FROM LANDFILL TO POWER PLANT
Wed Mar 20, 2013
Mostly, capped landfills remind me of the mausoleums of a consumer society. For most of a century we dumped our solid waste onto these Mt Trashmores and mixed up a brew of concentrated toxins which seeped into the surrounding areas and often polluted (and still do) our water. So we learned to treat our waste as a resource, close the landfills, cap them, and leave them idle. We’re still very primitive about this, but progress is steady.
There’s not much you can do on a capped landfill because it’s essential that we not disturb the protective rubber liner that is usually only 12-18” below the grass that covers it.
But there are some uses. Most are relatively passive: cultivation of hay, green space, wildlife habitat, and biking/walking/running trails. Some are more active: golf courses, baseball fields, and soccer fields.
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25 In 2012 . . . And Rising
Thu Jan 12, 2012
On the first day of this new year, South Mountain began its 25th year as an employee owned company (and its 38th year in business). It was on January 1, 1987 that we converted from a sole proprietorship in my ownership to a democratically owned worker co-operative. As I’ve so often said, it was a hinge point in the history of the company.
When I started South Mountain in 1975 I was 25. Now there’s a group of us in our sixties who will gradually retire during the coming decades (starting with Mike Drezner at the end of this year) and a collection of new, younger owners poised to lead SMC in to its 2nd generation, and beyond. My personal goal: to still be going strong in 2025, when SMC turns 50 and I’m 75.
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Where Will All The Solar Go?
Fri May 06, 2011
This was published as an op-ed today in the Vineyard Gazette.
Wind turbines get all the negative ink. Noise, vibration, flicker, interruption of beloved views. Big troublemakers, aren’t they?
Solar panels, on the other hand, are considered to be quite benign. The Nantucket Historic District Commission doesn’t like them much, and some people would rather see roofs without them, but by and large they have come to be widely accepted.
But what about when we scale them up with considerably larger installations that can make a meaningful contribution to our energy supply? Are they really so benign?
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Large Scale PV On MV
Mon Apr 11, 2011
Stanford Ovshinsky, one of the great thinkers of our time, is 88 years old and starting a new business. “His audacious goal,” according to an article by Laurence Fisher in Strategy + Business Magazine, “is to drive the unsubsidized cost of solar power below that of coal – to create, in effect, a Moore’s law for energy.”
There’s no reason to doubt he can do it.
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