The 2012 Meaning of Christmas

Ahhh, Christmas! That very special time of the year! The season which we spend more than we earn on plastic junk, which is forgotten about less than 24 hours after being opened. The world’s landfills are busy clearing room for this season’s payload of Chinese-made Christmas rubbish.

I’m yet to meet a person who actually loves the overconsumption, frenzied malls, consumer debt, environmental waste, and over-accumulation of needless stuff related to Christmas (except the owners of the malls and chain stores perhaps) so why not reign in your spending this year, and be a little more responsible.

I don’t suggest you should stop buying gifts for your loved ones, however I am suggesting you buy less of them. Here are some good alternatives to spending money things that will (and let’s be honest) almost certainly end up in the local landfill before Spring has even arrived.

• Do other things with your family, such as baking, watching It’s a Wonderful Life, or simply dedicating Christmas morning to playing whatever games they want to play.
• Volunteer your family to a homeless shelter, or decide to clean up a beach (with tasty rewards for the kids).
• Ask people to donate to your favorite charity in lieu of gifts.
• Buy goods from Trade Aid, or another globally conscious, ethical supplier.
• Make meaningful gifts – by yourself. Nothing means more than a hand-made gift.
• Do a gift swap where you put a valued possession (that you already own) into the swap.
• Bake gifts – this one’s my favourite.
• Have an experience instead of giving material goods: do something fun together, go fishing for example.
• Find hope. Christmas has so much potential to be about so much more than buying — it can be a season of hope, renewal, loved ones, inspiration, contemplation. Talk to your family about this — how can we find ways to be hopeful, thankful, cooperative? How can we be more present instead of worried about getting presents?
• Get stuff at Goodwill. It’s recycled, and the money helps a good cause.
• Start a family project: Convert your gasoline powered car to run on electricity. It’s easy, fun, and you won’t have to pay for gas again. Kids can learn a lot, as can parents. You need no special skills either with this downloadable tutorial.

If you’re not ready to go cold turkey on lavish spending, then perhaps the best advice I can give you is to simply set yourself a budget for each person. The kids? Your spouse or partner? Why not limit each family member to a maximum of $30 each.

Remember, Christmas isn’t about shopping, despite what the advertising might suggest!

Good luck!

How many hungry humans, is too many hungry humans?

The planet is ageing rapidly and becoming more crowded. That’s an undeniable fact, and if we don’t do something about it, we’re in for massive food shortages and general misery on a scale never seen before.

It’s hard to imagine, sitting in front of your PC screen, with a full stomach and a pantry of food just a few feet away, but this problem is becoming a reality as I type, and whether you want to believe it or not, it’s going to get worse.

When we think of this overpopulation issue, we instantly picture children in Africa or China or India as dub them as the culprits, but the reality is, those of us with cars, computers, and houses full of plastic stuff are much more dangerous to the environment and the planet’s resources. We eat more, we use more, we waste more, and we pollute more, than our fellow brethren in the aforementioned locations.

Considering we treat the ocean as both a pantry and a toilet, as unpopular as it sounds we need to introduce population control methods sooner rather than later.

By population control, I simply mean contraception. The Catholic church may squirm at the idea, but we have to recognise such problems and adapt to this changing world. For many years China has had a “One child per family” policy, where fines are imposed on families who have more than one child.

I wouldn’t want to take away the right to bear children from any mother or father, but at the very least I feel it’s time to encourage a limit on the amount of children you can have, or more realistically, a limit in the amount of taxpayer-funded support once you reach a certain number of children.

It’s a tricky topic, and perhaps that’s the reason politicians aren’t mentioning it, for fear it could polarise them in the ratings. Even the head of the United Nations, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that seven billion hungry humans is “A challenge”. Quite the understatement of the century.

Governments (other than China) need to act on this issue now, regardless of it’s popularity. Effects of such a monumental population are becoming apparent already. Food has been running out for decades, affecting the poorer nations first. Then at the same time, water has now become as precious as gold in some parts of the world. It doesn’t help that the climate is changing too.

This is not the rant of a “Dyed in the wool” tree-hugging hippy. I like having clean water and beaches as much as the next man, but this goes beyond “Eco-mentalism” (as Jeremy Clarkson likes to put it) and into common sense, quite literally.

We all know that oil and gas is running out worldwide – that’s obvious just by looking at the price per gallon of gasoline each day (by the way, this is the easy way for you to get out of that problem) but the fact that food is also increasing is perhaps more worrying when you consider the trend over the last decade alone.

On average, four babies are brought into the world every single second. This means that by the time you’ve read this far into the article, around 500 new people are now breathing their first breaths, ready for a lifetime of consuming and waste on our tiny little planet, spinning around in the corner of an empty galaxy.

There’s no second chance with planet Earth – this is it. Forget colonising Mars as a solution too, that’s something for 2312 – if we last that long.

The U.N. estimates the world population will reach 8 billion by 2025 and 10 billion by 2083, but they stopped short of suggesting any solutions to the problem.

These days, we like to think of our species as so much more “Enlightened”; and that the days of the major World Wars are long behind us. We’re believe we’re smarter now, and it’s simply not possible to happen again. I wonder, are we correct?
I’m normally an optimist, but in this case I have a really bad feeling about things unless we change. Now.

Any society is only three square meals away from revolution.
-Leon Trotsky

Prototype delivers 100 MWh of power to the grid

The UK’s fledgling tidal energy sector marked an impressive milestone this week after Rolls-Royce confirmed that its prototype generator in Scotland has generated 100 megawatt hours (MWh) of renewable, clean power.

