With a smart
grid system, your house can talk back to you and the power station
(Source: Jdorwin at Wikimedia Commons)
The government is spending billions of taxpayer dollars on a new “smart grid.” Mark Brush reports the new grid could eventually save you money on your energy bills:
Transcript
The government is spending billions of taxpayer dollars on a new “smart grid.” Mark Brush reports the new grid could eventually save you money on your energy bills:
Right now – power just goes from point A to point B.
But with a smart
grid system, your house can talk back to you and the power station.
The
meter could tell you how much it costs to heat your water, for instance.
And the power company will be able to talk to you if they’re having a
problem.
So, if they’re headed for a blackout, they can text message you
or e-mail you and ask you to shut off your A/C.
Jesse Berst is the founding editor of Smart Grid News dot com. It’s a trade publication.
He says, if electric grids are updated across the country, it would cut
down on pollution and save money.
“And that means there’s billions, tens of billions of dollars of power
plants and lines that we wouldn’t have to build over the next couple of
decades.”
Upgrading the system won’t be easy.
Each state has regulatory agencies that oversee thousands of electric
suppliers.
Will Allen, founder and CEO of Growing Power, Inc. (Photo courtesy of the MacArthur Fellows Program)
Experts say there’s plenty of food around the world, but nearly a billion people go hungry because of poverty, politics and rising prices. One man is working to change that by teaching people how to grow healthy food, in any climate, anywhere. Erin Toner has more:
Transcript
Experts say there’s plenty of food around the world, but nearly a billion people go hungry because of poverty, politics and rising prices. One man is working to change that by teaching people how to grow healthy food, in any climate, anywhere. Erin Toner has more:
There’s one farm in the whole city of Milwaukee, and it’s
not much to look at.
In the front, there’s a small farm stand and some grungy old
greenhouses. Out back, you’ll find turkeys, chickens and
goats – and all over the place, big piles of compost are
steaming in the cool morning air.
Will Allen runs this inner-city, non-profit farm, called
Growing Power.
We walk into a greenhouse that’s heated by compost, and
Allen pulls back a long sheet of plastic.
“I just opened up a bed and you see this beautiful
spinach growing here, and it’s Wisconsin,” Allen says.
This 59-year-old is a big guy.
He’s 6-foot-7, and ripped from his days playing pro
basketball.
Allen started Growing Power 15 years ago.
It’s a measly two acres, but it’s incredibly productive.
The staff makes compost to heat the buildings, they use
raised plant beds to maximize space, and they grow greens
and raise fish using the same water.
The farm sells a ton of food to restaurants and grocery
stores. It also gives food to local pantries, and sells fruits
and vegetables to neighborhood families at reduced prices.
“We have minorities that are eating processed foods
and getting diabetes and people aren’t living very long
because of you know the negative effects of poor eating
and poor lifestyle and so forth. So we’ve got to change
that,” Allen says.
Allen travels all over the world showing people how to
make what he’s done in Milwaukee work in other places.
The farm’s also become a training ground for local school
kids, interns and backyard farmers.
Last fall, Allen won a half-million-dollar “genius” grant
from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
He also gets invited to conferences by former presidents.
So, he’s become a sort of urban farming celebrity.
But you wouldn’t know it.
Allen says he still gets his hands in the dirt every day in
Milwaukee, and he’s always looking for ways to help
people who live here.
Growing Power’s newest project is with Rockwell
Automation, an industrial parts company in Milwaukee.
Every day, 1000 employees eat in the company’s cafeteria,
and that produces a lot of food waste.
Growing Power’s started hauling it away for free.
We’ve arrived at the loading dock of Rockwell Automation
and there’s lots of stuff in here that actually looks like its
still pretty good. There’s a couple buckets full of celery and
onions and a big trash bag full of lettuce.
When we get back to the farm, co-director Jay Salinas
starts unloading the Rockwell scraps.
