Image via YouTube video screengrab
Holy wow. This video is such a trip (har har). It's not quite as relaxing as if you were on the cruise enjoying it in real time, but if you don't have the funds or vacation time from work, the five minutes it takes to experience five days aboard this ship is sure amazing -- and, we must admit, a whole lot greener....Read the full story on TreeHugger
Mark Vachon
How’s GE’s ecomagination going?
I put that question today to Mark Vachon, who is vice president for ecomagination at GE. He replied by talking about natural gas.
“The large macro trend of gas is massive,” he said. “Our oil and gas business will be a huge beneficiary.”
An abundance of shale gas in the U.S., and methane gas reserves in Australia present a wealth of opportunities for GE, which plays all along the supply chain for natural gas.
“We’re a massive player in gas exploration,” Mark said. “We have a water business that can deal with issues in the fracking process.” And, of course, GE sells lots of gas-burning turbines, including a new combined cycle power plant, currently available in Europe, that enables gas to be burned more efficiently and in concert with renewable energy. (See my June blogpost, GE’s big bet on natural gas)
But can you put “ecomagination and shale gas in the same sentence? Yes,” Mark said. GE will focus on making shale gas cleaner, “with technologies like zero-leak valves” and water filtration products like a mobile evaporator that is basically a truck (see below) “designed to enable on-site frac water recycling, reducing the volume of wastewater and fresh water that needs to be hauled to and from the project site.”
Like it or not, natural gas is the big story today in the energy business. This is good for GE. It’s probably good for the U.S., given our domestic supply. Whether it’s good thing for the climate is very much an open question. If cleaner-burning gas plants replaces dirty coal plants, they will bring meaningful but incremental progress towards a climate solution. If cheap, abundant natural gas stalls the development of low-carbon renewable energy, or discourages investment in new clean-energy businesses, that’s a problem. Chances are, it’ll do both.
I met Mark near the U.S. Capitol, where he was headed for meetings on energy security with House leader John Boehner, among others. He has overseen GE’s ecomagination portfolio for Jeff Immelt since last October. Ecomagination products include efficient aircraft engines and locomotives, appliances, and LED and CFL light bulbs as well as GE’s gas, nuclear, renewable energy and smart-grid businesses; they’ll generate $20 billion to $22 billion in revenues this year, Mark estimates. The 52-year-old exec, who has been with GE for 28 years, was previously President & CEO of GE Healthcare’s $9 billion Americas Region. He still lives in Milwaukee, where the healthcare business is based, but because one of his jobs is to make ecomagination more global, he has traveled this year to Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Israel, Europe, Australia and China, and he’s soon headed to Brazil.
So if the gas business is booming, where are the challenges in the ecomagination portfolio?
Nuclear’s an obvious one. The son of a nuclear engineer, Mark believes in the technology but says, post-Fukushima, that “it’s very clear, at least for the moment, that we’re in a hiatus.” But, he added, “the nuclear industry is very good at learning from its mistakes.”
Wind, too, faces short-term issues, he said: “It’s clearly challenged over the next couple of years.” Without clean-energy mandates or tax subsidies, wind struggles to compete with cheap natural gas. And there’s uncertainty about those subsidies, particularly in the U.S. where Congress is looking to manage budget deficits.
This past spring, GE made a major commitment to solar PV, drawing on technology developed at the National Renewable Energy Lab. Mark said the company will site a manufacturing plant in the U.S. to make the panels.
Does GE remain committed to ecomagination despite the gloomy policy environment in the U.S.? After all, Immelt put his reputation on the line by becoming a vocal advocate for climate regulations through the U.S. Climate Action Partnership. That didn’t end well.
“Business has to step up and act,” Mark said, nothing that GE plans to buy 25,000 electric cars for its own fleet.
“We are not going to wait for policy,” he added. Good thing.
