Here's a list of questions that I feel I should know the answer to - by heart - if I want to consider myself an advocate of clean energy.

• What are the US's annual carbon emissions? How do they stack up against other major polluters?
• How many kilowatts does the US use annually?
• How many KWH does the average home use every month?
• How large would a solar array have to be to provide electricity for the entire US (let's ignore the storage question for this one)?
• How many watts of power does and average household use each year?
• How many average solar panels would be required, if working continuously, to meet all of a house's power requirements (assume ideal conditions and assume water is heated separately)?
• How many watts of power/mile are consumed by an electric car driving at 25, 45, and 60 miles/hour?
• Could one massive wind turbine produce enough energy to power a single household?
• How much power could one produce riding a stationary bicycle type power generator?
• How much CO2 does a lawn mower produce? a weed whacker? a rototiller? Leaf blower?
  
• How much oxygen does an average sized city tree produce? And how much CO2 does it consume? And how many trees are needed to provide enough O2 for one person?
  
• How is a unit of carbon measured when calculating the cost of manufacturing it?
• Describe an example of how embodied energy is used to justify a purchase?
  
• Is the energy required to recycle the different materials justifiable, vs. the energy used to produce the same product with new materials?

I'm a lifetime Seattle resident, and so I never seriously considered moving out to the suburbs to get more house for my money. But alot of people have subscribed to the "drive until you qualify" method of buying a home. In other words, if you can't find the 3000 square foot house you want in Seattle, drive out farther until you find a 3000 sf house that you can afford. I always thought this was a little weird, since this inevitably means that people spend alot more time in their cars commuting to work, which means they a) spend more on gas, b) spend more on car maintenance, c) lose more of their day to sitting in traffic, and d) have to deal with *alot* more stress that comes from unpredictable commutes and traffic jams. My 3 years of crossing Lake Washington to work pretty much cemented my thinking about this - living close to where you work is a good thing, as each of the items I noted above has a cost (the worst one for me was the stress of the commute - need to be somewhere by a certain time? Throw it all out the window if you have to sit in traffic...).

Anyways, I always thought it would be cool if someone smarter than me put together the *real* cost of living farther out from where you work. Certainly you pay more money for your house if you live nearer to the city, where most jobs tend to be. But at what point does paying high prices for in-city homes outweigh the benefits of being close to work? And at what point does all the driving and commuting outweigh the savings one might get from buying a less expensive home farther out?

Well, the folks at the Center for Neighborhood Technology have finally put something out that lets people measure some of the costs of high priced homes versus a high priced commute.
The site is pretty cool, as it lets you view things like the average cost of housing + transportation for neighborhoods in some of the country's more populous regions. For example, I can see that living in Issaquah (a suburb of Seattle) has a similar cost of housing + transportation to living in my neighborhood in Seattle. And costs being equal, that tells me that I could make my decision on where to live based on the nearness of my place of employment, since that will cause me less commuting stress.

Now, the information is based on 2000 census data, and as a result it's not very current. I also don't think it takes into account the current cost of gas, which could make some locations far from centers of employment much more expensive than what the map shows. But it's a useful tool for comparing one area to another.

Here's the link: http://htaindex.cnt.org

New list of Seattle's Green Tech companies

Well what do you know - exactly what I've been trying to compile myself over the last month through painstaking research. Now John Cook, the Seattle PI's Venture Capital reporter has done the work for me:

Seattle's 35 "green tech" firms

Rebates for installing Solar in WA

I've been sitting on this post for a while, I finally got around to cleaning it up and getting it out.

The Seattle Times had a few articles on installing solar panels in the paper a while ago, which I was happy to see. One of the articles had this little nugget that was news to me:

"...the state has new production incentives for utilities to pay solar owners 54 cents per kilowatt produced from solar modules and inverters (which synchronize electricity collected to the grid) made in Washington. For a 3-kW system, that would be roughly $2,000 a year, Nelson said. (A new factory is being built in the state that should provide the modules later this year.)

"With those higher payments and other federal tax breaks and state incentives, owners can effectively recoup their investment in seven years once the factory-built panels are available in our state, Nelson said."

Some further research reveals the following:

• Your system must, of course, be grid-tied
• The 54 cents/kwh payment expires on June 30 of 2014, so if you acted right now to get a 3000 kw system installed on your home (to the tune of $20-30k), you could potentially recoup $2k/year for the next 6 years only.
• The 54 cents/kwh is based on a base rate of 15 cents/kwh, with some multipliers tacked on (2.4x if you have solar panels manufactured in WA, and 1.2x if you have an inverter manufactured in WA).
• The rebate payment is capped at $2k per year, so you wouldn't benefit from installing a system large enough to generate more than $2k in rebate money (I'm not saying you shouldn't go big, of course...).
  

