I've been a little busy lately and don't have time for a full-blown blog post, so again we'll have to settle for some quick hits that I've taken note of lately:

• Recently I've been reading Greg Pahl's fascinating book, The Citizen-Powered Energy Handbook.  It's full of fascinating practical information about medium-scale renewable energy projects, which citizen groups and municipalities can undertake.  Pahl is a champion of Community Supported Energy (CSE), a co-operative model of renewable energy production not unlike the more popular Community Supported Agriculture (CSA).  Most CSAs I'm familiar with are well behind the technological curve and could benefit tremendously from even simple web-based technology for facilitating membership signup and horizontal communications; I'm sure the same could be said for CSEs.  (I've been thinking about websites for community supported agriculture for a long time, but I never seem to get the chance to put together a good CSA website solution.)
• OpenADR is an open-source demand-response system.  As far as I know demand-response is really making its presence felt only in the enterprise and commercial sectors, so hopefully OpenADR will help expand the market to include a wider swatch of commercial buildings as well as some residential buildings.  (h/t Earth2Tech)
• OpenPDC appears to be a promising open-source platform for aggregating and analyzing the health of the electrical grid, courtesy of the TVA.  (h/t Earth2Tech, again)
• PeoplePower is working on an open source wireless home automation network solution, which could be a great improvement on the elegant, but somewhat hobbyist-only, solution that is Tweet-A-Watt. (h/t Earth2Tech for the hat trick)
• EcoFactor is developing a smart thermostat, meant to reduce energy needed for space heating.  I'd be fascinated to see those algorithms!  (h/t - guess who?)
• Scientific Conservation, Inc. has recently released software to predict building energy use accurately.  The idea is to provide additional motivation for efficiency retrofits, by demonstrating return on investment more effectively than traditional modeling approaches.  That's well and good, but it makes me wonder whether or not it would be possible to use the tool in concert with a large database of information about buildings - from a municipal government's licensing board, let's say.  That would make it possible to identify a large set of buildings which would benefit from retrofits rapidly, and to prioritize the retrofits based on current or projected energy use.
• Mariah Power has released an incredibe iPhone application to measure wind speed in your backyard, to assess the feasibility of placing a turbine there.

I'm beginning to think I should pull together a library of open source projects on renewable energy, energy efficiency, and the like.  That could be a fun project for the holidays!

While I've got a lot of interesting green ideas I'd love to blog about, I don't have nearly enough time to get to them all.  So instead I'm going to just throw them out there, in hopes of getting back to them some day... or at least stimulating some interesting thoughts!

• The Eco-Patent Commons is a fascinating way to distribute green patents, and it is gaining steam.
• Earth2Tech recently compared a variety of iPhone apps for Car 2.0.
• The National Renewable Energy Laboratory offers a plugin to Google Sketchup that makes energy efficient building design much cheaper.  Is an open-source library of energy efficient designs far behind?
• The White House has a suggestion box for energy efficiency, open to all federal employees who want to help the government reduce its footprint.  Can we make something like that available to all organizations, large and small?
• Researchers are investigating software to make airports run more efficiently.  I'm not entirely sure what they have in mind, but it sound like a knockoff of the SETI-at-Home project, to bring distributed computing to bear on the complex problem of finding the most efficient schedule out of the vast number of potential schedules.  There are great possibilities for open source development and popular participation in this program.
• Green Cities California launched a new best practices website for municipal sustainability ordinances (h/t GreenBiz).  Hopefully this site will be not just a resource for California municipalities, but also a source of inspiration and ideas for local governments and civic activists across the country.

Not all of these are related to energy efficiency and renewable energy exactly, but they are all great examples of making the green revolution more accessible and democratic, so kudos all around.

Today, in celebration of Blog Action Day, I'm blogging about what we can do to prevent catastrophic climate change. This blog has focused on ideas to deliver renewable energy and energy efficiency for a few months now, but today I'd like to step back and discuss the one really big idea which I think is our single most powerful tool in fighting catastrophic climate change: democratization.

What's so great about democracy, and what will democratization do to prevent catastrophic climate change? Plenty!

• Reducing barriers. Renewable energy and energy efficiency must be made more readily available to ordinary people, so that everyone can take part in the green revolution. That means that we must reduce the cost of renewable energy and make it feasible for ordinary people to create renewable energy through their own initiative; it also means that we must make energy efficiency know-how more readily available, more easily navigable, and more immediately actionable.

