Here’s an interesting idea – line our roads and parking lots with solar panels! According to this article,  each 12-by-12-foot Solar Roadway panel would produce about 7,600 watt-hours a day, based on an average of four hours of sunlight. At that rate, a one-mile stretch of four-lane highway could power about 500 homes. A neat idea! This could be used in conjunction with Solar Trees (which I like even better for parking lots as it also provides shade for vehicles). The world sure is full of smart people coming up with great ideas! The future holds lots of promise. Read the article:

Environmental Visionaries: The Solar Roadrunner

By John Bradley, PopSci.com

The road ahead is paved with photovoltaics. That’s how Scott Brusaw sees it, anyway. His company, Solar Roadways, is embedding PV cells and LED lights into panels engineered to withstand the forces of traffic. The lights would allow for “smart” roadways and parking lots with changeable signage, while the cells would generate enough energy to power businesses, cities and, eventually, the entire country. Each 12-by-12-foot Solar Roadway panel would produce about 7,600 watt-hours a day, based on an average of four hours of sunlight. At that rate, a one-mile stretch of four-lane highway could power about 500 homes. Read the full article at: PopSci.com

This is a long one, but an inspirational and interesting listen:

Alex Bogusky At Turning The Tide on Vimeo

Here are some good tips for greening up the office place, whether you work from home, like me, or work in an office.



Source: www.chasinggreen.org
(this a great site with lots of green tips)

BE GREEN AT YOUR DESK

Use your computer’s power management function or sleep mode to save energy costs. General Electric reportedly saved $6.5 million a year in electricity costs by altering its computers’ settings. If just ten employees did this, they would save nearly $500 a year. Additionally, turn off computers at night and on weekends, turning them off saves more electricity than sleep mode.

• Similarly, Snap.com has a lightweight software program called CO 2 Saver that can be downloaded from their website for free. The program manages your computer’s power usage when it’s idle, saves energy, and decreases the demand on your power utility.
• Try to avoid using a wireless headset for your phone. These require button-size batteries that are full of mercury, lead, and zinc, which can pollute the air and water if they’re thrown in the trash. If your job requires you to use a wireless headset, make sure the batteries are taken to a local hazardous waste disposal site.
• If your office has enough natural light for you to see without eyestrain, turn off your desk lamp. One of the biggest office energy wasters comes from lights being turned on in vacant or sunlit rooms.

ECO-FRIENDLY IN THE BREAK ROOM

• American consumers use about $400 million worth of electricity just brewing coffee every year. Encourage your office to use reusable or nonbleached coffee filters in the coffeemaker, or just bring your own.
• Check the break room cupboard to see if your office stocks a shade-grown, organic, fair-trade brand of coffee such as Peet’s, Starbucks, or Tully’s. If they don’t, bring your own.
• One study found that 14.4 billion disposable paper cups for hot beverages were used and discarded in 2005; that number is estimated to reach 23 billion this year. If your office uses paper or Styrofoam cups that are thrown away after each use, instigate a strict, ‘bring-your-own-mug’ policy to cut cost and waste.
• Americans throw away 138 billion straws and stirrers each year. You can avoid using them altogether by simply pouring sugar and milk into your mug first, before adding coffee. Or use a spoon!
• Try to get your office to stock loose containers of sugar/sweeteners to reduce the packaging waste that individual packets accumulate.
• Bring your lunch from home to reduce waste and save money. A disposable lunch creates between four and eight ounces of garbage every day, which adds up to as much as one hundred pounds per year. Also, use reusable sandwich or other food containers instead of plastic bags.
• Try to use fewer paper napkins. As many as 2,200 two-ply napkins are used by each American every year.

EARTH FRIENDLY IN THE SUPPLY ROOM

• Utilize your copier’s standby button to lighten its energy load by 70 percent.
• When sending faxes, forego the cover page as often as possible to save paper on both ends of the transmission.
• If your office uses a postage meter, encourage them to start printing stamps online to save on equipment, maintenance, and money. Postage meters also use more ink than printing stamps online.
• Encourage your office to purchase an inkjet printer that uses only ten watts of electricity, instead of a laser printer that uses three hundred watts. Remember to also print double-sided pages and recycle the ink cartridge.
• Make sure your office has a recycling program in place. Offices can reduce 50 percent of the waste they send to landfills by just recycling paper.
• Try to use recycled paper: American businesses use over twenty-one million tons of paper each year.
• Use postconsumer recycled envelopes. It only takes seventeen office workers to go through a ton of paper, including envelopes, each year.
• Limit your use of labels; they can make it impossible to recycle the paper, envelopes, or other materials they’re stuck to. Print directly onto envelopes instead.
• If they don’t already do so, suggest that your office stock a water basted correction pen instead of bottled correction fluid. The pen won’t dry out as fast and less liquid will be used.
• Use refillable pens, pencils, and markers because the disposable plastic versions are neither recyclable nor biodegradable.
• Avoid using rubber bands, as they are synthetic and made from crude oil. Rubber bands that are incinerated at the dump can cause significant health effects.
• Nearly 643,000 metric tons of staples are produced annually in the United States . For this reason, suggest that your office buy an eco-stapler that doesn’t use metal staples.

