September 2009 Archives

I'm allowed to be a little tough on the Cincinnati Reds. They may be16 games behind the Cardinals, but as an Ohio native, there'll always be a soft spot in my heart for them. So you can imagine my pleasure as I opened up an email this morning and found the statement: "The Reds' Great American Ball Park is among the greenest ballparks in the country." Reds win! (Sort of...)

The quote came from a recent press release issued this morning from the National Biodiesel Board, which quotes Red's outfielder Chris Dickerson, Kansas City Chiefs' quarterback Matt Cassel, and the Indianapolis Colts' tight end Dallas Clark. All of whom are members of We Play Green, a group that works to unite athletes in encouraging environmental awareness and promoting alternative energy. We Play Green was founded by Dickerson with help from Cleveland Indian Jack Cassel. That whole state is pretty awesome.

What the teams are actually doing are really just implementing some simple ideas, but because they're being put into place on such a large scale (for example, last season, the Reds sent 8,234 gallons of used cooking and motor oils to be refined for biodiesel), they can result in big savings. Plus We Play Green's bigger goal is to promote using biodiesel as a fuel, as well as to demonstrate conservation in practice to their fans.

The "green" changes at the Great American Ballpark include:

• Composting grass clippings
• Using biodiesel blends for facility vehicles, such as maintenance vehicles and equipment, tractors, and emergency generators
• Waste oil from kitchen and concession stands are collected to produce a biofuel blend

Visit WePlayGreen.org to find out more about all the athletes who contribute.

Read the original press release at the National Biodiesel Board.

For more info on the NBB's activities, visit they're homepage, biodiesel.org.

The EPA and ACS worked together to set up a webinar on Thursday September 24, that covered all the money that the EPA is going to give away for research and development of new environment and energy-related ideas and products. The website is here--even though the meeting is over, there is some potentially useful info still there.

You may have to convince them a little to do it, but there is ample oppurtunity to do so with the EPA's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program. The program is scheduled to give away $5 million in 2010 to small business owners with an idea, technology, or product related to the environment or energy research. The program looks to fund projects and at two different stages of the innovation process. The first, Phase 1, just requires a proof of concept. You could be awarded a $70,000 grant (this increases to $80,000 come 2010) to develop your idea into a full blown business model.

For more developed products, Phase 2 will pay for further development and commercialization of your product. The grant for this phase is $225,000, and increases to $300,000 in 2010.

There's really some amazing opportunities out there for budding entrepeneurs right now. April Richards, the Deputy Director of the SBIR Program, advises to read the solicitation carefully—despite it's massive size—and suggests visiting the program's homepage for "success stories" to inspire you to finish your application.

Oh, and it looks like the NSF is doing something similar.

The most recent items highlighted in the "Energy Related News and Media Articles" section of the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy website:

• Electricity Harvested From Trees (Livescience)
• First Solar to Build World's Largest Solar Power Plant in China (Bloomberg)
• China Racing Ahead of U.S. in the Drive to Go Solar (New York Times)
• The Battery Made from Salt and Paper (Wired UK)
• J. Craig Venter to Receive National Medal of Science From President Obama (JCVI.org)

RSS Feed for Energy Related News and Media Articles from JRSE

Sorry about the silly title. Space-based solar energy is obviously more complicated than herding cattle, although I don't doubt that cattle can be pretty tricky to rustle up. Anyway, the idea of launching a satellite into orbit to collect energy has been around for quite a few years, but it looks like someone is finally funding the idea.

The price tag, though, is a doozy: $21 billion. The project is being funded by 16 Japanese companies, including Mitsubishi Electric Corp., Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd., and IHI Corp, but will be headed up by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

The station is slated to use 4 square kilometers of solar panels to generate 1 gigawatt of power, enough to power 294,000 homes, according to this report from Bloomberg. Unfortunately, there are an estimated 47 million households in Japan, according to the CIA's World Factbook.

A test satellite is slated to go into orbit in 2015, which will gather solar power and beam it back to earth on a much smaller scale. The real deal, however, wouldn't be functional until 2030. It's a lot of time to wait and a lot of money to invest, but if the lifespan is sufficient, the long-term benefits may outweigh these initial costs.

According to this article by Steve Kirsch, an entrepreneur and CEO of Abaca, "If we are to have any hope of avoiding a climate crisis, we have to be installing about 1 GW of new clean power somewhere in the world every single day for the next 30 years."

So, perhaps this step is too small, but it's hard to be sure. Doing nothing, though, will not help, so I say let's move forward with this and anything else we can.