Prize for Food Bike Big Idea: Low Capital, Low Footprint Alternative to Food Trucks
The Food Bikery seeks to prove that food bikes are a safe, legal, low-capital, and low-footprint alternative to food trucks.
Category: Energy
Symposium // Innovating Energy Access for Remote Areas: Discovering untapped resources
Symposium: UC Berkeley, April 10 – 12, 2014 Flying out to San Francisco, the hills look like waves of mountains, rolling toward inland California farms. Situated within this amazing landscape is one of the world’s most innovative communities working on inclusive and sustainable energy. Numerous universities, start- up entrepreneurs, financiers, technology companies and consultancies address distributed and affordable energy markets in myriad countries. In less than two weeks, prominent researchers…
The thermodynamics of mineral wealth, fossil fuels and drugs
A first lesson, taken strictly from ecological economics and its use of thermodynamic laws, is very telling about the history of resource exploitation in Latin America and the Caribbean. Energy quality and energy surpluses often determine the development of social and cultural patterns, and the unidirectional character of energy can dictate the economic and social arrangements through which wealth accumulation occurs in society.1,2 Consider the unidirectional flow of water (and…
Ivanpah is My Backyard
Thanks to the recent dedication of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS), the corresponding scathing article in the Wall Street Journal, and Dan Kammen and Tonio Buonassisi’s appearance on NPR’s On Point, Ivanpah and solar energy in general has been back in the news. ISEGS is a concentrating solar plant (CSP) driven by technology from BrightSource Energy: it uses mirrors to reflect the sun’s light to the top of…
Deconstructing the Keystone XL Report
On Friday, the U.S. State Department released its Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Its central finding—that the project would have little impact on climate change—was a disappointment to many in the environmental community. After all, the project would bring dirty oil from the Alberta tar sands (see above) to the Gulf Coast of the United States and clear the way to an even more carbon-intensive…
UC’s investments in fossil fuels are hurting the planet
Today, UC Berkeley and most institutions are financially invested in destroying our future. This may sound a little bit surprising to some — even unfounded. Let me explain. When it comes to climate change, the scientific community has presented a clear, unambiguous message: Human burning of fossil fuels — coal, oil and natural gas — is putting our world at risk. And this, in fact, is a needless risk. By…
Mexico, Wind and Culture
Despite the fact that Mexico is a country with great renewable energy resources, experts predict that it will face a severe energy crisis in the next decade [1]. Given the constant decrease in production of its major oil wells, and the inevitable growth of energy demand in the country, Mexico is expected to be a net importer of energy by 2020 [2]. In a recent analysis of the potential for…
How Our Power Lines Will Handle Everyone’s Power from the Sun
Here, I’m writing about what I study in an “up-goer five” way; that is, I’m using only the ten hundred most used words to make it as easy as possible for everyone to understand! I study power lines. Not the big power lines you see on a long car trip that carry power a long way, but the smaller lines that bring power to your home. You can see them…
Yucatan Field Trip
“It’s a big plastic stomach that’s outside in the yard, with a pipe that leads into the kitchen.”
Islands in the Sun!
Current trends and lessons from history on energy development in the Caribbean.