Green Leaf Report

I managed to get through the Christmas holidays buying almost all of my family’s gifts at Goodwill. I bought a complete Thomas the Train set with four engines, yards of train tracks and various other items, stacks of books, a few handmade dolls, a baby stroller, winter jackets, warm socks (every kid’s favorite Christmas present- still in the package, too), and jade Swank cufflinks for my husband.  I wrapped the presents in a leftover roll of wrapping paper and piles of gift bags, also purchased at Goodwill.  Overall, the entire pile under the tree wasn’t very expensive, and wasn’t very guilt inducing, from an over-consumption, environmentally-conscious standpoint. 

We placed the toys under the 1950s vintage aluminum Christmas tree we purchased several years ago at a flea market in Dallas.  The tree was decorated with small vintage wooden ornaments bought at various flea markets and thrift stores (they don’t break when my children knock over the tree yay!), though the bottom few branches were continually missing ornaments because my daughter is convinced the little wooden Santas and snowmen are toys meant for her.

And then today, we went over to my in-laws for a delayed Christmas celebration, and were met with all of the shiny, plastic, over-packaged toys that we had avoided.  The only items that didn’t take batteries were the life-sized dolls purchased for my daughter.  The kids were so excited that I think they became a little dizzy.  My son disappeared to work on his new Lightning McQueen laptop, while my daughter hid under the dining room table.  My husband had to make two trips to carry out the discarded packaging from the mass of toys. 

My daughter left making the “more” sign in the car, with her index finger on one hand pointing on her other palm.  In our car, loaded with toys, she kept saying “More, more…pwesents.” My son now wants to call his other grandparents.  We haven’t seen them yet, but he knows there are more presents waiting.  And they are likely similar in nature to the other grandparents.  I can’t tell either grandparent set about presents from the other, or the competitive streak continues.

Yoho Merry Christmas.  I’m a Grinch.  At least the Grinch was green too (in color, maybe in style, in his little cave)…

We can’t figure out how to stop the grandparents gifts; I’ve tried thrift store shopping trips with my mother-in-law and my mom (separately) to show the wonders of the donated items.  I’ve discussed the huge trade deficit and what it means to US jobs when we consistently buy only foreign made items at wondrously low prices, and how secondhand stores keep all of the money spent in the local economy. My husband has also pressed the point with his parents over this; we haven’t been able to stop the gift flow from the grandparents  while maintaining family harmony.

Maybe 2010 will be different.

via thedailygreen.com

I’m inspired with the upcycling of waste products. So many useful resources go straight into the landfills; let’s all embrace reuse instead of cutting down more trees, sending men down into more mines and devastating more untouched landscapes.

Posted via web from Jennifer Dillon

I’d like to introduce my neighbors to this technology of powering Christmas lights with solar power.  Christmas lights have been running on houses up and down my street for the last month.  I feel like a Scrooge, but all I can think about when I see the lights are the fossil fuels burning to power these superfluous holiday decorations.  Let’s not celebrate religious holidays at the expense of our nonrenewable fuels and the associated pollution.

Posted via email from Jennifer Dillon

Posted via email from Jennifer Dillon

  At some major intersections near downtown Houston, it’s a common sight to see people standing on street-corners holding cardboard signs.  Normally the signs have handwritten messages along the lines of “Out of work” or “Homeless” and “Need help.”  I’ve noticed two different panhandlers recently that seemed outside the norm, not because of the messages on their signs, but rather because they looked different: Both were quite obese.  It was jarring; what is the message about our society when our beggars look more well-nourished than most of the planet?  I’m not referring to slightly plump builds, these two people were overweight by possibly a couple of hundred pounds each.

Perhaps it’s a sign of the dramatic and precipitous fall of our economy. Persons that recently had clear access to food are now reaching this level of desperation, where the scorching heat and their own pride are less important than acquiring some form of help.  Or perhaps it’s all a scam, and the person chosen to hold the sign for the day was just a poor marketing choice.

In my mind, I equate it to the messages also coming in my electricity bills, asking for donations to help pay the utility bills of the impoverished. I keep my family sweating, in the humid Gulf Coast summer, trying to live with the seasons.  We were wilted today, the first day of August, at 97 degrees and full sun reflecting back from the poorly planned inner-city pavement.  I don’t want anyone to perish from heat stroke in the extreme heat, but I also don’t want to continue supporting poor consumption practices.  A dilemma.

Image by George Dearing via Flickr

What is a clean technology? The Clean Technology 2009 conference in Houston is one of the most all-encompassing technology events that  I’ve attended.  I concentrated primarily on the presentations and companies related to renewable energy, learning more about marine power, tidal energy, solar, wind, biofuels, geothermal, energy efficiency and green roofs, and even a little about waste stream reuse.

It was a great opportunity learn about innovation in the energy world and weigh some of the pros and cons of our portfolio of energy options.  I was a little surprised by the number of references to wind power from other renewable energy producers, though.  I pointed out to a few attendees during discussions- sure, wind is getting a lot of attention, but the big technology we all need to compete with is still fossil fuel.  Maybe utility scale wind power has jumped the shark in the world of renewables, no longer struggling for attention in the same manner as some of the other technologies.  But let’s not all compete for the same 2%-6% of energy production in the US; we need to think bigger! 

I was surprised not to hear hear from anyone on the floor about nuclear, with all the recent dialog about nuclear power as a cleaner technology.  But maybe the difference is that many of the attendees are small companies and start-ups interested in funding.  Nuclear doesn’t take that route; it hasn’t been achievable for the average entrepreneur…Or for the average major corporation in America, recently.

I didn’t attend the clean coal presentation, and the booth remained unmanned during my tours of the exhibition floor.  But one attendee that promoted a technology for PCB removal summed up my thoughts of some of the technologies present: “The Cleanest form of…”  I had to ask the gentleman working that booth: “So as far as PCB removal goes, you’re the cleanest…but how clean is it?”  I’ll admit, the technology sounded pretty good, though not sure it could scale enough to clean up GE’s years of polluting the Hudson river.

It is a good goal, though, for all technologies: To be the cleanest, on a pretty dirty planet.  Let’s all keep this goal in the forefront.

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The first week of May is a big week for renewable energy conferences.  Houston is hosting the Clean Technology 2009 Conference and Expo, with representatives from Renewable Energy, Sustainable Industry and more. 

Chicago will host the AWEA WindPower 2009 Conference and Exhibition, with representatives flying in from around the world to attend.

So it’s time to welcome the Spring, attend some lectures, make some deals, and help bring the world to a cleaner future.

Last year at the AWEA conference I wrote about many companies evaluating a greener future.  I met my own current employer in Wind Power at that Houston conference. 

In spite of the downturns in the market, I still see so much growth in my new industry.  Maybe we can bring about an economic recovery through cleaner technologies and further innovation.  We can only try.

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I’ve visited a couple of different college campuses recently, recruiting entry level engineers.  At a recent campus visit, I was impressed at the environmental credentials of many of the interviewees.  Candidate after candidate described his or her environmental projects, experiences installing residential wind turbines or solar panels, and on and on.  One student had completed multiple internships measuring local air quality for government projects.  I got the feeling during the interview that he expected me to have more answers.  He asked me what I thought about the haze hanging over the state, the way local coal plants were allowed to pollute because the local governments were so concerned over job loss if the plants left, the horrors of mountaintop mining.  He would pause and stare at me, waiting for me to provide a solution, perhaps.

About half way through the interview, I started to ask him if he had spoken with the woman interviewing in the room next to us.  She worked on the air quality monitors in coal plants. What a perfect fit, in my mind.  Take a person who cares about the pollution coming out of coal plants, and set that guy to work putting better filters in place, injecting carbon waste into the ground, working on more responsible processes and practices that the rest of us haven’t thought of yet.  Maybe he’s someone who could make clean coal happen, at least of the consumption side, if not on the processing site (but stop mountaintop mining anyway!)

