Archive for April 22, 2013

What You Can Do To Mark Earth Day 2013

Honor Earth Day; Support Solar, Wind and The Environment!

Honor Earth Day; Support Solar, Wind and The Environment!

With Earth Day in Mind, you can help make the world a better place.    How?

 

You could show the love and…join in:

Support Solar Power
Solar Energy Industry Association (SEIA) has some Great Ways to show your support for more solar energy through policy initiatives: check them out here:
Act Now / SEIA

Support Wind Power
Power Of Wind is the public outreach of the American Wind Energy Association.
become a Wind Avocate here

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Get involved with mature, respectable environmental groups
click here to Join Sierra Club. theyve finally taken the gloves off this year in opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline and actually protested and were arrested for it! 

      Time had long past, even for their high road tactics, to make a stand against

    • the dirtiest oil possible,
    • on a pipeline that will be excluded from contributing to the oil spill cleanup fund,
    • by people and their associates who have bad track records on spills,
    • that the head of NASA’s Climate Science said would be “game over” for the Earth’s climate,
    • that won’t even be used here in the US-its for Export to be used elsewhere!

You don’t have to go that far, but you sure can help support them!

You are what the world is waiting for.  What are you waiting for?

Point Lookout Energy Park Dept Of Energy Presentation

Town of Hempstead's Point Lookout Energy Park at Department of Conservation and Waterways

Town of Hempstead’s Point Lookout Energy Park at Department of Conservation and Waterways

 

The Point Lookout Energy Park, was featured in a US Department of Energy webinar.

The Community Renewable Energy Deployment (CommRE) “Renewable Energy Parks” webinar, from March 19, 2013, was presented by Tara Schneider from the Town of Hempstead Dept of Conservation and Waterways, which built and hosts the energy park.

The webinar explored the concept of energy parks as an outreach to the community, educational opportunity, and as a demonstration of what can be done.

 

Click here to see the presentation

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The presentation talked about

  • energy generation methods used
  • energy storage methods used
  • construction lessons learned
  • and what they’re learning, not just from the renewable energy, but from bringing it all together, the process of that, and the practice as well

Click here to watch the entire webinar

 

Point Lookout Energy Park 100kW Wind Turbine and solar array

Point Lookout Energy Park 100kW Wind Turbine and solar array

The other half of the webinar featured Bob Titus of the city of Ellensburg, Washington, who also have their own energy park including a small wind turbine test site.

Click here to read the text of both webinars here

 
Congratulations to this local project getting the recognition they deserve.

EmPower-ing Lido Beach to go solar

EmPower Solar's new Lido Beach community pricing plan, photo courtesy EmPower Solar

EmPower Solar of Island Park is going all out to help residents of Lido Beach grab the solar dream.

EmPower Solar's new Lido Beach community pricing plan, photo courtesy EmPower Solar

EmPower Solar’s new Lido Beach community pricing plan, photo courtesy EmPower Solar

They recently announced their Lido Beach Community Solar Pricing Program. Born of meetings with local residents and civic groups, the idea has come to fruition and EmPower is offering a $750 discount plus an additional sliding scale of incentives for residents in the town of Lido Beach to go solar.

The more residents that go solar through the program, the bigger the discount they all get.

Their goal: 400 kW of solar by the summer.

To help you get there, EmPower Solar is offering Lido Beach homeowners an upfront discount on the price of your system. With an extra tiered community pricing system, the more homeowners who go solar, the more everyone saves.

As part of the program, they will be hosting a solar tour day and event on April 20, 2013.
Residents can see solar power systems right in their own neighborhood, see how they work, and talk directly with what EmPower refers to as their ambassadors [Em-bassadors? ; )].
To qualify for the Community discount, Lido Beach residents must sign their contract with EmPower Solar by the program deadline of May 31, 2013 and participate in at least one ambassador activity.

So Lido Beach residents, if you’ve ever been thinking about going solar, now is the time. Might I also mention that while solar prices have been going down, so have the incentives available, and it is unlikely they’ll continue to be this good.

There’s really just a question to ask with your current LIPA Bill :
what’s the payback period on that?

Never.

What’s the payback on a solar power system? 5 1/2 to 7 1/2 years is usually about average.

What are you doing about your share of pollution created for the electricity you use, in addition to your “carbon footprint”. 

Find out by clicking here from the Nature Conservancy’s carbon footprint calculator.

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I personally like to think of it this way- are you planning to retire soon?

Wouldn’t it be nice to know that you were not going to have an electric bill for the remainder of your retirement? You know that electric bill isnt going to do anything but go up between now and then!

Too young to retire? Well may I suggest just retiring from paying an electric bill  5 to 7 years from now?

To find out for yourself, or to get more informatioon on the Solar Tour Event on April 20,  please contact Tara Bono at the number below or at  tbono@empowerces.com or follow the information below:

empowerinfo

EmPower Solar contact Information

 

**for the record, All Our Energy is not affiliated with EmPower solar, we are just getting word out about a program available to residents.  Please contact them for all related information. 

 

New York 100% renewable by 2030.

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This recent study is making waves across the renewable energy community into mainstream media.

This latest study from Stanford Professor Mark Z. Jacobson et al shows just how New York State could accomplish this.

Click here to see the study

I really love the explanations about “why not natural gas”, “why not biofuels”

And especially the use strictly of WWS (wind, water and sunlight).

You really should check it out
Some great maps and graphics!

They’re not the first to point us in the right direction.  Renewable Energy Long Island shiowed the way last year with their Long Island Clean Electricity Vision.

Probably the most important thing to go along with this (you know- besides doing the right thing for our children, our planet and the future) is the infrastructure and manufacturing base that would be born right here of the necessity to make this happen.

That would be a boon to the economy, help pay to fix crumbling and in need of repair infrastructure, and create tens of thousands of jobs. It could start an entire industry that could supply the rest of the world by investing in and succeeding in doing something like this right here.
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Of course we would like to see more of this or that in the list. Someone
has shown the way. We should not let the desire for (that creates waiting for) the “perfect” scenario to outweigh the rewards of the success that can be achieved by acting, and by acting now.

It’s very easy everybody! Not the undertaking itself, that is work – but we definitely can do it. What is easy is it can be done if we decide to do it.

That’s it! If we decide to do it there’s nothing else stopping us. The final details would get hammered out. The “oh too bad we can’t do it”‘s would mean we just find a different way to reach 100% that works for the problematic few percent.

Would it be a “failure” if we only got to 90 or 95% by 2030?

What if, by acting now we can do 150% by then, and export the rest to another state to our west to cut down on the fossil fuel pollution they create that blows our way?