chickenlittle

Purchasing carbon offsets to go carbon neutral

all - there's movement afoot for going carbon neutral by purchasing offsets.  if you'd like to, terrific.  here are a few sites.

www.carbonfund.org

www.green-e.org

www.nativeenergy.com

www.renewablechoice.com

www.greentagsusa.org

www.climatetrust.org

www.americanforests.org

Kill-a-Watt Device for monitoring home electricity usage

Green Team,

Here’s an idea for a stocking stuffer…

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=blended&field-keywords=kill%20a%20watt&results-process=default&dispatch=search/ref=pd_sl_aw_tops-1_blended_7428458_2&results-process=default?tag2=amd-google-20

The Kill-A-Watt is not a very romantic gift, but I’ve found it very useful in determining how much energy is being used by appliances over the course of a day, especially ones that “cycle” on and off -  like window AC’s, dehumidifiers, refrigerators, etc -  where the electrical ratings on the back of the unit aren’t enough info.   It can help you make smart choices: should you run a lot of fans or just one AC to cool the house in the summer…how much money will you save by replacing your fridge, etc, etc…

I was also amazed to find that some electronics were major drains, while others were not at all.  For example, my VCR and stereo use 15 W EACH when they’re TURNED OFF!!!  That’s like leaving a 30 W bulb on 24/7/365.  (so I put them on a separate on/off switch)  In contrast, my DVD player and TV barely use 1 W together when they are off (standby).  My camcorder and digital cameras kept sucking lots of power just sitting on their docks (even after the batteries are fully charged), while my cell phone did not (once the battery was recharged). 

Hope you find it useful…anyone in

Cambridge

is welcome to borrow at the next GNO.

Happy Holidays!

Tom

Various Solar Power Resources, Vendors, esp. NY and Northeast region

Nyseia.org

isi solar 845-348-4708 www.isi-solar.com

www.globalresourcesoptions.com

www.nesea.org

www.ases.org

www.getenergysmart.org

http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35297.pdf

http://www.thermotechs.com/nyc.htm

http://www.miasole.com/contact/contact.html

Good resources for emission reductions

www.thegreenguide.com This guide has in-depth product reports (on light bulbs, diapers and so on), blogs and a comfy feeling; especially good on health and nutrition.

www.dannyseo.typepad.com Mr. Seo, an eco-friendly designer, blogs about ways to greenify your home, inside and out.

www.energystar.gov Good conversion data is available here. Also, while some may find their eyes glazing over at descriptions of Energy Star-rated appliances, it’s interesting to check out differences between what you have and what’s available now.

www.aceee.org The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy offers refreshingly straightforward information for both regular folks and wonks.

www.nrdc.org The National Resources Defense Council weighs in with good policy papers on almost every aspect of the environment — air, water, cities, waste, etc.

www.stopglobalwarming.org This site lets users join the Stop Global Warming Virtual March (in about as much time as it takes to read this sentence twice). It also has consumer tips. ANDREW POSTMAN

Better Lightbulbs

GEOFF SWIFT WROTE:

And don’t forget that the least sexy (but most cost-effective), means to reduce electricity is to use the CF lightbulbs.  Anyone see the Starbucks full page ad over the weekend?  Called for doing just this.

TOM WIDEMAN WROTE: We replaced put in CF lightbulbs anywhere that the bulbs were protected (from our kids).  Most of the lights in our house are standing or desk lamps, though, and I didn’t want the lamps being knocked over, bulbs broken, and the mercury released.  (It’s only about 4 mg per bulb, but I’m kind of kooky about chemicals - odd, considering my background, huh?).

Anyhow, I saw this news release a while back: http://www.polybrite.com/News/Marquee60_04PR_1.pdf#search=%22polybrite%20bulb%22  I contacted Polybrite and Westinghouse and they will be releasing 60 W equivalent LED bulbs in the first quarter or 2007.  They use even less energy, contain no mercury, and are solid state so they can’t break.  They’ll probably cost a lot, but they pay off in the very long run. Thought you might be interested.

Stephens-Thode family tactis

Hey Nick,

Big savings from Colorado! As I indicated before, this is a combination of me (a hardy Oregonian) replacing a soft Tennesseean as Anna's housemate, a concerted effort to keep the thermostat down low, and of course a shared shower or two. Also, we skipped spring and went right to summer here, with mid 80s for the past several weeks. The BBC came and did some filming at one of my research sites last month but unfortunately I was in Mexico on another project so no glory for me . . . will have to get it the old fashioned way, by scoring a cameo in a  friend's movie. Hope the writing is going well.

