Not totally sure what the implications are, but this sticker caught my eye today.
I saw it in a bathroom and it says “This sticker will save up to 100lbs. of paper every year.” It also includes a link to the project’s website, TheseComeFromTrees.com. Just thought it was an interesting, albeit analog, example of communicating consumption to consumers. Maybe something to think about with smart grid/GE energy.
Ran across an interesting article over at The Oil Drum: Europe that defends wind energy as a viable option for our energy needs. (As a side note I’ve been working on a longer entry about some of the stuff we learned about the economics of wind power that hopefully I can get finished this week.) Anyway, I found this chart comparing the growth of nuclear energy in the 60s and 70s to the growth of wind over the last 15 years particularly interesting:
Interesting.
We’ve posted a few videos and things from our trip to the wind turbine at Jiminy Peak, but we haven’t talked about it much yet. So … that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
First off, here are the basics: It went up in August of 2007, it’s 80 meters high (that’s 262.467192 feet according to Google), each blade is 37 meters long (~121 feet … which is about 10 feet bigger than the largest blue whale ever recorded) and it’s roughly a 7-to-7.5 year return on investment for the folks at Jiminy Peak. (I will go deeper into how they made this whole thing happen in another post. Turns out it’s not super easy for an individual/organization to procure a single turbine.)
Anyhow, here’s Betsy from Jiminy talking about how it happened and why they made the decision to go with a turbine:
As a side note, she mentions the trouble with getting it up there. We’re trying to find the video of them doing that to throw up on the site. Hopefully will be up in the next few days.