Of a Universal Solar Belt Solution - Sustainable Change That Energizes (Almost) Everyone…

By Laura Mauney

I currently live in Los Angeles, one of the most populated urban communities in the world, and a potential source of massive rooftop solar real estate.

Yet, rarely do I see solar installed on the roof of any given home, business, school or other public facility.

Purely, simply, obviously, and easier to implement than we think, sun-belt households, whom I’ll call solar-belt households, should be using photovoltaics to generate and sell power to local utilities across the nation.

Local utilities, for their part, should be proactively soliciting residents in their communities for solar real estate for this very purpose; no, not "requiring by law" solar panels on every home, but contracting with local households to use rooftops to generate solar power - and - whether by direct or subcontracted, services, providing solar equipment, installation, wiring and maintenance at no charge, or perhaps in exchange for a nominal monthly fee to the owner, say $20 per month per household.

Beyond the profound patriotic aspect of a solar-belt solution, this particular answer to our nation's energy problems would engender benefits far beyond nearly-free sun-power for said households:

1. The complicated process of identifying and approving precious wilderness land for solar farms would be eliminated.
2. Our energy grid would be less dependent on centralized installation sites for power generation. Rather, generation would be spread far and wide across the very regions being served. If one segment of this massive solar community has a cloudy day, or suffers a disaster of some sort, other segments could easily pick up the slack (as long as the regional grids remain connected).
3. Sustained power loss at individual homes during disasters in the solar-belt would be virtually eliminated because each homeowner would be dependent on his/her own power generator.
4. Rollout of electric cars could be sped up, and become more realistic from an energy-usage perspective, since households would be in a position to generate their own electric power for their own electric vehicles.
5. Most significantly, even though a solar-belt solution might not provide enough energy to serve all energy needs 24/7/365, especially during rainy periods and harsh northern winters, a solar-belt solution would remove a significant portion of the energy burden from the volatile, polluting power resources: oil, coal, nuclear, gas, not only slowing down our gluttonous over-use of such resources, but giving the related industries and dependents the breathing room they need to facilitate a smooth transition to other, more sustainable energy production.

In my view, solar rollout should be treated the same as plumbing and electricity rollout, road paving, mass transit and phone line rollout were treated in the 20th century, as something close to being a natural right for all the people.

The solution is fairly simple:

• Continue to provide incentives for new solar businesses, and to educate new installers and engineers.
• Aggressively educate and inform the public about the tax incentives, long term benefits and ease of access to solar installation, similar to the way the public was educated about seat belts back in the day.
• Continue to tear down in communities nationwide public policies and municipal codes that have inhibited solar rollout in the past.

The USA can definitely afford a solar-belt solution, and it can be easily pulled off, if the same level of energy and ingenuity is applied as the amount elected officials put into election year campaigning, or strategizing a war, or developing any given piece of legislation.

If event producers can pull off a Superbowl and scientists can send us to the moon, then surely there is enough talent and organizational sensibility on hand to implement a solar-belt solution.

The beauty of the end-game would be (beyond a lot of new jobs and manufacturing opportunities in the short term): once done, a solar-belt solution will be done, ideally for as long as the sun shines in the sky.

Originally published March 21, 2011.

Making Change: How I Trained Myself to Remember to Use the Reusable Shopping Bags

- by Laura M Mauney

(In celebration of the Los Angeles City Council ban on plastic shopping bags, I decided to update this article, which I originally blogged on my Blogger blog in July, 2010, in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico BP deep-water oil well disaster).

Around 2006, I finally got fed up with the massive stockpile of plastic and paper shopping bags I had stuffed - or rather jammed - into one of my lower kitchen cabinets.

Fire hazard doesn't even begin to define the problem.

As the child of depression era parents, and the grandchild of a grandmother who saved and reused all manner of store-bought packaging, I had trouble with the idea of just throwing all those bags away.

As an environmentalist, the guilt I felt accepting the bags at all was also gnawing at my soul, and had been for years.

Paper bags require trees and cutting trees depletes the planet's oxygen supply.

Plastic bags, even worse, are made of petroleum - you know - the dinosaur goo that just ruined our beloved Gulf of Mexico after an oil well blew up.

