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World's First Electric Car Ferry Recharges in 10 Minutes | Autopia | Wired.com

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 12:12:45 -0500

World's First Electric Car Ferry Recharges in 10 Minutes | Autopia | Wired.com

positive-press-daily: A gymnasium in northern England has...

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 16:58:03 -0500

A gymnasium in northern England has become the first in the country to generate its own power supply from energy produced by members during exercise sessions.

The Spectrum Leisure Centre based in Willington, County Durham, has purchased a range of machines called The Green System, which turn exercise into electricity and cost the same as regular gym machines.

The new pieces of equipment include exercise bikes, elliptical trainers and upright bikes capable of producing up to 2,000 watts per hour.

Mark Turner, managing director of Sports Art Fitness, the company that designed and built the machines, said: “We have spent ten years developing this technology and have already seen it installed in the United States, Canada and Holland. Now The Spectrum has become the first leisure venue in the UK to recognise the environmental benefits of the machines.”

Mr Turner estimates that if the machines are used for 60% of the time the gym is open, the centre could save up to £10,000 on its energy bills over the next five years.

Ian Hirst, chairman of Slam Community Development Trust, the charity that runs the centre, said: “This is a very exciting development for us. Currently our monthly energy charges amount to the same as 50 members’ fees. The savings provided by these machines means we can potentially use 30 of those fees to fund other environmental initiatives. It’s a big boost to what the centre can offer.

“The biggest cost to any leisure-related venue is electricity: these new machines are the perfect way of tackling our energy costs.”

The centre also has energy efficient LED lights throughout the building and plans to install 400 solar panels, which will slash its electricity bills by a further 65% and make a major reduction in its carbon footprint.

Ebisu East Gallery (by ykanazawa1999)

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 00:18:10 -0500

Ebisu East Gallery (by ykanazawa1999)

sisterlegionnaire: Kenyan Susan Oguya created an app to help...

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 16:46:47 -0500

sisterlegionnaire:

Kenyan Susan Oguya created an app to help farmers in her homeland. Shown here in the office of her company, M-Farm, she also belongs to the group Akirachix, which seeks to bring more Kenyan women into the tech world.
Kenyan Women Create Their Own ‘Geek Culture’

When a collective of female computer programmers in Kenya needed a name for their ladies-only club, they took their inspiration from the Japanese cult film Akira.

“So akira is a Japanese word. It means energy and intelligence. And we are energetic and intelligent chicks,” says Judith Owigar, the president of Akirachix.

A group like Akirachix would have been unthinkable even five years ago. But Kenya is making a big push toward IT — part of a plan to create a middle-class country by the year 2030.

Kenya has laid hundreds of miles of fiber optic cable. Google and IBM set up shop here. The city even has plans for a $7 billion technology hub just outside the capital, Nairobi.

But you need more than tech giants and broadband and even money to launch a local tech industry. You also need a culture of computer geeks. That’s where Owigar and her collective Akirachix come in. They want to make sure that the girl geeks are encouraged as much as the guys.

Bridging The Gender Gap

“You know you’re the oddball just because of your gender,” Owigar says.

It turns out that in Kenya, exactly as in Silicon Valley, the problem with getting more women in tech is that there aren’t more women in tech.

“There are probably other women in tech who are alone, and they think they’re the weird ones, but if enough of us meet together, you know, it won’t be so weird anymore,” Owigar says.

Susan Oguya is also an Akirachick. She grew up on a farm in western Kenya without a computer. But she was lucky enough to have an uncle who worked in Nairobi.

When he came home for the holidays, he would haul his entire workstation in the car back with him — the monitor, the CPU, the keyboard, the mouse — and set it up in Oguya’s living room. Oguya was 15.

“So he’d bring it over, we’d use it, and then he would go back with it,” Oguya says. “So in the times when I didn’t have a computer, there were books that he left. Books about what is a computer, parts of a computer, what is a ROM, what is a RAM. It’s really basic.”

When she got to a university, she majored in IT. She had an idea for a mobile phone app that would help farmers like her parents.

One of the striking things about Kenya is that even impoverished farmers have cellphones. For decades, Kenya was too poor to lay copper telephone wire in the ground, so the vast majority of Kenyans use cellphones as their primary phone.

