Category Archives: green economy

Energy Independence – It should be every bodies right

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More next Fall. HAHA Took me three extra months to return. Sorry did not EVEN think about posting until now.

First, of let me say I am now cancer free. Second, let me say that taking a break away from posting because of the cancer and the cancer treatment left me fairly lazy, so it is tough getting back to writing these posts. The thought has occurred to me that I might retire at the end of the year. Anyway it is good to be back for now. So without further adieu:

https://springfieldstatejournalregister-il.newsmemory.com/?token=ad88ee2719e187433892376e5ee4084b&cnum=f1ab27f9-ae38-eb11-a0ad-90b11c3d639b&fod=1111111STD-0&selDate=20221001&licenseType=paid_subscriber&for-guid=7b00ad35-cf99-4e2d-8f79-47fcd162e2b9&utm_source=sj-r-DailyBriefing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily_briefing&utm_term=promo&utm_content=NSJR-ILLINOIS-SPRINGFIELD-NLETTER65

In one tiny German town, nobody worries about energy bills

By FRANK JORDANS yesterday

FELDHEIM, Germany (AP) — Europeans are opening their energy bills with trepidation these days, bracing for hefty price hikes as utility companies pass on the surging cost of natural gas, oil and electricity tied to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Many are trying to conserve by turning down the heat and shutting off lights this winter.

Not so the people of Feldheim, population 130.

Located about an hour and a half south of Berlin, this modest but well-kept village has been energy self-sufficient for more than a decade.

A bold experiment launched in the mid-1990s saw Feldheim erect a handful of wind turbines to provide electricity to the village. Then it built a local grid, solar panels, battery storage and more turbines. A biogas plant put up to keep piglets warm was expanded, providing extra income to the farmers’ cooperative, which pumps hot water through a village-wide central heating system. A hydrogen production facility is also under construction.

Come on! If a little tiny town can do it, we all can.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Some Good News On Climate Change – We’re no longer totally f$%@ed.

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But we’re also far from totally unf$@%*ed!”

I am quoting here. I always try to stay positive and I know regular readers find that hard to believe because I have been saying for awhile that Human’s will go extinct. Still I like to think that my Stepson Gus, and my nieces and nephews like Taylor and Cory will have pleasant lives of their own. I hope that their kids will too. So here is an article that spreads some of that positivity.

This article is from last year but, spread the old news, same as the new news.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/23/1042973/climate-change-action-progress-clean-energy/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Climate change

The rare spots of good news on climate change

It looks increasingly clear that we’ll at least sidestep the worst-case scenarios.

December 23, 2021

The deadly consequences of climate change only grew clearer this year, as record-shattering heat waves, floods, and wildfires killed thousands and strained the limits of our disaster responders.

In the closing days of 2021, scientists warned that the eastern ledge of a Florida-size glacier is about to snap off of Antarctica and US legislators found they may have flubbed their best chance in a decade to enact sweeping climate policies.

But amid these stark signs, there were also indications that momentum is beginning to build behind climate action. Indeed, there’s good reason now to believe that the world could at least sidestep the worst dangers of global warming.

Princeton energy researcher Jesse Jenkins accurately, and colorfully, pinpointed the weird moment we’ve arrived at in a recent tweet: “We’re no longer totally f$%@ed. But we’re also far from totally unf$@%*ed!”

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Go there and read. More next week.

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I Always Come Home To The Residential Market – It’s because that is where we live

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I know I write about all kinds of things like: the Russian Invasion of Ukraine or environmental disasters. But where this Blog started out was in the residential market. You know all the boring stuff. Improved air conditioning, or painting your roof white or insulating your water heater. Then I veer off in to “bugs that eat plastics” or Wind Turbines when I should be talking about energy efficient appliances. So without further ado here are 15 ways to use energy more better in your home.

Top 15 Home Energy Efficiency Upgrades and Their Costs in 2021

Top 15 Home Energy Efficiency Upgrades and Their Costs in 2021

Energy efficiency is not just a trend that people with money follow because it’s cool to be green. No. It’s a real way to reduce your carbon footprint and your monthly costs in the long run.

It’s true that big changes like switching to solar energy require significant investments but you will recover and even save money in the upcoming years.

Enough talking, let’s see exactly what can be done to make your house more energy efficient. It’s recommended to start with little things and work your way up to the most expensive changes.

Maximize the use of natural light

The first thing to do to lower your energy bill is let the light in (obviously). For that purpose, install large windows.

