Mr. Obama: It's Time To Secure The Internet
THIS
IS YOUR BANK THIS
IS YOUR BANK ON THE INTERNET
I’m
deviating from my usual topic of energy because
it’s time to fix the internet. (No, I am not
kidding.) It’s about ensuring that you can read
this blog, get cash from an ATM, make a phone call,
ensure your electric power stays on, railroads run and
your supermarket has food on its shelves.
What do all these vital services depend upon to
operate? Twenty year old insecure internet
standards.
Fixing China's Flawed New Mileage Standard
The New York Times reported that China laudably plans to increase its average automobile gas mileage by 18% - up to 42 mpg by 2015. This is great news - but without some (simple) fixes, the standard is likely to be ineffective and impractical to enforce. Here’s why.Read More...
Hale Zero: The Zero Energy Home
Hale is the Hawai`ian
word for home. This is a net zero energy home. Is this
possible without being slightly unlivable, expensive,
chic only to the eco-freak, and exotic?
If we draw on the time-tested principles that made
homes livable before electricity, coupled with iconic
and efficient architectural design, and a few modern
technologies, a low or zero energy home can be
achieved. Read on for how these principles can make a
livable, economical, zero-energy home
today?
Obama Gives Detroit Its Best Day In Decades
This is a story of
supply and demand. On the demand side of
the equation, President Obama has put in place
landmark new vehicle mileage
standard for cars and light
trucks. By 2016, cars must achieve 39 miles per
gallon in city + highway driving. Light trucks must
average 30 mpg. How aggressive is this standard?
Less than a handful of cars and no trucks can meet
it today. Yet everyone from Detroit to
retired military brass and Republican
leadership support it.
Why? Read on to see why President Obama has given
Detroit’s its best chance in
decades.
PCs, TVs & phones mean 200 more powerplants
The International Energy Agency tells us today that the ever-growing electrical thirst from our proliferating PCs, cell-phones, TVs and iPods is wiping out efficiency gains in lighting, heating and elsewhere.
How bad is the problem? The IEA suggests the worldwide growth in digi-gadgets will consume more power than all of the U.S. and Japan by 2030 unless we put our “stuff” on a diet. That’s the equivalent of 200 giant new power plants.
We can easily stop our PCs and devices from contributing today (and cut our utility bills too.) Click to read how...Read More...
Venture Capital Finally Gets Smart??
Beside efficiency’s often greater environmental benefit than Alt-E, efficiency investments have three significant benefits for investors:
1. Lower technical risk. Efficiency startups, such as smart electric meters, or more efficient lighting, use technology that already exists - it just needs to be designed and deployed in an economical business model. That means less chance the startup will fail.
2. Lower financing risk. Alternative energy startups often require huge amounts of investment to develop their technology and the build plants to build it. In a VC world that is investing less than half as much as it did in 2008, “capital efficiency” to get to breakeven reduces risk of failure, and helps ensure investors get a return even if the company doesn’t achieve a billion $ IPO.
3. No “valley of death.” Once the Alt-E company has developed its product and built its manufacturing plant (whew!), it still hasn’t succeeded because it now becomes dependent upon hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars of “project finance” to build projects (e.g. wind farms, solar powerplants) using its technology. Project finance is debt (e.g. bonds) issued to the power customer (e.g. a utility, or a county, state or country) to build the project (wind farm, solar farm) which gets paid of from the power generated (usually at a fixed guaranteed price) over 10 to 20 years. Unfortunately, with banks not lending even to typically credit-worthy entities, project finance has dried up.
We know one alternative energy CEO who has over a billion dollars of orders, but is within 90 days of “flame out” because of the lack of project finance. Ouch.
We’re glad VCs have seen the light (pun intended) and are turning to more efficient investing!Read More...
LED lights heading home (part 2)
Step by step...Read More...
If You Read Just One Book This Year...
This book should be
required reading for everyone in the developed world.
That’s a strong statement and I’ll preface
it with the fact that I often find that three-times
Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman’s New York
Times writings sensationalist.
Hot, Flat &
Crowded, (winner of
Washington Post, Chicago Tribune & Business Week
Book of the Year) is different. It’s
visionary, well researched and page-turningly well
written. It offers a new path away from the growing
consequences of our increasingly hot (climate
change), flat (rapidly expanding global middle
class), and crowded planet.
To begin with, the book demonstrates there is simply
not enough energy to fuel a 10x growth of the
world’s consumptive middle class driven by China
& India if this middle class consumes as much
resources (energy, water, land) as we do today. If you
buy this thesis (and it’s hard not to, based on
the evidence we saw in the summer of 2008 with
skyrocketing commodity prices, record pollution and
temperatures) the question Friedman begs is: now what?
Here is the visionary part: Friedman creates a
wholistic (and fact-based) perspective of how an
resource-efficient, economic, clean and sustainable
low/no carbon economy can be built with existing and
maturing technologies. And it offers a path to return
the United States to the forefront of its historical
leadership: exporting new technologies - something we
have lost in the past 15 years.
If this all sounds horrendously dull, it’s not.
The inspired vision is matched by inspired
writing. Get it here. To save some paper
and energy,
read it on your Kindle 2 or get
it from your
library.
Betting The Farm On The Right Curve
I’m going to show you the prices of three energy sources (e.g. oil or wind or coal in say, dollars per barrel) over time. (For you geeks, these are all in 2008 $ and the source is the U.S. Dept. of Energy)
US taxpayers have subsidized one of these energy sources for nearly a century with tens of billions of $ of tax breaks and other easements every year. As a result, we now depend upon this source of energy above all others.
You as President, must decide which energy sources you support and which you think the United States should wean itself away from.
From the mystery charts below, pick the two energy sources you think would be best for the American people and click Read More to find out what they are...
1.
2.
3.
Read More...
Kindle 2 & DX: Our Earthday Award Winner
As many
of us know, Amazon.com introduced its
Kindle 2 (and coming soon,
the larger Kindle DX) recently to a
great press fanfare. The Kindle 2 is, in our
opinion, the first real contender for a replacement
for the hundreds of millions of tons per year of of
trees, paper, glue (and energy) we deforest,
manufacture and ship around the planet in the form
of books, magazines & newspapers.
Why might Kindle actually do
that?