Now, all those Kenyan cellphone users are set to take advantage of an increasingly mobile world. Oguya’s app would allow farmers to check the crop prices with text messaging, skipping the middleman.

“Yeah, corrupt middleman,” Oguya says. “Let’s say skipping the corrupt middleman.”

But Oguya was one of only 10 women in her department of 80 — about the same ratio you’d find in a computer science class at Stanford. Her teachers doubted her ability to actually program this app she’d thought up.

“In my culture, it’s like men can only communicate with men. And I was like, ‘OK.’ Then if I could share this passion, like try and explain to the person, this is what I want to do? It’s only a woman who could understand me better,” Oguya says.

It wasn’t until her third year that she met a computer researcher at the same university, Jessica Colaco, who says she bumped into Oguya in the hallway. “I remember when I met her in the corridor, Susan was really shy. She was like, ‘Excuse me, are you Jessica Colaco?’ ” she says.

“So she invited me and was like, ‘Come meet other women who also have a passion like you, but they want to relate to other women who don’t know that this exists,’ ” Oguya says.

Oguya started spending some Saturday mornings with Colaco and other women, snipping code and poring through hacker cookbooks. These informal gatherings became the Akirachix.

Oguya graduated and turned her mobile phone idea into a company called M-Farm. At 25 years old, she now has a staff of 18. And 7,000 African farmers use her app.

Solving Local Problems

One floor up from Oguya’s office is a kind of oasis of geekdom — a gathering space for Nairobi’s tech community called the iHub. It feels like any sort of hacker space in Silicon Valley or New York, with comfy couches, fast Wi-Fi and cappuccinos served by a barista named Miss Rose.

But the techies you meet here aren’t trying to come up with the next Facebook or another app to share your photos. They’re solving local problems.

There’s one app that brings math and reading help by cellphone to village schools.

There’s an app that lets Kenyans who don’t have computers do their online shopping by cellphone.

There’s a micro-insurance product that measures the rainfall at cellphone towers and automatically distributes money to farmers in drought.

These are all applications started by women. Akirachix’s Owigar says they’re sending a message to the next wave of girl geeks. “We need them to see that we are doing it and we enjoy it. You know, you don’t find many African women looking for the spotlight. Most of them tend to hide their awesomeness,” Owigar says.

The best time to carve a spot for women in geek culture, she says, is when there isn’t much geek culture yet.

WRI: Why Businesses Must Focus on Climate Change Adaptation

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 20:41:22 -0500

WRI: Why Businesses Must Focus on Climate Change Adaptation :

climateadaptation:

Great read on corporations adapting to climate change by World Resources Institute. You’d be surprised by how many corporations are adapting - even big oil is adapting to climate change. Blame the media’s obsession with showing “the other side” of the debate. When 97% of climate scientists agree on something (a first) there is no other side to debate.

Now, businesses are finding they’ll also need to “adapt” to more volatile conditions and help vulnerable communities become more resilient. Adaptation means recognizing and preparing for impacts like water stress, coastal flooding, community health issues, or supply chain disruptions, among other issues.

WRI discussed why businesses need to embrace mitigation AND adaptation strategies at the recent Net Impact conference, where I sat on a panel entitled: “Climate Change Adaptation: Mitigating Risk and Building Resilience.” Dr. David Evans, Director of the Center for Sustainability at Noblis, moderated the panel. Other panelists included Gabriela Burian, Director for Sustainable Agriculture Ecosystems at Monsanto, and John Schulz, Director of Sustainability Operations at AT&T.

Why Adaptation Is So Important

Each panelist pointed to reasons why adapting to climate change is becoming increasingly important to their own companies. For example:

At AT&T, potential disruptions to IT networks pose real threats to the company and its customers. Drawing lessons from disasters like Hurricane Katrina, AT&T has started locating critical equipment on the 2nd floor of a building—rather than the ground floor—to avoid future floods.

At Monsanto, the focus is on meeting the future food needs of a growing global population. Global warming means new challenges for farmers, who must adjust to changing growing seasons and water availability.

Critical Issues for Corporate Climate Leaders

AT&T and Monsanto shared stories about their own experiences with climate change adaptation, but it’s important to note that this issue will increasingly impact all companies—from small, mom-and-pop shops to global corporations. Companies like Coca-Cola are publicly acknowledging climate risks as part of their financial reporting. More leadership is needed, as businesses start to look at their own climate risks as well as impacts on their customers and local communities.