  Think of what the web, and blogging software in particular, did for political organizing. It used to be that only fairly wealthy organizations and individuals had the means to broadly publish political opinions and news analysis. But with the advent of blogging software, it became radically easier to publish and organize around political opinions. The result was the modern progressive movement and, arguably, the presidency of Barack Obama. I'd like to think that steadily decreasing the cost of access to renewable energy and energy efficiency will have similarly dramatic effects on the green revolution.

• Transparency and creativity. Transparency and creativity are the lifeblood of democracy - they allow ordinary people to identify problems in society and fix them. They will also be the enablers of the green revolution. What I mean by that is that ordinary people must have access to the information necessary to diagnose problems in the green economy, and must be given free reign to use their creativity to fix those problems.

  Fortunately, policymakers seem to support this idea. The smart grid is, in some sense, all about creating transparency around critical energy use information, and the trend towards opening up government data certainly indicates that many policymakers want to unleash the creativity of civic-minded developers.

  There is still a long way to go, however. To begin with, open access to smart grid data (up to the limit necessary for security, of course) is not yet assured. A good deal of the emerging smart grid seems to be oriented around private deals between utilities and brand-name hardware and software developers. Open standards and APIs, and more than that open-source smart grid software and hardware, will be key to making the smart grid truly transparent.

  Moreover, energy usage is not the only area where we need transparency. The food system and transportation system are rife with hard-to-find and hard-to-use information. Labeling for food and data standards for metro transit systems are certainly a good start, but even these are too limited in scope. Both are aimed primarily at providing consumers information - which is a laudable goal, of course. But consumer information doesn't really address the problem at the source; it only allows us to solve the problem of agricultural emissions indirectly, for example.  Furthermore, there are plenty of greenhouse gas emissions from commercial and industrial users, and these users also need to reduce their footprint - and they need the help of creative people to do that. The green revolution will really take off when high-quality, real-time, standardized data about the impact and services provided by every level of the food and transportation sectors becomes available and actionable to ordinary people.

• Structural change through civic action. A lot of green entrepreneurs focus on private action to fight climate change. Again, that's a laudable goal, but it's not enough. We will only be able to reverse climate change through the structural reform that is possible when ordinary people use the power of government to green the economy.

  To be sure, that includes action at the highest levels, and here in the US that means that the Senate needs to pass the Boxer/Kerry bill, with strong targets for renewable energy and emission reductions. It also means that global leaders will need to craft an ambitious anti-climate change treaty in Copenhagen this December, and that the Senate will again need to ratify that compact.

  But civic action shouldn't stop there; indeed, action at the highest levels will not be nearly enough. States and municipalities will need to experiment on the right mix of incentives, regulations and investments needed to make energy efficiency the "business as usual" option; to make renewable energy affordable and widely-accessible; and to make our living spaces, food systems, and transportation systems sustainable. Ordinary people will need to lead the charge in pressing governments to adopt these measures, to be creative in trying new policies, and to be honest in changing course when those policies don't work.

It may seem odd that a web developer with a penchant for the green economy might be so interested in democratization. But at the end of the day, I think democratization is precisely what the web is about.  That's why I think it is such a powerful platform for change, and part of the reason why I've chosen this career. Democracy is one of the more powerful tools we've ever invented, and I think it is the key to preventing catastrophic climate change.

I've written before about the importance of supporting do-it-yourself weatherization projects, and the possibility of creating a simplistic do-it-yourself smart grid at home using the Tweet-a-Watt.  If do-it-yourselfers can reduce and measure their own demand for energy and electricity, how about creating some, too?

A pair of interesting stories making the rounds today are the inspiring story of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, via Change.org, and the Cambridge Energy Alliance's post on do-it-yourself solar.  As a big believer in renewable energy, and particularly in reducing the barriers to renewable energy solutions, I find these stories fascinating and very exciting.

Ready-made commercial solutions for harnessing the wind and the sun to create electricity or provide heat are fairly expensive.  Even rooftop wind turbines sold at hardware stores can cost up to $6,000, before tax incentives kick in (at which point the cost drops to around $4,200).  The CEA blog post above points to a commercially available solar hot air panel which costs "only" $1,500.  That's not chump change!

The good news is that there are lower-cost options available for intrepid hobbyists with a bit of spare time, the Change.org and CEA blog posts suggest.  What we need, I believe, are resources to distribute this knowledge more widely, and to make it easier to find and to put into practice.