Avoid light blocking treatments and use instead shades that can be opened at will. This way, you get darkness and light whenever you want. Place mirrors on the walls adjacent or opposite to windows. The idea is to have many reflective surfaces that create the illusion of light and spaciousness.

Install energy efficient windows

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Go there and read all 15. More next week.

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Trouble With Wind Turbines – Everything that is not true of turbines

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Let me say from the get go, that i support Wind Turbines one hundred percent. I have friends that hate them. Mainly because they consider them BIG eye sores. They bother me because they kill a lot of birds, thought the manufacturers are trying to do something about that.

The thing that really bothers me, and you see can it in the article, is that the Republicants make it a cause celeb with false claims about the Turbines, mostly human health related – likes Trump’s – they cause cancer comment. They get everybody riled up and angry because they think it will get people to vote for their candidates in elections and in the end it just screws things up for everyone involved. On top of that the wind farms get built (usually) and nobody is happy.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/facebook-groups-wind-turbine-construction?utm_source=digg

“Corrosive Communities”: How A Facebook Fight Over Wind Power Predicts the Future of Local Politics in America

In small towns around the country, wind turbines are doing something to the locals.

Picture of Joseph Bernstein Joseph Bernstein BuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted on December 17, 2021, at 11:35 a.m. ET

Bad vibrations abound. Many of them are obvious: We can sense them, measure the damage they do, try to counteract or avoid them. Others exist in a range outside the limit of normal human perception. Most of us go about our lives oblivious to these. But sometimes a person gains a new kind of awareness, one that gives form and name to the hidden forces in the air, in this country, at this moment. Such a person may become obsessed, tormented, desperate. Such a person may feel obligated to act.

Erik and Chantelle Benko live in rural Sidney Township, Michigan, about 45 minutes northeast of Grand Rapids. They moved there in 2016, to a ramshackle ranch on 40 rolling acres, where they planned to breed American quarter horses and set up an equine-assisted psychotherapy practice. Getting the place in shape took several hundred thousand dollars, they said. But it was worth it to raise their two boys in a place where people knew each other and treated each other with respect, where kids got the first day of hunting season off from school, where you couldn’t pump gas without making friends with the clerk. The first night in his new home, the sky was so clear, Erik Benko said, “you felt like you could reach out and grab a handful of stars.”

One day in October 2020, a post on the Facebook page for the Sidney Township Neighborhood Watch seized the Benkos’ attention. Jeffrey Lodholtz, a member of the township planning commission, had published a screenshot of a text message from Jed Welder, a local farmer and township trustee. Like hundreds of rural and agricultural communities across the country, Sidney Township, open, gusty, and short on cash, was receiving interest from a wind energy company. Wind farms can bring municipal tax benefits, construction jobs, and payments for fallow or devalued cropland. The planning commission was considering a new law to set standards to encourage developmen

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Go there and read. It is a very long article. More next week.

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Screw Batteries – Alternative energy doesn’t need them

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That’s right. Batteries are great for houses and cars, but that’s about it. For every other purpose there are better alternatives and for large scale reproduction of power. This is the newest and the best.

https://www.wired.com/story/energy-vault-gravity-storage/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Matt Reynolds

Backchannel

Gravity Could Solve Clean Energy’s One Major Drawback

Finding green energy when the winds are calm and the skies are cloudy has been a challenge. Storing it in giant concrete blocks could be the answer.

In a Swiss valley, an unusual multi-armed crane lifts two 35-ton concrete blocks high into the air. The blocks delicately inch their way up the blue steel frame of the crane, where they hang suspended from either side of a 66-meter-wide horizontal arm. There are three arms in total, each one housing the cables, winches, and grabbing hooks needed to hoist another pair of blocks into the sky, giving the apparatus the appearance of a giant metallic insect lifting and stacking bricks with steel webs. Although the tower is 75 meters tall, it is easily dwarfed by the forested flanks of southern Switzerland’s Lepontine Alps, which rise from the valley floor in all directions.

Thirty meters. Thirty-five. Forty. The concrete blocks are slowly hoisted upwards by motors powered with electricity from the Swiss power grid. For a few seconds they hang in the warm September air, then the steel cables holding the blocks start to unspool and they begin their slow descent to join the few dozen similar blocks stacked at the foot of the tower. This is the moment that this elaborate dance of steel and concrete has been designed for. As each block descends, the motors that lift the blocks start spinning in reverse, generating electricity that courses through the thick cables running down the side of the crane and onto the power grid. In the 30 seconds during which the blocks are descending, each one generates about one megawatt of electricity: enough to power roughly 1,000 homes.