In the course of the Q&A, the Net Impact session highlighted five important topics that corporate leaders will need to keep in mind:

Managing diverse climate change impacts across global operations: Companies that operate in multiple regions may face very different climate change impacts (for example, sea level rise, increasing temperatures, drought, or floods) in different locations. Corporate strategies must be developed locally and in partnership with departments across the organization’s various locations.

Finding and creating better decision-making tools: Companies will need information to help them factor potential climate risks into future investments and strategies. Experts in the audience and on the panel pointed to WRI tools like the Aqueduct global water risk maps and the forthcoming Sustainability SWOT (sSWOT) as examples of the type of resources needed to guide forward-looking, smart business decisions.

Recognizing underlying drivers of vulnerability: A changing climate is just one of several variables that contribute to business and community vulnerability. For example, population growth and mass consumption are two of the underlying drivers that came up in discussion as places to focus when seeking to increase community resiliency.

Taking a broad view of risks and opportunities by engaging stakeholders: A narrow view of climate impacts may unintentionally increase a company’s (or its customers’ or surrounding communities’) vulnerability to climate change. Looking just at the company’s own facilities along the coastline, for example, ignores risks in the supply chain. Similarly, the potential health impacts of climate change—like an increasing threat of water-borne disease—might not seem immediately relevant to some businesses, but it may impact employees or communities in future growth markets. Proactive stakeholder engagement is essential for identifying such risks, which for some companies, may also be opportunities to provide new solutions.

Reaching out to new partners: Effective strategies for adapting to climate change may in some cases be a source of competitive advantage (for example, in developing a new product or service). However, in other cases, adaptation measures can be pre-competitive, meaning that even bitter rivals (think Coca-Cola and Pepsi) could collaborate to create better information tools or share water resource management techniques.

Corporations Must Act Quickly

The list above is a partial one. Corporate action to adapt to climate change will certainly involve many more ideas and strategies—many of which are still being developed. More action is needed, and the important take-away from the discussion at the Net Impact conference is that action must start now.

kemiteko: ~ divine chocolate wrapper designed with adinkra...

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 23:58:35 -0400

kemiteko:

~ divine chocolate wrapper designed with adinkra symbols.

divine, the first ever fairtrade chocolate bar from the cocoa beans farmed by Kuapa Kokoo a cooperative of over 45,000 small scale farmers in Ghana, West Africa.

positive-press-daily: A small British company has developed a...

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 22:15:04 -0400

positive-press-daily:

A small British company has developed a way to create petrol from air and water, technology it hopes may one day contribute to large-scale production of green fuels.

Engineers at Air Fuel Synthesis (AFS) in Teeside, northern England, say they have produced 5 liters of synthetic petrol over a period of three months.

The technique involves extracting carbon dioxide from air and hydrogen from water, and combining them in a reactor with a catalyst to make methanol. The methanol is then converted into petrol.

By using renewable energy to power the process, it is possible to create carbon-neutral fuel that can be used in an identical way to standard petrol, scientists behind the technology say.

“It’s actually cleaner because it’s synthetic,” Peter Harrison, chief executive officer of AFS, said in an interview.

“You just make what you need to make in terms of the contents of it, so it doesn’t contain what might be seen as pollutants, like sulphur,” he said.

The work is part of a two-year project that has so far cost around 1 million pounds ($1.6 million).

The green petrol will not appear on forecourts any time soon, though.

“We can’t make (the petrol) at pump prices, but we will do eventually,” Harrison said. “All we need is renewable energy to make it, and so when oil becomes a problem we will be able to make a contribution to keep cars moving or to keep aeroplanes moving.”

AFS said it was confident the technology could be scaled up to refinery size in the future. Each of the processes that go into making the fuel already take place separately on an industrial scale.

For now, however, AFS plans to build a commercial plant in the next two years that will produce around 1,200 liters a day of specialist fuels for the motorsports sector, Harrison said.

positive-press-daily: First Solar finds love in India It’s...

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 14:25:32 -0400

positive-press-daily:

First Solar finds love in India

It’s been nearly two years since First Solar announced its first deal in India. The company has made good progress in this emerging market, and it announced another, 50MW deal Monday. What it really wants to do, though, is to develop projects in India.

