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Conserve Energy

The cheapest and greenest energy is always the energy not used. While new and alternative energy sources are a critical part of the solution, energy conservation is the real key.

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Latest Activity: Apr 22

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James Kantorowicz Comment by James Kantorowicz on April 22, 2009 at 1:47pm
I just wanted to post a testimony from a customer who saved a little money by using our pool heating technology. This will give you an idea of a global impact of what our technologies can do concerning energy conservation.

Eric Koch Comment by Eric Koch on March 25, 2009 at 12:40pm
http://push.pickensplan.com/group/suburbanconvertionproject
Eric Koch Comment by Eric Koch on January 25, 2009 at 8:39am
Choosing What Cities Will Look Like in a World Without Oil

http://www. worldchanging. com/archives/009304. html

Choosing What Our Cities Will Look Like in a World Without Oil

Sarah Kuck

As we draw nearer to reaching the point of Peak Oil, it benefits us to imagine what our cities will look like in a world without oil.
Does this conjure up images of cities turned into urban farms just to produce enough food for us all? Do we devote all our energy to growing, bartering and trading the food we grow? Or will the city become divided, with the wealthy moving to the center while higher costs of living force lower-income families to the outer-ring suburbs, where access to goods, services and transport will be limited?

If we start now, we can choose what we want our cities to look like in the future. We can make them the resilient, sustainable centers of culture, justice, art and creativity that we hope they will become.


Author and Professor Peter Newman is asking us to imagine and then get to work building these urban centers. His book and talk, both titled Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change, ask audiences to honestly look at what will happen to our cities when we reach Peak Oil. During his 90 minute presentation last night at Seattle's City Hall, Newman explained to the full house how peak oil will soon change reality as we know it; and how if we choose to make it so, we can take this challenge as our opportunity to create a functional, just and sustainable world.


Picturing a future where we do nothing resulted in some frightening scenarios: ones where we are barely getting by and injustice is running rampant. But, as Newman explained, picturing a future in which we respond to the challenge by building resilient cities results in images of a flexible and supportive, flourishing society.


In order to build the new resilient city of the future, Newman said that “we need to stop building extra urban road capacity and urban scatter; we need to start building electric renewable cities with much greater localism in the economy and infrastructure.


“We need both at the same time," Newman said. "Or they will undermine what we need to do together.


Here are a few exceptional points, summarized from Newman's worldchanging presentation:

End Agglomeration Diseconomies
The freeway is a failed technology. Freeways don’t actually ultimately help people get where they want to go any faster; they simply scatter people and economies. Freeways fail as public spaces; as infrastructure, they are dinosaurs. Their impact on cities is not good for economics or people. So we should stop building them. We should instead organize and advocate for rail systems so we can reclaim and rehabilitate our open spaces. Car-dependent cities can begin to reclaim freeways by investing in rail transit and building up local economies around station hubs.


Density, Walkability and Affordable Housing
High quality, high rise developments in the city will increase walkability, and decrease the number of trips taken by car. These developments will function best if developers work in partnership with land use planners. To end the division and disagreements that high density development creates, we have to require all developments to allot 15 percent of space to social housing, and require 5 percent of the value of a development to go toward social infrastructure, like landscaped open-to-the-public space, public art, community centers, schools, arts facilities.


Complete Streets, Smart Grids
Cars won’t go away completely, even though the oil we currently use to power them will. The cars of the future will run on alternatively produced electricity. We can link the extra energy produced from solar and wind production systems to the batteries in our cars with Smart Grids. These energy linking systems help buildings and transportation power each other. (Read more about Smart Grids on Worldchanging here and here.
)

Eco-villages colonizing the fringe
Build eco-villages on the outskirts of the urban ring. Built with their own water, power and sewage systems, we can turn the crumbling suburbs into self sustaining eco-communities of the future.


What We Need to do Now
Newman gave vibrant examples of each of these ideas happening in cities all over the world, from Seoul to London, Copenhagen to Vancouver, B.C., these cities are proving that this is possible.
All we need now, said Newman, is imagination, post oil strategies, partnerships and demonstrations, and above all HOPE!

Let’s get to work.
Curt Rothman Comment by Curt Rothman on January 23, 2009 at 6:23am
Energy conservation would have the most meaningful immediate impact with increased profits for industry.

Proven Technology to capture waste heat would lower fuel consumption in industrial applications typically 7 to 10% with ROI's that fit into any business model even in this economy.

For more information, please see www.dciheat.com
Eric Koch Comment by Eric Koch on January 14, 2009 at 10:39am
Copy,Paste,and Send to everyone you know.

America is sitting on an amazing untapped wind resource,the wind corridor that stretches from Texas to North Dakota...our population is stabilized but our agricultural lands are devastated from decades of food exports.

with bio-char production as dump load regulation,in conjunction with power storage solutions the wind power capacity can go in at an astounding rate...the wind fixes the soil ,the soil sequesters the carbon and gives life......our entire world is unsustainable as is, and the changes required don't stop there...what will it take to get you out of your arm chair?