“Of course a large part of it is compost, but there’s
always something in here that we can feed to the
animals, especially the chickens,” Salinas says.
Growing Power founder Will Allen says his passion for
food comes from his parents.
They made a meager living as sharecroppers near
Washington D.C.
“We fed people – our family and extended family – and
we sold food. So what I’m doing today, when people say
so how do you feel about this McArthur thing you won,
or this Ford Foundation thing or whatever you got, it’s
really my parents. They should be the recipients of
those,” Allen says.
He says it’s really getting back to the way things used to
be, when people ate healthy food that was grown or raised
in their own community.
A 42-inch flatscreen TV can use as much energy as a refrigerator. (Photo by Sol Grundy, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
College basketball’s big Final Four tournament is approaching, and television sales will no doubt spike, as they do with most major sporting events. These days, almost every TV sold is a flat panel. And, as Tamara Keith reports, most use more energy than the old cathode ray tube TVs:
Transcript
College basketball’s big Final Four tournament is approaching, and television sales will no doubt spike, as they do with most major sporting events.
These days, almost every TV sold is a flat panel. And, as Tamara Keith reports, most use more energy than the old cathode ray tube TVs:
Talking to Arshad Mansoor can leave a person feeling guilty. He’s vice president of the Electric Power Research Institute. It’s a non-profit study group.
Mansoor’s organization studies how much power different electronic devices use. Those flat screen TV’s everyone is buying– they’re at the top of his hit list.
“As we started bringing in flat screen, and as flat screen prices started coming down, television is one of the largest growth segments in terms of electricity use.”
And get this– a 42-inch flat screen TV can use as much electricity as a refrigerator. Talking to Mansoor got me thinking about my own power use. So, I asked him a hypothetical question that, let’s say, isn’t nearly as hypothetical as it sounds.
“So if I go through my house and replace every light bulb with a compact fluorescent and then I go buy a flat screen TV?”
“You almost wiped out all your savings with one plasma TV and one set-top box that you gained with replacing all your light bulbs with compact florescent.”
So, I guess I’m not as green as I thought! Part of the issue, he says, is that people don’t replace their 25-inch TV’s with 25-inch flat screens. They go bigger. But Mansoor isn’t saying that environmentally minded consumers should steer clear of flat panel TVs. He’s just saying they should shop smart.
For instance, LCD models use less energy than plasmas. Doug Johnson is senior director of technology policy for the Consumer Electronics Association. He insists not all flat screen TVs are energy hogs:
“The key thing really is how efficient are those new televisions and what we have in place now and what we’ve had in place since November 1st of last year is a new energy star specification at the national level that is encouraging a competition in the marketplace for energy efficient televisions.”
New energy star TVs are up to 30-percent more efficient than the last generation of energy stars. And there are now nearly 500 models on the market that meet the standard.
Katherine Kaplan leads Energy Star product development for the US Environmental Protection Agency. She says in the past the program only looked at how much power a TV used when it was turned off.
“Really, it was time to take our energy efficiency requirements to the next level and to focus for the first time on active power.”
At a Washington DC Best Buy, flat screens line an entire wall and half of another one. Richard Glenn can’t seem to take his eyes off of Kung Foo Panda playing on a big plasma TV:
“I have an old fashioned big and clunky TV.”
“And what’s making you shop?”
“Envy. I covet my neighbor’s flat screen.”
And Glenn knows that if he buys a new TV it will use more energy than his old one.
“This very nice plasma I’m looking at here like uses as much energy as a hair drier or something like that. It’s really really bad.”
But he just can’t resist. I ask store manager John Zittraur to point out the energy star TVs:
“Ahh. I think it would be harder to show you the ones that aren’t ’cause all of the ones that we’ve been getting in, I’d say for the past 6 months or so, have all had the energy star logo on it.”