(click-through for full story)

positive-press-daily: PICTURED ABOVE: Bosleav farmers in front...

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 18:29:41 -0400

positive-press-daily:

PICTURED ABOVE: Bosleav farmers in front of the commune’s first solar-powered water pump.

Cambodia: Water management goes solar

(click-through for full story)

positive-press-daily: Bamboo bikes hit the pavement in...

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 18:27:06 -0400

positive-press-daily:

Bamboo bikes hit the pavement in Ghana

In Ghana, a country burgeoning with traffic congestion, increasing economic growth, and a stark urban-rural divide, making frames of bicycles out of bamboo could be the key to promoting sustainable development. It also makes stronger, longer-lasting bikes.

This is according to Bernice Dapaah, the executive director of Bamboo Bikes Initiative, which trains young Ghanaians to build, fix, and market bamboo-framed bicycles.

“We are into women, children, and youth’s empowerment. And the project reduces carbon emissions and contributes to traffic decongestion, so using it is also a form of reducing climate change,” she said in an interview with IPS.

(click-through for full story)

positive-press-daily: VIDEO ABOVE: Professor David Carroll has...

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 18:26:44 -0400

positive-press-daily:

VIDEO ABOVE: Professor David Carroll has developed a fabric-like material that generates electricity. CNN’s Anna Coren reports.

Fabric turns body heat into electricity

Researchers have developed a way to turn body heat into electricity meaning your mobile will never go dead again. Power Felt can keep your phone going for up to 20 per cent longer just through the power of touch. Mobile users can even sit on their phones to make the ‘connection’ - passing electricity through their own body to the device.

The technology has been created by Professor David Carroll of Wakeforest University’s Centre for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials in the US.

He said that it could be the first wave of inexpensive ways to produce electricity that were far more affordable than current renewables such as solar, which was being held back by the high cost. Power Felt is also extremely versatile and could provide emergency electricity for a radio or a torch meaning it would be vital during power outages.

Professor Carroll said he began his experiments after finding there was no naturally occurring material which was able to conduct electricity in the way he wanted that was affordable and flexible.

Instead he and his team used nanotechnology to put tiny carbon nanotubes into miniscule plastic fibres and made them look like a fabric. Explaining the mechanism worked, Professor Carroll said, “If you grab one end of a bar of metal, the electrons that heat your hand become warm. As they warm, they seek out the cold spots, which would be the other end of the bar. So (the electrons go) rushing down to the other end of the bar. So I have an excess of electrons on one side, and a depletion of excess electrons underneath my hands, so I have a voltage between the two which is called the thermal voltage. And that’s what Power Felt generates.”

Even if there is no big temperature difference Power Felt can still pick up power from noises such as the vibration of the car, he added.

So far he has already made a shirt that charges batteries, but the first way the technology could be used is toys. Sports clothing could also have a range of gadgets to monitor a person’s performance built into it, all powered by the individual’s own electric charge. Professor Carroll told News Observer, “Kids absolutely love this stuff because you can put it all places and get power.

“You run little motors and stuff. … You can make little toys run. You can make little cars run around from a pad. Those are the fun things, because kids begin to imagine really wild places to start using this. … they’re interested in how it works, but they’re more interested in what can they do with it. It seems to be a property of children: ‘Can I put it here, or can I make it do that?’ They kind of want to fiddle with it, and that’s great. There’s loads and loads of science behind this, but that’s not the fun part of Power Felt. The fun part of Power Felt is playing with it.”

positive-press-daily: World’s biggest offshore windfarm...

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 18:23:19 -0400

positive-press-daily:

World’s biggest offshore windfarm planned off Scottish coast

The world’s biggest offshore windfarm could be built off the northern Scottish coast, after a scheme with enough capacity to power 40% of Scottish households was submitted for planning permission.

The £4.5bn complex would have 339 turbines covering 300 square kilometres off Caithness, making it 50% bigger than the giant London Array scheme off Kent. It is expected to be the first in a series of deep water schemes under “Round 3” licensing. The renewable industry has hailed it as a watershed moment but warned these new deep water farms might only be fully realised if the government provides policy stability by pushing through its proposed Energy Bill.

