The rapidly growing wine industry in the Finger Lakes Region of New York has been attracting a good deal of attention for the quality of its wines. One winery is looking to make a name for itself both for its wines and its commitment to the environment.

Red Tail Ridge Winery, in Penn Yan, N.Y., will break ground this spring on a new wine making building designed to meet the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED standards. It would be the first New York winery building to earn LEED certification, according to a search of the USGBC’s online LEED project database. Husband and wife owners Mike Schnelle and Nancy Irelan opened Red Tail Ridge after moving to the region from California, where Ireland worked for Gallo wineries. Their tasting room opened in August 2007.

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New legislation in Germany is making geothermal electricity a viable option for the first time. Germany’s support of solar energy, mostly in the form of incentives and high return for consumers who sell excess solar power back to the grid, has made it a world powerhouse in solar energy generation and solar panel manufacturing. Now it promises to surge ahead in geothermal electricity generation, according to a story in Renewable Energy World. A new tariff structure has made deep drilling for higher temperature steam financially feasible, causing a boom in plant construction and a shortage of drilling equipment.

“… Germany could be generating several thousands of megawatts (MW) of electricity from geothermal sources in a couple of decades. More plants — some as big as 8-10 MW — are due to go into operation in 2009-2010 …. And looking 3 to 5 years ahead, there could be more than a hundred plants. About 150 geothermal power plant projects are in the pipeline representing an investment of 4 billion euros, according to the German government.” — Jane Burgermeister, Renewable Energy World

1,300 households get heat, and 500 households get their electricity from a geothermal plant in Neustadt-Glewe, which gets 97-degree centigrade water from a well dug 2250 meters deep.  Image credit: Exorka.com