Image: Dirk Becker
Last week Colleen brought us the story of a woman in Michigan who is facing jail time for planting a garden. Sadly, this type of heavy-handed by-the-letter enforcement of bylaws exists at the same time as people embrace urban agriculture as a viable source of high quality nutrition. A man in Lanztville, British Columbia is facing a similar battle with the local government after converting his 2.5 acre "residential" lot from a gravel pit into a thriving organic farm. His refusal to ...Read the full story on TreeHugger
Photo: Wikipedia, CC
Offshore Wind Farms Might be Best Place to Grow Seaweed 'Farms'
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Image via reusethisbag.com
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Photo: Flickr, CC
Only Available in 7 States So Far, So It's Just the Beginning...
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"Above the Clouds, Looking down on Pennsylvania." Image credit:Flickr, katrha
The Charlotte News-Observer reports that "Duke Energy has spent $5 million over the past two years to fix corrosion in pollution-catching devices at its power plants, which are among dozens nationwide plagued by the problem." The sulfur dioxide from coal burning, captured by wet "scrubbers," forms sulfuric acid. This acid corrodes pollution control equipment from the inside. For a price, t...Read the full story on TreeHugger
Image: IRRI Images
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Remember the popular old preacher's joke? The one about the preacher refusing to get into rescue boats despite the rising flood waters all around him? How he says he's not worried, because he's been praying, and that "the Lord will provide"? And then, at the end, after the waters swallow him up, he wonders why the Lord never delivered. But "The Lord provided three boats," Saint Peter tells him. "It's not His fault that you were too dumb to get in."
Tom Junod opens his latest column over at Esquire with the parable, and ...Read the full story on TreeHugger
photo: Paul Sturgess/Creative Commons
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In the months since Randy Howland, 51, was first hired as a customer service representative, his excitement of having a job has turned to defeat. As part of the Road Back to Work series, we catch up with Howland — who was out of work for more than a year — as he prepares for a job interview for what he hopes is a better position.
A fusion reactor in a Canadian museum. Photo credit: David R. Carrol via Flickr/CC BY
Ah, nuclear fusion--that near-mythical idea that's only mentioned in whispers; that has long seemed doomed to linger on the sidelines of the "serious" energy debate. Okay, so I'm sort of overstating its outsider status (universities and governments have been researching the technology for decades), but it's true that solar, wind, nuclear fission, and fossil fuels dominate the conversation. There are plenty of reasons for that, but there's also a good r...Read the full story on TreeHugger
Images Credit Firetext
What is the best way to protect our homes and families from fire? Some say we should fill all our furniture and plastics with fire retardants; Others, like me, suggest that we would be better off without all these chemicals and should instead use natural materials, but that we need to crank up the fire protection accordingly. Thats why I think every home should have sprinklers. In lieu of that, here is a wonderful idea: A smoke detector with a built in SIM card that will send a text messa...Read the full story on TreeHugger
Images Credit Firetext
What is the best way to protect our homes and families from fire? Some say we should fill all our furniture and plastics with fire retardants; Others, like me, suggest that we would be better off without all these chemicals and should instead use natural materials, but that we need to crank up the fire protection accordingly. Thats why I think every home should have sprinklers. In lieu of that, here is a wonderful idea: A smoke detector with a built in SIM card that will send a text messa...Read the full story on TreeHugger
Photo Credit: Julie Bass
Since I wrote about the Michigan woman who is facing 93 days in jail for planting a vegetable garden last Friday, the story has just exploded. TIME, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Geek Mom, CRAFT, Grist, and Daily Kos -- along with plenty of other blogs -- have covered the story. It never fails that someone in the comment section defends the city of Oak Park's actions by saying "why should ...Read the full story on TreeHugger
Photo Credit: Julie Bass
Since I wrote about the Michigan woman who is facing 93 days in jail for planting a vegetable garden last Friday, the story has just exploded. TIME, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Geek Mom, CRAFT, Grist, and Daily Kos -- along with plenty of other blogs -- have covered the story. It never fails that someone in the comment section defends the city of Oak Park's actions by saying "why should ...Read the full story on TreeHugger
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