I don’t usually like to get political or get involved in the discussion of the national economy, but… It just seems to me that when a company from a foreign country comes in and buys a large portion of an American company it threatens our national security. Just my personal opinion. Now I am reading how companies from Japan and Germany are coming in and buying into American renewable energy to take advantage of new renewable energy initiatives (http://bit.ly/B5Byb). Are we selling ourselves and our wind overseas? I would love to hear your comments on this.

• Ten Tips Toward a More Eco Friendly Home Tip 1 - Turn the lights off any time that they are not needed, even if you are just moving from room to room in the course of your day. According to Energy Star, as much as 20 percent of a home's overall energy use comes from its lighting. Using......
• Why Conservatives Are Bad On Energy: It's All About The Costs. The following is a guest post by Tom Rooney of SPG Solar, whose commentaries have been in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Miami Herald, and who has made recent appearances on CSPAN and Fox Business News talking about the real costs of energy. Conservatives, let's talk......

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much. – Helen Keller

 Sometimes people don’t vote because they think “one vote can’t change anything”. I think the 2000 election proved that wrong, but some people still don’t believe. Now is your time to be counted by your elected officials. If you want this country to move forward with cleaner energy contact you Congressional Representatives and Senators today. It only takes a minute but can help save the earth a life time.

 Click here to email your U.S. Representative and Senators about the NAT GAS Act today!

• Green Hybrid Electric Vehicles and Toyota Prius Hybrid vehicles are being converted by their owners into vehicles that run purely on electricity. People who drive hybrid vehicles that are easy on gas to begin with are becoming increasingly interested in the idea of converting their vehicles from completely gasoline powered to completely electricity based. Drivers who own......
• Book Review & Giveaway: 'Get Motivated!' By Tamara Lowe. This giveaway has ended.It's time for another book review and giveaway, and for those of you seeking a little motivation, this one might be for you. Get Motivated! by Tamara Lowe claims to be able to help you Overcome any obstacle, Achieve any goal, and Accelerate your success - and......

When it comes to clean energy, saving our environment and living green, the best and only place to start is energy conservation. For every unit of energy saved, a unit of energy does not need to be produced. That sounds so very simple, yet I see it over looked time and time again. People are so impressed with the newest solar product, the next residential wind turbine or if hydrogen technology will replace natural gas, that they forget that all this technology can replace a greater percent of our energy if we use less energy to begin with. In other words energy conservation and efficiency are very often more economically worthwhile than renewable sources and also helps bridge the gap between demand for and availability of renewable energy.

We have all seen list after list of ways to save energy around our house; these should not be pushed to the side because you “did” the list last year. Like all maintenance around the house, conservation cannot be done once and forgotten about, that is why they call it maintenance. There are always new products coming out that can make energy conservation easier, more efficient and more affordable.

My attic is always the first place I look when thinking about energy loss. I have a cathedral ceiling in my living room and just never feel comfortable in the room during the cold winter months. Obviously I have insulated but I still just feel the heat escaping. So I went up to the attic at night leaving the living room lights on and the attic lights off. Bingo! I was able to identify several areas that were not completely insulated around the recessed lighting (make sure your recessed lighting fixtures are rated to have insulation around them). Next I went up to the dark attic on a very sunny morning, before the heat made it unbearable. Again, Bingo! There were a couple of places along the eaves where I could see daylight. Once these were fixed I started looking at different insulation products for attics that were DIY friendly and wallet friendly. Two products caught my eye: Super Insulating Radiant Barrier and the Battic Door Attic Stair Cover.

The Super Insulating Radiant Barrier is a fold out, insulating, reflective product that goes over your current insulation and/or over the roof rafters to create a barrier that actually radiates heat back down to the living space.

The Battic Door Attic Stair Cover is an insulating box that goes over dropdown attic stairs and keeps heat from escaping. This product is a huge improvement over ones of days gone bye. I have had a similar product for about fifteen years and can see this will pay for itself in very short time.