Zittraur has plenty of energy-saving advice for people like Richard Glenn. First, don’t buy more TV than you need. Keep the TV’s brightness settings toned down. Plug the TV, the DVD, and all the other electronics into a surge protector.
For The Environment Report, I’m Tamara Keith.
An illustration showing how much surface air temperatures might change from 1960 to 2060. The EPA is proposing that corporations should have to report the greenhouse gas emissions of their products. (Illustration courtesy of NASA)
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wants big businesses to report greenhouse gas emissions. Lester Graham has more on the proposal.
Transcript
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wants big businesses to report greenhouse gas emissions. Lester Graham has more on the proposal:
The EPA wants to establish a national system for reporting the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. Basically, the EPA is saying greenhouse gases are pollution. Big companies will have to monitor and report their emissions.
Dina Kruger is the Director of the EPA’s Climate Change Division. She says so far big business seems to be okay with this.
“The response was actually quite positive. They were happy that EPA was doing this. They provided us with good feedback on their views with respect on how this monitoring can be done.”
About 13-thousand facilities account for around 90-percent of U.S. greenhouse emissions. They’re the ones that will report to the EPA if the proposal goes through. And most of your greenhouse gas emissions — like your car emissions — will be reported. That’s because companies such as oil refineries have to include the total greenhouse gas emissions of making their products and their use.
A corn ethanol refinery- The ethanol industry is asking the EPA to raise the legal limit of ethanol that can be added to regular gasoline from 10 to 15%. (Photo by Grant Hellman, Courtesy of US Department of Agriculture)
In the 1970s, the government limited the amount of ethanol that can be blended with gasoline at 10 percent. Now, a trade group called Growth Energy has asked the U-S EPA to raise the limit to 15 percent:
Transcript
In the 1970s, the government limited the amount of ethanol that can be blended with gasoline at 10 percent.
Now, a trade group called Growth Energy has asked the U-S EPA to raise the limit to 15 percent.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has already said that 12 or 13 percent ethanol is possible soon.
But, an environmental groups says, “slow down.”
Jeremy Martin is with the Union of Concerned Scientists. He says, first, the government should make sure that a higher-ethanol blend doesn’t damage pollution controls on vehicle engines.
“We don’t want to quickly make a change and then find out that we’ve caused a lot of damage to lots of vehicles on the road or caused a lot of air quality impacts.”
Supporters of the increased ethanol blend say it would help US corn farmers and reduce the demand for foreign oil. But opponents say ethanol made from corn does more harm to the environment than good.
Neighborhood Electric Vehicles (N.E.V.'s) can go up to 25 mph. The City of Chicago would like to see more people using them for short-distance errands. (Photo by Mike Rhee)
Hybrid cars are all the rage nowadays.
But Mike Rhee reports another car could take the concept of green-friendly vehicles a step farther:
Transcript
Hybrid cars are all the rage nowadays.
But Mike Rhee reports another car could take the concept of green-friendly vehicles a step farther:
These new types of cars are called neighborhood electric vehicles, or N-E-V’s for short.
Now, to me, they look like souped-up golf carts.
But don’t say that to Matt Stewart.
“It gives them a bad name.”
Stewart is the senior automotive equipment analyst, kind of like the car expert, for the City of Chicago.
It owns four of these small electric vehicles.
And Stewart doesn’t like comparing them to golf carts because he says N-E-V’s are much more sophisticated.
“They can go faster than golf carts, I think golf carts are allowed to go up to just under 20 mph, these go between 20-25 is the top speed. They have safety glass windshields, they have mirrors, they have turn signals, brake lights, headlights, and then they have automotive certified safety belts.”
OK, so N-E-V’s are not golf carts–They’re road ready.
And fully electric.
The vehicles are charged with just a regular wall plug and can go up to 40 miles on a single charge.
And this year, Chicago’s approved these vehicles to drive around nearly everywhere in the city.
“Hi, Garrick.”
“How you doin’?”