Discarded plastic bags, just as bad, have piled up during the past three decades to the point where there are continent sized islands of them clustered out in the middle of our oceans. Fish eat the bits of plastic that break off into the water, and die... so on and so forth... you get the continent-sized ugly picture.

And besides, in my kitchen, I was running out of paper-and-plastic-bag-storage space.

So, finally, one day, I broke ranks with the cheap-side of my genetic makeup, and purchased five, $1 reusable shopping bags during my next grocery shop for the family.

I felt great - I'd CHANGED for the better, finally; so I thought.

But of course, the very next time I went to the market, though I'd been careful to take the reusable bags to my car, and store them in the hatchback part of my little, fuel-efficient hatchback, I forgot to carry the reusable bags into the store.

I did not realize my mistake until checkout, so I begged the clerk to let me run to the car to get the bags. He did, but the situation was awkward because it caused a checkout traffic jam, which nobody appreciates, including me.

The very next time after that, and again and again, the same exact scenario transpired: I forgot the bags and had to beg the clerk for a reprieve while I ran to the car to get them at checkout.

Sometimes, my teenaged daughter would be with me at the store, so I'd send her out, running, to get the bags from the car.

AAARRRGH! Why was it so hard for me to remember the resuable bags? Obviously, there was a big difference between "wanting change" and actually "changing."

Finally, fed up with my spoiled by the plastic bag forgetfulness, I decided to exploit my cheap-side, meanly.

Next time I went shopping and forgot the bags, I simply bought new bags, five, for $5.00.

I repeated this punishment for a couple of months - really - a couple of months - until I'd amassed about thirty reusable shopping bags in the back of my hatchback.

And then, at last, the great day came. I pulled into the parking lot at the grocery store; got out and locked the doors; went around to the hatch; unlocked it and lifted it open; grabbed about six of the 30 bags, and went into the store.

Yay! I had finally accomplished REAL change, that I could believe in, for a whopping $30 or so.

I felt good about myself, and moreover, as I walked into that store, I felt really super-cool; way ahead of the pack; like the first kid on the block; like a real maverick: this latter set of high self-esteem descriptors is quite an accomplishment for a middle aged mom.

Six years have gone by since I forced myself to discard my wasteful habit of accepting paper or plastic at the checkout counter. I view the number of bags I haven't used the way Scrooge McDuck views his gold coins; kind of a mutation of my cheap-side:

How many plastic bags have I now NEVER taken in the past six years? I figure the number is around 3,000. That amounts to 100 bags not wasted for every $1 I spent on a reusable bag.

Word on the street is that Angelenos are handed over 1 billion plastic bags per year while shopping, and that the city spends millions per year cleaning up the litter of those carelessly discarded.

Laura's Theory of Forcing the Eco-Game, a Bit

LaurasTheory offers a few new tips to help reduce our over-use of petro-plastics at a fairly low cost:

1) My most recent favorite discovery: if a food storage scenario REQUIRES a bag instead of a bowl, pan or box, wrap the food in an unused (thus obviously still clean), bio-degradeable doggie bag. When you use the food, you can then repurpose the bag to the needs of doggie cleanup :). Biodegradeable doggie bags are commonly available at most pet stores, and online at reasonable cost.

2) Most moms already know that much money can be saved by packing children's lunches in re-usable food storage containers. This practice also is more eco-friendly (and cheaper) for food storage in general. Instead of buying box after box, year after year, of plastic bags for food storage, invest in a set of re-usable containers for primary use.

Though plastic is better for child-use for safety reasons, glass is the most preferable for home-use, since it doesn't absorb mold and only requires petro-plastics for the lids (and one day that will change, too).

3) Instead of using those small, plastic trash-basket liners, or re-using plastic grocery bags for the same, line the bottom of non-kitchen trash-baskets with a paper towel, made of post-consumer content (recycled paper, in other words), or simply with a newspaper or magazine page, if you still take newspapers and magazines.

Some of the above may seem expensive upfront when compared to disposable petro-plastic products you can buy everywhere, but they are a bargain when you consider long term re-usability, and the impact of over-use of disposable plastic products on all our gasoline prices.

Though electric cars are entering the marketplace, AT LAST, many years are going to pass before the transition off gasoline is complete.

The snail's pace of manufacturing and distribution of plant based (rather than petroleum based) household products into the general marketplace is very frustrating, and the ridiculous prices attached to some of the products, especially trash bags, (which should be 100% biodegrable by now) is, frankly, angering.

LaurasTheory's view is that the game can be forced by we the people, so to speak, by simply engaging in methodologies that limit our use of plastics, thus creating an impact on the market.

This strategy will, at the very least, help boost the renewable resources sector of the economy, while hopefully, at the same time, take us one step further towards ending the destructive practices that the past three decades of extremely anti-environment (thus anti-life) economic practices have wrought.

We may as well do what we can to discourage the petro industry from mis-using the little bit of petroleum left in the world while we wait for bio-plastics and sustainable vehicles to reach mass-market levels of production.

- by Laura M Mauney

Of Change Worth Waiting For: My Review of The 2010 LA Auto Show

by Laura Mauney

The 2010 LA Auto Show at the Los Angeles Convention Center is the fifth I've attended on behalf of my employer, PriceQuotes.com, in as many years.

Over the course of the half decade, I've watched automakers move from teasing visitors with wall-posters about assorted alternative fuel concept cars, to cautious presentations of upcoming hybrids carefully hidden by the large pickups and SUVs that used to be all the rage, to this year's bold and beautiful Plug-In Hybrid, 100% EV and Hydrogen Fuel Cell showcases.

Gone are the days when one's hopes of finding green vehicles at the auto show resided solely with displays by evergreen Toyota and Honda, or at booths tucked downstairs with all those super-cool aftermarket products in Kentia Hall.

Whereas 2009's LA Auto Show showed serious improvement in the green category, especially by America's top two brands, Chevrolet and Ford, in 2010 almost every major automaker showed off at least one PEV (Plug-In Electric Vehicle) to the public, either as a concept or as a 2011 release. Several more automakers (beyond Honda and Toyota) refreshingly have more than one green car in the works.

Along with the exciting array of upcoming PEVs from established automakers, two startup electric car companies, Fisker and Coda, held space in the main showroom at the West Hall this year, signifying that there is more to green power in the marketplace than electricity.

Green cars are not just finally happening, in other words, but the field is hotly competitive, all the better for business and consumers, and the planet and its life as a whole.

Most heartening is the emergence of cooperative ventures between automakers and electricity providers, such as Southern California Edison (SCE), as well as in New York and other regions where PEVs will be rolled out in 2011. Power grids in major markets are being upgraded to handle increased demand, and consumers are being educated in the how-tos of PEV power management.

The product group for PEVs will include all-electric models that can travel extended distances (up to 120 miles) on a single charge, and models that revert to gasoline power on the road when a shorter term battery charge runs out. Just as with our laptops and cellphones, PEVs will come with their own chargers, which will be installed at the owners' homes.

Though the models have been initially marketed as urban cars, ideal for short distance commuting, I asked questions about using the all-electric PEVs for long distance travel. While most electric car makers will provide real time satellite / roadside assistance for stranded drivers suffering from dead batteries, assurances were also rampant about future development of roadside charging bays, some that can get a car up and running again in as little as 15 minutes.

(Imagine one day pulling up and plugging in at your favorite restaurant or motel along the interstate, recharging both your car and yourself and fellow passengers in a single stop! This scenario remains futuristic, but...)!

Federal tax breaks on alternative fuel vehicles combined with fairly large savings by not using gasoline (electricity remains much cheaper) will take a nice edge off the moderate+ PEV pricing for the time being.

Demand is already high, and while demand, as always, drives production, it will also, hopefully, create a future pricing environment across the many models coming up that will make PEVs affordable for most all of us in the years ahead.

Hydrogen Fuel Cell models, most notably being marketed as lease vehicles by Honda and Mercedes-Benz, are still being targeted to upscale drivers right now, and the fuel is not as easily obtainable as electricity. Nonetheless, progress is happening in this arena as well.

To find out more about the 2011 PEV and Fuel Cell releases, as well as future green cars, take a look at PriceQuotes.com's Facebook album for the 2010 LA Auto Show. The slideshow highlights selected PEVs and Hydrogen Fuel Cell models presented at the show (my apologies to those left out), as well as some of my favorites in the (now traditional) standard-hybrid and non-hybrid categories.

For more information about adapting your home energy usage to include a PEV, visit SCE.

Click this link to view photos of the new PEVs and other cars at The 2010 LA Auto Show.