GreenGab

Now this is cool stuff: I just read on Engadget that there’s an effort underway to get the town of Seville completely powered by a single solar tower.  This is how we need to get people thinking all the time.  There’s a lot of construction going on around San Francisco these days, and I can’t help but think how different things would be if the government put the right carrots and sticks in place.  Carrots helping builders and property owners who reduce their power intake/needs.  Sticks penalizing new construction that is a resource hog.

Any elected officials reading this?  I do vote nowadays, and I’m sure there’s a lot more people out there who’d like to see you paying more attention to projects like these, and using a few less of my tax dollars to figure out if baseball players are cheating or not…

In my eyes Solar power is one of those “obvious” things that I can’t believe humanity hasn’t done a better job with.  Humans seem to like sunlight.  We seem to have evolved such that we are supposed to spend less time in caves and underground, more time in the outdoors (although a little UV blocking is probably a good thing too).  One might even posit that we were meant to take advantage of the sun.  It is out there, you know, always…

But solar power, until extremely recently, was unbelievably inefficient.  The first few dozen years of innovation got less than 10% of the power absorbed by the cells actually stored and usable.  The first generation of nano-tech solar cells bumped that number to about 12%, but they are still primarily in labs.  According to CNET, some Australian researchers are now able to get 13-15% efficiency.  It’s better than nothing, but I sure hope we’re only at the tip of the iceberg to improving the market for solar power.

Hopefully this’ll soon make its way up to the great solar fields in Canada!

The Wall St Journal today featured an opinion piece by Holman W. Jenkins Jr taking a double shot at legislators trying to improve fuel efficiency standards and the US auto industry. His argument is that the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standard is being revamped this year is not because it is the most efficient technical or market solution to carbon emmissions, but because it is –as he puts it– a “political path to a purely political goal” and “the auto industry is the softest target politicians can find.” I think he has a point. We would be better served by policies that promote technical innovation and entrepreneurship, then let the free markets run with it.

GM’s vice-chairman Bob Lutz seems to agree in some backwards way, saying, “Toyota is miraculous and GM is run by a bunch of aging stumblebums who wouldn’t know technology if it hit ‘em in the face.”

However, Jenkins does offer one argument in defense of the auto industry, quoting an academic study that suggests while emmissions technology has improved, Americans have offset the advancements by getting fatter:

Americans are now pumping 938 million gallons of fuel more annually than they were in 1960 as a result of extra weight in vehicles. And when gas prices average $3 a gallon, the tab for overweight people in a vehicle amounts to $7.7 million a day, or $2.8 billion a year.

The free market might suggest a gym membership and the South Beach diet as an attainable way for individuals to contribute in the fight against global warming and stop pushing their congressmen towards poorly designed policies. In the end, though, I guess it’s not as politically efficient and the effort would have to find a replacement for Al Gore as spokesman…

DOE Secretary Bodman is developing quite an ethanol fetish, committing an additional $200m today to fund small-scale cellulosic plants in the US, bringing 2007 ethanol committments up to $585m.

In more serious news, a Wisconsin fetish club owner is being harrassed for her involvement in a local anti-ethanol effort.