And they can be installed nearly anywhere—around buildings of all shapes and sizes, on homes, boats, bridges, telecom sites, oil rigs, billboards, streetlights, parking lot lighting, and irrigation/water pumping stations. Wherever the wind blows, you can install one.
PacWind turbines can also be stacked vertically in tower configurations where large amounts of power are needed in small amounts of space. We believe these designs will change how we all look at and utilize wind energy. We like to say: Urban wind power has finally arrived.
—Ken Johnson
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An Easy Way to Go Green
Say you don’t want to make any kind of an investment in your home, even the modest deposit fees involved in leasing solar equipment. Or perhaps none of these options are viable for your location. You can still get greener power into your home—probably through the very same utility company you are now using.
Here’s how it works. The local utility company goes out and buys new green power in the marketplace. In turn, that company offers you the chance to buy this power for your home.
This is something you can do in most places in the country. You can sign up to buy green power from Austin Energy, or from the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, or from the Eugene Water & Electric Board. You can get it from the Omaha Public Power District or the Iowa Association of Municipal Utilities or Colorado Springs Utilities. Many municipal and public utility companies across the country are offering these green power programs.
Even if your current utility company does not have this kind of program, your state may still allow retail electricity competition. If so, you can just take your business elsewhere and buy green power from another supplier that does offer the green option.
The good news is that these green programs are introducing new green power into the grid. It’s not a case of the companies trying to get credit for existing green energy sources—“Oh, we took title to a hydro-plant out in Idaho from 1937. We own it. See? We bought it!”—because then, what’s the new influence on the grid? That hydro-plant’s been cranking out green power for years.
What the LADWP green power program does is put new green power into the grid that we all use. The DWP purchases new wind turbine power. It purchases new geothermal power, new solar power—some kind of alternative power that is clean and green.
Now, there’s a little footnote to this: In my area there is an additional charge for taking part in this program.
Originally, the service was offered free to low-income customers; they could have green power for no charge. This enabled the DWP to say, “We have 100,000 homes signed up for this green power program!” They didn’t advertise the fact that it didn’t cost 50,000 of them a cent, but another 50,000 did sign up to pay an extra penny for every kilowatt of power.
Me, I pay an extra 3¢ per kilowatt-hour because I said, “Look, I heard this green power program is only 20 percent green. I want 100 percent green. Do you have such a program?” And they said, “We’ll get back to you.”
After a few days, they called back to say it would be a lot of money. I asked, “How much money?” They replied, 3¢ per kilowatt-hour more. Ooh! Three extra cents! I figured I’m using so little power anyway that the difference to my bill would be negligible, so I told them, “Fine. Charge me three cents extra a kilowatt-hour.”
Now, remember, I buy nearly all my power off-peak, and that off-peak power starts at less than 4¢ per kilowatt-hour. Even with the 3¢ I’m adding to it for the green power program and some other various charges, I’m still paying only 9¢ a kilowatt-hour, which is very cheap for power. (The average Joe or Jane in California is paying more than 12¢ per kilowatt-hour for the same power.)
So for what little power I use—the less than 10 percent of my consumption for this house, including Rachelle’s Pilates studio with the heat on for most of the winter and the air conditioner on for most of the summer, with my larger electric car, with my Begley’s Best business, with our daughter and laundry and all kinds of activities—it’s still only $600 a year worth of grid power, and all of it’s green power. It’s green as the solar on my roof. It’s just coming from elsewhere.
Paying It Back with TerraPass
You can also do something that’s very simple—that’s just as green and just as real. You can sign up for a carbon offset pass. In Chapter 2 I showed how purchasing these carbon offsets allows you to mitigate the pollution coming from your car and your air travel. Well, you can also mitigate it from your home energy use.
Let’s say they don’t offer a green power program in the town where you live. You can still have your own personal green power program because you’re buying real green power that’s really going into the grid from TerraPass or another company like it.
This carbon offset won’t stop the pollution being made where you live by the power plant that serves you, but somewhere in the country there’s real green power being put into the grid, and that green power offsets the carbon emissions from the power you’re actually using.
So how do you sign up? You go to the TerraPass website’s section on home energy use. They have a screen with different fields. “How much electricity do you use in a year?”
I have no idea. “Honey, give me the bill. Let’s see.”
You can give me a winter month and a summer month, and there’s a way to figure out how much energy you use in a year. I didn’t know this, but I use 1,200 kilowatt-hours a month. Who knew? I never knew this, but they asked me to get this information, so I did, and then I typed in “1,200 kilowatt-hours a month.”
Next they ask, “Where do you live?” They ask you a few questions.
Then they mitigate. They know by state, by region, the amount of natural gas and coal from your region that you’re probably going to use for your power consumption.
They put that into an equation and they say, for example, “For a TerraPass, we’re going to charge you $35 a year”—or $135 a year, depending on how much power you use and where you live.