Garrick Mueller is a truck driver for the city of Chicago.
We’re standing in this huge warehouse that’s filled with fire engines, garbage trucks, and of course, some N-E-V’s.
Mueller says he uses this little vehicle all the time to move around the warehouse.
We buckle in.
“We’re all set, you ready?”
“Yeah.”
“Alright.”
“This is wild.”
“Isn’t it? It’s pretty neat.”
“OK, so we’re about to go on a regular street.”
“Yeah, Elston Avenue, we’re going to make a right. People look at you, they’re like, what is that? See right there– the cops looking at us? They’re like, ‘What is that.’ It’s like when you see a new car on the street you’re like, ‘Wow, look at that.'”
“Now, the ordinance they passed would allow everyday people like you and me have one of these at home. What do you think about being able to drive this around your neighborhood?”
“You know, I like it. I would definitely drive one of these. I mean, the doors come off in the summer, if you had kids and stuff, you could go to the ice cream parlor, have them seat-belted in and go right to the ice cream, you know, it’s nice.”
“That’s actually the goal.”
That’s Eileen Joyce.
She’s assistant commissioner of Chicago’s vehicle fleet.
Right now, Joyce says the city’s testing out the N-E-V’s for its lighter travel needs.
Say a worker needs to drop off a box of pamphlets at a concert.Or a few employees need to drive downtown for a meeting.
Granted, those kinds of trips are the minority compared to most of the city’s work with large vehicles like garbage trucks and snow plows.
But Joyce says the city wants to show residents how useful these vehicles can be, and, if they catch on, she says it could make a big impact on reducing pollution here.
She imagines N-E-V’s parked in driveways and garages everywhere.
“Plug it in overnight, go and run errands, go to the grocery store, the library, Blockbuster, return something, and come back and plug it in without using any fuel or emitting any emissions into the air.”
Joyce says 39 states permit these smaller vehicles to be used in some form or other.
Some businesses have already started using N-E-V’s for things like food and pizza delivery.
So, you may not have seen one yet, but it probably won’t be long before you do.
A regional carbon cap-and-trade program was supposed to be a model for the nation. Lester Graham reports now environmentalists are hoping it doesn’t set a bad example for the federal government:
Transcript
A regional carbon cap-and-trade program was supposed to be a model for the nation. Lester Graham reports now environmentalists are hoping it doesn’t set a bad example for the federal government:
Ten northeastern states have been working for years on an agreement to reduce the emissions that cause global warming.
The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative limits the amount of carbon dioxide power plants will be allowed to emit and puts a price on carbon allowances.
But, the Governor of New York, David Paterson, is changing the rules for his state.
The New York power generators complained existing contracts don’t include all the costs of the allowances. So, Governor Paterson plans to give those power generators some free allowances. That puts the other nine states’ power companies at a disadvantage.
Luis Martinez is with the environmental group the Natural Resources Defence Council.
“You know, I’m wishing, I’m hoping that he changes his mind once he realizes how important this is not only for the people of New York, but as a precedent for federal policy-making.”
Martinez hopes the other governors in the Northeast don’t follow Paterson’s example.
Melissa Rosen and her husband Greg Horos opened Locali's - LA's first "ecovenience" mart. (Photo by Devine Browne)
The only convenience store staples you won't find on Locali's shelves are cigarettes and lotto tickets. The owners say there are no clean versions of those. (Photo by Devine Browne)
Vegan condoms are Locali's most-blogged about item for sale. (Photo by Devine Browne)
Not that long ago, if you wanted to buy eco-friendly at the grocery store, your options might have been limited to the granola and beans in the bulk bins. Then stores started carrying organic produce. Later vegetarian fast food appeared. Devin Browne reports now eco-friendly is hitting convenience stores:
Transcript
Not that long ago, if you wanted to buy eco-friendly at the grocery store, your options might have been limited to the granola and beans in the bulk bins. Then stores started carrying organic produce. Later vegetarian fast food appeared. Devin Browne reports now eco-friendly is hitting convenience stores:
They’re called ecovenience stores and they’re showing up all over the country. The point is that they sell convenience store food, only greener.