Take time to look at these and other energy saving products. A dollar spent today could save hundreds over a life time not to mention helping to save the environment. Never under estimate the heat, or cooling, loss in your home. Keep vigilant about conservation, any energy saved is energy that does not have to be produced.

• 15 Products that save Time, Money, and Space The holidays are quickly approaching and that means shopping season is in high gear. Good luck going to a mall. It's too crowded for my taste. I'll be getting almost all of my gifts on Amazon and Ebay. For the rest, I'll pick up gift cards from the local drugstore.......
• How To Create A Great Video Product - Writing Your Script If you've been thinking about creating video products for sale on the Internet, you've probably been throwing around more ideas than you know what to do with. This is an easy trap to fall into. It's important to do some brainstorming for concepts initially, but always be sure to put......

In a June 1^st article by Dan Cook, in Arizona’s The Daily Courier, he wrote about a Habitat for Humanity home that had been built as a “net-zero energy” house.  The idea is to use smart building products and techniques, as well as alternative energy sources, such as solar, so that the house does not use any energy from the grid or fossil fuel. This is a whole new niche in the building industry and there is an unlimited amount of products and services to choose from. The problem is that builders and prospective  homeowners, we don’t know which products are proven, or will work in our situation, or have a chance to see the product installed or talk to a builder who has actually installed the product.

That is why I found this article interesting. If the companies offering these great new innovative energy saving products donated them to Habitat for Humanity, we would all benefit. First the company would win, getting actual exposure to the public with their product, as well as goodwill, for donating the product. Any builder interested in the product could donate their time to help install the product at the Habitat for Humanity job site. This gives them goodwill for helping, but also gives them experience with new products and techniques that they can sell to their clients. The homeowner wins because they are buying a product that they have seen work and are having it installed by someone who has had experience with the product. The recipient of the Habitat for Humanity home wins with lower or no utility bills. And last, but not least, the environment wins every time we do not use fossil fuel to power our world. This could be the ultimate win-win situation.

• The Reality Of Working At Home On Your Computer I think most people would love to work At Home. After all who doesn't want to pick their own work hours and have more time to spend with family and friends? There are some pitfalls you want to avoid like the plague. The first few years I was trying to......
• Gel Fuel Fireplaces: A Frugal Home Heating Alternative You've all heard the predictions about home heating costs going up this winter. Combined with the current state of our economy, the idea of paying more to heat your home might be enough to send some people over the edge. As a result, people are looking into alternative home heating......

According to Boston Business Journal, Boston’s Museum of Science announced this week that it will be putting a wind turbine laboratory on its roof. Apparently they have already done wind studies for a year and have come to the conclusion that there is not enough viable wind in their location to create any meaningful electricity. They already have two turbines up and intend to put up three more of varying shapes and sizes ranging from 7 feet to 40 feet. The idea is to “demonstrate small wind turbines that could be erected on small businesses and homes”.

The problem is that small wind turbines cannot be erected on any building, ever. Mother Nature is a very formidable force to deal with. Any and all wind turbines have an incredible vibration; this can cause both structural and noise problems. Roof top turbines have been known to cause nails to vibrate right out of the roof. While the museum roof may be substantial enough to withstand this, with a full time maintenance crew, the average home is not engineered to withstand these forces. 

Second, there is no usable wind on a roof. When you see a small wind turbine on a roof spinning wildly, it looks like it would be generating plenty of power. The truth is, all that spinning is the turbine trying to find a steady wind in a very turbulent area. Wind is invisible, and most people don’t understand what they can’t see. Think of a stick lazily drifting down a calm stream, making slow but steady progress, then there is a rock in the way, the stick goes around the rock but gets caught twirling in the eddy behind it, there is a lot of movement, but no progress. Wind is the same way, once it hits an object, such as a house or a tree; there is wind turbulence behind the object. Another way of looking at this is a sailboat in the lee of a bluff. You feel the wind on your face, it feels strong, but the sail is slapping madly and the boat is going nowhere. A wind turbine is the same way as it searches for the wind in the turbulence.