I don’t know if he’ll follow through on it, but I did get him an interview with the woman in the room next to me, and he came back later and spoke with her.  So for everyone else, let’s move away from coal. For those with the right knowledge base and idealism, please clean up that fossil fuel process, while we work on getting alternative energy replacements in place.

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A few weeks ago I was working from the site building at a customer’s wind farm.  A man came to the door and asked for the Site Manager, by name.  He had been told to come talk with the Site Manager about getting a job; as I looked over at him, I noticed he was dressed in work clothes and had worn through the leather toes of his steel-toe boots.  This man had shown up hoping for work, not for an interview.

Local jobs, for rural towns. We say the words, but I remember what it means each time I visit a wind farm.  When I was new in my current job, I argued for centralizing our supply of fork-lifts. Surely we could cuts costs, leverage our negotiating power and gain efficiencies by making one umbrella agreement for all of our farms with one vendor.  For all of my planning, a coworker cut me off by mentioning that he thought we were trying to support local businesses in these small towns by using local equipment, even if it wasn’t always quite as cheap.  Local jobs, in rural towns.

If I can keep more men at home in these small towns, I’ll sacrifice some of the gains from a cheaper, centralized energy source.  I’ve talked with some of our employees that came over from the fossil-fuel sector.  They’ve told me they made a lot more money when working on the off-shore rigs, or they made more money when working on drilling platforms overseas.  But they want to be near their families.  They want to go back to the small towns they came from.  They’re proud of using local resources for their energy needs. Local jobs, for rural people.

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At a dinner with my senior managers last fall, we were discussing one of my manager’s former jobs working on generators for nuclear plants. He mentioned traveling to some of the plants, and how there was great fishing in the coolant water ponds downstream from the plants.  I asked if the fish in those ponds had three eyes.  He stared at me for a minute, started laughing and called me a tree hugger.  I started laughing, too, and realized we had both thought the other was joking. 

Nuclear power has bad PR; whether US politicians can change the culture of fear may be more debatable than whether nuclear is the right power solution for tomorrow.

In my engineering classes in school, I studied nuclear power, and how our US plants are designed completely differently than Chernobyl.  Several of my friends went into the Navy nuclear program, and many of my coworkers now in wind power came from a nuclear background.  Even with my knowledge, or maybe because of it, I still think of nuclear as a step away from dangerous.  My Navy friends have summed it up for me- sure it’s cool technology, but without the military chain of command in charge, is it safe to have civilians handling this power?

As we debate the best path forward for US energy needs, I can’t think of another type of energy that has as much bad international press coverage.  I regularly see articles about whether Iran and North Korea have weapons grade nuclear fuel.  Maybe the articles are wrong to suppose the weapons grade fuel is so similar to power grade fuel, but how can a single industry overcome this constant media barrage about the possible dangers?  Sometimes I wonder if the same argument for nuclear power- that so much power can be generated from such a small bit of fuel, is the worst one for this industry: so much power is contained in such a small bit of fuel.

Maybe I’m showing my age as a Gen-X child of the 80s, watching movies about Red Dawn and worrying about the Soviet Union and all of their nuclear missiles pointed at the US.  Surely the face of war has changed to a much lower tech worry, with men using our own planes to attack our own buildings.  That said, do any of us wonder about the controls around those nuclear plants that some in our government want to build at the end of every main street?

What can a wind turbine do to us?  Can an over-speed condition fling a blade into a cow?  Can a solar panel fall through our roof and crush us?  Or fly off in a tornado and land in Oz? Less power per unit, less risk for control.  Sometimes the drawback is the the benefit, too. Too often we argue technical solutions from an analytical standpoint; I don’t think this nuclear energy solution can restart in the US without deep consideration of the emotional reaction.