotic lunar surface exploration missions, which could delay plans to return astronauts to the Moon by 2020.
We waited breathlessly last night to find out if we would be building 50 nukes with a goal of 100. The answer NAH. Energy drenched America may have finally woken up.
This is what green living looks like. To showcase the future of eco-friendly architecture, Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry has built a three-story “green” home in its backyard. On display from May 8, 2008 to Jan. 4, 2009, the Smart Home: Green + Wired exhibit not only features sustainable design and recycled materials, it also includes cutting-edge “smart” technology. With help from Wired magazine, the exhibit incorporates automation systems that save homeowners time, reduce energy consumption and enhance entertainment. For more information, visit msismarthome.org.
(JB Spector/Museum of Science and Industry)
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Please see the entire story for the slide show. There are 13 pictures in all.
Yesterday, on its 75th anniversary, Chicago’s much-praised Museum of Science and Industry announced construction of a 2,500 square-foot green home, reports the Chicago Sun Times. The home, slated for the museum’s east lawn, is designed to be a showcase for green living.
The 2-bedroom, 2-bath pre-fabricated house will feature a number of green building designs, including a gray water recycling system that redirects filtered sink water into the toilets. The toilets will even have two buttons to save water when only a little is needed, something that will be quite familiar to many Australian and European visitors.
The home will also have cement siding, energy-efficient LED light fixtures, insulating triple-pane windows, landscaping chips made of peach pits, recycled ceramic tiles and a green roof. It will be powered by solar and wind energy.
This “Smart Home” is scheduled to open May 8 and run through January 2009. It will cost guests $10.
Called the mkSolaire™, the home features family-friendly interior architecture and shows some of the possibilities and benefits of energy-efficient heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems and earth-friendly building materials.
The “Smart Home: Green + Wired” exhibit and home tours run through Jan. 4. Some detailed information on the exhibit and home features is available on the museum’s Web site.
The exhibit illustrates why many in the green building movement are embracing modular building systems. Modular construction, with its efficient use of materials, labor and energy, has been environmentally friendly almost since its inception.
In addition, modular construction can shorten the construction cycle by as much or more than two-thirds when compared to conventional site construction – reducing energy usage during construction and potentially saving on financing.
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Please note quoting the late great Robert Palmer: The lights are on but no one is home. Energy conservation and a model home right?
I just unplugged the microwave, our coffee pot, a battery recharger for our Dewalt power tool kit and turned off the old timey record turntable/radio/tape player that was on “standby”. I just saved enough power in one day to power a hut in Africa or a Southern Asia for a month! Americans don’t get the fact that they waste, waste, waste. Worse then that we are role models for the world. The big 5 of the future – Brazil, South Africa, India, China and Australia all want to be like us. If they succeed humanity could cease to exist.
By Lori BongiornoPosted Thu Oct 9, 2008 9:34am PDT
Virtually all of your electronics are sucking up energy even if they’re turned off or not being used. Some of the biggest culprits include your TV, computer, and printer. Even your electric toothbrush is drawing energy when it’s plugged in and sitting idle.
On its own, the “vampire power” used by one device might seem miniscule, but collectively it amounts to more than $4 billion a year of wasted energy here in the United States. What’s more, the Department of Energy says that about 75 percent of the electricity used to power home electronics is consumed while the products are turned off.
The easiest (and most obvious) thing you can do is get up right now and unplug whatever you’re not using. Candidates include:
Your hand-held vacuum in its charging station
Power drills
Automatic coffee makers
The VCR you haven’t used in nearly a decade
The TV that’s collecting dust in the guest room
The empty refrigerator in the garage
For the slightly more ambitious, buy a power strip at your local hardware store. Yes, it takes a little time up-front to plug everything into it, but you’ll more than make up the time when you can cut all power with just the flip of a switch.
Clamping down on vampire power is one of the easiest ways to save money on your electric bill (about 5 percent a month) and pump less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It may not seem like much, but it all adds up!