So, as I mentioned in Chapter 2, there’re forty thousand people signed up with TerraPass now. What would happen if everybody did that? What if four million people signed up? What would happen then?
I’ll tell you what would happen. One by one, utility companies would say, “You know what? Let’s shut down that dirty power plant that we’re getting all those fines for that’s not cost effective to run anymore. We’ve got all these people signed up for TerraPass. They put up a whole state’s worth of green energy in the form of wind. So shut down that coal plant. Did I say one? Shut down two of those coal plants in Indiana that are getting fined.”
So yes, there’s still real pollution that you’re creating by using the power wherever you may be. But then there’s also a real offset, which will really eliminate considerable pollution as more and more people sign up. That’s just as real.
The Downside of Green Power
Now, naysayers are quick to point out that green forms of power have consequences. And they do:
HYDROELECTRIC POWER. Though totally clean from an emissions standpoint, these big hydroelectric power plants have a cost. They first and foremost prevent many species of fish from reaching their spawning grounds. And then, like the wind turbines, they act as a giant Cuisinart, chopping up fish in their turbines. So they affect the natural habitat of fish and other wildlife.
Now, the hydro-plants recognize this, and they’ve taken some steps to try to fix the problems. For instance, some utilities have built fish ladders to help salmon get past a dam so they can reach their spawning grounds up-stream.
The smaller hydoelectric power plants are more environmentally friendly because they do not restrict the flow of a waterway in a manner that is anything like that. The river is allowed to flow and a smaller amount of electricity is harvested in a less restrictive manner.
Homeowners who have rights to a waterway on their property have regularly purchased small hydro units that simply capture the movement of their otherwis
e unrestricted stream. If you had a little stream and you had rights to the water in that stream, you’d install this little paddlewheel-like thing. It’s nothing a fish would want to swim into. It would be like a suicide attempt. Like, “Let me go toward that thing that’s moving.” So a small hydro is much more green.
WIND POWER. Wind turbines can destroy wildlife. You have to site them in a place that’s not in the Pacific Flyway, where you have a bunch of birds. You have to—as they have—slow down the blades and change the gearing so you get the same amount of rpm (revolutions per minute) that you need to your generator. You just change your gear ratio, so the blades are going slower. This way, the birds can dodge them better as they’re flying through these things that they don’t know could kill them. You put reflective coating on the blades so the bird has a better chance. You put up flashing strobes, night and day, so the bird can be like, “Ah! Something bad is there. Let me get away from it.” And all these things have greatly reduced the bird deaths.
I’m always thrilled by the output of my stand-alone hybrid solar/wind electric system.
Now, keep in mind, it’s not like birds don’t die in smokestacks. Plenty of birds die in “regular” power plants, too. So the people who are highly critical of wind turbines need to remember that there’s a consequence for every form of power.
SOLAR POWER. When you make a solar panel, there’s gallium arsenide and there’re toxic elements, but they’re sequestered in a sealed panel. They don’t escape into the environment. Maybe when those panels break down—but you tell me when that’s gonna be, because I don’t know anybody who has a solar panel that’s broken. I mean, if you got out there with a handgun and shot holes into it, I suppose you’d have a problem. I can’t imagine how you’re going to have trouble in the long run with these solar panels. They’re pieces of crystal trapped behind pieces of glass or other transparent material on a metal frame. I don’t know how that’s going to break down.
And there are panels that are still working from the early space program in the ’60s. There are solar panels, not just in space, that have been putting out clean, green power for fifty years—very similar to the ones I have on my roof. So they work a long time. And I assume they can be recycled at some point. They can recycle circuit boards. They can recycle lots of other things.
So compare that tiny bit of toxic material in a solar panel with a coal plant that puts out plenty of mercury into the air that we all breathe, that gets into our blood systems, that puts out plenty of other toxic elements and air pollution. The quantities that we’re talking about are not even close. It’s a tea-spoon to a tanker truck.
Now, it’s true that solar panels provide electricity only during the day-light hours. That’s why God invented batteries—or net metering.
Nuclear Energy
Some people will also tell you that nuclear power is green power. There are renewed discussions of siting new nuclear power plants in many parts of the country as a remedy to global warming. I and many others are not in favor of that due to several factors. One, where do you put the waste? No one—not even the folks in Nevada, who are near the Yucca Mountain Repository—wants it near them. I wouldn’t want a nuclear power plant near me.
Nuclear energy is a devil’s bargain. Imagine if the ancient Egyptians had created a poison so toxic that it had just now reduced to half its potency. This material would have been available to every warring nation from that period to this—to fling in catapults, to fling in slingshots, to hide in their opponents’ homes or barracks—and we would have had to deal with that poison for the past several thousand years. I don’t like the sound of that. I don’t think we’re capable of having material that toxic available to so many people over such a long period of time. There is tremendous risk.
Then, there’s the issue of making more fissionable material available to those who wish to do us harm. Every single nation that has a nuclear weapons program started with a nuclear energy program.
The risk of a Chernobyl-type accident is also real. Keep in mind that the worst energy-related accident from having solar panels on your roof is that you might get bonked on the head if you didn’t bolt down a panel well.
Choosing a Shade of Green
You know, there are different shades of green. Burning biomass is greener than burning coal or burning crude oil. But we must all recognize that it’s best to pick the deepest shade of green that is available on our budget and in the realm of common sense.
For you, that might mean installing a solar electric system or a residential wind turbine. Or it might mean signing up for your local utility company’s green power program.
And I’d encourage everyone to sign up for TerraPass or one of the other carbon offset programs being offered today, so no matter where your power comes from, you help to add new green power to the grid and help to reduce the need for smoke-belching power plants.
What else can you do to choose a deeper shade of green? You can grow your own food and you can support your local organic farmers.
Solar is clearly a renewable source of energy. So is wind. So is geothermal power. And so is power generated by burning biomass or by burning methane gas at a landfill or by burning waste.
According to the EPA, the process of generating electricity is the single largest source of CO2 emissions in the United States. It’s responsible for 38 percent of all man-made CO2 emissions.
The way your utility company generates power—and the cost and availability of whatever type of fuel it uses—has a lot to do with the price you pay for electricity.
By buying most of your power off-peak, clearly you can save a lot on your electricity bill. If it’s cloudy 180 to 200 days out of the year in your area, don’t put up solar; it’s not worth it economically. But for the rest of the country—nearly all of the country—solar panels make economic sense.
Without subsidies, it can take nearly twenty years to amortize the cost of installing a solar electric system. With subsidies, it’s eight or nine years—depending on where you live and how much you pay for power to begin with. With net metering, the power you feed into the grid literally spins your electric meter backward. You’re selling that power to the utility company at the exact same price you pay for the electricity you buy.
The sun supplies enough energy to Earth in one hour to supply all of our energy needs for an entire year.
How do we get power from wind? First, you have to understand that wind is kinetic energy, or the energy of motion.
According to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), a single 5- megawatt wind turbine can produce more than 15 million kilowatt-hours of electricity in a year—enough to power more than 1,400 households.
Today, U.S. wind farms generate enough electricity on a typical day to power more than 2.5 million homes. More than six hundred regulated utility companies in more than thirty states have begun offering green power pro grams.
Getting involved is easy. On your utility bill, check the box: I would like green power.
5
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IN THE GARDEN AND KITCHEN
GROWING YOUR OWN FOOD, BUYING ORGANIC, AND SOLAR COOKING
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If you have a patch of dirt to call your own, you can save money by growing your own produce. I grow about 25 percent of the food we eat on my property, and if I had a bigger property, I’d grow even more.
Gardening is great exercise, plus it gives you much more control over the food you eat. You know it’s fresh and you know it’s organic, because you’ve grown it that way.
There’s something about the flavor of produce eaten right off the vine, right off the tree, right out of the garden. Nothing can match a fresh-picked tomato that’s truly ripe, rather than one picked green for ease of shipping. The sugar that makes sweet corn so delicious turns to starch in a matter of hours, so even the corn you buy from a produce stand or a farmers’ market won’t be quite as delicious as fresh picked.
Even if you didn’t reap the re
wards of your labor in terms of better-tasting food, it’s still worth growing your own. It’s simply a lot more energy efficient to grow food yourself than to have it shipped long distances.
Today, with supermarkets routinely offering such once-exotic foods as mussels from New Zealand and winter raspberries from Chile, it has become the norm to cook and serve food that has come hundreds, if not thousands, of miles every single day. Obviously, a certain amount of fuel is required to transport food over such long distances. If you can cut down on that, it’s a really good thing.
And when you grow your own food, you’re using water that’s already piped in at your home, not supporting the diversion of millions of gallons to commercial farms’ irrigation systems that are far from the water’s source. There’s an environmental cost to bringing water into your home, certainly, but that water is there in the pipes already. You can collect rainwater to use for watering some of the plants in your garden, too.
Even if you’re in a condo or an apartment, you may be able to grow some of your own food. And if you don’t have any space where you live, there’s another wonderful option: You can participate in a community garden.
You have other choices, too, when it comes to food. When you shop for food, choose food that’s organic and buy food that’s local. You can also choose to prepare food in an energy-efficient way.
So let’s start by looking at what you can grow at home, then get into what you eat and how you cook it.
Why I Garden
When I was a kid I had this thing about self-sufficiency that was born from a very unfortunate mind-set. I was twelve years old when the Bay of Pigs crisis took place and had a profound effect on everyone. We thought that the
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