[Lanny_MacDonald]

Originally Posted by HOZ

Gotta love the "IDEA" factories.

Originally Posted by HOZ

We need to be leaders....
innovaters...
lead the world...
designers....
creators...
active....
proactive....


To all our cultural superiors, you keep coming up with these ideas! Leave the real thinking to others. Consequences and implimentation problems be damned!

More lame ass garbage from the guy who never ceases to come up with lame assed garbage. You don't like ideas because you never come up with any yourself. The last original thought you produced you flushed down the toilet minutes later, after a back to front wipe.

Just to shut you up, once and for all, here is exactly how communities can become greener without negatively impacting the economy.

The first and most important thing we have to do is start rethinking how we approach the concept of energy and transportation. We have to change our mindset from where we think of multiple energy standards to that of one energy standard. Our source of consumer “power” can be one stop shopping; that being electricity.

This power source is naturally occurring and can be generated in many different ways. If we can shift our focus to one source of energy to do everything, we have the ability to clean our atmosphere much easier. We move having to control hundreds of millions of points of pollution (cars, trucks, trains, house furnaces, factories, processing plants, etc.) to several thousand (the generator plants). Electricity can be used for any application. Heating, cooling, powering devices we use in our daily lives, and moving goods and people. Electricity has massive advantages over other sources of power.

The biggest knock against hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is that they will require either a completely new infrastructure or a retrofit of existing facilities. Electricity does not suffer from this problem as the delivery infrastructure already exists. Clean power is delivered to pretty well every home built today. There are very few places in North America that electric power is not available and not the primary source of energy. This infrastructure gives electric power a massive advantage over any other potential source of power out there as there is no significant infrastructure delivery system required.

What is really cool about electric power as a standard is that communities CAN be built as self-sufficient entities. Through the use of existing technologies, communities can be built that would allow the citizens who live there to generate all of the power they would require for their homes, for transportation, for community services, and still have excess power to sell back onto the grid for use in other applications. All it takes is some forward thinking. By designing communities that utilize solar power, wind power, biomass collection and conversion, and electric vehicles, the requirement to stay “on the grid” disappears. All aspects of home life and all transportation needs are met in a closed system. How does this work?

Communities are designed around a biomass collection facility that uses waste products to generate electricity. All wastes that leave homes arrive at this plant for processing in a closed system. All food wastes turn into power. Every time you take a dump, you’re flushing fuel down to the toilet that will be converted into power. Every time the grass is cut, fuel for power generation is created. This facility becomes the center of power generation for the community. But this facility is not overly taxed because each house in the community is roofed with an array of high efficiency solar cells that collect enough power during the day to meet or exceed the power needs of the dwelling. Any excess power is turned back to the grid and sold down stream, giving these homes the ability to pay for their water utility. The best part of this whole scenario is that transportation costs are almost eliminated. Out side of the investment in your electric vehicle, the cost of fuel is covered through your community power generation. There is no extra cost for fuel consumption.

This sounds somewhat Utopian, and in some ways it is, but the bottom line is that this is real and the technology is available today. What is missing is the incentive to create such communities.

There are going to be those who are going to argue that there are certain aspects of our society that we cannot address with “electric” power. That is true, there are going to be some modes of transportation (air travel, shipping and freight are examples that some will throw out there as road blocks) that electric power are going to be very hard to address with our current state of technology. But that too can change.

Freight can still be moved across the country by rail. Electric train engines are just as powerful and even more energy efficient than the diesel counterpart. This retrofit to the existing rail system would be simple and quite cost effective.

Shipping is likely to be considered a roadblock. Not so. Nuclear reactors have been powering the navy for quite some time. Pushing this technology to the commercial fleets of large freighters would drastically reduce their emissions and make our products cheaper in the long run, as these ships would only have to refuel every 40-50 years.

There are still going to be certain aspects of transportation that will require the use of fossil fuels. Until plasma engines become commercially available, air travel will still rely on kerosene. Trucking will still rely on diesel, but bio-diesel instead, reducing emissions (I work with a guy who is already running a bio-diesel Passat and loving it). There will still be emissions from these entities into the atmosphere, but the largest offenders (automobiles) will be long gone.