Renewable Energy and Economies of Scale

Daniel Kammen, Director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, explains why renewable energy might take less time for widespread incorporation than its critics care to admit.

Alternatives are great, but there's no way to scale them up rapidly enough to meet the energy needs of our society. This is the misconception that Mr. Kammen addresses here.

Wind and solar currently produce 0.5% of the electricity in the United States. Most engineers educated before 1999 take this knowledge and assume that renewables will remain two-bit players in the energy space.

Northern Germany went from no wind energy to more than 25% wind power in 6-8 years.

Places that are now going after biofuels, wind, and solar, they are going against the myth that widespread renewable use is too difficult and costly to implement. Every place that has tried has discovered that it's relatively easy to do.

Most incentives we have in government is for dirty power. We need to change these incentives to benefit clean, green power.

Solar Thermal Heating

This is a good introduction to Solar-powered water heating. These systems require a larger up-front investment, but they can save money in the long run.

20% Renewables by 2020

The European Union hopes to produce 20% of its energy from renewable sources by the year 2020. This video cites energy independence and global warming as the major impetuses (impeti?) for this move. Wind energy production in Europe has come a long way. The total wind production on the continent is the equivalent of all the energy needs in Denmark and Hungary combined. The video goes on to talk about a bunch of different renewable energy sources, but it's all pretty basic stuff. I just thought that statistic about wind energy was pretty neat.

Costa Rican Earthquake

I know this isn't 100% related to energy, and that it isn't a video, but I thought I'd let everyone know that I survived the earthquake in Costa Rica a few weeks ago. I also wanted to share with you some images that I came across that shows the extreme severity of what happened. I already wrote about it in my Costa Rican blog, so I'll just link to the earthquake photos from here. I hope you enjoy the photos. It certainly shows the kind of energy that is produced in the earth's massive, radioactive core. More on this later. Here are the photos:

http://costaricaspanish.blogspot.com/2009/01/costa-rican-earthquake-antes-y-despus.html

Greenpeace Video - Renewable Energy

Two billion people have no modern energy supply, no power to pump clean water, no cold storage for medicines. Smoke from cooking fires kills nearly 2 million people each year. It doesn't have to be like this. Coal, oil, gas, nuclear - no thank you. The wind can provide four times the energy we need. Clean, affordable, endless. Choose positive energy. Greenpeace.

Solar Powered Mobile Phone

Crazy contraption, a mobile device powered by the sun.

How biogas works

From the Video: 1. Most biodegradable organic material can be collected for anaerobic digestion. 2. The material is fed into a digester tank where bacteria break it down in the absence of oxygen. 3. This produces biogas (methane), which is cleaned, compressed, and sent to a CHP plant. 4. It also produces a digestate, which can be used for compost or as a fertilizer.