GREEN YOUR COMMUTE

• Ride your bike, carpool or take the bus to get to work.
• If you do drive,  combine errands such as grocery shopping on your way home from work — find shops on your regular route to maximize your time and gas savings.

Most of these tips sourced from: www.chasinggreen.org

Here is a neat idea from Japan (well, I’ve seen them sprouting up everywhere here, too) – Green Curtains. The idea is to plant a living fence that shades a cool air pocket between the “curtain” and the building. Of course, vines have been growing over house walls since we started building, so this is not a new idea.

Also, check out  Patrick Blanc’s “Vertical Garden” website for a slew of cool photos of his thermic isolation system: www.verticalgardenpatrickblanc.com

Article & Image Source: www.livingwallart.com

Kyocera – a Japanese company – took living walls and tried to maximize their energy and cost savings through a Green Curtain. It’s a stellar idea that involves planting vines on what looks to be similar to a massive chain link fence. The fence is set just off the building which allows a cool air pocket between the living wall and the building. That air dramatically diminishes the work the company’s A/C unit has to do to cool the building.

The length of the vertical gardens in all of Kyocera Group locations are 294m (965ft), which actually covers a total area of 775m² (8,342ft²). The growth of these Green Curtains will be able to absorb roughly 2,713kg-CO2 (5981lb-CO2) per year, or roughly the same amount as 194 cedar trees.

I can’t believe how quickly the vines covered that space. Those must be some ridiculously quick growing vines.

For the energy savings of this living wall/green curtain, Kyocera found that the Green Curtains can decrease the temperature by as much as 15 degrees C (27 degrees F). That’s amazing. – Article & Image Source: www.livingwallart.com

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Here are some more cool “living walls” from around the world:

Patrick Blanc’s “Vertical Garden” at the CaixaForum, Madrid – a new cultural center.
See more of Patrick’s work at: www.verticalgardenpatrickblanc.com

Source: www.justplants-bristol.co.uk

Oulu, a bar in Williamsburg, NYC – Source: www.inhabitat.com

Photo by Laenulfean via Flickr

Here’s an interesting article about petroleum-eating bacteria – which have been eating the naturally-occurring oil that seeps up from the ocean floor  (about 500,000 barrels of oil seeps into the gulf each year by bubbling up from cracks in the ocean floor.) So nature already has a remedy to oil spills – since they already occur naturally. That’s not to say our drilling efforts shouldn’t be questioned or at least carefully monitored with manditory safety measures, but it’s good to know we have mother nature on our cleanup crew!

Study: Petroleum-eating microbes significantly reduced gulf oil plume

By David Brown | Tuesday, August 24, 2010 | Source: Washington Post

The Gulf of Mexico ecosystem was ready and waiting for something like the Deepwater Horizon blowout, and seems to have made the most of it, a new scientific study suggests.

Petroleum-eating bacteria – which had dined for eons on oil seeping naturally through the sea floor – proliferated in the cloud of oil that drifted underwater for months after the April 20 accident. They not only outcompeted fellow microbes, they each ramped up their own internal metabolic machinery to digest the oil as efficiently as possible.

The result was a nature-made cleanup crew capable of reducing the amount of oil in the undersea “plume” by half about every three days, according to research published online Tuesday by the journal Science.

Read the rest of this entry »

And that my friends is why the chicken crossed  the road. Now you know!!!

Chevrolet Volt

Here is an article about electric cars from the Daily Herald by Marni Pyke. Maybe nobody will kill the electric car this time.

I love how my Tesla goes from 0 to 60 mph in less than 4 seconds. All right, technically, it’s not my Tesla since it costs $109,000, but it was for 15 minutes Friday.

I had a chance to test-drive the all-electric car, courtesy of Tesla Store Chicago. The two-seater sports roadster resembles a vintage Porsche with one big exception – it runs on a 990-pound battery with a 245-mile range per charge.

It’s an odd experience driving a car with a single-speed gearbox, meaning you don’t feel the gears shifting, but it’s easy to get used to. The Tesla has a regenerative brake system that kicks in when you ease off the accelerator, which slows down the vehicle eliminating the need for excessive pumping.

And the 0 to 60 feature? As good as a roller coaster.

