Current Savers Blog

Google co-founder Larry Page is building green, according to a local report.

He’s planning a cozy 6,000 square foot eco-mansion on a 0.75 acre lot in Palo Alto, the Palo Alto Weekly’s Web site says. The interim city planning chief told us that’s the biggest house one could build on such a lot, although the total space allowed is nearly 11,000 including garages and other outbuildings.

The paper says Page is kitting the house out with solar panels and paving that lets the rain run through to get it “green points“. Check out Palo Alto Online, whose Web site has strong reaction from foes and fans of Larry’s plan.

(Picture of Sergey Brin and Larry Page by Reuters)

 ”It promises to be largest demonstration of public concern about climate change ever attempted”, according to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

He’s not talking about something like an international series of protest marches, a coordinated shift to buying greener goods, nor a boycott of cars in favour of public transport.

What he wants is simply for you (and at least a billion other people) to turn out the lights for an “Earth Hour” on Saturday, March 28, from 8.30 p.m. local time.

This 60 minutes of darkness has really caught the public imagination — a year ago in the same event an estimated 50 million people worldwide joined in turning off lights after the idea started in Sydney in 2007 when 2.2 million homes and businesses took part. Now the target is for at least a billion people ( … and the organisers including WWF conservation group have even got Ban to make a video message about it). 

“I urge citizens everywhere to join us,” Ban says. “We are on a dangerous path, the planet is warming and we must change our ways.”

U.N. headquarters in New York will turn off the lights, along with landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The combination photo top right, by Tim Wimborne, shows Sydney Harbour Bridge before and after the switches were thrown last year.

 ”Earth Hour is a way for the citizens of the world to send a clear message. They want action on climate change,” Ban said.

Organisers suggest 10 ways to spend Earth Hour, such as a candlelight dinner (don’t be surprised if shares in candle-making companies rally this coming week), a night picnic in a park (if you live in a city you might even see the stars) or a romantic night with your loved one (if you work in a hospital maternity ward I reckon you may have to work overtime around Christmas and New Year 2010 to deliver a rush of babies).

So why has the lights off idea taken off so well? And has it made people more aware of saving energy at other times of the year? Any suggestions about what to do?

Tesla Motors unveiled the Model S, its newest all-electric car at a media event outside Los Angeles on Thursday afternoon. Billed as the first mass market highway-ready electric vehicle, the Model S can seat five adults and two children and can go for up to 300 miles on one charge. And, it costs a lot less than Tesla’s Roadster sports car, starting just shy of $50,000 (including a government tax credit). Check out our full story about the Model S unveiling here.

At the event, executives drove the prototype vehicle around the parking lot and into the surrounding neighborhood to show it off. We shot video of some of that, and here it is (forgive us for the guy walking into our shot!). Let us know what you think. Would you buy this car?

Billionaire T. Boone Pickens is spending $2 billion on a bunch of windmills and so far has no way to get the electricity they will produce to market. Last December he said he was a touch anxious, but on Wednesday he didn’t seem worried at all.

Pickens is pretty sure President Barack Obama will get some new power lines built to those plains in the Texas panhandle, but if need be, the oil-man-turned-renewable-energy-advocate will take his toys elsewhere.

“I’m not going to end up with 687 turbines in my garage. They are going to be sticking up spinning someplace,” he said at a San Francisco stop on his latest tour to drum up support for his plan to use wind power and natural gas-fueled vehicles to wean the Unites States from imported oil.

Pickens expects the price of a barrel of oil to hit $75 by the end of the year as OPEC cuts production, and between that and the desire for energy independence he sees Obama finding a way to get transmission lines built from Texas to markets that need electricity – like California.

One person at the event asked him if he could end up being the “czar” of transmission, production, and more. “Yeah, I’d love it,” the old independent “wildcat” oilman said.

But Pickens is not planning to build transmission lines himself, in part because of financing. “If you’re gonna be the czar of all those things you mentioned there, you’ve got to have a hell of a lot more money than Boone Pickens has got,” he said.

 When I attended a talk by Al Gore about global warming in Oslo in March 2007, I noticed that one of the people clapping loudest — about two rows in front of me — was the head of the committee that awards the Nobel Peace Prize.

Ole Danbolt Mjoes also joined in a minute-long standing ovation for the former U.S. vice president. “A very important message,” was all Mjoes would tell me of Gore’s speech afterwards when I went up and asked him if Gore had a chance of winning.

Gore of course went on to share the prize in December with the U.N. Climate Panel. The photo above shows Mjoes (left), handing the award to Gore in Oslo City Hall.

Gore said on Tuesday he will write a new book, “Our Choice”, for release on November 3 to follow up from his bestselling ”An Inconvenient Truth”. For a story, click here.

“It is time for a comprehensive global plan that actually solves the climate crisis. ‘Our Choice’ will answer that call,” Gore said.

Will it sell?

The timing is good because it will be issued a month before a U.N. conference in Copenhagen is meant to come up with a new global treaty to combat climate change.

But in 2007, Gore’s climate crusade stood out partly because former President George W. Bush was so out of step with his industrial allies by refusing caps on greenhouse gas emissions. (The Clinton administration, in which Gore was vice president, signed up for the carbon-capping 1997 Kyoto Protocol but never submitted it to the Senate for ratification). 

Now President Barack Obama favours cuts in emissions and every government in the world is coming up with plans. So will a new book by Gore about solutions to global warming stand out enough to have a big impact?

