Future piss
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A green transportation and green technology advocate living in Silicon Valley. Other blogs are at:
Desert areas obviously have lots of sunshine and make great places to put solar energy installations. They're an "out of sight out of mind" sort of place that lets us generate "clean" electricity without having to actually see the electricity generation facility. It seems that many simply don't want to "see" industrial facilities, and would rather they be located elsewhere. Hurm.
While the California Energy Commission has approved this, it's not the end of the process. There are other organizations who will have their say. Some controversy exists over this sort of facility. It's amazing that people could object over solar electricity power plants, but they do. With this sort of project the objection is habitat degradation out in the desert. There's a breed of environmentalist whose goal is protecting "fragile" ecosystems in the desert. Yeah, deserts have very little water and the existence of life there is absolutely amazing. Industrialization of the desert with this sort of facility means bulldozing the acres of land to allow installation of the equipment. It stops being desert habitat, and becomes an industrial power plant. That clean electricity has an effect. What might be better is to install solar panels on roof tops in town. Roof tops of existing buildings is already land that's already converted to non-natural landscape habitat. Hence rooftop solar panels or solar carports etc does not degrade habitat that isn't already degraded by something else.Amplify’d from news.cnet.com
The California Energy Commission has approved a permit for SolarReserve to build a 150-megawatt solar plant that uses molten salt to store energy, the company announced Wednesday.
The molten salt system will enable the solar farm to store and release solar energy so that it can continue to generate electricity for up to eight hours after sunset, according to SolarReserve.
However, this latest California board approval does not mean this project is full steam ahead. The Rice Solar Energy Project still needs to receive approvals from both the Bureau of Land Management and the Western Area Power Administration, according to SolarReserve.
This paper cup provided for coffee by my employer is supposed to be contributing to a smaller environmental footprint. But I wonder what's the smaller footprint, the use once and toss paper cup or the ceramic cup behind it I've used a thousand times? Bet it's the ceramic cup! The paper cup carries the "Ecotainer" brand name, says it's compostable, and it's made from renewable resources.
Yup, a shopping bag with Obama on it. Not sure I get the connection between Obama and shopping. It was Bush who, in the first hours of the 9/11 crisis who told us to go shopping, not Obama. Hence Bush would have more connection to being on a shopping bag, right?
Why have a bunch of yahoo messenger icons bursting out of a wall? Why not??
I recently traveled through Atlanta. Their airport is pretty darn good. This picture stood out as one of the most interesting parts. The circles emanating from the people look like radio signals. For those of us who understand the subtle energies (chi etc) these signals are our reality, and not a metaphor.
Craig Vetter has been focused for a couple years on what he calls a "Freedom Machine". This would be a small/light motorcycle, with a full streamlined fairing, highly energy efficient, getting over 100 miles/gallon, and able to handle typical daily around town trips like grocery shopping. I met him at the Mid America Motorcycle Meet in July 2009 when the TTXGP team was there, and he said to me that we (TTXGP fans) were making history by bringing electric motorcycles to such an event. He had mentioned electric motorcycles in his freedom machine writings but dismissed them on those pages. It seems having TTXGP show up with race worthy bikes opened his eyes to the possibility. In any case he has signed up with the TTXGP rules Wiki hopefully to bring his long long experience with motorcycle design and racing to the writing of TTXGP racing rules.
In the 2010 State of the Union and immediately following announcements, the Obama Administration called for money for high speed rail transport. There are many high speed rail proposals being developed around the U.S. In California it would connect the LA area with San Francisco and some points in-between.
Rail transit is generally more convenient than either cars or airplanes. The typical existing rail transit is slightly faster than driving a car, slower than flying in an airplane. High speed rail would be closer to airplane speed with a smaller environmental impact.
$8 billion however isn't enough to pay for the whole system. It'll help juice the projects along, however.
Getting everybody to adopt electric cars just means people switch from one kind of car to another kind of car. It would do nothing about gridlock, the abysmal blight that highways are, and the horrible land use conditions imposed by cars. Much better would be to convert over to more mass transit. But the popular conception is that cars are the only way to get around and therefore the only form of "green transportation" which can exist is a cleaner sort of car. There is more problems to be solved than just making cleaner cars.
