Surf - Design Planet Blurp No.40

Design for the Future/The Future Is Now!
"The Gospel of Green"

In the face of predictions, rhetoric and warnings about the planet's environmental crisis, one man stands alone as a revolutionary who is transforming a country. And it's likely you've never heard his name.

Dr. Hermann Scheer is a German parliamentarian who has turned ideas into practical solutions. Because of the laws that bear his name, Germany is now a solar-paneled, windmill-building, job-producing green powerhouse of the industrialized world. Fifteen per cent of Germany's electricity now comes from renewable energy systems. Scheer predicts that, if his country continues on this course, that number could be 100 per cent by 2030.

In The Gospel of Green, the fifth estate's Bob McKeown travels to Germany to meet Scheer and find out how this green miracle has been accomplished. What he finds is a man with an evangelist's fervour and economist's drive for practical applications. It was Germany's renewable energy act — now known as Scheer's Law — that launched the country as a world leader in green power.

He first proved it could work, ten years ago, when he promised to install solar panels on 100,000 homes, offering contracts that paid a premium to the homeowner for the electricity produced by the panels. Even Greenpeace thought that too ambitious, but Scheer finished the project a year early.

In the course of the documentary, you'll also meet a young Ontario manufacturer of solar panels whose business was days away from closing when he received a call from, who else, German authorities offering him tens of millions of dollars to move to Germany and build a factory there which he has done successfully.

The Gospel of Green then turns to Canada and asks: if one man can transform a country whose economy is so similar to that of Ontario, why can't, and why isn't, that province embracing Scheer's gospel of green? the fifth estate's investigation shows that after initially embracing the philosophy of renewable energies, the pace of change has faltered. The answer to why may lie in the power of Ontario's traditional energy giants.

Sit back, relax, have a snack, and watch this documentary video by cbc news, the fifth estate "The Gospel of Green" at:

http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/2008-2009/the_gospel_of_green/video.html

It is very enlightening, truly inspiring, an actual working success story!

This morning, Obama in his speech urging the US Congress to act on the Economy - a recession, pointed to the need for investing $150 billion dollars to build a green energy economy that he said would create 5 million jobs. Mmm! I wonder if he watched 'fifth estate'.

A more efficient generator could convert more of the wind's energy into electricity:

ExRo Technologies, a startup based in Vancouver, BC, has just developed a new kind of generator that's well suited to harvesting energy from wind. It could lower the cost of wind turbines while increasing their power output by 50 percent.
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/21666/?a=f


Segway inventor Kaman promotes private island as a model for energy independence:

Energy independence is still only a hypothetical goal for the U.S., but the owner of a tiny island off the coast of Connecticut says he has already achieved that feat and is offering his work as a model. http://www.nowpublic.com/tech-biz/segway-inventor-kaman-promotes-private-island-model-energy-independence?widgetid=3