Smart Energy

From Yahoo News via AFP:

China is set to become the world’s third largest wind power producer in 2009, state media reported, as the Asian giant seeks various ways to expand energy supply to power its economic boom.

The country’s installed wind power capacity will reach 20 gigawatts this year, said Shi Lishan, vice director of the National Energy Administration’s New Energy Department, the Xinhua news agency said Wednesday.

That will lift China to surpass Spain and become the world’s third biggest wind power producer after the United States and Germany, the report said.

The United States had 25.2 gigawatts in installed capacity of wind power in 2008, or 20.8 percent of the world’s total, compared with China’s capacity of 12.2 gigawatts, figures from the Global Wind Energy Council showed.

China has set a target of generating 15 percent of its energy from renewable sources — mainly wind and water — by 2020.

The threat of an asteroid crashing into Earth has captivated the imaginations of movie audiences for years. Now, however, Russia is working to develop a very real plan to counter such a threat.

The Russian space agency says it is working to prevent a large asteroid from colliding with Earth.

Without giving many details, a spokesman for the agency said it is working on a way to divert the path of the asteroid, named Apophis, without destroying it.

NASA’s latest calculations put Apophis at having only a one in 250,000 chance of hitting Earth by, or during, the 2030s.

via Russia, US at Odds Over Future Asteroid Hit | Science and Technology | English.

There’s more! Russia’s Armageddon plan to save Earth from collision with asteroid

Smaller communities in Washington have the chance (until Jan. 15) to apply for funding to hire a resource conversation manager. This is a great chance for communities in the Pullman-Palouse corridor to band together to hire a conservation manager who could help us all save some money through better energy use and management. Here’s more from Sightline Daily:

Energy efficiencies, ultimately, are not about buildings but about people. Fixing a building so that it is no longer an energy hog is important, but what happens when people use the building? It is easy to forget that turning up the thermostat, opening windows, or adding more appliances can wipe out hard won energy efficiencies achieved with retrofits. So once the fixes are made, teaching people how to use their buildings to keep energy savings is as important as the retrofits themselves. For local governments these savings can amount to more money in their budgets for critical services at a time of declining revenues.

Washington State University’s Energy Program is using Energy Efficiency Conservation Block Grant funds to address this important aspect of saving energy. The program has created a grant program to support hiring Resource Conservation Managers (RCM)—people focused on teaching people how to use buildings more efficiently—for small cities and county governments. Local governments have until January 15 to apply for up to $75,000 to fund an RCM that would be shared between smaller local governments.

Community Solar Project in Ellensburgh

In partnership with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, the city of Ellensburg, Wash., has installed the first “community solar” project in the nation. The unique financial model designed by the City allows local individuals and businesses to participate directly in a solar-electric project, without having to lift a finger (except to write a check, perhaps).

The 57 kW solar-electric system sits just off of Highway 90 in Ellensburg. It may represent the future of renewable energy project financing in the U.S. The groundbreaking project allows local individuals and businesses to make essential financial contributions to the project. In return, these contributors receive direct credits on their electricity bills for the power produced by the system. This “virtual net metering” arrangement produces a variety of efficiencies. The scale benefits that result from this financial model significantly reduce the cost of solar electricity. Just as importantly, because the City organizes the financial and technical details of project installation and maintenance, participation does not place an undue burden on the local citizens.

Interest in the model has also been strong in other parts of the northwest, and in other parts of the country.

Adapted from this article on the BEF Web site.

After an exhausting planning process, during which the initiative was twice rejected by local planning authorities, a group of families building a 74 acre ecovillage in Wales won £350,000 (over half a million US dollars) in grant money from the UK government last week.

via UK Ecovillage, Initially Rejected by Planning Authorities, Wins Government Grant : TreeHugger.

The ecocommunity is called Lammas, and because they also practice permaculture, they’ve just received another grant for carbon sequestration. Follow the link above for the complete story.

Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone by Eduardo Galeano

When Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave U.S. President Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s 1971 book Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, thousands of Americans bought the book, pushing it to the number two slot on Amazon.

Although Galeano’s trilogy, Memory of Fire, was published in English (and a couple dozen other languages), he has enjoyed only a cult following in the U.S. Memory of Fire will hopefully now receive a wider readership, perhaps carrying with it some of the other great but ignored writers of Latin America.

At once grand in scope but full of close-up details of the most personal kind, Memory of Fire traces the history of Latin America — the continent, its people, gods, plants and animals — from its origins to the present day. Galeano eschews the grand narrative tradition with its fascistic master tropes in favor of the strategic vignette, which opens for both writer and reader contemplative freedom in a vast landscape of possibility. For my money, Galeano’s approach is the honest one, and his latest book, Mirrors, proves why. Read the rest of this entry »

Wino, the Seattle-based magazine for wine lovers with an attitude, has just posted my latest column on the science of wine and the importance of micronutrients on grapes.

When humans don’t get enough zinc, we can get sick with cancer and suffer immune-system dysfunction. The same is true of plants. Micronutrients such as boron, zinc and copper, although only a tiny part of a plant’s diet, can have a profound effect on the plant’s health.

via Higher Learning: A Pinch of This, a Dash of That -.

Parody is now a crime? Tell it to the Yes Men or anyone else in the long history of literature who has issued a critique through this tried and legally true form.

In an effort to raise money against the outspoken freshman Democrat [Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida], a Republican activist named Angie Langley has launched “mycongressmanisnuts.com” — a Web site that parodies Grayson’s re-election site, “congressmanwithguts.com.”

via Slashdot and FOXNews.com

In a first for Latin America, Mexico City's legislature voted to legalize gay marriage Monday night, changing “the city's civil code definition of marriage from the union of a man and a woman to the 'free uniting of two people.'”

via Mexico City Approves Gay Marriage | MetaFilter.

This post is especially for Zoe over at Zoe in Wonderland. If you haven’t checked out her site (it’s in Puck’s blog roll), I highly recommend it as a source of wondrous, fantastical art and writing.

There’s a new paper on the sources of inspiration for the famous works of the mathematician Charles Dodgson — better known to most of us as Lewis Carrol, author of the Alice books.

In an article in New Scientist, doctor of philosophy student and literary scholar Melanie Bayley proposes that Dodgson wrote his books as an attack on the new-fangled mathematics making headway in his day. Dodgson was a conservative geometer, Bayley claims, who was deeply upset by the seemingly arbitrary manipulation of numbers and, especially, figures:

The 19th century was a turbulent time for mathematics, with many new and controversial concepts, like imaginary numbers, becoming widely accepted in the mathematical community. Putting Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in this context, it becomes clear that Dodgson, a stubbornly conservative mathematician, used some of the…  scenes to satirise these radical new ideas.

Bayley points out that, surprisingly (though not really, considering the great divide between the arts and sciences), there are few critical works on Dodgson that take into account the fact that he was a mathematician. Bayley goes a long way toward remedying that situation. Her piece should be a model for literary scholars who turn a blind eye toward science and math when commenting on literature.