Last month I got our electric bill and have to admit I was a bit ashamed. Well first let me tell you a little background on the story, we moved into the Good Project about 4 months ago now and were very excited that our utility bills were going to be super low compared to the standard efficiency home we were living in before. We now have solar panels and high efficiency appliances and all the other goodies crammed into the Good project. Anyway, month one came and went and we did not have an electricity bill so we called PG&E and they gave us their usual shpeal about new accounts and some paper mill that sent out bills being slow to respond. Month three rolls around and we finally got our first bill and I was ecstatic to see that we were only paying about a dollar a day in both gas and electricity. Yeah well apparently I am not that smart because what I forgot about the whole solar on the roof thing was the fact that our bill for electricity is set up on an annual billing cycle….Yeah so we were not actually being all that good with electricity after all, the real bill that I was finally able to get from PG&E was much higher. [Read more →]

Watch this.

I wouldn’t call PG&E progressive by any means, but look what they are going to start doing to change the landscape of the Solar Energy market in California.

Check out this house in Cambridge, MA its been solar heated since 1980 and from the looks of it has been working pretty darn well.  It’s an idea that should clearly be more developed into a consumer ready version.

Levi Benkert

I like when good things get better, sort of like the when the iPhone 3G was released or even better when Toyota announced the totally redone Prius for 09′. It’s great, something that is very good already gets tweaked and rethought to make it more efficient and even better.

When we started getting ready for phase 2 of the Good project we decided it was time to do a little upgrading ourselves. So without any further ado….. its with great pleasure that I introduce to you Good, the 09′ models.

We spent the last several months listening to comments and talking with engineers about areas we can push the limits of sustainability. We tweaked everything we could, added more storage and took an already efficient design and made it even more efficient. Some of the changes are big, and some are just little touches to make the homes more user-friendly, many you would never even know about unless you were digging behind the cabinets or peeling back the drywall. (which we do not encourage). All in all Good just got better and we are darn proud of it.

• Solar – We love solar power, its clean efficient and here in Northern California we have sun light-a-plenty. So why not use it to generate your own electricity, right? The problem is the solar array costs so much to install you won’t start getting a return on your investment for several years. We think we have found the answer! We like what the folks over at Sun Run are doing. What they do is install the system at their cost and all you do is pay them for the electricity at a very discounted rate. So you get good clean power without paying the big bucks! Simple, efficient, clean, it’s sort of a theme for us.

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As you have all noticed by the price it costs to fill up your tank with Gas, Oil prices have taken a steep nose dive. And next year looks like it may even keep going that direction. The chief energy economist of Deutsche Bank, Adam Sieminski, said recently that the demand for oil in 2009 will drop more than any other time in the last quarter of a century, due to the weak economy. Sieminski forecasts oil traded in New York falling as low as $30 and averaging $47.50 for the whole year. He says higher forecasts haven’t adequately factored in how the global downturn will hurt oil demand. So…gas may be getting cheaper than cheap…But there is a flip side to that good feeling you are getting at the pump. With oil at 145$ this past summer alternative energy was entering what seemed to be its prime time debut, finanicers were willing to pour money into anything that held even the slightest promise of sustainable energy, even the Venture capital funds known for their technology plays in the past 20 years dumped more money towards green technology than information technology. But with prices at 37$, now what? The question on everyone’s mind is what will that mean for sustainable technologies?

And here is the million dollar question for you today. Given the increase in funding for the right kind of innovation when pricing is high how much are you willing to pay for a gallon of gas?

Levi Benkert

Take a step outside the world you know with me for a second and try to dream of a place where things are better. What kind of better comes to mind? Here is what my better place looks like.

I see progress but not the kind that we have seen before, instead this progress raises the poor and the rich at the same time. It’s a place where everything for sale is like the shoes that Tom sells where every pair you buy also means that someone who is in need is given a pair. A place where opportunity to help others becomes as abundant as opportunity for greed is today. A place deciding to rise from the pit of extortion and take on the challenge of the worlds poor becoming a people who are not any longer just absorbed with our self interest but also that of others.

What I see is a people who decide that no longer can we move through life building our own separate lives full of third world produced trinkets and our oh-so-important personal freedoms because there is a better way.
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I am a big fan of renewable energy and today you have a chance to join me in sending a message that its important to all of us.

Just go here and sign your name. Because big changes need to start today.

Levi

This is a really cool idea that is pretty impressive to be undertaken by an existing community. My friend lives in the Hawthorne District in Portland and let me know about the plans to put the whole community on a much more efficient energy platform of hydronic heating and cooling fed by a biofuel boiler. Check it out.

The below is taken from the website.

“Project Overview
Sunnyside Neighborhood Energy (SunNE) is conceived as a comprehensive solution to local thermal energy needs. It will be structured as a community-owned district energy (DE) utility powered by renewable sources that will serve Sunnyside Environmental School and the surrounding historic neighborhood and commercial areas. The project is modeled on existing mid-sized DE utilities in Sweden, Denmark and Canada, which use solar thermal storage and biofuel boilers to provide thermal energy for detached single-family homes, multi-family residential and small commercial buildings. Adapting these successful international examples for implementation in Oregon gives us a scalable, replicable model whose economic and environmental impact will be tremendous.”

A while back we posted about our idea to do a solar farm.Now you have to understand that the idea was just that a little spark of inspiration but nothing more. All we did was get on here and post about how cool it would be to develop a solar farm. Thinking it was a shot in the dark and would most likely pass with time like many other ideas we have. Instead the day we posted we started getting email from people who work in the renewable energy business, many of them accomplished seasoned professionals who knew how to make this happen. Fast forward a mere 60 days and we are actually seeing this starting to come together. We are now working on finding the right contacts at PG+E who do their energy purchase agreements (anyone know who it is?) and see if we can’t sell all that power we hope to be creating. We have a pretty good picture of cost and scale and might even have the investors lined up to do it.  How crazy is that?

I just wanted to say how seriously cool this blog thing is. I think the concept of online communities working together to get real world things done is just beginning to take hold. Fast forward 10 years and the world might really be efficient at getting to the right people together at the right time to make things happen.

And speaking of finding things, I am going to have a garage full of empty boxes pretty soon here if anyone in the Sacramento area is moving and wants them…

Levi