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Safe Trip to Eden: Ten Steps to Save Planet Earth from the Global Warming Meltdown David Steinman See book keywords and concepts

Turbines at three West Texas wind farms harness the wind to supply pollution-free energy. Two landfills, one located just outside Austin and the other located near San Antonio, collect methane produced by decay to generate electricity. It fulfills every idea of what it is to stop being toxic. www.amd.com Intel The World Economic Forum ranked Intel eighteenth among the 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the world in 2 004.10 The company's progress since then has been consistent with improvements in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

BP is currently focusing their efforts on the development of wind farms at existing BP refineries and petrochemical plants; this has the additional benefit of curtailing the spread of industrialized land. And as far as continued use of fossil fuels is concerned, BP is part of a major effort to find ways to reduce emissions and reduce consumption. For example, research at Princeton University, supported by BP and Ford, has produced several scenarios in transportation where, using existing technologies, emissions could be cut by as much as 3.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually.

The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century James Howard Kunstler See book keywords and concepts

Yes, European nations have made major investments in "wind farms." Denmark was getting 18 percent of its electricity from wind in 2003, the most per capita of any country. Germany was producing more than 10,000 megawatts from its installations, Spain more than 3,000. This is all possible because the world has been at or around the historic peak of oil production, meaning the oil economy at the millennium was at its most robust just when these wind farms were set up.

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet Mark Lynas See book keywords and concepts

Wind turbines are visually intrusive, and onshore wind farms tend to be sited in highland areas which are visible for great distances. Offshore wind installations can be sited below the horizon if the seabed is shallow enough to allow it, but are more expensive to build and operate.

Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century Alex Steffen See book keywords and concepts

Less advanced systems can't handle multiple contributions from outside renewable-energy sources like home-solar outfits or small-scale wind farms, but smart grids can: the smarter our grids get, the greater the range of energy producers they can unite. Smart grids also make it easier for consumers to buy green energy. With a smart grid in place, power companies could be required to report the emissions coming from each of their plants, as well as their asking price for the energy produced at those plants.

The first advantage is that the wind is much steadier at altitude —so they would outperform ground-based wind farms, which only operate at their peak capacity 19-35 percent of the time, owing to wind intermittency. The second advantage is ad hoc generation: devices with a reasonably simple tether system do not have to be permanently installed in one place, so they could be trucked out to any location that needed them. There are a few drawbacks to Sky WindPower's design, however. In an electrical storm, the power-carrying tether could become an enormous lightning rod.

But wind power is growing (from 4,800 megawatts generated in 1995 to 59,322 megawatts in 2005, according to the Worldwatch Institute), and as more people build wind farms, the price of wind power drops. In fact, some recent wind projects are cranking out electricity that is priced competitively with coal and oil, and far cheaper than nuclear power, with none of the radioactivity or greenhouse-gas pollution. The Battelle Pacific Northwest National Laboratory estimates that as wind power's price drops to a competitive level, wind could quickly supply 20 percent of the nation's electricity.

Not so: under the right conditions, good wind farms already generate electricity for three cents per kilowatt-hour, which is almost as cheap as the cheapest energy source around—coal. Energy subsidies, or carbon taxes and credits can make wind power the cheapest energy source available. Solar photovoltaics are expensive compared to the grid, but in remote locations they are often cheaper than running power lines. Ten years from now, the cost of wind and solar power are projected to be one-tenth of what they are now, owing to technology and manufacturing improvements.

Every time one of us switches to compact fluorescents and wind power, a bunch of good things happen: less coal is burned (meaning healthier air and less damage to our climate); more wind farms are built; and energy companies get a signal that there's a market for energy-efficient products and more clean energy. By designing our lives to be greener, we help nudge the whole economy toward a bright green future. Individual actions are great, but look for individual actions that will influence others. There's an old saying that living well is the best revenge.

Large wind farms generate the most wind power, but small clusters of megawatt-range utility-scale turbines are popping up. This is especially true in the upper Midwest, where the turbines have received significant public policy support. In addition, farmers are starting to use smaller turbines to power their farms. The wind's potential to generate electricity is like a free gift waiting to be unwrapped. Wind is plentiful all around the world. It's clean. It'll never run out. So why aren't we letting the wind run our entire planet? The answer is simple: price.

The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century James Howard Kunstler See book keywords and concepts

Instead of running all the air conditioners of Houston on oil- or gas-generated electricity, we'll use wind farms, or massive solar arrays; we'll have super-fuel-efficient cars and keep on commuting over the interstate highway system. It isn't going to happen. The wish to keep running the same giant systems at gigantic scale using renewables is the heart of our illusions about solar, wind, and water power.

This is all possible because the world has been at or around the historic peak of oil production, meaning the oil economy at the millennium was at its most robust just when these wind farms were set up.

Germany has next to zero oil and gas resources and not much of a Plan B, despite a big push to develop wind farms on the North Sea. That said, the nations of Europe enjoy some advantages over the United States in facing the Long Emergency. Although all European countries have some suburban development, it is nowhere comparable to the complete fiasco of American suburbia, and they did not trash their towns and cities in the process, as America did.

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