I've just discovered a wonderful blog - it's going straight to my RSS list. WorldChanging has some things that are cheering me up after all the peak oil reading I've been doing:
1) 850 Megawatt Solar Power Plant to be built in California. Not a single photovoltaic panel, though: it's a stirling engine, powered by large solar concentrators. Apparently, the company is hoping to sell solar electricity at $0.06/kwh, which makes it about as cheap as what we're paying in Ontario these days - and that's before you count the cost of all the electricity we're importing during the summer! Finally, the modular design is going to let the plant start paying for itself soon after construction starts, and long before it finishes. Excellent.
2) Chinese-GM cooperation has produced the Wuling Sunshine, a small van that gets 43 miles to the gallon. (Compare to the US average, 20 mpg.) For $5,000, you can't have one of these - GM will refuse to import them to the US market. Somebody tell me again about the wonders of free trade...
3) This one from Wired News - new plants in the US are increasingly waste-free. Anyone who's read Natural Capitalism will understand the underlying reasons - waste, shockingly, is wasteful (in terms of money.) Subaru now has the first plant that is entirely waste-free. Woot.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment