Some Great New Ideas To Save Gaia!

I'm borrowing these paragraphs from a Truthout article by Kelpie Wilson, entitled 2006 Top Green Tech Ideas. OF course the idea of a plug in biodiesel hybrid car is familiar, but check out the V2G part:

Plug-In Hybrids and the V2G

At the end of 2006, General Motors announced it would commit to manufacturing a plug-in hybrid vehicle. A plug-in hybrid adds a larger battery pack and a plug to charge the batteries with grid power, allowing the car to rely more on the electric drive and less on the fuel supply. A new study for the Department of Energy has found that we already have enough electrical generating capacity to power 84 percent of our 220 million vehicles if they were plug-in hybrids. That's because our capacity is designed to meet peak power needs for air conditioning on hot afternoons, and when peak power is not needed there is plenty of spare capacity to charge electric car batteries.

This would be a bad trade-off where grid power is provided by coal. But ask not what grid can do for your car; rather, ask what your car can do for the grid.

The real promise of plug-in hybrids is using their batteries to stabilize a power grid that is supplied by renewable but variable wind and solar power. Dubbed "vehicle to grid," or V2G for short, the idea is to use the combined storage power of 220 million mobile battery packs to buffer the grid whenever the vehicles are not in use. Vehicles would absorb excess power at night or on sunny or windy days. The vehicle battery packs could then be tapped to help out during peak demand periods and a computerized "smart grid" would regulate it all. The potential is huge. Terry Penney, a technology manager at the National Renewable Energy Lab said, "if millions of these [plug-in hybrids] were produced, it would enable some of the renewable technologies to really take off."

Terra Preta - The Black Earth

I've saved the best for last. Terra preta is new to Western science, but it is an old technology from the Amazon that disappeared when the native populations were wiped out by European diseases after Columbus.

The technology of black earth is simple: Instead of slashing and burning the rainforest to make way for agriculture, long lost Amazonian civilizations burned forest slash in smoldering piles to make charcoal, and then buried the charcoal in the soil. This produces an astounding increase in soil fertility. The charcoal itself adds nutrients to soil, but it also acts as a sponge to absorb and retain any manures or other added fertilizers for very long periods of time. Some of the terra preta soils created more than 500 years ago are still highly fertile today.

Terra preta could be a win-win-win-win solution of tremendous magnitude. Here's how it would work: Farmers would start by growing biomass for energy - cornstalks, for instance. The material would be heated with solar furnaces to make the charcoal, which releases gases like methane. These gases can be collected and burned for energy. Then the charcoal gets buried in the fields, making them more productive. But the biggest prize of all is the carbon sequestration. This is a highly effective process for pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it into long-term storage in the earth.

The best thing about this idea is that anyone can do it. My resolution for 2007 is to try this in my own garden. But all the voluntary efforts of individuals and even corporations won't be enough to tackle the energy/climate crisis. We need a society-wide mobilization of resources to develop these excellent ideas and others, and put them into practice. My hope for 2007 is that the new Congress will be up to it.

Kelpie also talks about advances in solar, wind power kites and LED lightbulbs. If you aren't up on these sources of optimism, check out the article!

Cheers!