Reactions to Pickens’ Plan

01Aug08

Right now, we get about 20% of our electricity from burning natural gas. If we started getting that electricity from renewable sources instead, then we could take the natural gas we would save and use it to run our cars (or a lot of them) and thereby reduce our use of planet-warming, atmosphere-polluting oil. This [...]

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Solar Trees

25Jun08

A Solar Grove at the Kyocera Solar parking lot.

Well, not really. But a San Diego firm is marketing “solar trees” that stand 12 feet tall and provide both shade and electricity. They are intended to be clustered into “groves” that cover large parking lots.
The downside is that they’re not really trees at all and look [...]

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Frontiers of Green Computing

07Mar08

One of my favorite science fiction authors from back when I read science fiction was Norman Spinrad. His book of short stories, The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde, made a lasting impression on my 15-year-old self, partially because it included generous helpings of sex and drugs along with wild flights of imagination.
But another of [...]

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Take over the electric company

24Sep06

Today in the San Francisco Chronicle, there was a good article about how efforts to increase the use of renewable energy for electricity generation were being stifled by excessive regulation and red tape. I had two responses to the article.
First, while it is admirable that the state is setting goals for increasing the use of [...]

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