Environmental journalist Lori Bongiorno shares green-living tips and product reviews with Yahoo! Green’s users. Send Lori a question or suggestion for potential use in a future column. Her book, Green Greener Greenest: A Practical Guide to Making Eco-smart Choices a Part of Your Life, is available on Yahoo! Shopping.
For systems that provide auxiliary power, see Emergency power system.
“Phantom load” redirects here. For microphone powering technique, see Phantom power.
Standby power, also called vampire power,phantom load, or leaking electricity, refers to the electric power consumed by electronic appliances while they are switched off or in a standby mode. A very common “electricity vampire” is a power adapter which has no power-off switch. Some such devices offer remote controls and digital clock features to the user, while other devices, such as power adapters for laptop computers and other electronic devices, consume power without offering any features.
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I love the leaking electricity phrase – what it falls on the ground and makes a puddle?
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The British Government’s 2006 Energy Review found that standby modes on electronic devices account for 8% of all British domestic power consumption. A similar study in France in 2000 found that standby power accounted for 7% of total residential consumption. Further studies have since come to similar conclusions in other developed countries, including the Netherlands, Australia and Japan. Some estimates put the proportion of consumption due to standby power as high as 13%.
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To counter that is this little fellow. Unfortunately he doesn’t test anything with a CLOCK or LIGHT Display which do use power when turned off. Just think about the juice we use on clocks alone! Every house hold in America no matter how poor has an alarm clock that uses electricity. Is this necessary?
Fast on the heels of my energy-on-the-brain week in San Diego, I decided to run some experiments with my recently acquired Kill-a-Watt to debunk some myths about consumer electronics and power consumption. What follows is by no means exhaustive, but I figured I would write it up as it has frequently been the topic of lunchtime conversation at the office— with people arguing both sides of each argument as though it were politics and not simply electricity 101.
The basic statement that I was trying to confirm or disprove was that your computer/cellphone/ipod/etc. charger sucks electricity even when it is not connected to a device. Savvy environmental marketers have called this the “vampire effect” or the problem of “phantom power,” and truth be told, after I first heard the term, I could never look at one of those cuddly black bricks the same.
So I went around the house looking for as many bricks as possible, putting my Kill-a-Watt between them and the wall source of power and then connecting and disconnecting their associated devices. An aside: For those that don’t know what a Kill-a-Watt is (pictured here), it’s one of several cheap gizmos you can buy to plug between a given appliance and the wall to measure how much power is being consumed. I’m not quite sure how it works, but quickly testing it on both 60 and 100 Watt lightbulbs convinced me that it worked as billed.
The result: for each of the 13 bricks that I tried, ranging from a wireless phone charger to a MacBook Pro power adapter, the vampire/phantom thing is complete BS. The moment you disconnect the associated device the Watts measured on the Kill-a-Watt go right down to zero. Interestingly enough, this is equally true for low wattage chargers like the iPhone one (~1-2W while charging). It makes sense— after all I’m fairly certain that a fairly cheap circuit on the power adapter can get a good sense of load and just cut the whole power supply off if nothing is connected. As a funny aside, it seems that there is a whole category of “smart powerstrips” that are sold to protect the user against this bunk phantom power thing.
SAN ANTONIO — The sky-high cost of gasoline has major auto manufacturers racing to build battery-powered cars that can be charged from household outlets.
Then there’s 17-year-old Lucas Laborde, who plans to drive to high school this fall in an electric car he built in his father’s shop in San Antonio.
Laborde, known as “Luke” to most of his family and friends, spent about 150 hours over the summer converting a gas-powered car to battery power. When it’s finished, the car can be certified as street-legal with a state inspection.
“I’ve test-driven it around the block,” says Laborde, a senior at the International School of the Americas. “But there’s a couple of things to fix, like the windshield wipers. Then we’ll get it inspected.”
Laborde’s father, Ralph, bankrolled the project and provided some technical training and assistance.
“I showed him how to use a grinder, a SawzAll and a drill and stuff like that,” says the father, who owns River City Hydraulics Inc., a hydraulics maintenance and repair company near downtown San Antonio. “He just went to town on it.”
