Forced Green

Mariah Power, the manufacturer of the Windspire®, a residential and commercial wind power appliance, was recognized in “Best of What’s New” in the green tech category by Popular Science in its December 2008 issue.

The Windspire is a 30-foot tall, propeller-free, vertical-axis wind turbine designed for harnessing wind power in urban, suburban and rural locations for both residential and commercial use. Each year, Popular Science reviews thousands of new products and innovations and chooses the top 100 winners across 11 categories for inclusion in its annual “Best of What’s New” issue, the best-read issue of the year. To win, a product or technology must represent a significant step forward in its category.

This award comes on the heels of the company’s announcement of its first volume manufacturing facility in Michigan that will be up and running next year, and the first multi-unit commercial installation of six Windspires at Devon Bank the first “green bank” in the Chicago, Illinois area.

Should you want one of these, the cost is approximately $5,000.00 plus $1000 for installation which only takes a couple of hours. This unit will generate 1.2 kW (1.2 kilowatt, or 1200 watts).

And to take the bite out of any sticker shock, Congress passed legislation, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, H.R. 1424, that includes a new federal-level investment tax credit to help consumers purchase small wind turbines for home, farm, or business use. A few hours ago, President Bush signed the bill into law. Owners of small wind systems with 100 kilowatts (kW) of capacity and less can receive a credit for 30% of the total installed cost of the system, not to exceed $4,000. The credit will be available for equipment installed from today through December 31, 2016. For turbines used for homes, the credit is limited to the lesser of $1,000 per kW or $4,000 of capacity.

So, have a wind turbine installed and get a 30% tax break right away, plus (depending on your kwh rate), completely pay for itself in a couple of years.

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For you futurists, geeks and of course, you greenies……… look at this!

Supercomputers Break Petaflop Barrier, Transforming Science By Betsy Mason
A new crop of supercomputers is breaking down the petaflop speed barrier, pushing
high-performance computing into a new realm that could change science more profoundl
than at any time since Galileo, leading researchers say.

When the Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers was announced at the
international supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, on Monday, IBM had barely
managed to cling to the top spot, fending off a challenge from Cray. But both competitors
broke petaflop speeds, performing 1.105 and 1.059 quadrillion floating-point calculations
per second, the first two computers to do so.

These computers aren’t just faster than those they pushed further down the list, they<!–more–>
will enable a new class of science that wasn’t possible before. As recently described in
Wired magazine, these massive number crunchers will push simulation to the forefront of
science.

Scientists will be able to run new and vastly more accurate models of complex phenomena:
Climate models will have dramatically higher resolution and accuracy, new materials for
efficient energy transmission will be developed and simulations of scramjet engines will
reach a new level of complexity.

“The scientific method has changed for the first time since Galileo invented the
telescope (in 1609),” said computer scientist Mark Seager of Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory.

Supercomputing has made huge advances over the last decade or so, gradually packing on
the ability to handle more and more data points in increasingly complex ways. It has
enabled scientists to test theories, design experiments and predict outcomes as never
before. But now, the new class of petaflop-scale machines is poised to bring about major
qualitative changes in the way science is done.

“The new capability allows you to do fundamentally new physics and tackle new problems,”
said Thomas Zacharia, who heads up computer science at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in
Tennessee, home of the second place Cray XT5 Jaguar supercomputer. “And it will
accelerate the transition from basic research to applied technology.”

Breaking the petaflop barrier, a feat that seemed astronomical just two years ago, won’t
just allow faster computations. These computers will enable entirely new types of science
that couldn’t have been done before. This new generation of petascale machines will move
scientific simulation beyond just supporting the two main branches of science, theory and
experimentation, and into the foreground. Instead of just hypotheses being tested with
experiments and observations, large-scale extrapolation and prediction of things we can’t
observe or that would be impractical for an experiment, will become central to many
scientific endeavors.

“It’s getting to the point where simulation is actually the third branch of science,”
Seager said. “We say that nature is always the arbiter of truth, but it turns out our
ability to observe nature is fundamentally limited.”

Source: Wired Science

This gives me goosebumps at just the thought of the potential!

About 40 percent of the trash you create that is put into the landfills is made up
of paper products.

Alot of us are doing our thing by recycling newspapers and plain paper, but there
is still more we can do including a couple of steps that you may not of thought
about.

30 percent of timber is being used to create paper, it is important to find ways
to conserve what we use by starting at the ATM. Many of us take the receipt from
the ATM, look at the balance, stuff it in our pockets or purses only to rip it up
later and throw it away. Did you know that approximately 8 billion transactions Read more…

We Americans plug in, text, log on, tune in (tv) and tune out (music). We use
13 times the power than just 60 years ago. Electricity is truly the life blood
of the U.S. Economy. Back in 2003, New York and surrounding areas really realized
how important electricity is. 50 million folks lost their power in minutes.

Building a national grid may be on top of President Obama’s list of things to
do. One idea is a power network, modeled like the interstate road system
that was thought up by President Eisenhower. Some folks feel that moving
power the same way could help out in the long run. This system would supercede
the 200,000 miles of power lines and 500 different owners.

Wind farms that have been cropping up everywhere need to have transmission lines
to the surrounding cities, towns, and villages. The same is true for solar, Read more…

The whaling fleet is scheduled to put to sea in a matter of days and has set a target
of 850 minke whales and 50 fin whales, according to Shigeki Takaya, a spokesman for
the Ministry of Agriculture’s Far Seas Fisheries Division.

Last year, Tokyo announced that it would also take 50 humpbacks for the first time
since the sixties, provoking outrage from anti-whaling nations. That plan was dropped
and plans to hunt the species this year have again been cancelled.

“We received a lot of pressure from around the world, but particularly Australia
and New Zealand, so we will not be catching humpbacks as part of the research Read more…

Austrailia is working on a desalination plant due to the water shortage they are
experiencing.

Perth, Western Australia, is considered the most remote city on the planet. And
one thing they are running out of, like much of drought declared Australia, is
fresh drinking water.

They are currently working on a plan to cut the amount of energy it takes to
run it. They have considered using the wind. There is a new alternative that is
being looked at by inventor Alan Burns. He teamed up with Seapower Pacific Read more…