http://techpresident.com/news/…

A group of people from the Occupy Wall Street movement is collaborating with the climate change advocacy group 350.org and a new online toolkit for disaster recovery, recovers.org, to organize a grassroots relief effort in New York City.

Occupy Sandy:  http://occupywallst.org/articl…

Boston TEDX talk by Recovers.org http://www.ted.com/talks/caitr…

The combination of the jobs and economic focus of Occupy with the climate change and energy transition ideas of 350.org along with the disaster recovery systems of Recovers.org is a model that can build resilience and preparedness quickly if continued.  Add Solar IS Civil Defense, set the Maker Culture loose, and it just might shade over into Solar Swadeshi, Gandhian economics, a non-violent and restorative open source peer-to-peer economic system where we plan for 100% success for all humanity, to paraphrase R Buckminster Fuller.

A couple of years ago, Dr William Moomaw of Tufts mentioned a regional scale experiment with an all-renewable grid in Germany.  I’ve been curious about that project since then.  Today, I did a little googling and found a seven-minute youtube called “Fully renewable: biogas + wind + solar”

Dr Jurgen Schmid at the University of Kassel, Department of Efficient Energy Conversion is the spokesperson from this December 2007 video.  The system described is wind with pumped hydro storage and grid scale solar with methane from biomass (corn biofuels).  When the sun isn’t out in the South, the wind may be blowing in the North.  When there’s too much wind, it can be used to pump water into reservoirs that will provide hydroelectricity days or weeks later.  When the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, biomass can be burned or converted to methane.  They say Germany can have a 100% renewable grid by 2050.  Dr Schmid, along with John Sievers, Stefan Faulstich, Mathias Puchta, Ingo Stadler, is the co-author of “Long-term perspectives for balancing fluctuating renewable energy sources” (pdf alert:  http://desire.iwes.fraunhofer…. details the steps necessary to get to a fully renewable grid.

In less than 2 minutes, Gil Friend, CEO of Natural Logic, Inc and author of The Truth about Green Business, makes a clear business case against coal:

http://www.youtube.com/v/Eqifc…

A larger version of this chart, where you can read the numbers more easily is at

https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/energy/energy_archive/energy_flow_2009/LLNL_US_Energy_Flow_2009.png

Estimated US energy use in 2009 was 94.6 quadrillion btu’s.  54.64 quads were “rejected energy,” wasted energy.  39.97 quads actually provided energy services, did work.  We lost about 57.75% of the energy we produced to get the use of 42.25% of what we, mostly, burned.  At least, those are the percentages I get with my calculator.

Every year I start my garden early by using solar cloches made from 2 liter plastic bottles.  These three cloches were planted with seed in the last week of March and first week of April, respectively, with tomato and basil, cucumber and dill, and zucchini in planting Zone 6A, eastern Massachusetts.

The ring of bottles are filled with water to store solar heat during the day and the central bottle has its bottom cut out and pressed into the soil to protect the growing seeds.