Outback Power Systems makes inverters in Arlington, WA. Outback formed a subsidiary called Silicon Energy (also based in Arlington) who is manufacturing solar panels there.

Here's a good explanation of the incentives: http://www.solarpowerrocks.com/washington/

Recycling businesses

Recycling is most certainly a noble way to make money. It's input is usually something that might otherwise be thrown away, and its output is something that is again useful to society. The challenges to recycling are how to make the trash-to-treasure cycle worth taking on. The answer is simple - make the process make money - but it's easier said than done. Here is a list of things that consumers could recycle, and my next step in this exploration would be to learn more about how/if businesses are making money recycling any of these things:

• Construction waste
  
• The Re-Store here in Seattle takes construction materials it thinks it can sell again (used windows in good shape, doors, flooring, etc.). There's alot of trash in the trash-to-treasure cycle here, so owners have to be pretty discerning about what they take in.
  
• There are other businesses that can actually take construction debris, like wood, and grind it up into pulp or particles to be used somewhere else. [Need some examples here]
  
• Yard waste:
• How often have you done yardwork and ended up with a huge pile of weeds and sod, a big ole pile of dirt, or chunks of concrete? Don't you hate the prospect of having to pay someone to haul this away, or even worse, load it up in a truck yourself and take it to the dump? It would be cool to find a way to make hauling this stuff away worth someone's time and effort...
  
• Computer parts:
• Places like Re-PC in Seattle will take your old used computers and computer components and sell them to other end consumers. They also serve as recycling centers for things like CRT monitors that nobody seems to be able to get rid of these days. They usually charge a fee for recycling monitors.
  
• Extracting metals and other materials from computer waste - this happens alot in places like China and India where the labor to separate valuable parts is cheap, and the oversight into working with hazardous materials is lax, to say the least.
• Household garbage
• In Seattle, we can recycle glass, cans, paper and food waste by just putting these items out for pickup by the city's waste management services. But there's still alot of crap that gets thrown out that just ends up sitting in landfills. I wonder what this is, and if there's a way to turn it into something useful. [Note: Pyrolisis machines like the one from Clean Solutions Company can dispose of some of this waste]
• Wastewater:
• In cities, most of our wastewater goes to treatment plants. This is how we want it for really nasty stuff, like human waste, but the reality is that we also send alot of "just barely unclean" water to treatment plants, and this water could be used on our own properties. Systems that recycle water within a household are typically called greywater systems, and can take waste water from your shower and use it to flush the toilet, or water the lawn. The use of greywater systems would reduce the energy needed to process wastewater and in the case of using greywater to water your lawn, it would allow the earth to percolate and purify water. This transfers some of the water treatment burden from wastewater systems to the earth (which does it for free. Note that a homeowner would need to be careful about what soaps/chemicals/etc. are put into the greywater systems since whatever goes into the greywater system could end up in the groundwater, so it does require some changes in habits. I wonder if someone has found a simple greywater system that can be installed in new houses? That might be an opportunity for someone interested...
  

Green Tech or Clean Tech?

I found this blog post below interesting - it addresses the question of the difference between Clean Tech and Green Tech:

http://www.cleantechblog.com/2007/07/cleantech-vs-greentech.html

In a nutshell, it appears that Cleantech was coined by some VC folks who did alot of thinking about how to position their efforts (as the post indicates, saying you're part of the "energy and environment" sector was awkward). Greentech was odd for various reasons - too political in some ways ("green" sounds too far-left leaning, perhaps), and, to lift a quote from the post, "who wants green air or green water?".

Anyways, our blog uses Green Tech, and we did an entire 10 seconds of thinking on the name. So take that.

Company Research: V2Green

V2Green is really focusing on making vehicles "grid aware", meaning that cars will learn to interact with the grid to make decisions about when best to charge so that the grid doesn't get overloaded, when to give power back to the grid, potentially who to bill for the charging, etc. When you start thinking about the company in this way, V2Green's potential really starts to blossom in my mind.

Here are some links for my research into what V2Green does. If I wasn't lazy, I'd summarize this for you, but just like in school, it's better if you read/hear all the supporting material as opposed to just reading the Cliff's Notes:

• The best info source I've encountered is a conf call between David Kaplan, CTO and Founder of V2Green, and Lyle Dennis of GM-Volt.com (a fan site for the Volt). Here's a synopsis of Lyle's conversation with David Kaplan and the associated audio.
• Brief article from USA Today about how utilities are starting to prepare for the eventuality of massive amounts of people plugging their EV's into the grid.