The Boston Museum of Science would be doing the public a huge favor by teaching the physics of wind and turbulence using smoke chambers and roof mock ups to show how a nail or a screw can be loosened due to vibration. They should teach the benefits of clean wind energy when placed in the right location and the uselessness of putting it in the wrong location. With all my heart I hope the Boston Museum of Science is not advocating building mounted turbines, not only would they be putting the public at risk physically and promoting a waste of money, they will be putting a black mark on wind energy when these turbines never produce any meaningful electricity.

Look for an upcoming blog on proper wind turbine location.

For more information check out the Warwick Wind Trials data on building mounted turbines.

• Prefab Wednesday-The mkLotus By MKD Architecture. Well, it looks like Michelle Kaufmann has done it again with the introduction of the mkLotus prefab house. As I have mentioned before, Kaufmann's designs are among my absolute favorites in the prefab world, even if they are a tad pricey. This new mkLotus design is spectacular, with lots of......
• EnviroMission Solar Tower To Provide Electricity For 200,000 Homes. But can it be built? The company EnviroMission Ltd. is working on a giant Solar Tower in Australia that should have the capacity of providing electricity for at least 200,00 homes - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Solar Tower technology is created when the sun’s radiation is......

Haven’t you always wanted to go to a convention and find out more information, but you just couldn’t justify the time and expense of going? Now is your chance. Virtual Energy Forum is offering a free two-day converence on clean energy. No plane trip, no hotel room and no credit card bill!

Just sit down at your computer and wonder through the convention. Catch a live presentation by a keynote speaker or ask a vendor some questions. All while sitting at your desk, you can learn the latest about the most important issue facing the world.

This is your chance to find out how you can make a difference in clean energy without wasting any of your energy. Sign up today for free at Virtual Energy Forum. They can’t make it any easier than that. Set the date June 24th and June 25th, 2009.

• Lower Energy Costs Results In Higher Revenues The statement of lower energy costs higher profit margins is an accurate argument. With our economy slowing down in the past few years, now is certainly the time to learn how to lower our utility bills the best way we can. Regrettably, property owners do not have absolute control......
• How to Clean Your Own Gutters If your house is equipped with gutters and you can't remember the last time they were cleaned, it's best to get proactive and do it yourself. While there are services that can come do this for you, it's actually quite easy and just about anyone can do it safely. Before......

Great news on wind. The American Wind Energy Association had announced 2,800MW of new wind energy installed in the first quarter of 2009. This is awsome news for renewable energy and puts us on our way to reaching President Obama’s goal of 25% of our electricity coming from renewables by 2025.

But we still have some major obstacles, the largest of which is the lack of updated, smart grid transmission lines. Unfortunately, most great land wind in areas with smaller population densities. We need to get this great power to where it is needed.  We need a renewable energy standard (RES). Everybody who wants a cleaner, healthier future needs to write their Congressmen, their Senators and President Obama and demand what we voted for, a RES today.

To read the full AWEA report click on this link: http://www.awea.org/publications/reports/1Q09.pdf

To contact your elected officials click on this link:http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml

• What Is Geothermal Energy & How Does It Work? Dear EarthTalk: How are heating, cooling and electricity produced by geothermal energy? I don’t understand how it works. The term “geothermal” is derived from the Greek words for Earth (geo) and heat (therme). In essence geothermal energy is power harnessed from the Earth itself. Heat from the Earth’s core, which......
• 20 Frugal Tips from Someone Who Lived Through the Great Depression During another weekend road trip to visit the family for Mother's Day, I always make it a habit to drop in on Grandma and soak in a few hours worth of knowledge she's accumulated over her near 75 years. Gifts were exchanged, I overindulged in home cookin', but in the......

A couple of days ago I posted a response on a forum about whether nuclear energy should still be an option for the future. My answer was yes. This in turn has created some controversy among readers. In the meantime somebody else suggested I write about why ”the US and other countries insist on nuclear power when a reactor produces more waste in one day than will take over a million years to get rid of. Some of the technology should go to solving that problem before anyone tells us it is clean energy.”

