Month: July 2012

In New York City Gay Marriage is Worth $259 Million

- Adam Clare

You read that correctly, a $259 million (USD) boom in New York City’s economy is thanks to respecting human rights! Changing the law to reflect reality and letting homosexuals marry one another has generated some needed economic growth for the local economy. All of this in just one year!

“Marriage equality has made our City more open, inclusive and free — and it has also helped to create jobs and support our economy,” Mayor Bloomberg said in a statement.

More than 8,200 same-sex marriage licenses have been issued over the past year, representing more than 10% of the 75,000 licenses issued in the city, according to a survey conducted by the City Clerk’s Office and NYC & Company, the city’s tourism and marketing organization.

Read more at CNN.

Germany’s Sustainable Energy Grid Keeps Improving

- Adam Clare

In May, Germany was able to supply 50% of their national energy consumption using renewable power sources. That was remarkable in itself given the size of Germany in both industrial and population size.

Now, it’s been announced that for the first half 2012 Germany produced 67.9 billion kilowatt hours of renewable energy which makes up a quarter of all energy production this far into the year.

Biomass, or material acquired from living organisms, accounted for 5.7 percent and solar technology for 5.3 percent.

Solar energy saw the biggest increase, up 47 percent from the previous year. Germany is the world’s top market for power converted from solar radiation and its installed capacity accounts for more than a third of the global total.

Germany aims to derive 35 percent of its total energy needs from renewable sources by 2035.

Link for more info.

Thanks to Reddit, here’s a website that tracks energy production by type.

Homeowners Can Earn Cash From Solar Roofs

- Adam Clare

Energy is still delivered via large power stations which can fail and leave entire regions without electricity. The future requires a more distributed energy grid that is a combination of large and small electricity generators, doing so will ensure electricity is not so heavily impacted by a rise in the cost of single fuel source.

Light provides us with infinitely free energy, all we need is a way to capture it and year-over-year it’s getting easier to do so. Combing solar power and a distributed power grid opens up new opportunities and an enterprising company from always cloudy Vancouver have stepped up.

Gridbid will turn a homeowner’s roof into a power source and provide an ongoing revenue for the owner while making our energy source a little better.

Gridbid, allows homeowners to auction the solar installation rights to their roofs online. The company says solar installers can save as much as 80% of what they normally spend to find roof-top space, while the average residential utility bill drops between 10 and 35%.
…

He and his partners knew getting into solar was next. Proving the importance of engaging in customer discovery conversations, they talked to over 150 different people in the solar market to identify the key problems. The problems were roof acquisition and financing for projects. Thomas shared what’s driving him and his team, “we are going to learn faster than anyone, and ultimately build a very large solar auction and financing platform that will make going solar painless for any person, or organization who owns a roof.”

Read more here.

A Stove That Uses Fire to Charge Electronics

- Adam Clare

BioLite is a company that focuses on creating clean-burning stoves. We’ve looked at stoves before and why it’s important to create efficient stoves for a better planet and healthier people.

Recently, an employee of BioLite gave a presentation at TEDx Montreal about the importance of clean stoves.

The company has tied their business model of selling camping stoves to improving home stoves in a smart way, here’s an advertisement about their camping stove:

BioLite CampStove Demo & Story from BioLite on Vimeo.

Use Your Smartphone to Advance Science

- Adam Clare

Smartphones aren’t just for games and checking your email anymore! Today, these mobile devices can be used to better the world around us by helping scientists understand more about it. Thanks to the distribution of mobiles research can be crowd-sourced to provide information that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Below is one of ten ways that you can use your phone to make the world a little better:

5. Inventory your Local Wildlife
The goal of Project NOAH (Networked Organisms and Habitats) is pretty ambitious: “build the go-to platform for documenting all the world’s organisms.” Their app has two modes. “Spottings” lets you take photos of plants and animals you see, categorize and describe them and then submit the data for viewing on NOAH’s website and use by researchers for population and distribution studies.

Don’t know what you’re looking at? Check a box when you submit your photo and other users and scientists can help you identify the species. You can also use the location-based field guides to see other users’ Spottings near your location and learn more about your local wildlife. “Field Missions” let you help out with crowdsourced data collection for specific studies that labs have submitted to NOAH. You might be asked to photograph invasive beetles near your home, or log GPS coordinates when migrating flocks of birds pass over you, and if discovering wildlife and helping scientists isn’t enough motivation, completing missions also earns you cool badges in the app. Project NOAH is available for free for iOS and Android devices

Read the full text here.

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