This tower is a prototype from Switzerland-based Energy Vault, one of a number of startups finding new ways to use gravity to generate electricity. A fully-sized version of the tower might contain 7,000 bricks and provide enough electricity to power several thousand homes for eight hours. Storing energy in this way could help solve the biggest problem facing the transition to renewable electricity: finding a zero-carbon way to keep the lights on when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. “The greatest hurdle we have is getting low-cost storage,” says Robert Piconi, CEO and cofounder of Energy Vault.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Home Solar Power Is Cheap And Effective – Go for it now

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First off. This piece claims to be all you need to know about Home Solar Electric. It is not. But when you do all the things they TELL you to and THEN put them together. Then you are nearly there. BUT they do not include all the research you have to do on equipment manufacturers, convertors and batteries. Sigh. But they get A’s for optimism.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/what-you-need-to-know-about-converting-your-home-to-solar?utm_source=pocket-newtab

What You Need to Know About Converting Your Home to Solar

Let us be your guiding light.

Popular Science

  • Whitson Gordon

 

If you live in an area with abundant sunlight—hello, fellow southern Californians—you’ve probably thought about installing solar panels on your roof to save on your electric bill. But with so much information, it can be hard to know where to start.

Look no further—start here

Between the different types of panels, financing, inverters, and other jargon, researching solar energy can feel overwhelming at first. That’s why I recommend starting at a solar quote comparison site like EnergySage, Solar-Estimate, or SolarReviews (the latter two are run by the same people).

Both EnergySage and Solar-Estimate act as educational resources and comparison shopping tools to help you field bids. I’ve been using EnergySage, which is chock-full of articles explaining the technology involved. You can also watch videos, look at their buyer’s guide, or start getting quotes. Their Solar 101 series of articles will help you understand the basics, and when you’re done, scroll through the site’s “Learn About Solar” sidebar to read even more articles that’ll give you a feel for the process.

To understand what your home requires, though, you’ll need to look up how much electricity you use. If your bill tells you the average amount of electricity you use each month, make a note of that, or calculate a quick and dirty average yourself. The more information you have on your usage, the more accurate an estimate you can get from installers.

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Go there and read so much. More next week.

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Grid Regulation With Alternative Power – Its almost as important how you turn alternative power off as how you turn it on

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Can the Grid run only on Alternative Power? Yes. Can we store enough Alternative Energy to run the Grid smoothly (night and day, whenever)? Yes. Can we turn Alternative Power off if we need to? This video argues, Yes. Again, I do not normally do videos because this is a print based blog. But this video says it better than any article I have ever seen. So:

https://digg.com/video/what-happens-when-islands-makes-way-more-power-than-neededs

 

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Go there and watch. Its only 6 minutes. More next week.

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We Need To Rebuild Our Power Grid – Or suffer devastating increased costs for natural disasters

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This is a first for this blog. We have never posted an “OP/ED” piece before, but Ms. Granholm knows what she is talking about. So listen up!

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/perspectives/clean-energy-economy-build-back-better-agenda/index.html

Extreme weather keeps knocking out America’s power. Here’s what we must do

Opinion by Jennifer M. Granholm for CNN Business Perspectives

Jennifer M. Granholm is the 16th United States Secretary of Energy. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own.

Perspectives Jennifer M Granholm

The image of a collapsed electrical tower and power lines that Hurricane Ida tossed into the Mississippi River illustrated a fundamental challenge facing the nation: Our power systems weren’t built to withstand extreme weather events. Without major investments to reinforce, modernize and clean our grid, the question will not be whether it fails, but when.

Over the year, we’ve gotten a full view of the dangers ahead. Even before Ida, we had wildfires and heatwaves threatening to overload the grid, droughts straining hydropower generation, and a polar vortex that froze gas production. This pummeling is part of a long trend driven by climate change — one that will continue to worsen if we keep spewing carbon pollution.
As UN Secretary-General António Guterres has said, this is a code red for humanity. But luckily, the Biden administration has a plan to respond: the Build Back Better Agenda, which will make essential crucial investments to protect our infrastructure against climate impacts, and put our nation on track to build a clean energy economy.
While some have questioned the scope of the President’s historic proposals, we should weigh their concern alongside the exponentially skyrocketing costs of cleaning up after extreme weather events. In the 1980s, it cost about $18 billion a year to clean up after climate disasters. Then the extreme weather intensified, so the costs ballooned. In the 1990s, we spent about $27 billion annually to clean up. In the 2000s, it cost almost $52 billion annually. In the 2010s, cleanup costs exploded to $81 billion. Then in the last five years, we’ve spent a whopping $121 billion per year to clean up after an angry Mother Nature.