The tools to do that online are well within reach.  There are already a handful of web-based resources which already compile information about DIY renewable energy projects - including Discover Solar Energy and Got Wind.  These sites are a great start, but there's still room for improvement.  I'm thinking of a comprehensive interactive website which includes how-to videos, detailed instruction manuals, an online store for the raw materials, a question-and-answers discussion forum, and Digg-style voting to promote the best resources.  Such a site could even incorporate advice for hobbyists who'd like to "go professional" and sell their services to others who would like to purchase low-cost renewable energy, but don't have the time or know-how to take on such a project themselves.  The site could be supported through affiliate sales for raw materials and premium memberships purchased by hobbyists wishing to advertise their services to other enthusiasts.  There's even an opportunity for the site's owners to sell consulting services or run workshops for real estate developers, municipalities, or other entities who wish to deploy low-cost distributed renewable energy on a wide scale.

Large-scale investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency, together with government policies which put a price on carbon, are certainly necessary to make a big difference in solving global warming.  At the same time, there is plenty of room for everyone, from do-it-yourself hobbyists to web developers, to chip in as well.

One thing I find fascinating about the renewable energy industry, in its current incarnation, is that it seems to be founded on the notion that we are living in the late nineteenth century.

That may come across as a bit harsh, and I don't intend to throw spit-balls at people who are trying to do important work.  But we do need to re-evaluate the way the renewable energy industry does business, and the core assumptions embedded within many renewable energy businesses.

In particular, I'm referring to the assumption that renewable energy should be a functionally equivalent alternative to dirty energy.  That is to say, the renewable energy industry currently strives to replace (or in some cases to augment) things like coal-fired power plants with solar arrays, wind turbines, and geothermal plants.  The operative notion, at least for the US renewable energy industry, is that we are living in a time when electricity is not already widely available and affordable.

Of course, in the industrialized world, electricity is widely available and affordable.  It is so affordable, that renewable energy is too expensive to compete effectively with coal and natural gas.  The solution, it appears, is to ask government to incentivize renewable energy in one way or another, to spur scale-up investment or to increase the cost of dirty energy, leaving renewable energy more competitive as a result.  I support this solution whole-heartedly, for a number of reasons - dirty energy generates far too many externalities to be borne by those who can least afford them, and, at least in the United States, government at every level has done more than enough, for far too long, to boost dirty energies.  It's time to give renewables a fair shake.

Beyond government action, the renewable energy industry also needs to rethink its product.

What if renewable energy was not just functionally equivalent to dirty energy?  What if it was a superior product, that made life easier and better, on top of the benefits of electricity?  Then the issue of price might not be so important - many consumers would be willing to pay a premium for a service that provides "renewable energy plus".

For example, suppose that it were possible to install a special kind of rooftop solar panel on a consumer's home, which would not only provide the consumer with renewable energy, but would also automatically clean the dishes, sweep the floor, and wash the clothes.  That's a pretty far-fetched scenario, but it's easy to see how a consumer might sign up for an installation, even if the electricity was a bit more expensive than the stuff hawked by the local coal-fired plant.  This new product would make life easier and more hassle-free!  I know I'd pay a bit extra for that.

Although this idea may sound like something straight out of The Jetsons, progress is already being made on similar, more realistic, concepts.  Earlier this week I was at an event with New Generation Energy, and spoke with Warren Anderson, the founder of Hydrolosophy.  He is part of a team working on an innovative new approach to renewable energy; the idea will be presented as a business plan in the Ignite Clean Energy competition next summer.  While I don't want to give too much away, the basic idea is to develop an commercial-scale renewable energy system which also provides a number of other services, and thereby garner a number of additional revenue streams.  The resulting service will therefore have significantly more profit potential than traditional renewable energy systems.

Power generation is certainly not my specialty, but my guess is that the most likely candidates for add-on products to come out of a renewable energy system are going to be things like clean water, fairly basic motive force, and beneficial chemicals or simple life forms.  With the right kind of engineering, those basic outputs can be turned into very valuable end products for the consumer, resulting in a dramatically more competitive renewable energy industry.

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times ran a fascinating piece on a new kind of financial institution: the green bank, which offers lower loan rates to finance energy efficiency and sustainability projects of various kinds.  It seems that the new banks are having some trouble staying afloat, partially due to the generally dismal economic times and also because, as with many businesses, start-up costs are high in the first few years of a bank's existence.

