Clean Energy Springfield

Ah, the bane of bloggers everywhere -- the long, unexplained absence that leaves your front page entirely post-less. Vacation travel followed by a family emergency has left us in dire straits. But fear not -- I have brought presents for you all. We've tweaked the design of the front page a little bit to make room for the most wonderful supercool thing ever -- a Wind Farm monitor for Springfield's wind power purchases.

Since our wind farm is out of town--Iowa, to be approximate--we thought it would be nice to have a little way for people in town to keep tabs on when the wind blows. Dave Heinzel did a wonderful job of taking a publicity photo from Florida Power and Light and animating it. The monitor pulls real-time weather data, with the wind speed, from the National Weather Service, and turns the blades of the turbine somewhat in-line with the speed. ("Somewhat" because the relation of turns to wind speed is just made up right now, but we hope to update it with real information from FPL one day.)

Right now, we're only buying into the Hancock County wind farm -- Osceola won't come online until late this year or early 2008. So if you ever have the hankering to check in on our little contribution to fighting climate change, drop by and see how the wind is blowing.

The SJR had a good article yesterday on people who have started putting in their own renewable energy generators. This is, of course, a welcome thing, and gets to the heart of what we're trying to do with our comments on CWLP's PURPA standards, which govern (among other things) how these small generators hook up to CWLP's system, and how their energy production gets paid back.

As Chris Wetterich notes in the article, CWLP is sending its recommendations to city council today. They're basically just going to get slotted to a committee tonight, but ought to be more fully considered at next week's utilities committee meeting.

As this article shows, what we're primarily looking for are good rules that allow people to make their own investments in renewable energy, or for people to invest, through CWLP, in renewable energy. If you read down into comments on the article, you see the inevitable incoherence about coercion and whatnot, which just goes to show how rote this all is. We're asking for rules that give people more power over their own energy use.

ALSO: In the article, the guy putting solar panels on his roof talks about how inefficient his home is. I hope everyone else knows how big a no-no that is--why put your money into something with a 10- or 20-year payback, when you can start with insulation and furnace upgrades that are going to have 2- or 5-year paybacks? Not even to mention all of the filling of little gaps (which we are blessed with a utility that will train you in how to do this) which are nearly cost-less.

I have a pile of urgent and relevant clean energy links that I have just not had the time to share with you. So what do you get instead? Harry Potter news, of course. The last book in the series, slated to arrive at the house of all the children you know on Saturday, is apparently something of a leader in green publishing, to the extent that, "Production of the book spurred the development of 32 new ecological papers, six for Potter exclusively, and prompted 300 publishers to adopt new environmental policies, according to Markets Initiative, a Vancouver-based environmental group." Who knew?

Okay, so one more link for today, since I don't know that I have a whole lot to say about it. It's not strictly energy stuff, but it's useful info, I think. According to Kevin Harris, who is a pretty good source on what's going on in the UK to improve neighborhoods from the ground up, what makes the biggest difference (in terms of positive factors) for happiness with your neighborhood is that the people are friendly. This isn't ground-breaking stuff, but it is stuff that's easy to forget about. Kevin's post is about forgetting about friendliness while focusing on community involvement and influence (i.e., self-determination at the local level), but you could probably come up with a dozen other things that people focus on instead of friendliness.

Of course, that "instead of" is tricky, because I don't think you can solve everybody's problems just by forcing everyone to smile at everyone else, and at some point you do have to deal with self-governance or whatever else. But maybe while you're working on all those things, we need to also find ways to spread friendliness. These things work together, after all, and how much can a smile cost?

Here's this week's recipe, again courtesy Carey Smith Moorman:

Beans and Taters

Chop and fry 3-4 medium onions, and one bulb of garlic/handful of garlic scapes, in 1 Tbsp. of olive oil. Add 2 quarts yukon gold potatoes, washed and chopped, along with one cube of bouillon and two cups of water. Bring to a boil, then simmer lightly until potatoes are soft. Add 1 pound green beans, snapped. Cook additional 5 minutes. Salt, pepper, and otherwise season to taste.

I've been negligent in not praising the SJR for opening up all of its content online--so, thanks, y'all!

In the news today: front-yard gardens in marketplace, about their roles in not just making food about as local as possible, but also as community areas, bringing neighbors together. We've done a lot to bring greenery, including vegetables, into our tiny tiny yard, but it's all in the back. The one thing I really wanted to do, and haven't, is to put a pumpkin plant in the front yard, near the house, and grow it up a trellis, so that by the time fall hits, we'd have ready-made Halloween decorations, in the form of ghostly floating pumpkins. Alas.

The other big thing in today's paper: 2006 temperatures higher than average. There's not a whole lot of new information here, but it's always good to get a reminder of where we're at, and it's rare to get this kind of thing from an Illinois perspective. For some context, here's average temperatures across the US last year:

The full report is here.