Environmental SurvivalGuide

If your living in New Mexico you can sign-up with PNM Sky Blue, a voluntary program that allows you to get up to 90% of your electricity from renewable wind power. We signed up about a year ago and have felt relief ever since.

The way it works, is they charge you a small amount extra for the electricity you want to receive from renewable energy. We pay between $10 (winter) and $20 (summer) extra per month for our home (1,500sq. ft. / family of four) in order to get 90% of our electricity from renewable sources. It costs more because wind fluctuates and at times they are required to purchase renewable energy from elsewhere. This is a small price to pay for the piece of mind it provides.

The reason it is important to sign-up for this program is that global warming (and other forms of pollution) cannot be stopped while 49.7% of US electricity is being generated from coal-fired power plants. Currently, in the US there are 151 new coal-fired plants in various stages of development. Efforts to reduce CO2 emissions is being negated by these plants. It is the reason why more people need to get on board with renewable electricity and support programs like Sky Blue.

If your not in New Mexico but would like to look into similar programs in your area, visit the Department of Energy’s Green Power Markets Program By State.

Inhabitat is an interesting blog that is focused on the materials and practices that push sustainable architecture and design forward. It’s mainly focused on this topic but also has a wealth of other information about green concepts, products, and transportation. In addition to their regular posts (2-4 a day) I also found their How-to guides a useful resource and the interviews were compeling. However, most of their videos were fairly on-the-spot style videography. Outside of that it’s a great resource and worth a daily read because of their wide range of green topics.

Plug-in Hybrids can extend the mileage of a typical electric/gas hybrid by harnessing more use from the electric motor. The minds at CalCars propose we electrify the world and look at ways we can then clean the grid. The report notes that electric cars produce only half the amount of green house gases as a typical gasoline vehicle. The Prius modifications they perform adds 20 lead batteries in place of the single factory nickel battery. This addition allows them to modify the car so that it runs on the electric motor for the first 10 miles. This saving allows their modified hybrids to push the 100MPG threshold.  View the fullsize video.

The first upgrade that I did on our home was to try and reduce our electrical consumption by replacing the incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents (CFLs). CFLs use about 75% less energy than a regular incandescent bulb and last about 10 times longer. If every household in the US replaced their 5 most used incandescent bulbs with CFLs, we would save approximately $8 billion each year in energy expenses. This is the equivalent to the emissions of nearly 10 million cars.

This was all the information that I needed to get interested. On my first outing to the hardware store, I returned with a four-pack of CFLs. I thought that I would test them out and see if we could get by without the warm, yellow light. After replacing the four 100-watt incandescent floodlights with 18-watt CFLs, we began to test our comfort to the new blue light. It instantly turned our kitchen into a cold place and I noticed that we kept turning on other nearby incandescants to compensate.

I went back a week or so later to try and read the packaging more carefully to find a CFL that could better match the yellow tone we were used to. I remembered seeing several different varieties and some that were actually covered in a yellow diffuser. I knew there had to be something that could work so I ended up coming home with three different bulbs. All three of these new bulbs had a near perfect yellow hue. One of them seemed to have trouble getting started and would take a short while to get up to full power. I was a bit confused why it did this so I looked a little more closely at the packaging and began to notice a little warning on the back about Mercury content.

This was not the cause of the delay but it did stop me from buying any more CFL bulbs. I didn’t even want to think about how many of these are going to end up leaking in the landfill despite recycling efforts. Will the Mercury content of these new light bulbs end up doing more harm than the emissions caused from powering incandescent bulbs? Michael Richard over at TreeHugger does a reality check on this mercury risk by comparing it to the amount of mercury that is released from burning coal in order to power incandescant bulbs. This is a great bit of information, validating the environmental savings over incandescents. However, I’m still going to look into LED lighting as my next step.

If your still interested in CFLs and you want to learn more about them, you should visit the Lighter Footstep’s Guide to Living with CFLs.  It provides a good overview about how to survive the change.

We recently finished the Website for QUEST, a new multimedia series that utilizes all of the KQED Public Broadcasting’s platforms. The site features high quality video, radio segments, and exploration guides that get you out into the real world (if your in the Bay Area). You can learn more about our role in this project by visiting the Ideum portfolio. This Website is a great resource for learning more about environmental issues. I will begin to post television segments as they are released. Here’s a video introducing QUEST.

There are a lot of resources online to help guide people into ways in which they can reduce their environmental impact and help promote earth-friendly products and services. As a part of my service for this survival guide, I will be documenting all the resources that I cross and will post them to an organized directory. I will first post them here and provide a little insight about the website, product or service and what value it provides to someone trying to learn more about becoming green.