Green Options

If the trend of extinguishing coal-fired plants continues, more and more mines will be shut down, not to mention mines that simply up and quit. But what is to be done with the abandoned mines? It isn’t as though we can just dispose of them at some hi-tech facility. These mines will become useless scars.

There is enough energy stored beneath the earth’s surface to power all of our energy demands thousands of times over. The problem is, it’s thousands of feet beneath us. Out of sight. Out of mind. But what if we could get to it? What if we could harvest that power?

In the heart of Tuscany the city of Grosseto has recently presented an important eco-building project, the first in Italy that will allow residents to forget completely house bills.

North Carolina church goes green and holds to their traditions of cherishing the Earth. How’d they do it?

Harnessing the Earth’s Heat for Food and Power

As the rumbling temblors beneath Yellowstone National Park continue (over 900 hundred such weak quakes in 2008), media attention shifts to two topics: the possibility of a super-volcanic eruption (not likely, according to most geologists), and secondly, the harnessing of geothermal energy.

This latter consideration is all the more fashionable these days as America struggles to embrace an alternative and sustainable energy future.

Geothermal energy offers the promise of a virtually unlimited source of power. Although less energetic in terms  of total constant power output compared to the sun, harnessing the geothermal venting from a single, sufficiently high-grade, hot-spring could conceivably provide power for a population of tens of thousands, and it’s not weather dependent.  But there are also plenty of “lower grade” springs that can be put to other uses, such as growing hothouse produce (and the spring water is also used for watering the plants) and  naturally warming water for fish farming (the Talipia species, a popular dinner fish, is one species farmed this way). Not all animals that are farmed this way are used for food, some, like the farmed alligators in Mosca, CO (see photo), are raised for their skins primarily (though some do eat the meat).

Battered by the fluctuating oil prices Nicaragua seeks to tap its renewable energy sources to build a reliable energy sector and reduce its dependence on oil-based energy to merely 3 percent.

By Lester R. Brown

At a time when major U.S. companies are announcing job layoffs almost daily, the renewable energy industry is hiring new workers every day to build wind farms, install rooftop solar arrays, and build solar thermal and geothermal power plants. The output of industrial firms that manufacture the equipment for these energy facilities is expanding by well over 30 percent a year. These investments both create jobs and help prevent climate change from spiraling out of control.

Among the several sources of renewable energy, wind looms large. The United States has 24,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity already online (think 24 coal-fired power plants), and 83 wind farms with some 8,000 megawatts of capacity are under construction. Beyond this, a staggering 225,000 megawatts of planned wind farms are waiting for access to transmission lines.

Currently, the United States has 40 plants manufacturing wind power components. Eight of these plants are assembling wind turbines, 20 are fabricating wind towers, and 12 are making blades. In addition, many more manufacturing facilities are under construction, recently announced, and in planning. Every billion dollars invested in wind farms creates some 3,350 jobs—nearly four times the 870 jobs created with a similar investment in coal-fired power plants. (See data.)

The Icelandic singer used her spot at a climate change conference in Brussels to give an impassioned speech warning about the risks of allowing the economic crisis to override environmental regulation.

Raser Technologies announced this week that it has completed construction of a plant on top of one of the United States’ largest geothermal hotbeds to be discovered in over 25 years—so large that Raser believes it could power one third of all homes in Utah.

The lands that will be opened are in Alaska and 11 western states. It is believed that the geothermal energy in time could provide electricity to 5.5 million homes.

Despite its recent foray into sustainable practices, the United States Army isn’t known as an environmental leader. Now the Army is trying to prove its greenness with the world’s strongest solar array. Yesterday, the Army announced that it plans to construct a 500 MW solar thermal plant in the Mojave Desert at Fort Irwin. Currently, the United States’ largest solar array is a 15 MW plant at Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas.