reikiman's story links

Electric bicycles help you get around with using miniscule amounts of electricity.  For them to replace typical car trips they must have decent cargo capacity.  My benchmark is "four bags of groceries" and my current bicycle does a pretty decent job.

Solar and Wind energy is intermittent and it's always been a head scratcher to mitigate the intermittency.  The obvious thing is to store energy but the question has been '?how?'.  Daniel Nocera has the answer.

Robotaxi's whisking us around could save our cities, save the environment, make us safer on the roads, etc. Or could they?

Running a website is tied to using electricity to run the servers, and it's a question how a sustainability minded person might run a web site in a sustainable way.  This is a list of web hosting providers who take steps to be 'green'.  In most cases they're buying credits to "offset" their carbon footprint.

Amory Lovins appeared recently on Democracy Now with a puzzler of a claim:  Increased use of Nuclear Power would increase the rate of global warming.  Interesting thinking resulted and by golly he seems to be right.

Ag Science is working to use corn stover, the leaves and stalks left over after harvest, as input to cellulosic ethanol.  It sounds cool because it's ethanol that doesn't divert fuel.  But there are problems, in the form of genetically modifying corn, and in diverting what used to be soil protection and nutrients to producing fuel.

It's time for the yearly plea for a day where nobody buys gasoline causing the oil companies to collapse in a heap of conniptions.  Or something like that.  It's baloney to think one day with a few people not buying gasoline will make any difference.  Instead what will make a difference is for lots of people to systematically end gasoline use.

A man was arrested recently for the "illegal transportation of inedible kitchen grease" and this leads one on an exploration of issues related to using "waste vegetable oil" to make biodiesel.

There is a lot of land area containing large warehouse-style buildings that have flat roofs. These buildings could then have roof-top solar panels. There is breaking news (links below) that Southern California Edison is launching a program to install solar panels on commercial rooftops.

Do you want to get on the water, but leery of wearing out your arms? Do you want to go a little farther with your kayak? Do you want to do other things from a kayak, such as fishing or photography, without also having to paddle? A small electric motor is probably for you, then. This is a list of several companies and tutorials offering ways to electrify a kayak.

NEV's are limited in most U.S. states to 25 miles/hr. While that's fast enough to get around the neighborhood it's not quite compatible with traffic on 35 miles/hr roads, and of course some people just can't drive 55. Is it legal or prudent or safe to modify an NEV to go faster? In California it's not legal. It might not be safe depending on the equipment the manufacturer installed.

Wind power is available when it's windy, right? While many claim that's a detriment for wind power, what it really points to is the need for affordable methods to store energy. Affordable energy storage also affects the need for peaker plants, because the energy could be generated at night, stored, and released during the day. Affordable energy storage works with wind power to store energy when it's windy, for release on days it's calm.

The BugE is a really cool electric motorcycle kit. I was thinking by now that someone had test ridden or built one of the vehicles and posted information on their experience, so I went looking. I found several newspaper articles, but only one test ride experience.

The ubiquitous "standard" DVD case is everywhere, but is not at all sustainable. It's made of plastic, meaning it encourages pushing persistent poisonous chemicals into the environment, and it is not very space efficient. There are alternatives, and An Inconvenient Truth showcased some of them.