Tag Archives: sustainable

I am committed to developing a culture of sustainability on this campus –VSU President McKinney @ SAVE 2013-11-15

At installation of VSU’s solar canopy, the president of VSU answered SAVE’s question:

You’ve heard about how these kinds of projects can yield a relatively quick return on investment. And you all need to know that, so long as I am president, I am committed to developing a culture of sustainability on this campus. I do not believe for a moment that environmental sustainability and the long-term economic well-being of the university are contradictory goals.

He offered an autobiographical tidbit:

I began my career in academia… as a professor of environmental ethics. I didn’t leave that behind when moved into the role I’m in now. I still hold dear to that kind of thinking. I still hold dear that kind of open dialog. And I remain committed to these kinds of projects. The sun is something we have in abundance here. And I think it is something we can continue to take advantage of.

Now I will take a little bit of credit. I remember probably the most opposite of the day we have today. Back over the summer, and early in the morning, and it was already extremely hot, and we were walking around trying to decide where we were going to put the array, and we looked a couple of spots, and then we came back here.

Smokestack And the first thing that struck me from an academic perspective was the juxtaposition of having a solar panel and the old physical plant. Just from a metaphorical perspective, I just thought that was unique. But then we started talking about the fact that we could have shelter, power, for what is in many ways an academic hub of the university, the library. And generate some power in the process.

And be able to have not only the event that we have today, but I would hope other kinds of events, because I really do see this as a starting point.

He thanked everybody involved, especially SAVE and its president Danielle Jordan for her leadership, and in absentia plant operations.

Continue reading →

Increased investment in demand-side reduction –a homebuilder @ GA PSC 2013-06-18

Paul[?] Matthews said he’s been green since before it was cool, first in an earlier Georgia Power program (EarthCraft), and now in EarthCents. He thinks the program is good, with both environmental and economic benefits, but he asked for it to be extended to become a model for the south, at the Georgia Public Service Commission meeting Tuesday 18 June 2013.

He spoke about his company’s investment in sustainable efficiency and conservation, and asked GA PSC and Georgia Power to also do more.

A much more efficient way and cost-effective of reducing power is by reducing energy used. We’re not only looking at tripling the savings over the next ten years, but we’re also looking at job growth….

…a sustainable and long-term growth approach.

Let’s make the rebates and also the tax credits so they’re a model for Georgia and also for the south.

Here’s the video:

Continue reading →

Portland’s Clean Economy of Place

Ironically, Portland is the prime example in both Amy Liu’s slides and the book The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Jennifer Bradley and Bruce Katz.

Here’s Bruce Katz in the Guardian 23 April 2012, Urbanization and Inventing a Clean Economy of Place,

Portland, Oregon, is also internationally renowned for its commitment to sustainable development. The Portland metropolis has an expansive public transit system and an urban growth boundary to control development at the urban periphery. The city boasts a green investment fund to provide grants for residential and commercial building projects.

Now the city is striving, like Copenhagen, to reap the economic rewards of sustainable development through business formation, firm expansion, job growth and private investment. In February, Portland released its first regional export plan to double exports over five years by building on the region’s distinctive economic and physical attributes. A critical pillar of this strategy involves increasing the export orientation of firms in the burgeoning clean technology sector to serve growing markets in Asia, Latin America and elsewhere.

Hm, a clean economy of place; there’s an idea. Here’s one of Portland’s green investments: 12W (Indigo) Project Report, Continue reading →

Clean Green Metro Florida by Brookings Institution

Amy Liu spoke about globalization last week in Orlando, Leaders will seize the clean economy about clean industries leading economic growth. Even though she was talking linear growth, her Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings Institution has some interesting points that mesh with the exponential growth like compound interest Georgia can get on with in solar and wind power.

The Florida Economic Development Council 2013 FEDC Conference 26-28 June 2013 was the venue for Amy Liu’s A Globally Competitive Florida: Regional Opportunities in the Next Economy. To summarize her slides (which are in a format not easily linkable, she bashes Congress to motivate cities leading. In particular, Florida’s 20 metro ares have 61.75 of land area, 94.1% of population, and 95.9% of output. Nothing surprising there: cities are densely populated. Two of the biggest in Florida are in our Floridan Aquifer: Orlando and Jacksonville. (She didn’t mention the aquifer; I did.)

The national economic recovery is slow, the middle class has been hard-hit, and Florida is recovering faster, except on unemployment. The U.S. population is rapidly getting older and by 2050 53.7% will be minorities, each of which have very different educational achievements, and much of this is happening in metro areas.

Her solution is Continue reading →

Interactive charts: U.S. nuclear power reactors (NRC data)

Why are all these “dependable” baseload capacity nukes down so much? LAKE: NRC Power Reactor Status See for yourself in these interactive graphs of NRC Power Reactor Status. They’re in Google annotated timeline format, with all the zoom and pan features used by Google finance for stock charts. But these Reactor Status charts show seven years of daily NRC power percentage data. Want to see last month, six months, any 7 days, or some other period? Now you can, for all 104 reactors, including the ones recently removed by NRC from status because they’ve closed permanently.

You can view your own local reactors in any of 20 charts. Why so many graphs? Google annotated timeline charts apparently were meant for comparing a few stock prices, and don’t handle more than about seven curves well. But you can see things in these graphs that are hard to spot in NRC’s daily tables.

Example: Southern Nuclear Operating Co., Inc. (Alabama, Georgia)

Continue reading →

The cloudy day doesn’t last for an entire month –John S. Quarterman @ GA PSC 2013-06-18

The disruptive challenge electric utilities face is like 1: Solar power telephone companies faced years ago, as Edison Electric Institute recently pointed out. Circuit switching 20 years ago is like distributed solar power and the smart grid it needs now; this is what I described at the Georgia Public Service Commission meeting Tuesday 18 June 2013.

Hi, I’m John Quarterman, I’m from Lowndes County, down near the Florida line. These videos I’ve been taking are with Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange and you’ll find them on YouTube later.

Two things Now I’d like to commend Georgia Power for helping fund our Industrial Authority down in Lowndes County to do a strategic plan. And in the focus groups they did with that, they discovered there’s at least two things everybody wants: business, education, health care, the people in general: Continue reading →

Sustainable public housing for Valdosta?

A group of Valdosta City Council members recently visited Sustainable Fellwood in Savannah, and may be considering it as a model for affordable fair housing in Valdosta. There’s also a model much closer than Savannah.

Here’s how one blog described Sustainable Fellwood, 17 November 2009:

Fellwood is a project which aims to demonstrate that highly efficient and healthy buildings can be built affordably. The project will include a four acre park and a community garden. Preserving the local oak tree canopy will be another important step. The development team is taking steps to reduce stormwater run off and utilize native landscaping. Energy Star appliances, reflective roofs, and high efficiency windows are all included in the plans. The project will be registered with the EarthCraft Coastal Communities certification, and it is a pilot LEED — ND neighborhood. It is developed using the principles of smart growth for walkable and diverse communities.

Jan Skutch wrote for SavannahNow 16 May 2012, Sustainable Fellwood celebrates final two phases,

Continue reading →

Greening the ghetto —Majora Carter

Child of the ghetto grows up to raise a park out of trash and to invite the rich and famous to join her to make sustainable development that works for all three of developers, community, and government sexy and profitable. A stray dog one day led her down a forgotten street to the river. She got a seed grant, leveraged it 300 times, and turned that street into a park.

She’s talking about the south Bronx in New York City, and the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, but I think in her problems and solutions you will see some similarities to the south side of Valdosta. If the Chamber was helping with this kind of thing, that would make a far more positive difference to education and real estate values for the whole community, both inside and outside Valdosta, than pushing destructive school “unification”.

It’s a TED Talk.

-jsq

PS: Owed to Scout Smith.

Do you have solar energy yourself? Why yes, yes, I do

Grady Blankenship wrote a LTE in the VDT Wednesday, in which he asked “do you have solar energy yourself?” Why yes, yes, I do. And I have some questions for everyone at the end.

Back in 2009 we installed solar panels on our farm workshop. At the time the closest certified solar installer I could find was in Marietta. Four years ago there were 4 in the state. now there are forty. And that’s in a state that’s trailing North Carolina and even New Jersey in solar installations.

Also, I applied some weeks back for a USDA REAP grant for solar for Okra Paradise Farms. Much to our surprise, last week we Continue reading →

Growing talent instead of population

What are some ideas for economic and cultural growth that don’t require huge population growth? Richard Florida has many ideas for large and mid-sized population areas in the article discussed below. Who’s the Richard Florida for places the size of Lowndes County?

Richard Florida wrote in the Atlantic in December 2009, How the Crash Will Reshape America:

Big, talent-attracting places benefit from accelerated rates of “urban metabolism,”
The question we need to address is how to be a small talent-attracting place, and even more a smallish place that grows its own talent and jobs.

This part is especially relevant: Continue reading →