I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I have been looking into this. According to researchers at MIT we have four options to reduce our carbon footprint for our future energy needs:

·         Nuclear Energy

·         Renewable Energy

·         Increased Energy Efficiency

·         Capturing Carbon Emissions[1]

Obviously I do not consider nuclear power the best option. I personally believe that wind will be our future in the coming decades. Wind is not just a source of electricity, the power from a wind tower can be used to produce hydrogen and then the tower itself can be used to store the hydrogen.[2] Hydrogen is a great source of carbon free fuel. Solar is also a great fuel source, at this point it is not cost effective for large scale application or the average consumer. The Japanese are working on a Space Solar Power System(SSPS) that will catch the sun’s rays in space without atmospheric interruptions and then beam the energy in the form of lasers back to earth.[3] These are awesome plans but will not be functional for decades.

Today we have an ever increasing demand for electricity and transportation fuel, and an ever shrinking reserve of fossil fuels. Basic economics of supply and demand are telling us the cost to produce electricity and transportation fuel is going to sky rocket again in the near future. As the price of oil increases again it will be even more obvious we need to use more natural gas than oil for our transportation and electrical needs. Natural gas is commodity that is readily available from North American sources. The infrastructure is already in place to transport and use it and it is cleaner and easier to mine than coal. Natural gas does not have to be purchased from countries that do not like us and is cleaner than oil. Natural gas powered cars can be filled using a device at your home and putting up filling stations around the country is a small price to pay compared to what we are paying for our foreign oil habit. Companies like Mirant, who own non-nuclear electric plants, have already converted most plants to use natural gas, coal or oil depending on price. They have also gone to great lengths to reduce emissions.[4]  But the fact remains that however much we increase efficiency and decrease emissions we still are leaving far too much of a carbon footprint.

Then there is nuclear energy. The biggest things nuclear has going for it are that it produces large amounts of electricity without producing carbon and the technology already exists and is in place and can be replicated. Everything else about nuclear power is not so pretty. First of all is cost, the initial outlay of time and money does not make new nuclear power plants competitive with other sources of electricity. There is also the issue that even if we did build new nuclear power plants to meet the up coming demand for electricity that there would only be sufficient uranium available for 50 or so years. Then there is the issue of proliferation, the stealing of technology and/or enriched uranium or plutonium.[5] After the break up of the USSR, 9/11 and the North Koreans this is a serious issue.  And then there is the storage of the spent fuel. According to Entergy Inc., owner of many nuclear plants, 80% of spent fuel loses its radioactivity within 3 years and can be stored on site safely for up to 100 years.[6] Yet the remainder can take thousands of years to break down. There is no doubt that huge irrepairable mistakes have been made with the handling of nuclear waste in the past.  Today the Department of Energy is making plans to build a repository in Yucca Mountain to store and seal off the spent nuclear fuel for eternity.[7] Not perfect, but a best case solution for a very serious problem.

So the deal is we need to reduce our carbon footprint yesterday. The best solution is to have large scale renewable energy in place today, but that is still decades off. We need a bridge to get us from foreign oil dependency to 100% renewable, carbon free energy. One piece of that bridge is nuclear power, whether we like the idea or not. The other parts of that bridge are using more natural gas for transportation and electricity production, improving existing technology to lessen our carbon emissions and to push forward with research for renewable, carbon free energy.

I invite everybody to check out the Pickens Plan and to pay attention to the plans our new President, Barak Obama, will bring forth. Please take time to visit the other websites used in researching this blog. Be informed.

The Pickens Plan: http://www.pickensplan.com/index.php

The Office of the President Elect: http://change.gov/

• What to Do in Household Emergencies pt 1 of 2 There are a number of household emergencies that are unfortunately common occurrences all the time in homes all over the world. Knowing what can be done to address such a household emergency will be able to save money, manpower and even lives in the right circumstances. We are going to......
• 10 Ways to Prove that Frugal Living is Really Green Living in Disguise. I'm probably the most unlikely Green Living advocate on the planet. I'm an advocate of offshore drilling, I voted for Bush in 2004 (bad call I know), and I drive a crossover SUV. Yet, more and more these days, I find myself being slowly taken in by the tree hugger......