Burnin’

The Oregonian has an interesting piece on the solar business and how important tax credits are to the burgeoning industry.

According to the story, Portland’s Tanner Creek Energy faces a module shortage and record-high prices as they rush to erect solar systems before the 30 percent federal tax credit for solar-system owners expires at year’s end. Solar advocates say such subsidies are crucial until new technology and mass manufacturing reduce costs.

Faced with the loss of these tax credits, many in the solar industry fear a crippling slowdown right as momentum is rising.

On the other hand, Tim McCabe, director of the Oregon Economic and Community Development Department, is unfazed by predictions of a panel surplus and slowdown.

“The interest level in Oregon, with our business-energy tax credits, is extremely high with solar manufacturers right now,” McCabe says.

I heard Bobby Kennedy Jr. speak in Savannah a year or so ago. One of the things that stuck with me from his talk is the fact that we can power the entire country with wind and solar, if we had a means of transmitting the electricity generated. In other words, we can invest deeply in wind and solar, but that’s not enough. We also need to build out the infrastructure.

Regulators in Texas are doing something about it. According to The New York Times, Texas regulators have approved a $4.93 billion wind-power transmission project.

The planned web of transmission lines will carry electricity from remote western parts of the state to major population centers like Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio. The lines can handle 18,500 megawatts of power, enough for 3.7 million homes on a hot day when air-conditioners are running.

Transmission companies will pay the upfront costs of the project. They will recoup the money from power users, at a rate of about $4 a month for residential customers.

The transmission problem is so acute in Texas that turbines are sometimes shut off even when the wind is blowing.

“When the amount of generation exceeds the export capacity, you have to start turning off wind generators” to keep things in balance, said Hunter Armistead, head of the renewable energy division in North America at Babcock & Brown, a large wind developer and transmission provider.

Other states may find the Texas model difficult to emulate. The state is unique in having its own electricity grid. All other states fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, adding an extra layer of bureaucracy to any transmission proposals.

Today in Philadelphia, at the centennial meeting of the National Governor’s Association, President Clinton gave a rousing speech. He quoted liberally from an earlier speech, given 100 years ago by then President Theodore Roosevelt to the same gathering of governors.

Here’s the essence of what Roosevelt said and Clinton repeated:

Disregarding for the moment the question of moral purpose, it is safe to say that the prosperity of our people depends directly on the energy and intelligence with which our natural resources are used. It is equally clear that these resources are the final basis of national power and perpetuity. Finally, it is ominously evident that these resources are in the course of rapid exhaustion.

We have become great in a material sense because of the lavish use of our resources; and we have just reason to be proud of our growth. But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils shall have been still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields, and obstructing navigation. These questions do not relate only to the next century or to the next generation. One distinguishing characteristic of really civilized men is foresight; we have to, as a nation, exercise foresight for this nation in the future; and if we do not exercise that foresight, dark will be the future!

We are coming to recognize as never before the right of the Nation to guard it’s own future in the essential matter of natural resources. In the past we have admitted the right of the individual to injure the future of the Republic for his own present profit. In fact there has been a good deal of a demand for unrestricted individualism, for the right of the individual to injure the future of all of us for his own temporary and immediate profit. The time has come for a change.

Can you imagine if this type of conservative existed today? We’d be in much better shape if such persons did exist (in either political party). Since, for the most part, they do not exist, we the people must carry the weight. We the people must refuse to allow unrestricted individualism. Regulation of industry in not bad, it’s necessary for the common good (an American ideal if there ever was one). Reagan and his ilk convinced a lot of people regulation of industry was wrong, but it’s time to move past that false ideal. Unrestricted individualism, perpetrated by a greedy man or a mob of greedy men, is in fact the ruin of this nation. Are you ready to put a stop it? I am.

Here’s an idea…let’s change the “American Way of Life” for the better.

According to Wikipedia, the concept of clean coal is said to be a solution to climate change and global warming by coal industry groups, while environmental groups believe it is greenwash. Greenpeace is a major opponent of the concept because emissions and wastes are not avoided, but are transferred from one waste stream to another.

As for the ad itself, the argument is built on fear and that’s not what we need to move forward as a nation. Does fear motivate? Certainly, but it’s an unethical tactic. Why not tout the strengths of coal industry’s claims? Why not convince people with irrefutable facts? I’m inclined to believe the coal industry doesn’t have those facts. If they did their ad agency would have mined them.

[via Gristmill]

A good friend described his time in Chile like this: California 100 years ago. That is, it’s uncrowded and it’s natural beauty is unspoiled. I’ve wanted to go for an extended visit ever since.

Now, I’m reading Yvon Chouinard’s classic business book, Let My People Go Surfing. In it, he mentions that his good friend and fellow adventurer Doug Tompkins married former Patagonia CEO Kris McDivitt and moved to Chile, where the couple is using their money to buy up vast stretches of wild land in effort to create national parks. That piqued my curiosity, so I Googled them to learn more.