Britt

Ajemian Family - Ways to Save CO2

hi nick,

we did a number of things this winter to reduce our emissions, but in the

end, i think the biggest difference was that we got a new furnace. the old

one was 50+ years old and konked out on us over new years, forcing a new,

more efficient model into the house. so, yes, the dec number is 0, amazingly

enough, and there is currently a credit balance on our fuel account. yeah!!

stay well,

grace

Biland Family - Ways to Save CO2

Nick- Laura and I have installed additional insulation (albeit in the dead of summer, so I almost died in the attic!), installed a timer on our hot water circulator, reduced the average temperature in the house during the winter months, and lowered the temperature on our hot water heater. Before this whole thing started we had changed out our windows to help maintain the temperature in our house and we have considered installing a radiant barrier in the attic for further energy savings. We'd be curious to learn if anyone else had alternatives they have implemented that might be applicable in our home. Keep up the good work. Also, I am going to enlist my classmates at school to participate in an all North Texas version of the CO2 reduction intiative. I'll be in touch to find out what I need to start it. Talk to you later. Joe & Laura & Hannah.

Energy Credits

NRDC

June 2006
FOOTLOOSE AND CARBON-FREE

It's frustrating to feel you're part of the problem when you want to be part of the solution. But there isn't much choice in a fossil-fuel driven world. Unless you practice a severe form of back-to-nature self-sufficiency, you contribute to global warming, like it or not.

There's no avoiding it -- not even if you drive a Prius, perfectly insulate your home, replace all your incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents, use rechargeable batteries and follow every other precept in the energy-savers rulebook. No, not even if you power your home with your very own solar panels and bike to work each day (though kudos to you if you do).

The reason is that personal emissions -- the ones from home energy use and driving that you're directly responsible for -- account for just 40 percent of your total. The larger part comes from everything else you buy and do. Your clothes, for instance. The songs on your iPod. The food you eat. For all of these things are made, grown or transported with the help of fossil fuels. So is the bike with which you may idealistically pedal to work. So are the solar panels.

But let's get real. If you're like most people, these indirect emissions are beside the point. You do depend on a car for transportation and the "grid" for power and are not about to overturn your whole life in a quixotic attempt to fight a global problem single-handedly. Still, you wish there were something reasonable you could do. And there is: buy carbon offsets to cancel out your emissions.

Carbon offsets are projects that reduce or prevent the accumulation of global warming gases in the atmosphere to make up for the gases that you have inadvertently put there. They achieve this either by increasing the availability of renewable energy, supporting energy-efficiency improvements by industry or capturing and sequestering emissions.

Of course, you don't really buy these projects. What you do is contribute to them. Depending on who you do it with, the contribution may or may not be tax-deductible. What it goes towards will also vary. Some organizations and companies focus on just one thing, such as buying renewable energy certificates. Others make a point of funding different types of projects, much as a mutual fund would. Certain groups choose projects that not only help with global warming, but other environmental or social problems as well, such as forest degradation or poverty.

Here are some of the major players in the United States:

CarbonFund.org is a non-profit that funds renewable energy, efficiency and sequestration projects. You can choose among them on the contribution form. The site has an easy-to-use calculator on the homepage for estimating your emissions, both direct and indirect. However, it only factors in carbon emissions, not those from other global warming gases. If this bothers you, contribute a little extra.

CarbonCounter.org is a joint project of The Climate Trust and the international relief organization Mercy Corps, which has gotten involved out of a desire to forestall humanitarian disasters stemming from climate change. CarbonCounter.org funds energy efficiency, renewable energy, cogeneration, transportation efficiency and reforestation projects. For project details, see The Climate Trust site.

Native Energy, a privately held Native American energy company, helps build new wind farms and biomass generators owned by Native Americans and/or farmers. Native Energy also offers renewable energy credits. In addition to an all-purpose calculator, it has a travel calculator that factors in all kinds of transportation (including train and bus) as well as accommodations. Unfortunately, the site itself is a little confusing, but not so bad you can't make sense of it.

Bonneville Environmental Fund is a non-profit that sells renewable energy credits to offset emissions. Bonneville's site has several calculators -- one is all-purpose, another is for special events and a third is for car and air travel.

Terrapass is a for-profit company that offers a simple 1-2-3 process for offsetting your car emissions. Funds go toward a variety of wind, biomass and efficiency projects.

Solar Electric Light Fund provides rural villages in developing countries with solar power. A gift to this group isn't an offset per se, but a way of extending the benefits of electricity -- in a climate-neutral way -- to some of the two billion people on the planet who lack it.

Each of these groups, other than the Solar Electric Light Fund, takes pains to get third-party certification for the projects it funds. Unfortunately, certification criteria aren't uniform, so you can't be sure all projects measure up. Renewable energy certificates are the exception. You can feel confident they conform to high standards if they have the Green-e seal of approval.

Some people question whether buying offsets isn't like paying for the right to pollute. They think we should focus on bringing our individual emissions down instead. I don't see it that way. Sure, we should do what we can in our personal lives. But dealing with global warming requires something more -- a change in the technologies that power our world. In my view, offsets will get us there quicker.

Besides, it's not an either/or choice. We can reduce our energy use and buy carbon offsets at the same time. The more we do -- and the sooner -- the better. Time is short.

—Sheryl Eisenberg

ONLINE RESOURCES DAVID SUZUKI FOUNDATION Go Carbon Neutral GRIST Fee to Be Carbon Free POWER SCORECARD Twenty Things You Can Do to Conserve Energy MAINE GREEN POWER CONNECTION How to Buy Green Power Certificates EERE Renewable Energy Certificate Products NRDC Turn up the Heat -- Fight Global Warming NRDC Global Warming Basics

Wind Power

TECHNOLOGY QUARTERLY

Turning wind power on its side

Mar 9th 2006
From The Economist print edition

Energy technology: Wind turbines that rotate about a vertical axis, rather than the usual horizontal one, could have a number of benefits

WIND turbines are springing up in all sorts of places around the world, from China to California, but most of them have the same basic design: the blades rotate about a horizontal axis, as in an old-fashioned windmill. Such turbines can generate electricity at a cost not much higher than non-renewable, fossil-fuel sources—provided the wind is blowing, that is. But if proponents of a rival design are to be believed, electricity can be generated from wind even more cheaply, using turbines that rotate about a vertical axis, like a playground roundabout.

TMA, a company based in Cheyenne, Wyoming, announced in November that its first vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT) would soon be ready for commercial production. The TMA system has two sets of vertical blades. The two inner blades, each shaped like a half-cylinder, catch the wind and rotate about a central axis, while the three outer blades, shaped like aircraft wings, are fixed. The interaction between the two sets of blades causes a drop in pressure in front of the rotating blades' leading edges, which further increases the rate of rotation. TMA claims that its system harvests 43-45% of the wind's available energy; conventional propeller-style turbines, in contrast, have efficiencies of 25-40%.

In winds of more than 80kph (50mph), furthermore, the blades and gearboxes of conventional turbines cannot cope with the strain, and they have to be shut down. TMA says its vertical-axis design can still work even at wind speeds as high as 110kph, however. The ability to harvest high-speed winds is particularly valuable, since each doubling of wind speed results in an eightfold increase in available energy. TMA also claims that its design is quieter and less visually obtrusive than conventional turbines.

A British consortium, Eurowind Developments, which includes VT Group, a shipbuilding and engineering company, and Mott Macdonald, a consultancy, believes VAWTs could be the best design for giant offshore turbines. Such a turbine, with a capacity of ten megawatts, would be able to power around 10,000 homes. Today's largest horizontal-axis turbines produce around five megawatts, and are proving difficult to scale up. Each blade has to be more than 60 metres long, and the bigger the blade, the greater the stress it experiences as it turns: the blade's own weight compresses it at the top of the cycle and stretches it at the bottom. As a result, blades must be made and transported in one piece, which is expensive. Reinforcing the blade to enable it to withstand these forces further increases cost and reduces efficiency.

The blades of a VAWT, in contrast, do not have to undergo this repeated stretching and compression. Nor does their cross-section vary from top to bottom, which makes them cheaper to manufacture than windmill blades, the shape of which must be painstakingly engineered. VAWT blades can also be made in pieces and joined together on site. So vertical-axis designs should enable wind turbines to be scaled up more easily, resulting in cheaper electricity, even for VAWT designs of similar efficiency to conventional turbines. “If we can build a ten megawatt turbine for only slightly more than other companies build five megawatt turbines, then the efficiency question goes out of the window,” says Steven Peace of Eurowind.

Neither TMA nor Eurowind has yet proved the technology in commercial deployments, however, and the mainstream wind industry remains sceptical about the benefits of VAWTs, in large part because the idea is not new. Simple VAWTs, with a couple of sails pushed around by the wind, have been around for centuries, and were being used in Persia thousands of years ago. In 1922 a Finnish engineer, S. J. Savonius, improved on this primitive design, and devised a turbine based on two half-cylinder blades, as TMA uses. In 1931 a Frenchman, Georges Darrieus, patented a wind turbine that operates on an entirely different principle with two thin, curved blades fixed to a central axis, in a design often compared to an egg-beater.

