Mountain Biking: Rubber side down- And Now, Back to Your Local News…Since the weather’s getting better, I’m sure we’re all totally jonesing to get onto the trails, but in general, they’re a mess. It’s a bummer to see nice singletracks get trashed and widened, so like all of you, I’m grinding my teeth in annoyance while I try to be patient. The good news is that you [...] […]
- Downieville, Take ThreeOkay, well, things went pretty haywire in race promotion after the registration debacle. The organizer received so many hateful emails and comments about the mishap that it made him wonder if he should even bother putting the race on. I can’t blame him, really. In his shoes I might do the same thing. It sounds [...] […]
- And Now, Back to Your Local News…
- Edgy Veggie
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CU’s Environmental Center offers free energy visits for students
Jimena Zamora, left, who is part of the University of Colorado Student and Community Outreach on Renter Energy (SCORE), checks the temperature of the hot water in a student house on Monday. Resident Mariko McMillan, right, watches. Photo by Marty Caivano, Camera.
In a city where there are tons of renters, it’s tough to motivate people to spend money on saving energy. That’s part of why the University of Colorado’s Environmental Center is helping students living off campus chip away at their energy bills by visiting their homes to show them how:
Hosted by CU’s Environmental Center, Student and Community Outreach for Renter Efficiency — or SCORE — teaches students living in certain Boulder neighborhoods how to lower their energy bills by making their homes more efficient through simple and inexpensive adjustments, such as using energy efficient light bulbs or setting thermostats to optimal temperatures. Read more
Mobile home owners miss out on solar
Maria Downing and Nick Tamm are trying to get solar panels for the awning for their mobile home in Boulder.
A couple of mobile home owners in Boulder (who actually live in a super-retrofitted 1958 trailer that doesn’t look anything like a trailer at all) have gotten shut down by Xcel Energy in their quest to power their mini-house with solar.
Apparently, solar can only be put on permanent structures, and mobile homes, by definition, aren’t permanent. On the surface, that doesn’t sound unreasonable, but for Maria Downing and Nick Tamm, the issue is that their mobile home is their permanent home. And they don’t plan on moving.
(Also, their neighborhood is zoned only for mobile homes, and they have a 99-year lease on their land, so there’s no reason to think they’ll be forced to leave anytime soon to make way for some other, glitzier development.)
Downing and Tamm are frustrated about their own situation — but they’re also frustrated about the larger implications. Is solar only for the rich, who may be the people who are least at risk for rising utility bills? What about lower-income folks in Boulder who’s money is going, in part, to subsidize the solar panels put on wealthier people’s homes?
Read more about the solar mobile home shutout at DailyCamera.com.
Boulder Tech kids are turning a gas guzzler into an electric vehicle
Josh Reid, left, Andrew Gibson and Melvin Gamill, all of the collision repair class at Boulder Valley s Technical Education Center, do body work on the Nissan pickup truck that they are working to turn into an electric vehicle. ( CLIFF GRASSMICK )
Students at Boulder Tech — a vocational school in Boulder Valley — are turning the empty hull of a Nissan pickup truck into an all electric vehicle.
For Dave Pence — an instructor at Boulder Valley’s Career and Technical Education Center — green inspiration came in the form of a 1998 Nissan Frontier pickup truck.
He found the truck, which had no motor but a decent body, on Craigslist for $150 and saw it as an opportunity for his students to do something the school has never done before — turn an old gas guzzler into an all-electric vehicle.
“When I saw the truck, I thought about Boulder Tech, and I thought we could infuse a little imagination into the program,” Pence said.
Read more about it at DailyCamera.com.
NREL to study the environmental impacts of large solar farms
National Renewable Energy Laboratory senior biologist Brenda Beatty is supervising revegetation and wildlife studies at the new solar array field at NREL's National Wind Technology Center. (Courtesy of NREL)
As renewable energy technology gains momentum as a viable replacement for burning fossil fuels (thanks largely to environmentalists concerned about the toxins and the carbon dioxide spewed by coal plants), opposition is also starting to grow — from other environmentalists.
In order to replace a utility-scale coal plant, renewable energy projects may also have to be, well, utility scale. And for solar plants, that may mean covering thousands of acres of land with mirrors or PV panels. This has some environmentalists concerned about how those panels will affect local ecosytems.
Now, biologists from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have begun a three-year study to look at how the land under solar panel arrays — which is typically graded, stripping the earth of its native vegetation — can be restored. Read more
Is the frozen dead guy in Nederland contributing to global warming?
Bo Shaffer pours dry ice on the frozen body of "Grandpa" Bredo Morstoel in Nederland in 2006. Grandpa Bredo died in 1989, in Norway.
In the last several years, the city and county of Boulder have been working to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. But it’s possible they’ve forgotten one significant source of carbon: the frozen dead guy who’s kept in a Tuff Shed in Nederland. Read more
Did WSJ just give Boulder the big green beatdown?
Even Boulder Finds It Isn't Easy Going Green, by Stephanie Simon, WSJ
Last Saturday, the Wall Street Journal published a story about Boulder on its front page: “Boulder Struggles with Green Dream: Even Boulder Finds It Isn’t Easy Going Green.”
This spring, city contractors will fan out across this well-to-do college town to unscrew light bulbs in thousands of homes and replace them with more energy-efficient models, at taxpayer expense.
City officials never dreamed they’d have to play nanny when they set out in 2006 to make Boulder a role model in the fight against global warming. The cause seemed like a natural fit in a place where residents tend to be politically liberal and passionate about the great outdoors.