Companies such as GM and Ford have spent several years and millions of dollars in an attempt to develop mass-produced battery-powered cars and hybrids, such as the recently announced Chevy Volt and an experimental, plug-in version of the Ford Escape.
Luke Laborde’s electric car is based on a kit car known as a Bradley GT II. The Bradley conversions, built in the 1970s with chassis, engines and transmissions from VW Beetles, have Fiberglas bodies and futuristic styling, including gull-wing doors.
Ralph Laborde bought his son’s Bradley on eBay for $5,000. The car only had a few thousand miles on it and its gas-burning, air-cooled and rear-mounted engine got between 32 and 35 miles per gallon. But the goal was to switch completely to electricity, so the father spent another $4,700 for electric conversion parts and $1,000 for batteries.
After that, creation of the car depended on Luke Laborde and his ingenuity. For instance, he found space for eight 80-pound batteries in several creative locations in the small vehicle, including the void left after removal of the fuel tank in the nose of the car.
The car’s deep-cycle, 12-volt, lead-acid batteries are hooked up in series. They provide a total of 96 volts of current to an electric motor mounted in the reconstituted Beetle’s trunk, where its gasoline engine used to reside. Gauges mounted on the car’s instrument panel now include one for amperage to show how much current the electric motor is drawing and another one for voltage to let Laborde know when his batteries are running low. The car uses the Bradley’s original transmission, a manual four-speed, but the clutch is no longer needed to change gears. The car has a top speed of about 45 mph — plenty fast for in-town commuting and lots of low-end torque. The motor doesn’t make any sound, but Laborde inadvertently makes the rear tires chirp when he steps on the accelerator a little too hard while backing the car out of his father’s shop.
What would our collective Presidential Energy Policy look like? :
1. Ban the sale of Gasoline and Diesel as of January 2015, except 1 gallon containers and Heavy Transport Trucks.
2. Ban Diesel and Gasoline sales to Heavey Transport Trucks by 2018.
This would allow everyone to keep mowing their grass and having their backyard barbeques while the USA shifts its transportation capacity to cleaner safer fuels.
3. Ban the Burning of coal in Electrical Generating Stations in 2020.
That would require switching all those plants to another fuel source, probably natural gas.
4. Fund 3 Hot Rocks Power Stations. One in California to replace Diablo Nuclear Power Plant, One to replace Clinton Nuclear Power Plant in Illinois and one to replace Savannah Nuclear Power Plant in Georgia. This would begin the proceess of Converting our economy to geothermal energy on existing sites where Nukes should not be in the first place.
This would proceed for all Nuclear Power Plants in the nation.
5. Create and support manditory energy conservation programs in both the residential market and the commercial market to reduce their consumption by 50%.
Lets insulate and modernize our world.
6. Order all Landfill operaters and Waste Haulers to begin the mining of all landfills and dumps for metals, glass, plastics and and paper products. Compost the rest.
7. Mandate that all materials be recycled with the goal of a steady state materials economy in the USA by 2020
8. Using tax incentives to increase the Market share of solar, geothermal and wind generation by 25% per year until the USA is largely energy self sufficient.
9. Create a maglev train system in the USA
10. Create a light rail system in the top 50 major markets.
11. Ban the sale of diesel fuel to the railroads in 2025.
12. Open the Yucca Mountain repository by Executive Order if necessary and order all spent nuclear materials to be stored there.
To pay for this I would cut the military budgets of the following services: reduce the Navy to 2 active Fleets, one on the West Coast, one on the East Coast; reduce the Army to 4 batallions; reduce the Airforce to 4 Airwings; leave the Marines alone.
To pay for these policies I would slash the Pentagon staff in half, and the “spying budget” by 1/3.
To pay for these policies I would close the Federal Office of Education. Then I would start in on some of the stupid Federal Budget items that we as tax payers fund, like closing the National Helium Repository in Texas. We sure won’t need the Strategic Petroleum Resevre.
This program would create million of new good paying jobs. Put this country back to work and not flipping burgers at McDonalds.
