Given the state of the economy you’d think they’d be pinching every penny but it appears that the State of Arizona has money to burn – perhaps literally.  Last week the House voted in favor of a bill that would use old tires to fill abandoned mines.  The bill’s supporters cite the growing problem of used tire dumps, but apparently they don’t keep up with the latest business news.  Magnum D’Or and InfoSpi are just two of the rapidly growing number of companies that see the potential for recycling those tire dumps into real money – and creating more green jobs to boot.

Squandering an opportunity to make money is bad enough, but the Arizona bill does something much worse.  Tires burn, right?  Doesn’t everybody know that?   Tire fires are hard enough to put out when they’re in open dumps.  The idea of stuffing millions of tires into abandoned mines sounds a little less than common sensical… that is, if you know anything about underground mine fires…

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At the Wall Street Journal’s recent ECO:nomics conference, the “only CEO-level event focused on the relationship between the environment and the bottom line,” the CEOs of some major energy companies expressed their impatience at the US’ slow and unclear movement to take action on climate change and clean energy.

Royal Dutch Shell chief executive Peter Voser said that the industry needs “certainty on the carbon price, certainty on legislation.” Shell is a member of the US Climate Action Partnership.

American Electric Power chairman Michael Morris, regarding climate change and clean energy legislation, said, “We need this done. America needs to lead the world [in clean technologies].”

And FPL Group chief executive Lew Hay reiterated, “We need some certainty about the economics.”

These top CEOs are getting impatient, and there is no question why. The bottom line is, if the US is going to lead the global economy (or even be a significant player in it), it needs to get cracking on clean energy legislation.

In a similar manner, the question the Center for American Progress (CAP) recently decided to pose is this: “Is the US already out of the clean energy race?”. They have just released a report on this topic.

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A Florida Power and Light hybrid of solar and gas at the Martin Next Generation Solar Energy Center in Florida could provide a road map for helping shepherd utility-scale solar past regulatory roadblocks. Perhaps by combining solar with fossil energy plants (that are always somehow on the fast-track ) we can finally ease utility-scale solar into the marketplace.

At the hybrid gas/solar plant in Martin, a relatively modest 70 MW heliostat solar thermal power plant – but which is nevertheless second in size only to its much larger US heliostat solar thermal prototype that totals 354 MW – SEGS, that has operated since the ’80’s in California’s Mojave – is to be grafted onto an existing natural gas plant; one that is itself the largest in the US.

The capacity of the natural gas plant has been gradually built up over the years. It comprises three 800 MW steam-generating units, two 450 MW combined-cycle units and two 160 MW combustion turbine peaking units, and now totals 3,800 MW.

However, the solar portion is large enough so that because of the size of each source, this pilot project will definitively answer the question: “But is this doable at full-scale?” Small solar projects already sometimes use a small gas turbine for cloudy days backup, but this is a first at this scale.

Larger  similar heliostat-based solar thermal projects Brightsource (440 MW) Solar Reserve (150 MW) and Abengoa (250 MW) are currently bogged down in the regulatory review pipeline in California. The difference?  Theirs are not married to natural gas plants.

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China is reportedly planning to produce 15% of its electricity from low-carbon technology by 2020, and to reduce it’s carbon intensity by 40-45% from the 2005 level.

Zhang Guobao, head of the National Energy Administration, told the government-owned newspaper China Daily this last week that a national program consisting of billions of dollars of investment in wind, solar and nuclear power would be launched sometime soon.

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A team of researchers at Yale University has developed a new kind of magnetic, lead free solder that could be used to manufacture electronics more cheaply and efficiently.  That would be a big boost for efforts to manage the growing problem of electronic waste disposal and recycling, because conventional solder is made from lead, a known health hazard.

Lead is a heavy metal that was commonly used in house paint and gasoline in the U.S.  Those uses were banned after the discovery that lead is a potent neurotoxin, but lead solder continues to be permitted in U.S. manufacturing.  That creates a huge problem in the electronic waste stream, and it also impedes U.S. companies from entering global markets where anti-lead regulations are growing.

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Sea level rise creates new business opportunity and “green jobs” that we’ll see more of, borne from the effects of climate change, as sea levels rise. The first floating island has just been commissioned this week by the sinking island nation of the Maldives, from Dutch Docklands, whose past work includes part of  the artificial islands comprising The World off the coast of Dubai.

Humanity is faced with possibly its worst problem in all of its history, in climate change. It takes political imagination to make the changes needed to turn around the disaster bearing down on us. Half of us have an IQ under 100, so making this change and convincing all of us that we can do it (by switching to renewable energy sources) will be very much harder than just inventing fire was (perhaps our last comparable climate change challenge).

Perhaps we can’t save ourselves, and adaptation may be our only chance. Dutch Docklands is predicated on solving one result of this failure; rising sea levels – by inventing and engineering floating islands. Like inventing imitation glaciers, it’s an example of the kind of lateral thinking that we’ll need more of.

The company specializes in solutions for places where sea levels are rising, land is sinking or where sand shortages make traditional erosion control reclamation prohibitively expensive. (more…)

Republicans are supposed to be more of the “let the market take care of things” people. However, when it comes to an issue they don’t want to address at all, some of them are apparently even willing to make an attack on the financial market.

A key to a well-functioning market is the availability and sharing of information. It is one of the most basic and important assumptions behind market-driven policies.

Due to the impending (and already beginning) effects of climate change on our world, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently decided that companies “must consider the effects of global warming and efforts to curb climate change when disclosing business risks to investors.”

However, at least one Republican in Congress is going out of his way (..well, has written a two-sentence bill) to try to stop this from happening.

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A bus powered with solar energy. That gets my blood moving!

SunPods Inc., a California-based manufacturer of modular, fully integrated and tested solar power generation systems, and Bauer Intelligent Transportation, a leading provider of chauffeured green transportation, recently teamed up to create what they say is the “first solar power-assist system for buses.”

And the system was developed in less than six weeks!

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On Friday, Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced $600 million in awards for 191 transit projects across the nation. The transit projects are aimed at transforming the nation’s infrastructure and creating thousands of jobs.

With this announcement, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) met its ambitious deadline of awarding 100% of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funding for transit by March 5, 2010.

In total, since the ARRA was announced by Obama in February, 2009, the FTA has awarded 881 grants totaling $7.5 billion.

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…And this little piggy is facing an $11 million fine for inflicting “relentless and extreme” clouds of pig manure odor upon several families near a gigantic factory farm in Berlin, Missouri.  The award, which was announced on March 5, was decided by a jury against industrial hog producer Premium Standard Farms, Inc.  The company processes about 200,000 hogs per year, generating 83 million gallons of manure and liquid waste yearly for the past eleven years.  That stuff all goes into lake-sized lagoons and ends up spread over the company’s 4,300 acre compound, with predictable results.

If only Premium Standard had invested in a few biogas digesters! Digesters convert raw manure into reusable methane gas and fertilizer.  The dairy industry is starting to convert to sustainable digester-based manure management through programs like Vermont’s Cow Power, and the U.S. EPA is encouraging the entire agricultural sector to make the switch through its  AgSTAR biogas program.  So what was holding Premium back?

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