Imagine this.  You live in a home whose roof is covered with solar panels to generate electricity.  In your backyard there is a small wind power generator.  In your garage are two cars, one electric and the other a hybrid plug-in.  At night, when it is usually windier, your cars are plugged in and re-charged.  The sun, on sunny days, complements the wind in generating more than enough electricity needed in your home.

You buy electricity, if ever needed.  Your electric company buys any excess electricity that you might generate, from the wind and sun, beyond what’s needed in your home and to recharge your car batteries.  Your electric company even pays you to draw some electricity from your car’s batteries to help meet their grid’s expensive peak load requirements.  During power company outages, your home could draw electricity from your car batteries for a day or two, if coincidentally you do not generate enough from your solar and wind energy sources during that time.
You are largely energy independent!
The technology for all of this is available today. Five years ago, I learned how to install small wind power generators for a Peace Corps project begun in 2001 in Yalta.  Fifty years ago, as an engineering student, I wrote an article about a Yalta wind turbine and about how twenty percent of our electricity could have been wind generated twenty years later (by about 1975); that never happened.  That same thing, being said again today, will indeed happen — unless big oil and car companies lobby Congress “to death” — as has almost been happening in recent years, under the leadership of two oil men, now serving as our President and VP.
Incentives for distributed “networked” power (wind, solar and electric & hybrid cars, when plugged in) will be enacted, as subsidies for concentrated power (oil, coal, nuclear) get repealed.  We cannot wait for central governments to act.  Cities are following New York City’s lead in requiring that taxies be hybrids.  California and Minnesota are leading on energy reforms, as is Austin, Texas.  Our City Council in Austin, Minnesota, is considering a “Cool Cities” resolution.
Over the past century, we have invested trillions of dollars in a gigantic grid that delivers electricity from large power plants.  Large wind farms now feed that “hungry” grid, even though it leaks and wastes power.  Once “networked” power — small wind, solar, small hydro, etc. plus plug-in hybrid & electric cars — is widely distributed, then backup grid power could still come from remaining concentrated power (oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear) resources — without causing further global warming and oil wars.
Six years ago, about 100 people from Ukraine and the US met in Yalta, to discuss how energy conservation and solar and wind energy could help end Ukraine’s reliance on nuclear power and Russian oil.  Ukraine’s nuclear accident at Chernobyl helped trigger the “independence” of Ukraine.  Coincidentally, on Ukrainian Independence Day, August 24, 2007, at 11a.m., you are welcome to our “Taste of Ukraine” potluck lunch and discussion of world cultures with Ukrainian and other exchange students and their hosts at Austin Public Library. Phone Tami Fett, 507-325-2245, for reservations.
You are also invited to join our Austin Coalition for the Environmental Sustainabiity (ACES) and its coalition affiliates.  See ACES at the Mower County Fair and at http://co.net/aces online.  ACES aims to reduce CO2, a greenhouse gas that causes global warming.  Most people begin by recycling, bicycling and/or planting trees — before buying their first hybrid car.   In 2001 my family purchased a hybrid car and a second in 2006.  Hybrids get 35 to 50 miles per gallon.  A modified plug-in hybrid would get over 100 miles per gallon.  Electric cars, good to have as second cars for commuting, use no gasoline at all.
As an incentive, we received a $2600 tax credit for buying our Toyota Camry hybrid.  With other Austin MN hybrid cars, ours will be on display on August 11, 2007, at Mower County Fair.  If building a home, consider installing solar energy roof panels, and choose land on which to erect a small wind power tower.  Equip your home with energy-efficient bulbs and appliances.  Recycle, bicycle, plant trees, drive hybrids, grow & buy local, and harvest your sunrays & the wind!
Fighting global warming and working for energy independence both begin at home.  Go Green!
______
by  CHANDLER HARRISON STEVENS

Member of aces
Renewable Energy
CoolCity GreenTeam
PeaceCorps Ukraine
Kherson 1999-2000
Yalta, Crimea 2000-01
PeaceCorps Response
Katrina Crisis Corps
Alabama 2005