Turbines based on the Savonius design are already used for small-scale generation in remote locations. Even large-scale VAWTs have been tried before. In the early 1990s the British government funded a trial in Carmarthen Bay in Wales, which culminated in the construction of a 500 kilowatt, 35-metre turbine. But it failed after six months because of a manufacturing fault, and the trial was wound up shortly afterwards. The project's final report concluded that VAWTs had no applications on land, but they should be reconsidered “if offshore wind energy becomes more attractive”.

That day has now come, so it might be time to give the technology another look. Nigel Crowe, director of the British Wind Energy Association, says the use of horizontal-axis turbines has as much to do with historical factors as technological merit. “Why do we use horizontal axis turbines? Why do we use VHS, not Betamax?” he asks. “They are the ones that got accepted first, and got established in the marketplace. The industry now is going through some major changes. Maybe the goalposts have moved a bit and maybe it is the right time to look again.” With plans afoot to build wind farms off the coast of Britain and elsewhere, the fortunes of the VAWT may be about to take a turn for the better.

Easy, but not for long

In reference to Nick's post below, yes offsetting one's own CO2 emissions by purchasing Certified Emission Reduction (CER) credits on the open market is ridiculously easy at the moment, considering the average American is responsible for around 20 tons of CO2 emissions per year (CDIAC, multiply by 44/12 to convert tons carbon to tons CO2) and that credits are selling for around $5 per ton.  Also theoretically all of the credits being sold go through a fairly rigorous certification process.  It looks like CarbonFund is using a combination of wind power projects and a biomass digester.  I offset my car's emissions (and my family's cars' emissions as Christmas presents) using
http://www.drivinggreen.com
and am now a proud owner of an "I emit no gas" t-shirt.  Driving Green is a service from AgCert, a company that captures methane from manure ponds using large tents.  Because methane is 20 times more efficient than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere, they can then sell CER credits corresponding to the methane they trap.  AgCert is traded on the London stock exchange as AGC and as AGCTF on the Nasdaq OTCBB (sorry I didn't post this 4 months ago).  Also, under the Kyoto agreement EU countries that miss their targets will pay penalties of 40 EURO/ton for the first three years and then 100 EURO/ton after that, so with the normal caveats that I am not an economist it seems clear to me that as long as international agreements hold the demand will outstrip supply for years to come and that the prices will inevitably go up.

Now, if everyone in the industrialized world simply had to pay $100 per year to avert climate change, this would be a nice easy solution.  Unfortunately the capacity to prevent or capture CO2 (or methane) emissions is very small relative to our total emissions, so this is not possible.  Of course people are working very hard at coming up with new ways to do this (if you have any great ideas let me know) but the magnitude of the problem is immense.  Think of all the infrastructure it takes to get a gallon of gasoline to your car  (wells, tankers, pipelines, trucks) and then think about the fact that every gallon of gasoline you burn produces 19 pounds of CO2 - if you could somehow get it into solid form (as dry ice), what would you do with it all?  You'd either need to build up an equally extensive infrastructure to dispose of it or we'd have great skiing in L.A.  Of course the fact that CO2 comes out as a gas makes the problem even harder to deal with both because you first have to capture it and because people don't think much about something they can't see.

Nonetheless, buying CER credits now provides a direct incentive for companies to expand this capacity, for example by putting in wind farms instead of coal plants whenever possible, so I strongly endorse Nick's suggestion:

Question: any thoughts on how/whether or not to incorporate the purchase of carbon-trading rights into the game?  Maybe make our usage-reduction goal 10% and our emissions-reduction goal 100% (not 30%) - i.e. at the end of the year, participants purchase carbon-trading rights to render themselves carbon neutral (should only cost ~ $100 - 150 per individual, worst case, I suspect).

Draft stoppers for doors and windows

All, a good energy saver-tip - most of the energy loss through windows comes via draft through the crack between panes and at the bottom of the window.  I've found a bunch of places on the web to buy "draft snakes" - tubes stuffed with insulating material - to cut down on this loss:

If these url's wrap around on your screen, you need to merge them back into a single url in your web browser:

http://www.poconomts.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=Bdix&Category_Code=draft

http://www.lnt.com/product/index.jsp?productId=1899658&cp=1901015&view=all&parentPage=family#product_

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00078ZJPG/ref=nosim/002-2125890-8215224?n=284507

http://www.vermontcountrystore.com/jump.jsp?itemID=6043&itemType=PRODUCT