Local Environmental Scene -- What's Happening

MaineEnvironmentalNews has launched a great new environmental news site for Maine. Check it out www.MaineEnviroNews.com

Monday, March 3 -- The Brunswick Town Council may consider taking action on its Cool Community Pledge to reduce global warming emissions. If you feel that Brunswick should develop a plan to reduce its carbon footprint, contact your Councilor or come to Monday's council meeting to express your opinion. Public support is critical to convince our Town's elected officials and professional staff to take meaningful action!

Tuesday, March 4 -- Environmental Health Lobby Day at the statehouse in Augusta, hosted by The Alliance for a Clean and Healthy Maine. For more information, visit www.cleanandhealthyme.org

Saturday, March 15 -- Spring Growth 2008, 9am to 4:30pm at MOFGA’s Common Ground Education Center, Unity, Maine. A full day focusing on energy, agriculture and climate, featuring what to expect for Maine’s climate in the future and breakout sessions on energy efficiency and renewables. Keynote Speaker: Tim LaSalle, Director, Rodale Institute. For more information, visit www.MOFGA.org

Wednesday, March 19 -- 2008 Maine Water Conference, 7:30am-4:00pm, Augusta Civic Center, Augusta, Maine. The Maine Water Conference was founded in 1994 by the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Environmental and Watershed Research at the University of Maine as an annual forum for water resource professionals, researchers, consultants, citizens, students, regulators, and planners to exchange information and present new findings on water resource issues in Maine. For more information, visit www.umaine.edu/waterresearch/mwc/

Friday, March 21 and Saturday, March 22 -- F.W. Horch's first annual Spring Green Sale. Here's your chance to buy green and save some green! Save on all close-outs and overstock items, and get a sneak peek at the new products we'll be bringing in for the spring and summer. 56 Maine Street, Brunswick. 729-4050.

Saturday, March 22 -- Bicycle Film and Auction Fundraiser, 11am - 1pm, Eveningstar Cinema. To raise funds for the upcoming Brunswick Bike Fair, the Brunswick Sustainability Group is screening the film Return of the Scorcher and holding a silent auction. This half-hour documentary looks at bike culture and bike lifestyles around the world, with beautiful and inspiring scenes of bike use filmed in China, The Netherlands, Denmark, and the U.S. After the film screening, we will be auctioning entertainment items, including movie tickets from the Eveningstar Cinema, sustainable living goods from FW Horch, landscaping design services, gift certificates from area restaurants, and more!

Wednesday, March 26 -- Vanessa Levesque, the Natural Resources Planner for the Town of Brunswick, is looking for 30 volunteers to help with a mapping survey of vernal pools in the Brunswick area this spring. The data will be key in planning – both to help plan development that is near these features and to help target conservation efforts to high priority areas. There will be a two hour training session for volunteers on Wed. March 26th in the early evening (most likely starting at 6pm), food provided. If you’re interested, please email Vanessa at vlevesque@brunswickme.org.

Thursday, April 3 -- The Governor's Energy Efficiency Summit: Revitalizing Maine's Business and Energy Climate, in the Augusta Civic Center, Augusta. For more information, visit www.maine.gov/governor/baldacci/policy/EnergySummit.html

Saturday April 26 -- Brunswick Bike Fair, 11 am - 2 pm, Downtown Mall. The Brunswick Sustainability Group invites you to take part in a Bike Fair in Brunswick. The goals of the Bike Fair are to encourage attendees to view bicycling as a viable means of transportation in and around our community, to motivate people to get on their bikes, and to celebrate current bikers. Our hope is that the fair, through gear and safety demonstrations, group rides, and information by a number of organizations, will motivate people to view and ride bicycles as more than just a form of exercise but as an effective and efficient form of transportation. BSG Bike Events Contact: Maggie Soulman, ecosquirrel@hotmail.com, 617.512-0437.

New Products: BioBricks, NatureMills, and more!