The 1.5-gigawatt farm is being developed by Moray Offshore Renewables, a joint venture between Spanish oil company Repsol, and an arm of Portuguese power group EDP, which has recently become partly owned by China’s state-owned Three Gorges Corporation. It has already attracted controversy because it is opposed by American billionaire Donald Trump, who says the 200-metre-high turbines will spoil the view from his planned new golf course. Dan Finch, project director for the scheme due to come on stream in 2018, said working more than 12 miles from shore allowed it to take advantage of the excellent wind resource in the outer Moray Firth.

“We estimate that the project will be capable of supplying the electricity needs of 800,000 to 1m households … Each year this development could save between 3.5m and 4.5m tonnes of carbon dioxide compared with coal fired generation, and between 1.5m and 2m tonnes of carbon dioxide compared with gas fired generation,” he said.

The industry body, RenewableUK, said a further 4.5 gigawatts of offshore wind schemes should follow into the planning process this year with a total of 18 gigawatts expected to become operational over the next eight years. But Maria McCaffery, RenewableUK’s chief executive, emphasised that this progress could only be achieved if the policy certainty laid out in the upcoming Energy Bill was achieved.

“We’re marking a watershed moment as Round Three starts to become a reality with this planning application. It’s the first of many coming forward. As well as delivering secure supplies of low carbon electricity to British homes and businesses, our global leadership role in offshore wind can provide tens of thousands of jobs across the country, building and maintaining these turbines.”

The Moray Firth wind farm, which will be given significant subsidies, compares with the 1-gigawatt at the London Array, which is currently in the construction phase, and compares with the largest British coal-fired plant, Drax in northern Yorkshire of 4 gigawatts, and the planned new EDF nuclear reactors at Hinkley Point in Somerset with a combined output of 3.2 gigawatts and a bill of at least £10bn.

China Three Gorges Corporation acquired a 21% holding from the cash-strapped Portuguese government in Energias de Portugal, EDP, for €2.69bn (£2.13bn). The Beijing-based energy company was responsible for construction of the also controversial Three Gorges Dam-project, the world largest hydroelectric power plant, that went into operation in 2008.

positive-press-daily: Switzerland’s solar-powered Islas office...

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 21:58:52 -0400

positive-press-daily:

Switzerland’s solar-powered Islas office is an energy-storing battery building

The Islas Commercial Office Building in Samedan, Switzerland hides a secret inside - it’s actually an energy storage facility. Like a battery that stores electricity, Islas stores energy in the form of heat. Designed by Mierta & Kurt Lazzarini Architekten, the office makes use of concrete floors, underground water tanks and a large solar system on the roof to soak up the sun’s energy and store it inside for later use.

The Islas Office Building is located in Samedan between the Inn River and Kantonal Road. Mierta & Kurt Lazzarini Architekten took inspiration for the building’s facade from the nearby riverbed and the stepped hillsides in the distance.

The wavy rusty iron sheet and the glass facade reflect the surroundings and the ever-changing light. The four-story structure includes a central atrium and circulation core for each of the four businesses within: migrolino-store, a dental surgery, a beauty clinic and an architecture office.

A clever energy-saving system is integrated throughout the entire building, and intelligent controls manage all the equipment. On the roof, a large solar photovoltaic system soaks up the sun’s energy, which is stored in water tanks under the building. Similarly, each level features concrete floors, which absorb the sun’s heat during the day and transfer that heat to the interior of the building for use later in the night.

Also, rejected heat from the migrolino store’s refrigerator system is moved throughout the building for heating elsewhere. Thanks to these systems, very little additional heating is needed during the cooler months.

discoverynews: Giant Marble Harvests Energy from Sun and Moon...

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 10:03:36 -0400

discoverynews:

Giant Marble Harvests Energy from Sun and Moon

It looks like a giant, glass marble. But this globe is no game. It’s a sun-tracking, solar energy concentrator.

This sun-tracking glass globe is able to concentrate sunlight and moonlight up to 10,000 times and that the system is 35 percent more efficient than traditional photovoltaic designs that track the sun.

cool…

positive-press-daily: Electric car breaks 500 mile barrier The...

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 09:23:35 -0400

positive-press-daily:

Electric car breaks 500 mile barrier

The arguments against an electric car are growing fewer. A vehicle in development by ECOmove – a consortium of Danish car builders – has unveiled a car that can travel 500 miles without refueling. Once a sticking point for electric vehicles, distance could be ticked off the list of grievances the driving populace has with electrics. Fuel prices have moved drivers to turn to hybrid and clean diesel but advances in electric technology could signal the rise of electrics as a space for entrepreneurs and established companies alike.