The Times quotes Bert Ely, a banking consultant from Virginia, who is skeptical about green banking in general:

"I'm not convinced this is ultimately going to be very profitable," he said, noting that the green banks appeared to have relatively high operating expenses — perhaps, Mr. Ely said, because of the need for specialized expertise among loan officers, among other factors. Also, providing discounted interest rates, while good for borrowers, can detract from a bank’s income, Mr. Ely observed.

The latter point is self-evident, but the first is questionable, or it can be for certain kinds of green projects.  Replacing incandescent lightbulbs for compact flourescent lights, or better yet LED lights, is a sure-fire way to reduce electric usage, and the return on investment is well-known.  More complicated projects, like insulating a basement or an attic, may well raise some detailed questions about the kind of insulation or sealant to use, but the costs can be "rounded up" without too much trouble.  It's a bit more difficult to determine how much energy will be saved due to a given insulation project, but here again, some relatively straightforward tests carried out by a trusted energy auditor can provide good estimates, which can in turn give a good idea for the return on investment.

I think the real issues that are troubling green banks are a little more mundane.  While I've never visited such a bank, my guess is that all of the banks listed in the Times article have faily sophisticated marketing efforts, modern green branch offices, and all the other trappings of a modern green business.  All of that costs money, and in a cutthroat industry like finance, high overhead means either higher loan rates or lower profit margins, or both.  Moreover, like many banks, green banks are probably most interested in relatively large loans, whose interest rates are likely to generate profits necessary to offset the cost of the loan officer's time in processing the loan.  However, a vast number of energy efficiency projects are very small-capital loans - a whole household full of lightbulbs might not amount to more than a few hundred dollars, and an insulation project can easily come in under one thousand dollars.  No bank with a nice branch office will ever bother with a loan that small; there's no way to make a profit on it.

However, some of these low-capital projects are also very, very safe investments, so long as the borrowers are trustworthy and solvent.  The time to recover the costs of a CFL project or an insulation project might be measured in months, and the recovery time for a hot water heater replacement might be only a few years (especially if utility discounts are available).

In other words, this is an ideal space for micro-loans or low-overhead lending operations.  Using a system similar to the Kiva API, it would be possible to build a website to support peer-to-peer micro-lending for low-capital green projects with near-certain positive return.  These loans would probably have some fair amount of risk - all loans have some risk, and in order to keep overhead down, it would probably not be possible to thoroughly vet borrowers.  Then again, the low size of the loans would keep risk down, and reputation systems could further mitigate risk.  Such a system could help finance a high volume of relatively low-capital green projects, which is exactly what we need to fight global warming.

Last week was Intersolar 2009, so I thought I'd devote some space here to a solar energy idea.  For all the talk about thin-film solar, solar-powered cell phones, and so on, solar power is actually a very mature renewable energy source.  The technology is predictable; installation and maintenance are well-understood problems.  The problem is financing.

In order to be cost-effective, solar power projects generally rely on the federal tax credit, which was extended this year in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.  Using this credit, developers can effectively knock 30% off the cost of a solar power project.  Combined with state and local incentives, as well as potentially lucrative provisions for selling power back to the local utility, the up-front cost for a solar panel can be effectively off-set by lower electric bills in the future.

However, the federal tax credit isn't available for entities that don't have what's called a "tax appetite", i.e. entities which don't have to pay taxes in the first place.  Consequently, non-profit organizations, schools, and other government buildings are not directly eligible for the federal tax credit.  That is a real problem, because in many cases such entities are precisely the ideal location for a solar project - they have a long-term presence in a single physical location, are responsive to their surrounding community, and have a vested interest in reliably cheap power.

Typically, non-taxable entities with a suitable installation site get around this problem by entering into a power-purchase agreement with a private solar developer with a tax appetite.  The agreemnts are fairly complicated, but the basic idea is that a private entity leases the installation site, installs solar power, takes the federal tax credit, and sells the solar power back to the non-taxable "landlord", at a lower rate than the local utility.

The difficulty with power purchase agreements is that they require a lot of hand-holding and trust, on both sides.  As a developer, it can be difficult to find a suitable landlord. On the other hand, a lot of potentially good solar "landlords" don't take the initiative to go looking for a developer, particulalry if environmental action isn't directly related to their mission.

