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Austin, Texas: A Green Capital

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

This may shock you as much as it did me: Austin, Texas may just be the best place in the USA for clean-tech companies. Time Magazine has a good article on how the socially regressive state is forward-looking in the corporate sustainable energy sector. Ironically, or rather appropriately, the same state that brought the world many oil barons is now bringing up a new generation of sustainable energy leaders because the business culture in Texas is used to taking risks on the energy market.

But as politically conservative as Texas tends to be, it’s kept an open mind on renewable energy, which is one reason more wind power has been installed in the state than anywhere else. And within Texas, Austin has always been an outlier: a fairly liberal college town that has managed to marry high tech with hipster culture. Now that’s paying off in the renewable-energy sector, as Austin contends with Silicon Valley as a top clean-tech hub. The city is home to dozens of green start-ups like HelioVolt, many funded by homegrown venture capitalists. Some 15,000 Austin residents are employed in the broader green economy, and the municipal utility, Austin Energy, has pledged to get 35% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. Over the past eight years, the number of clean-tech jobs has grown more than twice as fast in the Austin metro area as it has in San Francisco. With its background in information technology, Austin is set to take the lead in one of the most exciting areas in clean tech: the marriage of new energy technology with the Internet. “Austin is already a high-tech city,” says Jose Beceiro, the director of clean energy at the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce. “Now it’s becoming a clean-tech city.”

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China Pushes Green Technology Forward

- Adam Clare

China has to confront a lot of environmental problems brought forth by its own quick development, and when China confronts an issue they go all out! Renewable Energy World has a quick write up comparing and contrasting China and the USA in how they support green technologies.

The China Development Bank (CDB) is being relentless in its funding of clean-tech concerns. While American politicians battle it out over Solyndra’s collapse and potential loss to the government of $528 million, the Chinese are pumping billions into their clean-tech concerns, knowing full well that some of them will fail. The CDB put more than $30 billion in credit into its burgeoning solar companies in 2010, including Suntech Power, Trina, and Yingli. It recently announced financial commitments to ensure that its fledgling wind industry can join the ranks of GE, Vestas, and Siemens, allocating at least $15 billion in state-backed credit to China’s biggest windmill makers Sinovel Wind Group and Xinjiang Goldwind Science & Technology. And China has plans to invest some $45 billion in smart-grid companies and technologies alone over the next five years.

These investments haven’t gone unnoticed in the U.S., and have been front and center in recent complaints that have claimed that China’s solar industry, for example, has an unfair trade advantage.

Ontario Votes

- Adam Clare

Hey people in Ontario, if you can vote you should vote!

Things Are Good supports anybody you want to vote for except the Tea Conservative Party. Vote for the Ontario you want to see, vote with hope and optimism. Vote for a party that will actually make the province a better place to live!

NDP
Green Party
Liberal Party
Ontario Conservative Party 😉

In addition to the links above Torontoist has great primers on issues in this election.

Greenpeace at 40

- Adam Clare

I’ll come out and say that I”m a keen supporter of Greenpeace so I’m happy to point out all the good work they’ve done over the past 40 years that they’ve been around. You can see what Greenpeace actions we’ve covered at Things Are Good in the past.

Greenpeace has put up a slideshow on their site celebrating the accomplishments, you can view it here.

You can read Greenpeace’s blog post on the event here.

From the CBC:

“We wouldn’t see the kind of action by governments that we’ve had in the last 40 years if you hadn’t had that kind of pressure applied by the environmental movement.”

Sept. 15, 1971, is cited as the beginning of Greenpeace, the day a group of anti-nuclear activists in Vancouver called the Don’t Make a Wave Committee chartered a ship with the aim of heading off underground nuclear tests by the U.S. government on the remote Alaskan island of Amchitka. In anticipation of the protest, the vessel, Phyllis Cormack, was renamed Greenpeace, a term coined by activist Bill Darnell.

The ship was ultimately blocked by the U.S. Coast Guard before it could reach Amchitka, and the scheduled tests went ahead as planned. But the protest aroused significant public interest in the group, which was renamed Greenpeace International in 1972.

Read more from the CBC on Greenpeace’s 40 year history.

From Landfill to Sustainable Power Plant

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Madison, New York, has a landfill that has been sitting and rotting and essentially not doing anything productive. That’s all about to change. A new pilot test of a Spectro PowerCap Exposed Geomembrane Solar Cover system – a sheet of something close to magic that will convert the mound of trash into a mound of solar power.

The eight-acre demonstration site features a three-ply membrane that serves as both the closure system for the decommissioned landfill and the platform for an integrated 40-kilowatt Uni-Solar thin-film photovoltaic array. The technology was developed as both a long-term and final landfill closure solution. The PV system is expected to offset nearly all of the power requirements of the Madison County ARC Recycling Facility on the site for 20 to 30 years

Read more at Earth Techling.

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