(sound of a store)
“This is our organic hot pretzel, we have organic hot pretzels. It’s organic flour.”
That’s Melissa Rosen; she co-owns a new ecovenience store in Los Angeles, called Locali. Which is actually spelled L-O-C-A-L-I.
And they’ve got hot pretzels, but organic. Hot dogs, but grass-fed. The store even looks like a convenience store: It’s in a strip mall, it’s near a freeway. They’ve got cold drinks in the fridge and impulse buys like candy near the cash register. The customers are in a hurry, but a happy hurry. They rave about the chips
“It is a flavor explosion in your mouth, it is beyond savory.”
and the slushies.
“Slushies! There you go, the slushies are amazing.”
But then you get closer and you see that the cold drinks are not soda or beer: They’re Kombucha, the fermented tea. The candy is vegan gummy bears and organic lollipops. And the slushie, their signature item, is sweetened with agave.
There are a few 7-11 staples that are missing from the shelves, like cigarettes and lotto tickets. The owners say there are no green versions of those.
Some of Locali’s products are really pragmatic and not that exciting like energy efficient light bulbs and ecological laundry drops. Others are kind of sensational, silly, really.
“For example the vegan condoms. What is that, what is Glyde? I didn’t know my condoms weren’t vegan.”
So, vegan condoms, vegan caviar. Snow cones sweetened with brown rice syrup. They have this really big variety of products that have never been greened before.
And so the question becomes: will new green products like these, however silly, really mean new green consumers? Matt Kahn is an Environmental Economist at UCLA. HE thinks maybe so.
“So the goal might be to create buzz. That if you only sell green light bulbs and a tofu turkey burger, people might say oh yeah, that’s the green place. But if you do some truly wacky stuff, generating this green buzz, might tip, that even a Dick Cheney might come with his grandson hearing that it’s this wacky.”
Which is more or less the point – Locali wants to recruit new green consumers. Consumers who right now live in neighborhoods that don’t really have supermarkets and so they buy most of their food at liquor and convenience stores.
Of course, one of the problems will probably be price. A 16 oz slushie at Locali is $5.49, while a 22 oz slurpee at 7-11 is just $1.40. But Kahn, the economist, thinks because Locali is smaller and more flexible than say a Whole Foods, it might actually have a better shot at making it in new neighborhoods.
“And so a smaller business might have to pay only a couple hundred thousand dollars rather then multi million dollars to build a big boxed store. And that lower fixed cost of entering a market makes it more likely that smaller green stores might experiment more.”
And apparently, the ecovenience experiment is something that a lot of people want to try. In the first six days of business, the owners received phone calls from people in Seattle and DC and cities all over Southern California. And they all asked the same thing: how soon can we open a locali in our local neighborhood.
All that energy goes into making the plastic bottles, treating the water, and, of course, shipping - sometimes from as far away as the South Pacific. (Photo by Lester Graham)
Bottled water burns up a lot of energy.
Rebecca Williams reports on a new study
that figured out how much:
Transcript
Bottled water burns up a lot of energy.
Rebecca Williams reports on a new study
that figured out how much:
Bottled water burns up a lot of energy.
Rebecca Williams reports on a new study
that figured out how much:
We Americans love our bottled water, for a lot of reasons. We actually drink more bottled water than beer.
And that bottled water uses lots of energy. As much as 2000 times more than tap water.
That’s from a new study in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
All that energy goes into making the plastic bottles, treating the water, and of course shipping. Sometimes from as far away as the South Pacific.
Peter Gleick is an author of the study. He says if you want to use less energy, tap water is the clear winner.