ECOmove’s car, the QBEAK, can reach 75 miles and hour, uses electric motors and a fuel cell that converts a bio-methanol and water mixtur into electricity, which charges the battery.

(click-through for full story)

positive-press-daily: The world’s eight largest development...

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 14:45:22 -0400

positive-press-daily:

The world’s eight largest development banks said on Wednesday they will invest $175 billion over 10 years to support low-emission transportation programs, such as car sharing or rapid bus systems, in Asia, Latin America and Africa, whose cities are bracing for population growth of 1 billion people over next two decades.

The Asian Development Bank, World Bank and six other multilateral banks announced the $175 billion commitment of loans and grant at the U.N. Sustainable Development Conference in Rio de Janeiro (Rio+20), where they called for sustainable transportation to be set as a priority in the U.N.’s development agenda.

The banks said they are making the financial commitment at a critical time for the transportation sector, as cities in Africa and Asia are expected to add hundreds of millions of people to their populations.

The pace of urban growth will require new transportation systems to help these cities prevent patters of urban sprawl and congestion, according to the Partnership on Sustainable Low Carbon Transport (SLoCaT), a partnership including UN-organizations, the development banks and other development organizations.

“The breakthrough that we are witnessing allows us to plan for the one billion people who will move to cities over the next 20 years and the one billion people still living in poverty,” says Cornie Huizenga, an organizer SLoCaT’s Rio+20 campaign.

In a joint statement released on Wednesday, the development banks said that with more people driving in developing countries as incomes rise, a lack of efficient transportation in some rapidly growing cities has caused major congestion, which has resulted in lost time and higher transport costs that range from 2 to 5 percent of GDP.

The banks also said that if current trends continue, the transportation sector will become the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, accounting for 46 percent of global emissions by 2035.

“These unprecedented commitments have the promise to save hundreds of thousands of lives by cleaning the air and making roads safer; cutting congestion in hundreds of cities; and reducing the contribution of transportation to harmful climate change,” said Joan Clos, executive director of U.N.-HABITAT, a U.N. agency focused on urban development.

The development banks estimated that between 2010 and 2020, developing countries in Asia will need more than $2.5 trillion in transportation investment, while Latin America will require $0.7 trillion.

In Africa, transport investment requirements of $18.3 billion annually will be needed for the period up to 2020, the development banks said

positive-press-daily: Enel Green Power, Italy’s biggest...

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 14:43:51 -0400

positive-press-daily:

Enel Green Power, Italy’s biggest renewable energy company, has started production at four new solar power plants in Greece to take its installed capacity in the country to 245 megawatts.

EGP also said on Tuesday that ESSE, a joint venture with Japanese group Sharp, has started production of two solar plants in Greece with a capacity of 2 MW.

EGP, controlled by Europe’s No. 2 utility Enel, is focused on countries that have clear regulatory frameworks and plentiful renewable resources such as solar and wind power.

“Positive signs for a recovery in competitivity and growth are coming from the country … despite the difficulties Greece has respected all its remuneration commitments on renewable plants,” an EGP spokesman told Reuters.

Greek political parties meeting on Tuesday said they expected to form a coalition government soon and then seek concessions to the painful austerity measures tied to the international bailout deal keeping the country from bankruptcy.

Shrinking power demand, bad debts and poor regulation has created a 350 million euro hole in the finances of Greece’s energy system, which depends on imported electricity and gas.

EGP’s new Greek plants, which have an installed capacity of 17.4 megawatts, are all in the Peloponnesian region where it also has wind and hydro capacity.

EGP shares were up 2.2 percent at 1130 GMT, compated with a 0.2 percent higher European utility index.

urbanrelationsinfo: “The American Dream: Phase II “Sprawl …...

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 14:34:36 -0400

urbanrelationsinfo:

“The American Dream: Phase II

“Sprawl … It’s the American dream unfolding before your eyes.”

That’s L. Brooks Patterson’s irresistible description of sprawl, proving yet again how masterful the stalwarts of the status quo are at messaging that which they hope to preserve in amber.

In a speech to his constituents earlier this year, Patterson, the county executive of Oakland County, Mich., continued to wax poetic on the topic: “I love sprawl. I need it. I promote it. Oakland County can’t get enough of it. Are you getting the picture? Sprawl is not evil. In fact, it is good … [it] is new jobs, new hope and the fulfillment of lifelong dreams.”

Patterson’s rousing stump speech for sprawl is emblematic of how we as a culture are far too invested in a vision of the American dream that doesn’t make sense in the 21st century. Over the past 30 years we’ve stripped away the supporting mechanisms of sprawl but have continued to create it.

We’ve built more houses than we’ve needed — and built them farther away from jobs. This has led to longer commutes, which has created more traffic. In response, we built more highways, increasing fuel consumption and, as transportation planners acknowledge, doing little if anything to reduce traffic. It’s a vicious, seemingly endless cycle, and at its core is the notion that the American dream can exist only within the framework of the single-family home on a large lot.

Indeed, we’ve become so fixated on this as the sole delivery mechanism of that American dream that we’ve spent a disproportionate amount of our collective energies (home-) improving it without considering meaningful alternative visions — or devoting at least a smidgen of attention to what’s outside the front door or down the block. Everything in our culture today reinforces this idea of home as castle (or fortress) rather than home as part of a larger whole (i.e., neighborhood). We need to find our way to the latter view, and part of that means finding a better way to talk about it.

The good news is that more and more people are.

It’s true that for years, homebuilders and home-sellers were touting Patterson’s sprawl-friendly sales pitch. If you were to walk into the sales center of any subdivision or master-planned community, from Modesto, Calif., to Tampa, Fla., the first question you’d be asked was, “How much square footage are you looking for?” Not “What kind of community would you like to be a part of?”

But increasingly, many of those looking for places to live found that the market had nothing for them. Houses were too big, too isolated, too generic, too hard to maintain. Or they were designed for the quintessential nuclear family that exists more in our cultural imagination than in reality. Few homes offered options for aging in place, for returning college kids or elderly parents, or even decent home office space. Would-be residents lamented the lack of amenities like a café or a playground within walking distance in master-planned communities of 5,000, 10,000 or even 40,000 homes (!), an absence often explained away with “a community of this size couldn’t support it.” For years, I heard from builders and developers who said they knew there was a market for smaller, more sustainable properties — they just couldn’t get such projects to pencil out.

Now, it seems those pencils have been sharpened.

“The giants of the building industry, the creators for decades of massive communities of cookie-cutter homes, cul-de-sacs and McMansions in far-flung suburbs” are doing an about-face, suddenly building smaller neighborhoods in and close to cities, noted an article in USA Today last month.

The market slowdown, the article went on to explain, “has given builders time to assess sweeping demographic changes that are transforming the way Americans want to live.”

In short, builders are recognizing that buyers (and renters, too!) value the neighborhood as much as — if not more than — the house. And what they want from that neighborhood might not be McMansions and four-car garages after all. Resale value may not in fact trump all else. Young and old, whether they’re in the city or the suburbs, want to walk to places like restaurants and shops. (And let’s stop talking about the integration of things like cafes, public transit and bike racks as “urbanizing” an area, which only reinforces the divide between two entities that are divided enough already.)

People have begun to wake up to the fact that the more time spent in the car means poorer health and less time with their families — and they’re seeking shorter commutes. They’re interested in smaller homes that are easier to maintain (and less expensive to heat and cool). Young millennials and older baby boomers are also showing less and less interest in car ownership and a corresponding greater interest in public transit, walking and biking. And again, it’s likely that we’re all less interested in continuing to discuss “urban” and “suburban” as dueling polar opposites — and more interested in recognizing there’s mutual benefit to some overlap.

The aforementioned changes point to the fact that a paradigmatic shift in our concept of the American dream is underway. And this shift is not just because of the recession, says Gregory Vilkin, managing principal and president of MacFarlane Partners, quoted in that USA Today piece, “It’s no longer the American dream to own a plot of land with a house on it and two cars in the driveway.”

Via: NYTimes

New Printable Cling-Film Solar Cells are Cheap and Easy to Produce.

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 15:29:24 -0400

New Printable Cling-Film Solar Cells are Cheap and Easy to Produce.:

offtherockerbnj:

konterkariert: Solar Roadways

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 15:26:23 -0400

konterkariert:

Solar Roadways