Mr.Pickens is out of his....and i'm sure as hell not going to tell him to sit down.

http://action.pickensplan.com
Eric Koch Comment by Eric Koch on December 18, 2008 at 10:55am
Commence Anarchy!!!!

find your place in the future...(any one who thinks someone else is going to do it for them is dead weight)...if nothing else..get the message out.


..Big turbines+big wind = bang/buck. leave the NG in the electrical power pie and promote people powered people transport and community NEV cargo fleets for grid blasting,and pv installations for reduced grid load.use excess capacity as an opportunity to phase out old,non-combined cycle, coal plants. wile phasing in ETT maglev to replace continental flights and interstate traffic.


stop at one consider none = less mouths to feed..(no time for day care or labor/delivery here)

suburban conversion project....suburban basements are reconfigured to earth sheltered green houses for food production..garages become houses with reconstruction leftovers....cold climates get south facing glazings at Latitude +21 degrees...two runs of 6' culvert pipe between basement and garage for thermal transfer.
Eric Koch Comment by Eric Koch on November 28, 2008 at 7:29am
Maglev is a smarter way to say good-bye to oil



22 October 2008



Our economy, standard of living, and national security in the U.S. depend on efficient, effective, and affordable autos, trucks, airplanes, and trains. But rapidly escalating oil prices and America's increasing dependence on expensive oil imports from hostile and politically unstable countries threatens all three. The situation, bad as it is now, will get much worse in the coming years as world oil production declines.



The major mode of transport in the 21st century will be electric autos and trucks, and maglev (Magnetic Levitation). Oil-fueled autos and trucks will become as obsolete as coal-fired trains are today.



Why will this happen?



World oil reserves are running out while demand keeps rising.
There are no practical alternative fuels to oil. Biofuels can meet only a tiny fraction of U.S. transport needs and they drive up food prices. Hydrogen fuel requires impossible amounts of energy to produce it, and has insurmountable safety and security problems. Synfuels from coal and oil shale will greatly increase carbon dioxide emissions, speeding up global warming.
Oil-fueled transport is a major cause of global warming, due to the carbon dioxide emissions from its tailpipes. As the developing world adopts the American lifestyle, global warming will rapidly accelerate, with incredible damage to the environment and human society.
Even though modern maglev was invented by two American scientists - Drs. James Powell and Gordon Danby in the 1960's - the U.S. is behind the curve in the development of electric transport. The federal government started a maglev research program, but dropped it in 1973. However, other countries took up the slack and now lead the world in operating first generation maglev systems.



Japan's first-generation Superconducting Maglev system, which is based on the 1960's inventions of Powell and Danby, has carried over 50,000 passengers and holds the world ground speed record of 361 mph. Japan plans to build a 300 mph maglev line between Tokyo and Osaka that will carry over 100,000 passengers daily. Germany has also developed a first-generation maglev that uses conventional electromagnets rather than superconducting magnets. The maglev train in Shanghai, China, was built by Germany.



-James Jordan, DC Examiner Staff Writer
President of the Interstate Maglev Project



[Source: http://www.dcexaminer.com/opinion/Maglev_is_a_smarter_way_to_say_good-bye_to_oil.html]
Eric Koch Comment by Eric Koch on November 24, 2008 at 8:05am
don't meen to change the subject.....just stoping by to tack this poster up.

The bridge to the future seem to be collapsing under the weight of minds chained to boat anchors resembling automobiles (of any kind) A gallon of gas is the equivalent of 500 human hours of labor, so the future may see some changes. Even the lowest-paid worker might baulk at wages of a penny an hour -- when gas is $5 a gallon. http://www.lifeafte rtheoilcrash. net/Research. html#anchor_ 71

we have "discharged" the plethora of condensed solar energy called oil ,that took millions of years to create under very energy intensive pressures and heat...in the span of a few hundred years( give it up ).....reconfiguring our systems to operate on available ambient is going to require copious amounts of energy from every available resource,and a commitment to frugality(after being given a warning, non human powered"recreational" vehicle operators may be shot on sight )...if your legs work, use them...there are simple machines widely distributed that will allow you to increase your mechanical advantage for transportation purposes (they are called bicycles).....

Reqauntifying energy to a common unit:our current agricultural machine puts food on the plate at an efficiency of ten calories in/ one calorie out..

http://push.pickensplan.com/group/suburbanconvertionproject
Bill Mollring Comment by Bill Mollring on July 9, 2008 at 2:16pm
Please take look at our group site Mariah Power. The Windspire in now on display in Washington D.C. at the U.S. Capitol Botanic Garden through October 2008. Units are going up in California, Nevada, and Utah now, and we will very visable and effective throughout Hawaii this year. Mariah will be available worldwide as production increases with the completion of a new plant in Youngstown, Ohio. For more information contact us through http://www.emsystems.net or contact Bill Mollring at : 831 402-2037 mrbillmaui@yahoo.com -
http://www.push.pickensplan.com/group/mariahpower
 

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Mike Moore Bill Mollring Rusty jay Marty Grossman Gypsy Keeper Lynn Robb Lawrence Murray John Mc Neill TOM SPENCER Dee RN Karen Adams Michael OffTheGrid Tom Ruen Luane Todd David Harju James Artuso Eric Koch Kelly Hollis MISTER MIKEST Curt Rothman James Kantorowicz
 
 

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