Instead, as Congress considers how to encourage Americans to conserve more energy, Boulder stands as a cautionary tale about the limits of good intentions.
Ouch.
The article, in general, focused on the fact that since individuals wouldn’t motivate to make energy-efficient upgrades to their own, the city of Boulder (like a cross, eye-rolling nanny) planned to do it for them. By Monday, Boulder’s supposed fall from green grace had made its way around the Internet echo chamber, showing up on a handful of high-profile blogs. Take, for example, this joke that introduced a post on the Time magazine Web site:
How many residents of Boulder, Colorado, does it take to screw in a light bulb? 100,000: Taxpayers foot the bill for teams of techies to go door-to-door and caulk windows, swap old light bulbs for compact fluorescent ones, and install programmable thermostats, all in the name of energy efficiency. Should saving energy—and money—be this difficult to achieve?
Even in an exceptionally progressive, environmentally sensitive town like Boulder, it seems nearly impossible to get residents to lift a finger, spend a buck, or change their habits to save the planet.
So is this true? And if not, what’s the real story? Is Boulder green or isn’t it? Read more
Saving mountain gorillas from half a world away (aka Nederland, Colo.)
Williams with his briquettes | Daily Camera file photo
Robert Williams wants to help recover the dwindling population of mountain gorillas, and along the way, help save the Congo, too.
And living in the tiny mountain town of Nederland (on an entirely different continent) isn’t gonna stop him.
Williams has already organized an event in Boulder with Wildlife Direct that raised $12,000 for gorilla protection in 2008, and he’s raised another $23,000 since then. Now he’s focusing his attention on issues in Virunga National Park that are leading to the destruction of the gorillas’ natural habitat: fuel collection.
A group called the Charcoal Mafia illegally harvests trees from the national park to turn into charcoal, which is used by the Congolese for cooking fuel.
Williams hopes that by replacing Congolese residents’ charcoal stoves with biomass briquettes made in Nederland, he can help to run out the so-called Charcoal Mafia rebels that have resisted conservationist efforts and have a stranglehold on the area.
More than 600 briquette presses now operate on the ground, making it the largest alternative fuel program in Congo. Each press is run by a six-person “microenterprise,” translating into 3,600 new fair-wage jobs for Congolese residents. By November, the goal is to hit 1,000 presses.
But Williams isn’t stopping there, he’s also looking for ways to provide the national park with on-going financial support so park rangers can continue to protect the gorillas. He’s proposing a Boulder sanctuary, where residents could adopt an acre of the park for $25 a month.
Read more about Williams’ effort to save the mountain gorilla at DailyCamera.com
Was building Boulder’s smart grid a smart idea?
In March 2008, it all sounded great. Xcel Energy announced that Boulder would be home to the very first smart grid in the country, and people loved it. City council members thought the idea was stupendous; environmentalists said it would help the average person conserve electricity — or at least spread out their electricity use so that peak loads could be diminished (and, therefore, so could peak-load plants that are most often run off of coal and natural gas).
The costs of Xcel Energy's SmartGridCity project in Boulder are far higher than originally projected.
But two years later, the smart grid doesn’t look as shiny as it once did. For one thing, costs have skyrocketed. At first, Xcel thought that it would cost the company about $15.3 million to actually build the grid, not including the cost of running and maintaining it. By May 2009, Xcel realized it was going to be far more, perhaps $27.9 million. Now, Xcel is guessing that total capital expenditures — we’re talking digging ditches for fiber cable and installing smart meters in people’s homes — will cost $42.1 million. Read more
Cool old-timey beer production video reminds us how far we’ve come
If I had the time, I’d make a remix of this wonderful video with some footage of solar arrays and other neat energy innovations in brewing on the front end — and leave the rest intact until the very final “thanks to coal” bit.
We’ve definitely come a long way from loads purely coal fueled breweries to trends toward wind and solar powered sustainable, green breweries. Brooklyn Brewery was early in the trend in 2003 when they converted to 100% wind powered energy.
Of course as we’ve posted here before, New Belgium Brewery’s 870-panel solar array is nothing to sneeze at, with Odell Brewing Company not far behind getting 39 percent of energy needs covered by their solar array.
And there are other cool energy-saving marvels, too — different varieties of heat recapturing are used at New Belgium, famously at Sierra Nevada in California, and Canada’s Steam Whistle Brewing might have one of the more unique green strategies–using a deep lake water cooling refrigeration system.
As long as you’re asking, you’ll also get people reminding you that consuming locally-brewed beer (as with consuming locally-produced anything) uses less energy, so the craft brew boom of the last decade and a half, along with changes in packaging and shipping (how heavy did those crates of bottles look in the video?) have cut down on the total energy needed.
Not only are sustainable breweries good for the environment, but they also help brewers cuts costs, which is probably a big part of why greener brewing is on the rise.
–Dave Burdick and Lindsay Gulisano
Love watching the Super Bowl? Love snacking? Consider yourself a greenie, veg-head, sustainability devotee? We have what you need.
Super Bowl XLIV | From Flickr user RMTip21
This Sunday, millions of people will sit down to watch the Colts and the Saints battle it out at Super Bowl XLIV. However, all the Boulderites out there are probably looking for a way to make their Super bowl parties a little lighter and a little greener.
From watching the game on a more environmentally friendly TV, to cooking with sustainable ingredients, to eating vegetarian, greening your Super bowl can be simple.
Here are a some guilt-free, game-appropriate recipes that will please any football enthusiast, whether they care about sustainability or not. Read more