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Go there and read the rest. More next week.

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Advice On Saving Energy At Home – Not from me mind you, someone who creates content for CIELOWiggle

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I know it has been awhile since I did a residential post. I know this started out as a blog about residential energy needs and services. You know, energy efficient roofs, HVAC equipment and other such stuff. But years ago, I got off on energy related environmental stuff and then eventually Global Warming. Then anti-Nuclear stuff. Finally just raw Environmental stuff like obnoxious polluting and horrible deaths. Well today a gentleman named Chris Winters reached out and touched me so I am touching him back, so to speak. As always, I can vouch for his tips because they are somewhat general, but anything specific he is pitching I can not (For instance AC controllers – which his company sells). Also I may have put up this as an addenda to any earlier piece, so if i did forgive me.

https://www.cielowigle.com/blog/energy-saving-tips/

No matter what the season, energy usage tends to increase one way or another. With long running air conditioning and increased wash cycles of sweaty laundry in summer, to high heating usage and wash cycles of bulkier laundry in winter, we simply cannot operate without electricity.

We can be extremely energy efficient and follow energy saving tips and tricks to ingrain some environmentally friendly habits.

Following energy saving tips is essential to lower your costs, but it is also important to decrease your ecological footprint.

With millennials and Gen Z nicknamed “generation green”, there is a strong focus on energy saving, and rightly so. However, global warming is rising more rapidly than ever, and the term ‘climate emergency’ is being used rather than climate change to highlight the situation’s intensity.

All industries such as HVAC are revolutionizing their technology to act on climate change. Since home appliances and devices are a major contributor to our energy consumption, utilizing smart devices such as smart thermostats or smart controllers for air conditioners can make a huge difference on your bills!

Let’s get right to it. Here are 21 energy saving tips that can easily help you decrease your energy consumption:

1. Use Energy Efficient Appliances

Energy efficient appliances are specially designed to consume minimum energy to complete the same tasks that you’d perform with normal appliances.  In addition, some

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Good there and read. More next week.

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When There Is Too Much Electricity – Yah gotta let it out baby

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Any Electrical Generation System can generate too much energy in a system where output is unknown. To put it another way where consumption is unknown. And this is just my opinion but I am betting any system would rather have too much than too little product or produce to sell. If the system is really large a little bit too much is way better then a little bit less. But what to do with the excess?  By the way. contrary to this article, you can turn energy generation off, so long as you know when you have to turn it back on.

https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/what-do-we-do-too-much-renewable-energy

What Do We Do With Too Much Renewable Energy?

It’s not easy to turn off a wind turbine, but the electricity has to go somewhere

By Natasha Khullar Relph | Aug 19 2020

We know that green energy is good, but can there be too much of a good thing?

For instance, with unusually low demand during the COVID-19 lockdown, the United Kingdom’s power consumption fell by nearly 20 percent this summer. That caused a surge in unused green energy. In May, the National Grid asked for emergency powers to switch off solar and wind farms and warned of blackouts and a “significant risk of disruption to security of supply.”

Britain is certainly not alone. As the transition to renewable energy gathers pace, early adopter regions like Germany, Denmark, and California are finding that, counterintuitively, too much green power poses problems for their energy supply. Electricity, when generated, must be used instantaneously, and therefore the amount of generation and the amount of demand must be balanced perfectly at all times. This can cause surges in the grid unless there are means of storing or diverting this excess.

Finding that perfect balance is complicated at the best of times, says Cisco DeVries, an energy expert and the CEO of OhmConnect as well as a former aide to the secretary of energy during the Clinton administration. It’s far worse when you throw in sudden surprises such as a global pandemic. Suddenly, people are consuming more power at home, but factories are standing empty. “We’re changing when and where we’re using [energy], and we’re doing it in a way that’s never been done before,” he says. Add the challenges of disconnecting solar power plants and wind farms to changing use patterns, he notes, and you’ve “exponentially complicated the balancing of supply and demand.”

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Go there and read. More next week.

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