2nd Green Revolution

Despite announcing his intention not to seek a second term as governor of Colorado, Governor Bill Ritter has continued to pursue a clean energy future for the state. While many states have mandates of 20% or 25% electricity generation from renewable energy sources by 2020, Ritter is pushing ahead toward 30%. Ritter’s goal is one of the most ambitious, ranking in the top three states as measured by a percentage of electricity production.  Read the rest of this entry »

• The U.S. has three electric grids: Eastern Interconnection, Western Interconnection, and ERCOT (Texas)
• The Tres Amigas “superstation” has been proposed to be built in Clovis, NM to connect the grids and spur development of renewable power that would otherwise be too remote to efficiently reach population centers.
• The substation would be able to carry 5,000 megawatts of electricity – an amount many times greater than current substations and equivalent to the output of 5 nuclear power plants.
• The Tres Amigas substation would use superconducting cable from American Superconductor Corp that is chilled to minus-300 degrees Fahrenheit.
• Public Service Co. of New Mexico has more than 7,000 megawatts of proposed wind generation that could benefit from the project.

From Wall Street Journal article: “Transforming Clean-Energy Industry Into a Local One“

• Japan’s CO₂ emissions per GDP are among the lowest of industrial countries at .24kg CO₂/US$ (IAEA)
• Hybrid car sales amount to well under a million cars a year, or less than 1% of world demand. J.P. Morgan analysts forecast that hybrids will reach 13% of global automobile sales in 2020. (Fortune Magazine, Special Advertising Section on Japan)
• The average person loses 13 pounds their first year of commuting by bike. http://bcycle.com/
• A four-mile bicycle trip keeps about 15 pounds of pollutants out of the air we breathe. http://bcycle.com/
• Nuclear energy experts count 436 operating nuclear power stations around the world, producing eight percent of the world’s electricity and around 20% of America’s. To power them, producer countries ship about 65,000 tons of uranium around the world each year. Top uranium producer countries  in 2008 (in metirc tons): Canada 9,000 tons; Kazakhstan 8,500; Australia 8,400; Namibia 4,400; Russia 3,500 (DLC)

- Justin Manger