We have until 2017! That is FIVE years!!! FIVE!!! The whole world is at stake – nut just Africa!

Tears run down my face in fear – yet we MUST stay strong and Get IT DONE!

What are YOU… yes, YOU doing – not your neighbor?  Don’t wait until it is too late!

Do you even know what to do? Where to start? The answer lies within our Transportation, Buildings, which are the two worst offenders to our emission levels.

Please Don’t drive unless it is absolutely necessary. Never Idle. Car and Van Pool, Use Rideshare to connect!  In Vermont: www.ConnectingCommuters.org  (800-685-RIDE) or www.uppervalleyrideshare.com (802-295-1824 x204). Take the bus, train, ferry, bike, e-bike, walk, ski… and drive energy efficient vehicles. Our future transportation infrastructure needs to start now!

Seal and Insulate your Buildings to reduce the emissions caused from the use of dirty non-renewable fossil fuels. You can’t seal them tight enough!  Zero Energy Buildings ARE achievable. This should be the goal and not to settle for anything less!

Renewable Energy – this is the solution! Clean energy from Solar, Wind, Micro-hydro*…  We need Community Solar and Wind Farms… We can’t get solar installed or wind turbines up fast enough!  It is about TIME!  NOW is the time to G.E.T. going!

Learn more in every issue of Green Energy Times… New Issue coming out on Dec. 15th with a Front page article about the 2017 dilemma directly from the IEA warning, that Anjali Appadurai refers to … The new issue will be online next week, so ck back with us! AND, watch for G.E.T.  at newstands near you or subscribe on this website out and about in VT and NH at the same time!

* Micro-hydro is an untapped goldmine of energy producing power that runs 24 hrs a day and does NOT harm the environment in ANY way. The Federal Gov’t is the only block in making this happen.  It is time to get that changed.  Go to your state representatives and government officials and let’s get the micro-hydro laws changed!

Watch for it at a newsstand, supermarket, and local stores and establishments near you – throughout 85% of Vermont & 45% of New Hampshire! Be sure to pick up copies when they first come out or they may be gone when you come back.

If you can’t find it near you – let us know so that we see if we can make it happen… you can also subscribe right from this website on the Advertising/Subscriptions Tab (above).

Enjoy, learn and most of all we hope you find something to help move us forward on our path to energy independence and reducing our carbon emission levels.  Share your stories with us!  We love to hear from you!

Type of Building: 5500sf (includes 1500 sf of old Herrick Building) Post and Beam Visitor Center, built in 2009 by Jeff Schoellkopf, Architect/Designer and JA Morrissey, Builder, with main contributors to the Post and Beam effort: Erik and Laurel Tobiason of Colby and Tobiason of Woodstock, Mike Elder of JA Morrissey of Williston, and Duncan Kier of Liberty Head Post and Beam in Huntington. Construction Cost: 1.8 million.

Fuel Type: High Efficiency Wood Boiler. Froling Turbo 3000 – 177,000 BTU cord wood boiler. Why cord wood and not pellets? Cord wood has a lower embodied energy/cord (less processing) and is available to GMC at little to no cost. Our current supply of firewood comes from GMC’s Meltzer property in Lowell where we recently conducted a sustainable timber harvest as part of our State of Vermont Forest Management Plan (This plan allows the property to be in the Current Use Program and thereby reduces the property tax burden).

Annual Heating Fuel Consumption: 8 cords of firewood over 12 mos of domestic hot water heating and space heating – includes heating 1500sf of poorly insulated building.

Electricity Use: 35,000kWH/year. Our electricity covers lights, computers systems (servers), air conditioning, refrigeration, a work shop, our circulators and fans for the heating and cooling system, etc. We are open 7 days a week from 9-5 from Memorial Day through Columbus Day and M-F from 10-5 for the winter and spring.