Mjoes will probably be among the readers of “Our Choice”.

Are you likely to read it?

Home electric bills could rise as much as 30 percent under a U.S. cap-and-trade plan to address carbon dioxide emissions, Moody’s estimates.

The tough part for households is that Moody’s expects industrial users to figure out a way to duck the cost with special rates, meaning residential electric customers will carry “the vast majority” of the cost burden. Check out our story here.

If Moody’s is right, and if the cap-and-trade plan slows global warming, is the price right?

California Senator Dianne Feinstein is fuming over a federal plan to use some Mojave desert lands to develop solar power plants and wind farms.

In a letter to Dept. of the InteriorSecretary Ken Salazar, Feinstein said she planned to introduce legislation that would protect the former railroad lands, thereby preventing the federal government from leasing them to renewable energy project developers. The 600,000 acres in question were acquired by and donated to the government’s Bureau of Land Management between 1999 and 2004 for the purpose of conservation.

“I have been informed that the BLM now considers these areas open for all types of use except mining.  This is unacceptable!” Feinstein wrote in a March 3 letter made public last week.

Feinstein, a supporter of renewable energy, said many of the desert lands being considered for solar and wind development are unsuitable.

“It is critical that these projects move forward on public and private lands well suited for that purpose,” Feinstein wrote.  “Unfortunately, many of the sites now being considered for leases are completely inappropriate and will lead to the wholesale destruction of some of the most pristine areas in the desert.”

Earlier this month, the U.S. Interior Department said it would identify zones on public lands where the department can act rapidly to create large-scale production of solar, wind, geothermal and biomass energy. Building and consuming more clean, renewable energy is a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s energy and economic policies.

Google co-founder Larry Page is building green, according to a local report. He’s planning a cozy 6,000 square foot eco-mansion on a 0.75 acre lot in Palo Alto, the Palo Alto Weekly’s Web site says. The interim city planning chief told us that’s the biggest house one could build on such a lot, although the total space allowed is nearly 11,000 including garages and other outbuildings. The paper says Page is kitting it out with solar panels and paving that lets the rain run through to get it “green points“. Check out Palo Alto Online, whose Web site has strong reaction from foes and fans of Larry’s plan. 

(Picture of Sergey Brin and Larry Page by Reuters)

 ”It promises to be largest demonstration of public concern about climate change ever attempted”, according to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

He’s not talking about something like an international series of protest marches, a coordinated shift to buying greener goods, nor a boycott of cars in favour of public transport.

What he wants is simply for you (and at least a billion other people) to turn out the lights for an “Earth Hour” on Saturday, March 28, from 8.30 p.m. local time.

This 60 minutes of darkness has really caught the public imagination — a year ago in the same event an estimated 50 million people worldwide joined in turning off lights after the idea started in Sydney in 2007 when 2.2 million homes and businesses took part. Now the target is for at least a billion people ( … and the organisers including WWF conservation group have even got Ban to make a video message about it). 

“I urge citizens everywhere to join us,” Ban says. “We are on a dangerous path, the planet is warming and we must change our ways.”

U.N. headquarters in New York will turn off the lights, along with landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The combination photo top right, by Tim Wimborne, shows Sydney Harbour Bridge before and after the switches were thrown last year.

 ”Earth Hour is a way for the citizens of the world to send a clear message. They want action on climate change,” Ban said.

Organisers suggest 10 ways to spend Earth Hour, such as a candlelight dinner (don’t be surprised if shares in candle-making companies rally this coming week), a night picnic in a park (if you live in a city you might even see the stars) or a romantic night with your loved one (if you work in a hospital maternity ward I reckon you may have to work overtime around Christmas and New Year 2010 to deliver a rush of babies).

So why has the lights off idea taken off so well? And has it made people more aware of saving energy at other times of the year? Any suggestions about what to do?

Since the days of Thomas Edison, finding a way to effectively store electricity has been one of the “Holy Grails” for power companies.

While it won’t be an overnight revolution for electricity, eventually plug-in electric cars and trucks will be a step toward the elusive goal, said Ted Craver, chief executive officer of Edison International.

Edison International is the parent of Southern California Edison (SCE), which is the biggest utilty in the United States in terms of power delivered to customers.

 ”They are effectively storage units on wheels,” Craver said of electric cars and trucks.

Vehicles batteries charged during off-peak periods could feed power back to the grid during periods of peak demand, said Craver in a telephone interview on Thursday.

California like other states requires that power utilities have enough power plant generation to serve the highest demand day of the year. This means that more than half of the state’s power generation sits unused most of the time.

“Our electricity system is about 49-percent utilized,” said Craver. “If we had a reasonably modest introduction of electric vehicles into the system, we could change that 49 percent to 55 or 56 percent.”

So in addition to having the ability to propel cars without creating carbon dioxide emissions — outside of the power plants that must run to serve them — electric vehicles may one day help keep utilities from building as many power plants.

Craver’s interview came minutes after he hosted President Barack Obama’s visit to SCE’s electic Vehicle Technical Center in Pamona, California to promote green jobs are green technology.

Obama said that by 2015 there will be a million plug-in hybrid vehicles on U.S. roads.

Obama also announed $2.4 billion in grants for work on plug-in hybrid vehicles and batteries to run them, as well as a $7,500 tax credit for owners of plug-in vehicles.

SCE has more than 300 cars and trucks that run on electricity, the largest U.S. fleet of electric vehicles, Craver said.