Renewable Energy and a New Economy- Here We Come

I have just returned from a 2 month vacation and this blog will now be updated at least once a week. Thank you for reading.


PG and E is trying to start a project near San Francisco that would store energy from renewable sources in an underground facility so it can use energy during times when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing, this would make sources like coal less vital and neccessary.


National Geographic comments on sustainable agriculture, and on the page is links to a lot of other great stories and information sources.


Rocky Mountain Institute provides a great interactive map showing where we have received all of our oil in the US for the past 4 decades. Currently, in the NW of the US 17% of all oil at the gas station comes from the TarSands in Alberta Canada, a source that is greatly inefficient compared to our historical returns from investments on petroleum production, we are certainly using up all of the cheap sources of quality, known oil.


Amory Lovins, one of the frontmen at Rocky Mountain Institute recently received another reward, this time for energy efficiency. He is well aware of all the obstacles to his plans and ideas, most of them being politics and lack of knowledge on the part of engineers and other planners of our economy and infrastructure. An issue with increasing energy efficiency has been that the cheaper and more accessible it is the more a single person will use thus wasting the gains of increasing efficiency.


Mass Media Environmentalism focuses on Global Warming but much else is going on, is this monofocus good? I would say that the monofocus is often productive, but of course more needs to be explained to the public about the many environmental threats that exist today.


Wind energy is on the rise, but remember we can only receive a small fraction of our energy demand from wind, and each turbine takes a colossal amount of steel which carries a heavy environmental price.


The solar cell is becoming more efficient everyday, this is vital to using the sun's energy as a power source. A new solar cell efficiency record was set, it is expensive now but hopefully not in the near future.


Japan continues on with its economy, strengthening itself through technologies of the future, solar cells and big in Japan and on the rise.