Window Brand: Accurate Dorwin. Triple paned Argon gas filled. Our windows have a low U Factor (the lower the U-factor, the better) of .17 to .26 depending on whether they are designed to allow more passive solar energy or not. In the case of our building we utilized windows that shade sun on the south side of the meeting hall but units that allow passive solar on the western exposure of the Marvin B. Gameroff Hiker Information Center.

Insulation Type: Spray Foam Closed Cell. R 35 walls and R 40 Roof. Roof is made up of Structural Insulated Panels.

Building Feature Details:

Composting toilet: Clivus Multrum M-32 Compost Reactor with three dry toilet stools. We reduce our waste water by using a dry composting toilet system. Our minimal amounts of gray water go in to a conventional septic. Our Clivus Multrum system saves thousands of gallons of water a year.

Energy Star Appliances: Sun Frost 16 Cubic Foot Refrigerator/Freezer (most energy efficient refrigerator available today). Bosch Energy Star Dishwasher.
Grid Tied PV. 2kW roof mounted array rated to produce 2000 kWH/year. Three AllSun Trackers each rated at 4kW produce 12,000kWH a year. Given the excellent nature of our site for solar, our trackers could produce as high as 6kW per tracker and thus give us 18,000kWH/yr. Our ultimate goal is to be electrically neutral – producing as much as we use – and we hope to achieve this through three additional trackers planned for a fall 2011 installation.

Heat recovery ventilation: This unit helps keep our tight building’s air clean and filtered while preventing heat loss.
All wood was locally and sustainably harvested in Bristol and Ripton Vermont.
Non-Toxic Products: Both in building and for cleaning purposes.

High Efficiency Lighting: Not only are all lights compact fluorescent, but many of them are on occupancy sensors (turns the lights off when no one is present) or on timers (outside lights) to reduce electrical demand. We have also just begun to replace our compact fluorescent bulbs with high efficiency LED bulbs to further reduce our lighting demand. Every effort was made to provide natural daylighting, reducing electric lighting.

Future Project:

Planned installation of second wood gasification boiler at our seasonal housing facility. This unit will cover the high demand for hot water in the summer and space heating in the winter. We plan to experiment with a clothes dryer that can use the hot water heat as the energy source rather than propane.

For questions on what GMC is doing,
email Pete Antos-Ketcham.
pantosketcham@greenmountainclub.org  

by Pete Antos-Ketcham, GMC Facilities Manager
GET Aug2011 page  22

Goes Bi-Monthly

Starting with the August issue Green Energy Times will begin publishing Bi-Monthly.

We will now deliver more up-to-date news, articles and practical content, plus more regular distribution.

As part of this move, more staff are joining our team to strengthen production, customer service and distribution. We’re more ready than ever to help G.E.T. the word out that the time to move into a renewable and sustainable future is here.

New Publishing Calender For Green Energy Times

Next Issue – August 15th

October 15th

December 15th

February 15th

April 15th

June 15th

In our next issue we’ll peer into the lives of real people who are learning to live without the everyday use of a car. How they do it. How well it works. What would make life easier. What needs to change in our society to make fossil free transportation a more livable option.

We know (from experience) that it’s not easy to live without the convenience of using a car everyday so we’re eager to share your story.

If you’ve got a story to tell or some useful info to share about the joys and struggles of not driving – drop a post here, or send an email directly to David@greenenergytimes.org.

Thx much for your patience.  It will be here as soon as we can possibly can…

Snow in winter is to be expected. Massive snow dumps, one after another in areas that don’t usually get much, if any, snow … not so much. The increasing number of larger storms is not predicted based on past, stable weather patterns; but is predicted if you change the amount of heat in the planetary weather system – such as the increase that has been created by humans burning massive amounts of fossil fuels. Those fuels create a blanket of gases that trap heat that would otherwise have escaped into space. When it comes to messing with the weather, the first law of thermodynamics isn’t our friend.

But it’s not just the US being hammered, today. At the same time the US is being slathered in slippery white stuff, the people in an already devastated part of Australia are being hit by a record Tropical Cyclone. A tropical cyclone is basically the same as a hurricane, here, but spins the other way, because of it’s location south of the equator. If you remember Hurricane Katrina, you’ll have an idea what we’re talking about, but this one’s larger.

And unlike the US Gulf Coast, which hadn’t had too much rain activity before Katrina hit, Queensland Australia has had nearly non-stop flooding since October. Last report was hovering between a high category 4 and low category 5 Cyclone. (5 is the largest possible on the scale). A category 5 storm has sustained winds similar to those in a tornado. Imagine being hit by a tornado thousands of miles wide.

To give a sense of scale, the current storm in the US covers the Eastern 30% of the continent. Someone clever took a satellite image of Tropical Cyclone Yasi and superimposed it over a map of the US (to scale, see image at left): If it hit here, it would cover 80% of our continent.

Cyclone Yasi is nearly 3 times as large as our current massive snow storm!

Today, 1/3 of the US population is being deluged with snow, sleet or ice from a single massive storm, and the people in the Queensland Province of Australia are watching the destruction of everything they hadn’t already lost in this season’s massive, ongoing floods.

Clearly, it’s time to ask ourselves a question:

Do we really want to continue increasing the number of these monster storms?

We actually have some control over this – because we control one of the major sources of heat on the planet: fuel burning. Another rule of physics says “for every action, there is a reaction.” Our actions today and tomorrow will cause reactions across our planet. Some of them will be relatively mild, but far too many will be devastating.

One small, bright spot in today’s storm here in the wintry part of the planet: the eastern 3rd of the US has a much lower carbon footprint than normal, beecause we’re not all out flying on planes, sitting in traffic jams, and turning on lights and computers by the tens of millions. A small breather for the planet, but not nearly enough.

We need to get serious, because the consequences of failing to cut our fuel burning (and the resulting warming of the planet) are serious. Very serious. Monster storms and disrupted weather patterns will be the new normal if we fail.

You not only will have a great time, but the opportunity to learn about how you can improve your life and our planet with renewable energy – have your questions answered.  Hear from those doin’ it….

We will be participating in the “Living with Solar Panel Discussion” at 12:30 – 1:30pm
Tent #1
This presentation is a great opportunity to find out what it’s really like to live with solar – both power and thermal. Panelists will discuss their personal experiences with the planning, installation and logistics of on- and off-grid solar living, as well as give a day-to-day account of what it’s like to do all the things the rest of us take for granted.
Presenters: Steve Letendre, Greg Ullstrom, Dave Bonta, Nancy Rae Mallery, and Annette Smith

Hope to see you there!

As we celebrate the independence of our country this 4th of July, I have to think that we have missed the boat.  True independence for our country will occur when we are Energy Independent, as well.  We have a long ways to go!  Too many still don’t understand this IS a real necessity that needs to happen in the very near future – NOT 2050 or 2030.  That is way too late.

Not only are we on the downside of the bell curve of Peak Oil, but we need to reduce our current CO2 which is 387 ppm and rising way too fast. We are already over the safe 350 level, and it must be lowered. Catastrophic results will happen from the melting of the polar and glacial ice. We need to not only reduce our emissions, but also find ways to remove the damages that have already occurred!  We could go on and on about how, but will leave that to our quarterly publication and subsequent postings.

For now, you need to understan that Clean Energy can meet our needs.  It is affordable to ANYone who wants to truly stop talking and start walking. Let’s walk that talk people!  Let’s all work together to move on up to Renewable Energy in al of our lives!

Of course, this will require that your needs must be reduced.  It does not mean you have to give up you comforts.  This can all be accomplished.  We went from using the average 20+ kW/day, planning to reduce that number down to 10.5 to 11 kWh/day and ended up accomplishing way more… now using, on the average: 3.5 kWh/day!

Did I give up comfort?  No!  We have a dishwasher, microwave, even a jacuzzi tub in the bathroom; an Amana refrigerator, Crosley Freezer, Premier Cookstove that does not have a glow-bar in it or an electric clock (phantom load) – in fact, all of my clocks are battery operated.  We use a front loading washing machine and dryer (but choose to hang my clothes 99% of the time.  A soft start Grund-fos well pump which runs on electric, pulls the water from the 170’ deep well, which leads to an oversized pressure tank, and on to a preheat tank for our Solar Hot Water …and on to the Rinnai On-demand Hot Water tank (propane). The on-demand system supplements the SHW in the winter and/or super cloudy days. We use a vacuum cleaner! – imagine that?!  I DO try to do the vacuuming on sunny days and am not afraid of a broom or a dustmop (remember them?).  I even use a toaster which i might think twice about using on cloudy stretches and then will fry my bread if i have the urge for toast.  My microwave is on a wall switch that is turned off after use, reducing the phantom load.

The office includes an iMac that is made with some recycled material and uses low energy.  It is on all day long. The fax and printer are turned off when not in use.  The ceiling energy star fans and open windows (we live in VT & NH!) keep it nice and cool in here, along with the design of the structure.*

All of this and probably many things I am forgetting to mention – (like the stereo and television, that are connected to a wall switch that addresses the phantom load issue that really add up. Energy efficient lighting that anyone and everyone should have changed by now is a given (shame on you, if you haven’t replace yours!)
All of our electricity is produced from SOLAR!  In fact, we do not even come close to using all that it produces or could produce.

Our system was designed, as I stated in the beginning, to meet our needs if we were to use 10.5-11 kWh/day:
• 24 160W panels = 3,840W system or 3.8 kW,
12 250 lead acid deep cycle batteries for storage (28.8 kW storage capacity).
So …part of the charge controller’s job is to avoid overload and thus it stops the system from taking in any more electric when the batteries are at full capacity.  This is usually accomplished by 9:30 every morning – maybe 10:30 on a cloudy day.  We can go up to 5 days before the propane generator will come on! (You must have guessed that we are off-grid**) It came on 3 times last year and 2 times in 2008. We use 65 gal. of propane a year. (Gotta work on lowering that – it’s a fossil fuel)

The point of telling you all of this is to show you that YOU ALL can do this, too! It will take a LOT of work by us all, but just going solar and using renewable energy CAN lead to a truly Independent country – an Energy Independent Country where we will, hopefully, be able to celebrate as such on the 4th of July in our near future!

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY (Independence Day, 2010) to you all!

*The structure is passive solar with SIP’s (R-38 walls, R-47 roof); triple pane doors and windows, with 4 foot overhangs to keep it cooler in the summer on the south and a porch on the west; breezeway & garage on the north to get some relief from the elements in the winter; basement walls are Insulated blocks that give us an R-25 against the earths insulating value, as well…

** We would love to be on-grid, if we could afford the $30,000 to bury lines to connect. Maybe Washington Electric would like to donate that to us so that we can send our extra energy back to the grid, to help others and not waste what we could produce, if only given the chance.

• We want to hear from RE powered businesses, that would like to be featured in this issue.  Your example is important to encourage more businesses to do the same. Let our readers know how well it is or isn’t working for you – the pros and cons, the stats and benefits, ways and means….
• Contact us here or give us a call at 802.439.6675.   The format will be similar to our Green Energy Times 5.4 10 Issue. We welcome pics, stats…  Call to discuss details. Deadline is July 22nd.  We look forward to hearing from you!
• Our 2nd feature will again be on ‘Sustainable Gardening’ along with related subjects. Johnny’s Seeds has agreed to write a series of articles for Green Energy Times, including recipes from what you can grow yourself or buy at local farmer’s markets. We welcome questions.
• Watch for our continued column: David Blittersdorf’s ‘View From the Top’ Articles*.
• Also, be sure to send in your Solar and Renewable Energy questions!  SunCatchers’ Howie Michaelson is here to answer your questions and help you make an educated decision as you contemplate your move into Energy Independence.**

We hope that we are addressing what you would like and need to know in Green Energy Times.  Please communicate with us …your thoughts, questions and ideas.  We welcome them all, if they are related in any way to the transition into our energy independent future.

namasté