It might be possible to streamline the process a bit, and to lower the barriers for creating new power purchase agreements.  A lot of the data on municipal buildings, and in some cases non-profit buildings, is readily available in government databases.  Using satellite imagery and GIS systems, these databases could be scoured for entities with good prospective solar installation sites.  A bit more careful cross-referencing with the Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency, along with local utility rates, could also help streamline some of the intial financing work.

The end result would be a high-quality database of prospective solar installation sites for buildings owned by entities lacking a tax appetite.  Selling database access to solar developers should offset the cost of operations.  Ultimately such a database would reduce the cost of the solar power development process by streamlining power purchase agreements, and would encourage the development of more solar power.

By way of the great folks at Green Lights comes this great new rap from members of the Louisiana Green Corps:

I wonder if you'd call this socially conscious hip-hop?  It's a great way to kick off the weekend, regardless!

One of the biggest challenges in greening our economy is green job training.  GreenBiz recently highlighted the efforts of Green for All (one of my favorite green organizations) and the state of California in leading the way on green-collar job training.  I applaud these efforts to develop solid training programs for green-collar jobs, but I believe there are also opportunities for smaller-scale green training.

In particular, I'm thinking about free online videos for simple energy efficiency tasks, like caulking and storm window insulation.  If you search YouTube for "storm window installation", you'll eventually find the following:

This video is actually pretty good, and it's a testimony to the diversity and quality of video available at YouTube (despite all the static).  But it's possible to improve on this user experiene quite a bit, in a number of ways.

I'd like to see a site dedicated exclusively to providing users with instructional videos about weatherization tasks, and perhaps some overview videos that give some high-level information about how weatherization works and why it's important.  Such a site would feature the following:

• The ability to browse videos by type of task and difficulty level
• Multiple videos showcasing different approaches to the same task (e.g. one video for vinyl storm windows, and another for permanent storm windows)
• Ratings and comments to allow users to review a video and provide helpful critiques
• Ecommerce features to allow users to buy related products for their weatherization tasks
• Community features to allow users to get together with others in their area and participate in a weatherization project

Using Drupal and embedded videos with YouTube (together with some helpful Drupal modules like Five Star and Ubercart), it would be relatively easy to build such a site on a low budget.  The revenues for weatherization product sales could help pay for maintenance.

I think the main trick would be driving traffic to the site and keeping users engaged over time.  The site would certainly be targeted towards motivated individuals, who are interested in energy efficiency and like to roll up their sleeves.  While it wouldn't be as comprehensive as a bona fide job training program, such a site would be one more approach to making weatherization projects more common and widespread, and could help contribute to lower energy use.

Last night at Green Drinks Boston, the buzz was about WattsOn, which is DIY Kyoto's gadget for monitoring home energy use.  I've heard a bit about this sleek little gadget before, although I haven't investigated.  I just took a gander at the website, and I'm mighty impressed!

WattsOn is a gadget that displays your current energy usage, using a sensor and transmitter which hook in to your electric meter.  The device also comes with software which allows you to monitor your usage over time, and to plug into a community of other WattsOn users.  Although I haven't tried out the device (it's apparently available in the UK, but not in the US), it appears to be designed exceptionally well - it could be a nice conversation-starter on a coffee table - and the software seems to handle most of the typical reports you'd expect.

As far as I can tell, the community tools attached to WattsOn are fairly basic - they allow you to see cumulative energy and monetary savings for the community as a whole, but that's about it.  There are plenty of other things that a community of people trying to reduce their energy usage can do - for example, review and recommend energy-efficient appliances, swap tips on the best ways to implement energy-saving practices, and so on.  Additionally, I can imagine a number of other ways to make the historical usage data available to users - e.g., over email, text message, and so forth.  Good data analysis might also reveal patterns that could help home energy users find additional savings above those offered by the typical measures, like replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents.

While WattsOn is definitely a more comprehensive reporter than Tweet-A-Watt, it would be nice to get a breakdown of energy usage by room or appliance.  Depending on how it's implemented, Tweet-A-Watt is capable of creating that kind of breakdown, while WattsOn only displays aggregated usage.  On the other hand, WattsOn also takes 288 meter readings a day, so it's usually possible to reasonably approximate the reason for various spikes.  For example, if you turn on the clothes dryer around 6 pm, and see a big spike in the usage data starting at 6 and lasting for about 45 minutes, it's probably a good sign that the dryer was the cause of that spike.

WattsOn is an excellent tool in the energy efficiency arsenal.  While it's not yet available in the US, I hope it jumps across the pond soon!