Tesla’s coming out with a sedan priced around $50,000 in 2012 with similar features – I can just see the acceleration factor coming into play at the mall parking lot.

Typical buyers range from collectors to sports car fanatics to people who want an alternate fuel vehicle, Tesla Store Chicago General Manager Dustin Krause said.

And speaking of green cars, General Motors announced this week the Chevrolet Volt – its much-awaited electric car – goes on sale this fall with a $41,000 base price.

The four-door Volt, runs on electricity for up to 40 miles when a gas generator kicks in, powering the battery for another 300 miles.

Consumers can cut the cost with a $7,500 federal tax credit, which also applies to the Volt’s competitor, the $32,780 Nissan Leaf, set to debut in December and the Tesla. Both GM and Nissan offer $350-a-month leases.

But Illinoisans shouldn’t expect to drive off with a Volt in 2010. The car won’t be sold here for at least 12 months.

And what about the vast majority of us, who want to drive green but don’t have the cash for a $41,000 car?

Argonne National Laboratory’s Don Hillebrand, a mechanical engineer, has got some picks.

For starters, he recommends looking at diesel vehicles manufactured by the likes of Volkswagen, Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz. The Volkswagen Golf two-door hatchback starts at $17,620, for example, and gets 22 mpg city/30 mpg highway.

To figure out the fuel economy of a diesel engines, “take whatever vehicle you have and add 30 percent,” said Hillebrand, Argonne Center for Transportation Research director and a former Chrysler research manager.

Then, there are hybrids. Hillebrand likes the Toyota Prius.

“As hybrids go, it’s still a generation ahead,” he said.

But other hybrids he recommends include the Ford Fusion, which starts at $19,695, and the Honda Insight.

When choosing an alternate fuel vehicle, “it all comes down to what you do,” Hillebrand said. “If you live in Peoria and commute, get a diesel. If you live in the city and commute within the city, buy a Prius. And if you’ve got a set commute with not many places to go and a garage to charge a vehicle – you might want an electric vehicle.”

If you’re looking for more advice on green cars, check out the website chicagocleancities.org.

Though I’d rather the coastline remain unspoiled, this is an interesting idea for a resort in Montenegro that incorporates green roofing to the extreme. MVRDV, a Netherlands-based architecture and urban design practice company, has offered us a peek at their new design plans for a luxury holiday resort for Aston Martin. The project, named “Galije,” (which I believe means “ship”), is to blend into the natural landscape of the coastline  – according to MVRDV, it should be invisible. The plan is to combine exclusivity with sustainability, preserving the rough beauty of Montenegro’s undeveloped coastline.  It brings to mind a “hobbit hotel,” I’ve always loved the idea of hobbit houses.  The resort would contain 115 apartments, 87 hotel rooms, a restaurant, a pool, a parking lot and retail space.

An interesting idea… it will be neat to see this project progress.

My development Partner, Kurt Whitt of Planet Media, has teamed up with Erin Behrenhausen in a great new green website project, www.milehigreen.com. This website is a great resource for original articles providing information to metro Denver residents about ways to green Colorado and the planet.

This month: read about How to go Solar for FREE »

Interesting, Excel Energy is taking a hybrid solar-coal approach using parabolic-trough solar technology to provide heat to produce supplemental steam for power generation at their new Cameo Station Unit 2. The benefits:

• decrease the overall consumption of coal,
• reduce emissions from the plant,
• improve plant efficiency,
• test commercial viability of concentrating solar integration, and
• increase the opportunity for cost-effective renewable power generation.

Energy Firm Pairs Solar With Coal in Colorado

GetSolar Staff. 01, July. 2010 – Source»

Xcel Energy of Minneapolis said on Wednesday that it is demonstrating a unique, first of its kind solar hybrid power plant at its Cameo Generating Station in Grand Junction, Colorado. The plant uses a combination of burning coal and parabolic-trough solar mirrors, which focus the sun’s heat to reduce the amount of coal energy needed to turn water to steam.

The company is trying to create a solar solution that can be integrated with existing coal power plants to improve their efficiency and lower their emissions. In a conventional coal plant, burning coal boils water, which turns steam turbines to generate electricity. Xcel’s mirrors reduce the amount of coal needed to create the steam.

In many ways, Xcel’s technology is similar to that used in solar hot water and solar heating systems, which transform the sun’s rays directly into heat rather than converting it to electricity.

“If this project produces the successful results we expect, this type of solar thermal integration will help move the use of solar energy one step closer to being a potential technology for improving the environmental performance of coal-fired power plants for Xcel Energy and for utilities around the country,” said Kent Larson, Xcel Energy’s vice president and chief energy supply officer.