How much are you paying for gas right now? My wife and I live in Massachusetts and we are paying $1.55 or so. Over the summer how much were you paying? We were up around $4.85 or so. Pretty sweet if you ask me.

So I was driving my fifty minute commute home Friday night and started thinking, how did this come about? What precipitated this fortuitous drop in price? Well funny thing is the guys on NPR were thinking about the same thing and since they are on the radio they are sort of compelled to talk about it too. And they were saying that we are seeing the big drop for the same reason we saw the huge increase. The law of supply and demand is hard at work. Our demand is way, way, way down and the price followed. I kind of started cheering then. It gets lonely in my car on the long ride home with no one to carpool with. I was cheering because I realized that every gas guzzling person on the planet has banded together and we are all boycotting OPEC and the oil companies. Yeah, stick it to the man. …read more of The Accidental Boycott here

Over the last couple weeks I have been blogging my head off about what energy source we might use to replace oil. I have been pondering what would turn the wheels of my car, what would keep the floors warm around our home, what would make it possible for me to use a computer instead of a typewriter to blog my head off with. My conclusion? We can replace dirty, polluting, climate changing oil with cleaner and more renewable forms of energy. You might have heard of them – solar, wind, ocean energy, geothermal, hydroelectric. Yes these forms of energy would allow us to make our lives cleaner, greener and healthier. But there is another benefit that they could provide that may not be immediately evident. They can provide us freedom.

My last blog looked at the idea of changing our energy production model from what is primarily a two or three source model. Right now, oil, coal and natural gas provide most of the energy in the US and in many other countries around the world. My last blog explored the idea of changing that system from a three source monopoly to hundreds or thousands of smaller more locally specific energy production plants. Solar and wind and ocean plants all within a twenty or thirty mile radius providing electricity for your heat, lights and car. …read more of Off the Grid Communities here

There seems to be a plethora of companies and methods, some creating a new system with each site.  That is true because so much goes in to getting off the grid; location, how much sun, how the temperature ranges in that area, (like New England-can you use solar there?), what is the consumption, how far away is the collection from the use and so much more.  The most important to us, I believe, is lowering our dependency, your carbon footprint and your ghastly heat & energy bills.

Since I am doing a series of alternative ways to heat/cool, provide energy and heat water, I thought it best to do an additional overview of Solar.

Not only do Solar systems provide clean energy, they are considerably quieter and can meet the entire heating needs of a home or business. These systems are a way to collect, store, and disburse the sun’s heat and energy and two basic main categories; Passive and Active Solar. …read more of Solar-What Are My Options? here

Long time oil man T. Boone Pickens is all over the place these days. This 80-year-old entrepreneur has launched The Pickens Plan, a detailed blueprint for getting America off of its addiction to foreign oil. Like Obama, he wants to employ a ten year plan that will wean us off of foreign fuel by combining the use of natural gas for our transportation and the use of wind for our energy use.

Pickens and followers are promoting this plan now in order to have the full attention of Obama’s administration when he takes office in January. Currently, the U.S. uses a quarter of the world’s oil and 70% of that oil is imported, compared to 24% in 1970. This imported oil costs us $700 billion per year. The Pickens Plan proposes spending a lot more money on the move to wind and natural gas, but it’s an important point that this is a one-time cost. …read more of Oil Man T. Boone Pickens Launches Alternative Fuel Plan here

Imagine if you will, a future where you have a fifteen minute commute in your electric car to your job at the “Fifth Precinct Wind Power Plant”. Imagine that your best friends who live across town drive twenty minutes to their jobs at the “Tenth Precinct Solar Power Plant”. You would still have television and computers and lights outside your house. Only instead of filling up your car with gas, you would use the charging station at your parking spot at work or the one connected to that parking meter that still runs out while you are at the checkout counter in the store (Coulomb Technologies is at work on these chargers now). This is what the world might look like in the multi source energy future.

In this future, there are still software development companies and department stores and pillow manufacturing plants and chefs. You still read books by the lamp on that table next to your favorite chair. You still watch your favorite shows after dinner, or during dinner if that’s the way you do it. It looks a lot like your life today except that there would be a much larger number of jobs in the energy production sector and they would be local and the pollution from these plants would be the result of dropped fast food wrappers or knocked over garbage cans. The plants might produce energy on a smaller scale, but there would be more of them doing it. …read more of What is Life Like in the Multi Source Energy Future? here