Saturday, April 11, 2009

Florida will be home to the first "Solar City"


According to Engadget, the first "Solar City" will be built right here in Florida! If all goes as planned, construction will begin 2011. The location is called Babcock Ranch and is on the Gulf side of the state. Fortunately there is a Plan B in case the economy is still in a slump. I don't know if the stimulus money is part of this project or not. Housing here is crawling slowly forward from what I can tell locally. There are some homes being bought and sold but a lot are still sitting on the market. I wonder about building yet more houses when there is a glut of houses sitting on the market. But from what this blog post said, the back up plan was to go ahead with the power plant and sell the electricity to the larger grid. This sounds like a better plan that what is often heard around here which is "Build Nuclear!"

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Earth Cinema Circle - A DVD club

I joined Earth Cinema Circle about 9 months ago. It works a lot like a book club. They send out an "eco-friendly" DVD every other month. It costs $40 every other month. I figured it was a good cause and a way to help circulate into the mainstream, eco-friendly topics. So far I have been moderately pleased. The DVD's selected are more like student projects. They are often too heavy with negative stuff or too "unfocused" to really have a message. There have been a few that were excellent though. I figure I'll stay in it at least a year to "support" the cause and to give them a chance to improve. They are getting better. I think it's only 2 years old. It's a great concept. If more people were making Earth Videos, then it would help educate people. But there has to be a market and this is one way to help create that market.