Turns out San Francisco Chronicle did a lengthy piece on Doug and Kris in 2006.

Over the past decade and a half, the Tompkinses have spent about $150 million to buy two dozen properties covering 2.2 million acres of Chile and Argentina, in what collectively amounts to the world’s largest privately run land conservation project.

At stake throughout the region is a historic opportunity much like the North American West in the 19th century — an underpopulated vastness of prairie, glacier-capped mountains and majestic forests that can still be grabbed by anyone with money and ambition.

“In the States, we can only protect small areas, but here, for $10 million you can buy a million-acre ranch,” said Chouinard, chairman of Patagonia Inc., who purchased 8,000 acres next to Valle Chacabuco and has donated funds to the park project. “There are tons of opportunities for creating parks, and now is the time,” Chouinard said. “Everything’s for sale. Sheep ranching is finished.”

The Tompkinses are among the most prominent individual donors to ecological and anti-globalization groups. Last year, two Sausalito foundations that they fund and control — Foundation for Deep Ecology and Conservation Land Trust — spent $15.7 million on conservation projects and grants to environmental and anti-free-trade groups.

As any reader of Natural Capitalism knows, there’s money to be made in sustainability.

Governing.com points out that one direction for budding green workers is to join the staff of a city government.

Fayetteville’s mayor, Dan Coody, is one of 805 mayors nationally who have signed pledges to slash their cities’ greenhouse gas emissions in line with targets set in the Kyoto Protocol. Those mayors have lapped up international praise for leading on climate change where Washington lagged. But the truth is, they are just now getting down to figuring out what exactly they have agreed to. What does it really mean to reduce a city’s carbon footprint?

About three dozen cities now have sustainability directors, and there are more whose job titles reflect either the broader fight against climate change or the somewhat narrower quest for energy efficiency. The idea is to have one person — or in Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and other big cities, entire staffs — dedicated to squeezing greenhouse gas emissions out of the way government does business, and to serve as both a liaison and a beacon to businesses and citizens who want to limit their own carbon output.

I think he’ll be to Rome
As is the osprey to the fish, who takes it
By sovereignty of nature. -Shakespeare

Our local power provider, Palmetto Electric Co-op, is offering the community a chance to learn more about majestic raptors in our midst.

For years electric transmission towers have served as nesting homes for the migratory Osprey. As you drive across the Intracoastal Waterway to Hilton Head Island, you can spot the Ospreys congregating on the towers during the spring and summer months. Another tower—in Palmetto Electric’s own backyard—has also served as home to Osprey since 1988.

Each spring our feathered friends return to reside high atop the communications tower that overlooks Palmetto Electric’s Hilton Head Island operations center. This year new residents have taken over the nest and are settling in for the summer. Join Palmetto Electric in our second Osprey season as we get a bird’s-eye view thanks to a Web camera mounted nearby.

Osprey, commonly known as a “seahawk,” live to be 20 or more years old. They mate for life and migrate to South America and back every year. Their diet is 99% fish.

Click here for Palmetto’s Osprey Blog. Or here to hear the Osprey’s call.

Have you read Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s essay on energy in Vanity Fair? It’s well worth your time if you have yet to see it.

Here’s a quick look at the essential argument:

Carbon dependence has eroded our economic power, destroyed our moral authority, diminished our international influence and prestige, endangered our national security, and damaged our health and landscapes. It is subverting everything we value.

And yet, there is ample reason to be hopeful.

We sit atop the second-largest geothermal resources in the world. The American Midwest is the Saudi Arabia of wind; indeed, North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas alone produce enough harnessable wind to meet all of the nation’s electricity demand. As for solar, according to a study in Scientific American, photovoltaic and solar-thermal installations across just 19 percent of the most barren desert land in the Southwest could supply nearly all of our nation’s electricity needs.

All I know is I want to be part of this clean energy boom. Entrepreneurs will solve what government won’t. Am I right?

Inhabit is encouraging citizens of the world to participate in tonight’s Earth Hour, an idea from World Wildlife Fund that asks us to turn off our lights for an hour (to conserve energy and build awareness for the growing need to do so).

The program has a blog and a Flickr page.

Thanks to an article in Dwell, I’m freaking out right now. In a good way. I’m freaking because I just learned about El Cosmico, the new community art project from Bunkhouse Management.

Bunkhouse is the team behind the coolest hotel in the world, Austin’s Hotel San Jose. Their vision of El Cosmico is equally enthralling.

El Cosmico will be part yurt and hammock hotel, part residential living, part art-house, greenhouse and amphitheatre – a community space that fosters and agitates artistic and intellectual exchange. As part of the overall aim to build community in a creative and sustainable space, thirty renovated vintage trailers will make up a small village on the site.

This experiement is taking place in West Texas, outside the small town of Marfa.

Like any great community project, there is a blog to keep people in the loop.