Rolls-Royce said that a 500kw tidal turbine, built by Tidal Generation Limited, has generated more than 100MWh since connecting to the grid in September last year. The machine is installed at the European Marine Energy Centre’s (EMEC’s) test site off the Orkney Islands, and is the first in the area to receive Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs).

Robert Stevenson, vice president of Rolls-Royce’s Power Ventures division, claimed that the announcement is a major step towards commercialisation.

“Reaching the 100MWh milestone highlights the significant potential of cleaner, greener tidal power as part of a diversified UK energy mix,” he said. “Having proven the capability of tidal energy, Rolls-Royce is well placed to meet any future demand with larger, more efficient technology on a commercial scale.”

The system features a three-blade turbine attached by a tripod to the seabed, and can operate fully submerged at a depth of 40 metres.

Tidal Generation Limited is planning to deploy 20 of the 500KW machines in the fast-flowing Inner Sound area of the Pentland Firth, as part of a much larger 400MW project being developed by the MeyGen consortium.

Rolls-Royce is also currently building a 1MW tidal turbine demonstration unit that will be deployed in mid-2012 at EMEC in Orkney. The project is being supported by the Energy Technologies Institute-funded Reliable Data Acquisition Platform for Tidal consortium.

The news is the latest in a string of positive announcements for the tidal energy sector.
Last week saw the UK and Scottish governments announce plans to increase tidal power subsidies under the ROC scheme.
Tidal stream developers now look set to receive five ROCs per MWh generated compared to the current two.

The Scottish government also unveiled an £18m fund to support the development of the country’s first commercial wave and tidal power arrays. Well done UK. Keep up the good work.

Laurel Mountain wind farm and its 32MW of lithium battery storage.

Two divisions of energy project developer AES today said that the 98-megawatt Laurel Mountain wind facility in West Virginia is now connected to 32 megawatts worth of lithium ion batteries from A123 Systems. It’s the largest project to couple wind power with lithium ion batteries, according to the company.

The shipping container-size batteries will allow AES to gradually adjust power delivery to the grid up and down, rather than have a more sudden drop-off in power due to a change in wind. The variability of wind and solar can make integrating large amounts of renewable energy challenging to grid operators.

More significant from a commercial point of view is that the battery operations will be selling frequency regulation services to local grid operator PJM. The batteries will supply 32 megawatts of power in quick bursts to maintain an even balance between power supply and demand on the grid, displacing a job which had been done by a natural gas power plant.

The scale of the project demonstrates that batteries can be cost-effective for grid storage and can be used for different applications, such as supplying power to the grid during peak times when the price is highest, said AES Energy Storage president Chris Shelton.

There are 16 shipping containers, each of which can supply two megawatts for up to 15 minutes. AES chose lithium ion batteries because they were the least expensive for this application and they are proven in the auto industry, Shelton said.

“If you can charge and discharge them in 15 minutes, it’s not hard to think you could do it over an hour or four hours–you just add more batteries,” he said. “We see the costs of the (lithium ion battery) technology decline over time because of the focus on electric vehicles and the batteries are getting smaller, better, and cheaper.”

After little activity for years, grid storage has sped up over the past few years, aided by stimulus grants to test technologies to buffer renewable energy or provide back-up power.

At the Laurel Mountain project, the batteries will be connected to 61 mountaintop wind turbines each of has a generating capacity of 1.6 megawatts.

“Combining wind and solar with storage provides the greatest benefit to grid operations and has the potential to achieve the greatest economic value,” said PJM president and CEO Terry Boston in a statement who called energy storage the “silver bullet” for solving the problems of variability in power.

I wonder if it comes with a lightning fast-charger?

By 1982, the company was floundering and Delorean became the focus of an FBI drug sting that ultimately found him accused of attempting to smuggle $24 million worth of cocaine into the United States. Delorean was acquitted of the charges but his company never recovered. Shortly thereafter the company was finished.

Fast forward to 2011. Texas businessman Stephen Wynne now owns the Delorean Motor Company name. His past endeavors have included selling T-shirts and sneakers with the iconic DMC logo – now, it seems, the newly reconstituted version of Delorean is begun to set their sights a tad bit higher.

According to the company, Delorean is back in the auto business — the electric auto business. The new Delorean, created in partnership with Epic Electric Vehicles, made its debut (as a concept/prototype) at a Delorean Owners event in Houston recently. The company plans to have the car for sale n the US by 2013.

The new Delorean will share the look of the “classic” DMC 12 and utilize an Epic EV powertrain in early models. The company claims a top speed of 125 MPH and a 0 to 60 time of 4.9 seconds (which is pretty good considering the original DMC did the sprint in a sluggish 10 seconds.)

The new DMC will have a range of 100+ miles and take a full charge in 3.5 hours using a 240 volt connection. There’s no word, however, on whether or not it will come with a Flux Capacitor installed.

Unashamed advertisement: Keen on doing something similar to your own car? A fast, reliable electric conversion can be done for under $5000 USD. Get ready to drive past gas stations forever with my full tutorial here. Or, you can go back to driving your noisy & expensive gas car… (That’s me attempting to use reverse psychology!)

Seriously though, home-built electric cars are a piece of cake, and for the careful bargain hunter, a complete conversion can be achieved for under $1000 USD using high-power electric forklift components. You’ll be surprised what those big old rusty forklifts motors can do. Spend an evening learning how here.