Facts about the Macalester College wind turbine:
1. It produces 10 kilowatts.
2. The blades have a 27′ diameter which sit at the top of a 90′ pole.
3. Over it’s 20-30 year lifetime, the clean energy it produces will offset some 1.2 tons of air pollutants and 250 tons of greenhouse gas.
This was one of those little things that made me see an every day reality from a completely different vantage point.
Yes it’s 100 percent recyclable, and no, I don’t have a better idea, but what an odd notion asphalt concrete really is. Smearing wide swaths of petroleum over the landscape for the sake of speed and the efficiency of travel. It’s like an addiction. Once you put down a roadway, a path or a parking lot, you have to keep feeding it more oil from time to time.
We must feed the beast.
Producing one cubic yard of concrete takes about 1,700,000 BTUs or 500,000 watts of energy. Once those 500 kilowatts have been embedded in the final product it really tends to stay put for a very long time.
You could have yourself some big math fun if you multiply that number by the annual 7 billion yard global production figure I learned about in the posting titled “Concrete” from 6/18/’09.
What a strange thing to do to a tree.
Go into a forest, cut it down, strip it bare, soak it in pentachlorophenol, drag it into the city, fix it in the ground and then drape dangerous wires and buzzing street lamps all over it.
19,891,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Kilograms of blazing light. With a mass some 332,900 times the size of earth, our friend the sun is about as inspiring as it is hard to comprehend. Something about this petroglyph manages to capture a nice part of the sublime relationship we have with our local star.
And after all, without the sun, the rain wouldn’t do us much good at all.
The High Bridge power plant being disassembled piece by piece.
As the process continues over the coarse of the summer we watch huge piles of individual pieces grow higher and higher. A heap of steel, a mountain of broken concrete, mounds of bricks, wood, aluminum and much more.
Seeing the materials stripped away layer after layer and then having them re-presented to you in enormous piles seems to sharpen your thinking about just how many resources and how much energy goes into what we build, whether it’s a power plant, another freeway lane or a cabin in the woods.
In fact, according to the National Institute of Building Sciences, building construction and operation the the US accounts for 39% of total energy use, 12% of total water consumption, 68% of total electricity used and 38% of carbon dioxide emissions.
Right in the center of this bulls eye mirror sits an image of the freshly decommissioned Xcel Energy High Bridge power plant in St. Paul Minnesota. The old coal fired plant was taken off line and replaced with a new plant powered by natural gas in 2008.
As of April of 2009, there were 27 new coal fired plants being built in the US, with another 21 either starting construction soon, or under permit to build.
Worldwide, there are some 55,000 coal burning plants, with more being added every day.
In Hot, Flat and Crowded, Thomas Friedman does a nice job looking into some of these deep and tangled energy issues: “Wherever governments can raise most of their revenues by simply drilling a hole in the ground rather than tapping their people’s energy, creativity and entrepreneurship, freedom tends to be curtailed, education underfunded and human development retarded.”
This is not a soft wall.
What an incredible representation though of the versatility of one material to express itself texturally. All this while performing the common task of holding things back from the work of gravity.
A bit of knowledge concerning the subject at hand: the world produces about one cubic yard of concrete for every person on globe, each and every year. 7 Billion cubic yards. All that energy. All those raw materials.
That’s enough to make a lot of walls.
Five reasons to celebrate the reel mower:
1. Good exercise. 50 million Americans have gym memberships, when they could just be out mowing the lawn.
2. No petroleum. A typical gas mower produces four times as much pollution as a car does.
3. No noise. A gas mower runs at about 90 decibels, which causes hearing loss in time.
4. Better lawn. Reel mowers make cleaner cuts which makes for greener grass.
5. Less lawn. It’s hard work, so you’ll want to rip out turf and replace it with perennial gardens.
As much as 5 percent of the entire energy expenditure in the public sector may be directly related to street lighting. Imagine how much we could save if a big part of that lighting could be either eliminated or converted to run off of solar power.