The Status of the Smart Grid

  • A smart grid diagram from the US Department of Energy (Photo courtesy of the US Department of Energy)

Your power bill likely will change
in the next few years. Lester Graham
reports there’s a good chance you’ll
be thinking about how much electricity
you use and when you’ll use it:

Transcript

Your power bill likely will change
in the next few years. Lester Graham
reports there’s a good chance you’ll
be thinking about how much electricity
you use and when you’ll use it:

The Smart Grid will mean changes. Electric companies we’ll be able to monitor power use better and deliver electricity more efficiently. That should help avoid brown outs and black outs.

But it’ll also be tell you in real time how much power you’re using.

Brian Seal is with the non-profit Electric Power Research Institute. He says, eventually, you’ll be charged different rates at different times of the day.

“Consumers would be aware of that so that they can program their appliances and other equipment to consume energy when the price is low rather than when it’s high.”

But you’ll need Smart Appliances to work with a Smart Grid. GE is the first to announce a product line – right as the government released $3.4 billion in grants to power companies for the Smart Grid.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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School’s Back, Sans Textbooks

  • Several universities are testing out the new Kindle DX, hoping to save money and paper on printing (Photo source: K.lee at Wikimedia Commons)

This fall, six colleges and
universities are throwing out
a lot of their textbooks. Rebecca
Williams reports they’re testing
out the idea of students using
electronic readers for some
classes instead of textbooks:

Transcript

This fall, six colleges and universities are throwing out a lot of their textbooks. Rebecca Williams reports they’re testing out the idea of students using electronic readers for some classes instead of textbooks:

The schools are Case Western, Arizona State, Reed College, Pace University, The University of Virginia’s business school and Princeton.

They’re all testing out the new Kindle DX – it’s got a large screen that the text of textbooks will be loaded into.

Cass Cliatt is with Princeton. She says the University prints out 50 million sheets of paper a year – even though a lot of course material is online these days.

“So the irony is that the availability of digitized text has lead to an actual increase in printing because people don’t like to read a lot of text on computer screens.”

But she says these are different. The new Kindles let you highlight stuff and take notes the way you might in an actual textbook. So in theory, students won’t need to print.

Cliatt says they’ll be testing that theory to see if universities can save paper and money on printing.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Hemingway’s Paradise Lost

  • Students do 'the Hemingway thing' (Photo by Jennifer Guerra)

A good book has the ability to transport
you to different times and places. You can travel
to far off exotic countries or cities nearby. You
can also visit places that aren’t so easy to get
to – mostly because they don’t really exist anymore.
Places like Hemingway’s wild north woods. Jennifer
Guerra reports:

Transcript

A good book has the ability to transport
you to different times and places. You can travel
to far off exotic countries or cities nearby. You
can also visit places that aren’t so easy to get
to – mostly because they don’t really exist anymore.
Places like Hemingway’s wild north woods. Jennifer
Guerra reports:

Say what you want about Ernest Hemingway’s writing, the man loved his North Woods.
Up until his early twenties, he spent almost every summer up north at his family’s cottage
in Michigan.

And it’s there where most of The Nick Adams Stories take place.

“They were walking on the brown forest floor now and it was springy and cool under
their feet. There was no underbrush and the trunks of the trees rose sixty feet high
before there were any branches. It was cool in the shade of the trees and high up in
them Nick could hear the breeze that was rising.”

This is Nick Adams country in the early 1900s. The Last Good Country, Hemingway
called it. Filled with cathedral-like forests and streams swimming with big fat trout.

Now, it’s said that some of The Nick Adams Stories are based on Hemingway’s own
experiences in the north woods. Especially the parts in the book about hunting and
fishing.

“That was one of his favorite things to do.”

Valerie Hemingway was with the author when he wrote The Nick Adams Stories. Before
she married into the family, she was Hemingway’s secretary and occasional fishing
buddy. She says Hemingway used to go on and on about the good old days back in
northern Michigan.

“He taught me how to shoot a gun, told me about the river fishing – and these were
things that were initially associated with Michigan. And I think Michigan
represented the freedom in his life.”

But if Hemingway went up north today, he probably wouldn’t recognize the place.

“I think we’ve done our share of damaging it. And I’m sure there are areas where we
can still find something that he found, but it would be few and far between.”

Mary Crockett just finished The Nick Adams Stories. She read it as part of a state-wide
reading project put on by the local chapter of the National Endowment for the
Humanities. The reason The Nick Adams Stories was chosen for the great state read was
because of its obvious ties to Michigan and the north woods.

But Adam and Eva Colas
just read the book in a high school writing class. They’ve lived in Michigan their entire
lives, and they can’t relate to Hemingway’s North Woods at all.

“It doesn’t feel really representative of Michigan to me, cause it’s not the Michigan I know.”

“Cause even if you go to
Lake Michigan now for camping, there are specific pits for bonfires and specific cabins and all
these designated areas that make sure you don’t get lost or hurt, and you don’t have
to do anything for yourself.”

Their teachers thought that might happen, so they came up with the next best thing. An
outdoor classroom where the students can talk about the stories while doing what Adam
and Eva Colas call ‘the Hemingway thing’.

“The nature, hiking, canoeing. We can’t do the hunting/fishing thing, but just sort
of experiencing nature as nature.”

“Michigan as it was back in the day when this takes
place.”

See, that’s the beauty of a good book. Virginia Murphy teaches a class on Environmental
Literature at the University of Michigan. She says just because the students can’t
experience Hemingway’s world as it was back in the day, doesn’t mean they can’t learn
from his words.

“It allows them to see an environment that they’re not necessarily exposed to on a
daily basis. Most of us live in cities, drive our cars, work in buildings. And so it offers us a
perspective that we don’t have.”

So even if you never got to experience the north woods with all the big open spaces and
virgin forests and clear blue streams, well, there’s always the public library.

For The Environment Report, I’m Jennifer Guerra.

Related Links

A Closer Look at Mercury Hair Test

  • Hair is now a way to test people for mercury levels, as opposed to more invasive tests of blood and urine. (Photo by Anna Miller)

Health officials are experimenting with another way to gauge the level of mercury in people who eat a lot of fish. The only test sample needed is… hair. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach
reports:

Transcript

Health officials are experimenting with another way to gauge the level of mercury in people who eat a lot of fish. The only test sample needed is… hair. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:


Doctors can already test your blood and urine for mercury. Now, as a less invasive technique, some health officials can test the hair near your scalp for the toxic chemical. There’s some debate over the quality of the tests, the lab analyses, and over what a high test reading means. The federal health warning for mercury in hair is one part per million. But that’s for susceptible populations like an unborn fetus.


Jack Spengler is a professor of environmental health at Harvard University. he recently ate a lot of fish and says his hair tested out at 3 parts per million of mercury.


“But I’m not going apoplectic about it because I know if I just watch my consumption, I can moderate that over time… and there’s that safety margin…that I suspect I’d have to be much higher for much longer to really have symptoms. ”

Prolonged high levels of the most toxic form of mercury, methyl mercury can trigger various health problems in adults such as memory loss and cardiovascular damage.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

Related Links

A Backyard Encounter

Covering the wilderness experience during the cold winter months has
taken Knight-Ridder outdoors writer Sam Cook on snow-shoeing and camping
trips throughout the Great Lakes region. But in a
sampling from his latest book "Friendship Fires", Cook points out that
it’s not necessary go any farther than your own backyard to share a
winter encounter: