As the 2010 Winter Olympics draw to a close and athletes from around the world count up their Bronze, Silver, and Gold medals, it is also important to honor the planners of the great event with their own “Green” medal for making the 2010 Vancouver games one of the most eco-friendly and sustainable Olympic games ever.

As reported at the British Columbia Renewable Energy Blog,  The David Suzuki Foundation awarded the Vancouver Olympics with a bronze medal for its “climate scorecard.”  The Vancouver-based foundation lauded Olympic organizers for creating innovative and energy-efficient venues which use clean hydroelectric energy as well as waste heat from refrigeration systems, landfill methane, and ground-source heat pumps.

“We feel like we’ve raised the bar,” said Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson. “Some of these technologies will be a legacy for generations to come, that will benefit cities all over the world.” Such eco-friendly concerns come naturally to 45-year-old former organic farmer, who earlier ran the Happy Planet juice company, and whose primary form of transportation is a well-used mountain bike.

Grouse Mountain, Vancouver’s most visited attraction (drawing more than a million visitors annually) constructed its very own 1.5 megawatt wind turbine. Dubbed “The Eye of the Wind,”  this 213-foot tower was installed this winter and was fully operational in time for the Olympics. The force of the wind will spin the blades to speeds as high as 160 mph at their tips, and is expected to offset up to 25 percent of the Grouse Mountain’s annual operational electricity needs.

Offsetters estimates the 2010 Winter Games will create 118,000 tons of carbon emissions directly attributable to the 2010 Winter Games through venue construction, facility heating, and athlete travel. Additionally, the site estimates the event will produce 150,000 tons of ‘indirect’ emissions from flights and accommodation for spectators, media, corporate sponsors and their partners. Visitors to the event can offset their carbon footprint while attending the Games by purchasing offsets at the venue. Eco-minded Olympics fans around the world can purchase one ton of carbon offsets for $25 (Canadian dollars) at the Offsetters site and receive a commemorative certificate and a special limited edition Offsetters 2010 pin. » Read more

For the second year in a row, New Yorkers and tourists alike will have the chance to literally help power the 2010 numerals by pedaling a Power Rover in the Duracell Smart Power Lab in Times Square. The rovers use rotary technology to capture human energy created from every push of the pedal. The energy is then converted into usable power and routed and stored at Duracell Battery Center, so it can be used light up the 2010 numerals as the New Year’s Eve Ball drops when the clock strikes midnight.

“When the world watches the New Year’s Ball drop and the numerals light up at midnight on January 1, our guests will be able to say they truly powered the start of a new decade,” said Rick June, Duracell vice president and general manager, North America. “The Smart Power Lab is just one example of how Duracell delivers innovative, efficient and reliable ways to power important moments today and for decades to come.” » Read more

Well, it took a little bit of sleuthing, but a friend helped me track down the back story on the Holiday Light Show video we posted a couple weeks ago.

This Christmas light display is produced each year by Richard Holdman,  a professional lighting contractor who creates unique animated and static lighting setups year-round for a variety of commercial and consumer purposes.

Not only is the display quite beautiful, but Goldman uses it to collect funds for the Utah Make-a-Wish foundation to enrich the lives of children with life-threatening medical conditions. The 2009 holiday light show has already raised more than $5000 in donations to grant this year’s wish; his display raised more than $10,000 in 2007, and nearly $4500 in 2008.

This holiday light show is Goldman’s labor of love, and he dedicated more than 250 hours into the initial development, programming, and construction. Each year it takes about 100 hours to set up the display. Goldman’s holiday light display includes around 150,000 lights, transferred from 21 dedicated grounded circuits by nearly 7000 feet of extension cords. The red, green, and white sequencing is programmed using software and hardware from Light-O-Rama. The display for 2006 used 80 different channels, 2007 was 176 channels, and for 2008 it used 215 channels. The music to which the lights are synchronized is broadcast on a short-range FM signal, so viewers can listen from within their cars. They also have speakers outside so pedestrians can enjoy the music as well.

Carol of the Bells – 2008 Holdman Christmas Display from Richard Holdman on Vimeo.

While many might consider such a display to be a waste of energy, according to Goldman, the display is actually 100% wind-powered! Goldman uses electricity provided by his local power company, and then replaces the power back onto the grid with Wind Turbines using a service provided by www.renewablechoice.com – Goldman says his display consumes about 1800kwh; he covers that use by sending 3000kwh back to the power grid. » Read more

Los Angeles-based fans of the Chevrolet Volt will be pleased to learn the highly anticipated extended-range electric vehicle is in Tinseltown for a few spins around the City of Angels and a whirlwind tour of activities leading up to the 2009 Los Angeles Auto Show. The Volt will be popping up all over town, mingling with the stars and generally showing off to consumers and media alike. The Volt  even visited a local middle school for what could possibly be the world’s largest show-and-tell.

Unfamiliar with the Chevrolet Volt?  The Chevrolet Volt is an electric vehicle that can be charged at home overnight to run on battery power alone for shorter trips up to 40 miles, but which also benefits from a range-extending gasoline engine that kicks in to charge the batteries when additional electricity is required for longer trips. Those whose daily commute is under 40 miles roundtrip will use almost no gasoline and contribute no greenhouse gasses as a result of their driving. A full charge can be obtained from a 110-volt outlet in about six hours, or from a 220-volt outlet in as little as three hours. Regenerative brakes also help recharge the vehicle’s batteries.

Today, Monday, November 30, kicks off a series of live video webcasts, embedded below, and also available on ChevroletVoltage.com as well as the Chevrolet and Chevrolet Volt Facebook pages.

Volt started its tour with a live assembly from Harvard-Westlake Middle School this morning. There, more than 800 students and staff learned about the basics of electricity and how this common energy source can be used to transform the way we drive. Middle school teachers and students from across the country were also invited to participate in the live webcast.

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I already love to eat Kettle brand chips. Ironically, I never even enjoyed potato chips until earlier this year when I absentmindedly snacked on a bag of Kettle Tuscan Three Cheese chips at a media event I was attending: From that moment on I was hooked. Since then, I’ve sampled many of the flavors in their line, always delighted by their wonderful crunch and delicious flavors.

Only recently, I happened to notice verbage on the packaging that drew my attention to the company’s sustainability efforts and was pleased to discover the company supports a variety of eco-friendly practices. In fact, green building, renewable energy, habitat restoration, recycling, and reuse make up the pillars of Kettle Foods’ environmental initiative! Awesome practices contribute to their awesome chips!

The new 73,000-square-foot Kettle Foods factory in Beloit, Wisconsin, is the first food manufacturing facility in the U.S. to receive Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)  Gold-level certification for green building. On top, the building features 18 wind turbines that generate enough energy to produce 56,000 bags of Kettle Brand Potato Chips every year – or approximately 28,000 kilowatt hours.

The Kettle Foods headquarters in Salem, Oregon, is home to one of the largest commercial solar power arrays in the Pacific Northwest. As a producer of renewable energy, Kettle Foods’ 616 solar panels generate 120,000 kWh of electricity annually – enough to make 250,000 bags of Kettle Brand Potato Chips each year, and reduce Kettle Foods’ annual CO2 emissions by 65 tons.

When Kettle Foods’ headquarters moved to Oregon in 1999, the company set out to restore a federally designated natural wetlands on the company grounds.  Invasive non-native species including Himalayan blackberry bushes and Scotch Broom were removed and the grounds were replanted with native plants such as Aster, Camas, Red Alder, Lupine, and Sword Fern in addition to aquatic plant species such as Wapato and Marsh Pennywort which enhance biological diversity in the wetland pond. » Read more

With gas prices continually in flux, interest in domestically produced bio-fuels like ethanol (E85) is on the rise. These flex fuels have been gaining popularity not only for their lower cost, but also their lessened impact on the environment. Flex Fuel vehicles that can run on gas, E85 or a combination of both, are already available from Chevrolet, Ford, Dodge, and GMC.

Helping to lessen the impact on the environment even more, Coskata Inc., a leading developer of alternative bio-fuels, has just announced the successful start-up of “Project Lighthouse” its semi-commercial flex-ethanol facility. We first heard of Coskata when General Motors announced their partnership with the energy company at the 2008 Detroit Auto Show. It’s a suitable partnership, since General Motors has built 5 million of these Flex Fuel vehicles to date, and has committed to making 50 percent of its fleet Flex Fuel compatible by 2012.

Unlike other technologies and facilities that often rely on one primary source of feedstock, the company’s flexible ethanol facility will be producing ethanol from numerous sources, including wood biomass, agricultural waste, construction waste, and even household garbage.  They expect to produce about 100 gallons of ethanol per dry ton of biomass material. That’s energy out of trash, people! » Read more

An estimated 250 million registered vehicles drive more than 6 billion miles on America’s roadways, every day: how cool would it be if companies could generate electricity every time one of those vehicles pulled into their parking lot or rolled through their drive-up convenience window?

New Energy Technologies, Inc. a next-generation alternative and renewable energy developer, has created a system that does just that with its MotionPower technology for generating electricity from the motion of slowing cars and light trucks. It recently underwent durability testing at a Burger King in Hillside, New Jersey, throughout the busy Labor Day weekend

It looks just like a flattened speed bump with long levers across the top that press down when tires roll over them. That force turns gears inside, generating 2000 watts of electricity instantaneously, say the engineers who designed it. Watch a demo of it here at www.newenergytechnologiesinc.com

Designed as a roadway-based system for installation where vehicles are already required to decelerate or stop, MotionPower technology assists vehicles in slowing down, and in the process of doing so, captures the slowing vehicles’ motion (kinetic) energy before it is lost as brake heat, and creatively converts that energy into clean, ‘green’ electricity.

As millions of vehicles slow or come to a stop at toll plazas, rest areas, residential traffic slowing areas, drive-thrus, and countless other roadway points, their original motion energy, derived from the burning of fossil fuels, is dissipated into the brakes and lost as heat to the environment. I’m thinking that such systems could be even more functional than those speed humps meant to slow down speeding drivers in residential neighborhoods. » Read more

Our emphasis here at eCycleGroup is to share different perspectives on all kinds of sustainable and  eco-friendly subjects; this is the second of two stories intended to identify some pros and cons of the alternative engine choices available now and promised to come to market in the future. (Click here to read part one,  which focused on emerging automotive technologies, such as hydrogen, electric, and hybrid electric/gasoline powerplants.) Part two focuses on the variety of alternative fuels currently in production. You can find a list of that operate on these fuels by searchng at fueleconomy.gov

Diesel
Diesel is produced as a byproduct of the distillation procedure that produces gasoline. Both gasoline and diesel are produced from the same crude oil. As part of the production process, crude oil is heated, releasing different hydrocarbon compounds at different boiling temperatures. The lightest components — such as ethane and propane — evaporate first. The next components, called naphtha, are used for making gasoline. Finally, the heaviest portion of crude oil is used to make diesel fuel.

Diesel engines are known for their high strength and durability, and today’s modern diesels are typically much cleaner and more fuel efficient than their predecessors. Thanks to today’s high-tech direct injection diesel engines, the days of smelly, sooty diesel discharge are long gone.

Some diesel engines have been modified to burn biodiesel,  which is a domestically produced, renewable fuel derived from natural oils like soybean oil. Biodiesel is produced without petroleum, though it can be blended  with petroleum diesel to create a biodiesel blend. Biodiesel blends of up to 20 percent can be used in any diesel engine without requiring any modifications to the engine or the fuel system. Some specially prepped vehicles are even able to use post-consumer oil products recycled from restaurants — like old french fry cooking oil! You can find out much more at www.biodiesel.org » Read more

Our emphasis here at eCycleGroup is to share different persepectives on all kinds of sustainable and  eco-friendly subjects, so we thought it might be useful to identify some pros and cons of the alternative engine choices available now and promised to come to market in the future. There’s a lot to digest here, so we’re breaking it into two segments, with part two to follow next week.

This week, we’ll focus on emerging automotive technologies. Next week, we’ll discuss the fuels themselves.

Hydrogen:
I’ve had several opportunities to drive Chevy’s Hydrogen Fuel Cell Equinox and it offers excellent performance. If I had a couple million dollars, I would absolutely build a 700-bar Hydrogen fueling station in my neighborhood to help create one tiny piece of the infrastructure required to support this emerging technology. While Eeperts suggest urban areas should have enough Hydrogen fuel stations located close enough to each other so that users will have ready access to fuel, even building just 100 fueling stations around Los Angeles would require an investment of 200 million dollars.  And as if that’s not enough, the prohibitive cost of producing the fuel cells themselves puts the feasibility of this choice far into the future. Hydrogen-powered vehicles have been manufactured by BMW, Ford, General Motors, Honda, and Toyota. Can you buy one? Some are available in specialized fleets, but none are yet for sale to the general public.

Electric:
We’ve all heard about the Tesla electric car and are amazed by the performance (0 to 60 in four seconds) promised by this battery-operated sports car, but did you know that it is powered by more than 6800 lithium-ion computer batteries? Besides being incredibly expensive ($98,000) have you considered how the battery performance of your laptop degrades over time and how this is likely to transfer to the performance of that little car? And where will all those little batteries go after they lose their effectiveness? Again, this car is too expensive and impractical to be considered a viable option for the average consumer. » Read more

Be Green with AskPatty.com

As a female friendly business, AskPatty.com trains automotive dealerships and retailers to create a safe and comfortable environment where women feel welcome; these businesses are then held to a high level of customer satisfaction for their women consumers. However, AskPatty.com is also an automotive website that recognizes its responsibility to the world around us, encouraging its employees and affiliated dealers and retail businesses to continually strive to reduce their environmental impact.

AskPatty.com’s President and CEO Jody DeVere launched the BE GREEN initiative last year to help affiliated automotive dealerships and retail locations become more environmentally friendly.  As part of their training, AskPatty provides business with the information and tools they need to utilize green marketing and to highlight earth friendly vehicles in their inventory.

AskPatty developed an Earth Friendly Logo that dealers can place on any vehicles in stock that are earth friendly, allowing consumers to easily identify vehicles that qualify for the program.  How are vehicles defined as “Earth Friendly”? Under the Be Green program any vehicles that utilize hybrid gasoline/electric power plants, are powered by clean-burning natural gas, produce the lowest emissions possible thanks to PZEV and ULEV engines, or promise more than 28 miles per gallon qualify as Earth Friendly. The AskPatty BeGreen program also helps dealerships highlight vehicles that they sell that are Earth Friendly.

AskPatty.com also educates its Certified Female Friendly dealers and retail businesses on things they can do to become more environmentally friendly in their day-to-day operations, such as: » Read more