“Tap water may require a thousandth of the energy that it takes to bottle water. And the tap water in the United States is typically of very, very high quality, as high or higher than most of our bottled waters.”
He says buying local bottled water saves energy. So he says try to buy as close to home as you can.
One company created a website that acts as kind of a Craigslist just for reclaimed building materials (Photo courtesy of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction)
In the middle of a recession that’s
crippling the construction field,
there’s at least one sector of
industry that’s doing pretty well.
That’s “material reuse.” Taking pieces
of old buildings and using them in
new ones. Advocates say used materials
could save developers a heap of money.
Samara Freemark has the
story of one re-use company that’s both
green and in the black:
Transcript
In the middle of a recession that’s
crippling the construction field,
there’s at least one sector of
industry that’s doing pretty well.
That’s “material reuse.” Taking pieces
of old buildings and using them in
new ones. Advocates say used materials
could save developers a heap of money.
Samara Freemark has the
story of one re-use company that’s both
green and in the black:
You’ve probably heard what’s going on in the construction industry
these days.
(news montage of housing crisis)
But in middle of all that bad news, there might be one bright spot.
“We’ve actually been expanding quite a bit. I guess it’s one of the
only times I’ve heard
of where that’s the case.”
That’s architect Brad Hardin.
He got interested in reusing building materials pretty early in his career.
He likes the way
the old stuff looked. And he likes the idea of saving resources. And
he’s also kind of
horrified by the tens of millions of tons of construction waste that get
tossed into landfills
every year.
But actually getting his hands on used materials, so that he could reuse
them- that turned
out to be a real pain in the butt.
“You know you’ll be literally going out to someone’s yard and getting
rained on, or
sorting through someone’s basement– it was kind of a hit and miss
process.”
A big part of the problem was simple logistics. Imagine you’re knocking
down an old
house to build a new one. You’d like to sell off whatever pieces of the
old building you
can. But how do you find someone to buy all that stuff? Where do you store
it while you
look for a buyer? And how do you ship the materials?
Harry Giles is a professor of green architecture at the University of
Michigan.
He says most developers don’t want to bother with all that hassle. In the
end, they usually
just end up bulldozing everything. Giles says that’s because there’s no
real secondhand
market for used construction materials- not like there is in a lot of other
industries.
“If you take the car industry, a lot of it is geared around the reuse of
materials. Not just
taking the car and crushing it, but taking it apart and finding useful
components on it.”
You know, like a salvage yard.
And that was the problem Brad Hardin wanted to solve – how to create a
secondhand
market for spare building parts. He figured that if he could do that,
reusing building
materials could actually end up profitable.
So last year he started a company called Planet ReUse. The company’s
website acts as
kind of a Craigslist just for reclaimed building materials. Buyers and
sellers can find each
other on the ‘net.
And Planet ReUse tests all material to make sure it’s up to code. That
way the buyer
doesn’t end up with, say, eight tons of rotten planking. And Planet ReUse
arranges all the
shipping- trying to hook up sellers to nearby buyers. That saves money and
fuel.
By removing those basic barriers, Hardin says his buyers save about 20%
compared to
buying new. And Planet ReUse still makes a profit.
And it’s also a start to reducing those millions of tons of landfill
waste.
So, what kind of stuff does he sell on the site?
“How much time do you have? Steel, flooring…”
It turns out there’s money in just about everything you can salvage from
a building.
Harry Giles says that cash is the key to cutting down waste.
“If people see that it’s a lucrative business to actually salvage
materials, that will drive it
much faster than concern for the environment.”
And it’s not just buildings. Remember President Obama’s inauguration
stage? Well, that
got torn down, and Planet ReUse is trying to get the pieces to New Orleans.
They’ll be
used to rebuild houses damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
It’s just one more way for Planet ReUse to prove that you can do good, be
green, and
make a little money too.
With a smart grid system, your house can talk back to you and the power station (Source: Jdorwin at Wikimedia Commons)