It's not easy being green when you run a retail store. We are constantly evaluating product ideas. It's a time-intensive process to do the research to find products that really are practical and really do help save the planet. But we've been hard at work tackling our backlog of hundreds of product ideas and customer requests from our first year of operations.

We now have more than a dozen new products on our web site, including:

• BioBricks
  Heat your home with clean and efficient compressed sawdust bricks. (Limit 4 per customer due to limited supply.)
  
• Night Logs
  Keep your wood stove going all night with a compressed sawdust log--more than twice the density and half the moisture content of cord wood. (Limit 2 per customer due to limited supply.)
  
• Power Logs
  Enjoy a clean-burning, environmentally-friendly fire in your fireplace, without the hassles of cord wood. (Limit 3 per customer due to limited supply.)
  
• The Happy Farmer Bokashi Ktichen Composter
  Anaerobically "compost" meat scraps indoors without odors.
  
• NatureMill Plus Indoor / Outdoor Composter
  Plug in this electric composter to compost up to 120 pounds of food waste per month (including meat scraps) quickly and efficiently all year round, indoors or out.
  
• NatureMill Pet Friendly Composter
  Placed on a deck or back porch, this electric composter can handle up to 120 pounds of food and pet waste per month.
  
• NatureMill Pro Indoor/Outdoor Composter
  Choose a heavy-duty electric composter with stainless steel components for continuous duty in a large family or small cafe. (AVAILABLE IN MARCH)
  
• Doggie Dooley Pet Waste Composter
  When warmer weather arrives, plan to install one of these in-ground composting systems to safely and conveniently eliminate pet waste.

News from ReVision Energy

Jen Hatch of the newly-named ReVision Energy writes,

In like a Lion
March is nearly here, and spring is almost amongst us. I happen to love the winter but I can image that many are looking forward to transition from this particularly snowy season.

The snow has not slowed us down this winter; in fact I think people's increased concern for alternative solutions to their rising energy bills has given rise to the awareness of solar. We have been fortunate to work with many homeowners to reduce their energy bills by supplementing that source with solar energy.

As summer is not too far off the horizon we continue to stress the benefits of solar energy. If you are a homeowner who is burning oil or gas during the months between May to October, where there is little to no call for heat, you may be interested to know that a solar hot water system will turn that furnace off, and keep it off, unless of course there is a particularly high demand for hot water, or if there is an extended period of time without sun. Think about how much oil or gas you use during those months, and you can think of that as a start to your savings.

Did you know that if you are a commercial business the state will pay for 35% of your solar hot water system, capped at $10,500? We recently held a seminar geared for restaurant businesses, as we feel that restaurants, with their continuous and extensive usage of hot water, are excellent candidates for a solar energy system. Any business that wishes to find out how a solar application can benefit them should contact our office. The state rebate is incredibly favorable at this time for commercial systems.

Not only is there a state incentive, there is also an incentive on the federal level, 30% uncapped of the remaining cost of the system. With these rebates the payback is hard to beat.

ReVision Energy recently worked with WPXT-TV and Efficiency Maine as part of the 'Green Team' that helped to give the Wright family in Falmouth a home efficiency makeover. Jed Wright was selected out of 100 nominees for the first ever green make over show provided by WPXT-TV. ReVision Energy provided the labor and materials for the solar hot water installation. You can view an article that ran in the Press Herald at the link provided below:

Going Green In More Ways Than One

And last, but certainly not least, we are pleased to tell you that we have finished the Yarmouth High School solar photovoltaic installation. This summer students from the Yarmouth High school worked on writing a grant provided by the public utilities commission for a demonstrative solar electric system to be installed on the roof of their school. The proposal not only included panels for the roof but also a data monitoring system that will track what the panels are doing and will be able to be read and utilized in the classroom.

The students demonstrated that a solar electric system benefits not only the school but the community as a whole. They were awarded the grant money last fall and were recognized by the governor for their ambition and hard work. The forecaster has been keeping tabs on this project, this is their most recent story highlighting the installation.

Sun shines on Yarmouth High solar project

As always, please call our office to find out how a solar application may benefit you, 221-6342.

Be well,
Jen

Community Supported Agriculture

The families in the Brunswick community who rely on Crystal Spring Farm for their CSA shares will need to find another source of local food this year. To help people connect with other local farmers, we have published a directory of CSA Farms in the Brunswick area. In March we will be creating a local environmental information bulletin board in our store, which will feature CSA information.

Super-Efficient Home Talk

"Design and Build Your Own Super-Efficient Home", Mar 13
Join us at the store on Thursday, March 13th, at 7:00 pm for our next Sustainable Living Talk, "Design and Build Your Own Super-Efficient Home."

We are delighted to have Al Heath back to talk on the topic of super-efficient building. He writes,

"I was a carpenter, designer, and contractor for 12 years before changing careers in 1990. Four years ago when I wanted to build my family a new and much more energy efficient house, I found that not only was it prohibitively expensive, but most of the builders I spoke with didn't really know what "super-insulated, passive solar" meant. I decided to re-educate myself to the new reality and techniques of energy efficiency and build it myself.

My wife and I researched, designed, and built 80% of our new home while sub-contracting the rest. We now easily heat our beautiful 2,000 square foot home on one cord of wood, 75 gallons of kerosene, and all the free/clean sunshine we can get. I have recently installed a solar hot water system that provides a majority of our domestic hot water needs and next, we hope to increase the size of this system for space heating and further reduce our use of firewood and oil.

It is challenging, interesting, and important work but you don't have to be a rocket scientist! I will share everything time allows, including a list of helpful sources and contractors."

Free refreshments and informational handouts will also be available.

Our Sustainable Living Talks are on the second Thursday of each month at 7:00 pm at 56 Maine Street in Brunswick. Space is limited, so we encourage you to call the store at 729-4050 to reserve a seat.

Vampire Loads - Sustainable Living Tip for February 2008

According to Efficiency Maine, 75% of electricity used for home electronics is consumed while the products are turned off. You can use a Kill-a-Watt meter to test which appliances are "vampires"--sucking electricity all night long. Stop them by unplugging them or putting them on a power strip with a switch.

More to know about Vampire Loads

• Electricity in Maine costs about 15.5 cents per kilowatt hour, well above the national average. Leaving a desktop computer in "idle" mode (monitor and hard drive powered down) for a year costs about $183 here in Maine.
• Any device that requires resetting after a blackout is a vampire. Some microwave ovens, for example, draw electricity to maintain clock settings. Try wearing a watch to keep time, then put your microwave oven on a switch outlet so you can turn it off. Ignore the blink when you turn it back on; you can cook with it just fine. The flashing time will remind you to turn it off when you're done. ("It's not a problem, it's a feature!")
• Always unplug cell phone chargers and other transformers from the wall. Any "wall wart" that gets warm to the touch is wasting energy! Don't just disconnect your cell phone or laptop from the charger. Remember to unplug the charger from the wall.
• Consider replacing old-fashioned incandescent night lights with the new Light Emitting Capacitor (LEC) technology. These blue-green nightlights are cool to the touch, consuming only 0.03 watts (that's three one hundreths of a watt). LECs are 8 times more efficient than LEDs and 200 times more efficient than incandescent night lights, saving you about $9.50 per year.
• The best tool to use to measure vampire loads is a Kill-A-Watt meter. Plug this electricity monitor into the wall, then plug your appliance into it. An LCD screen shows you exactly how much electricity the vampire is using.
• Keep in mind that simply turning lights and appliances off can often be a more effective conservation approach than buying the most efficient product and leaving it on all the time. For example, a 100 watt incandescent light bulb on a motion sensor that comes on only when someone comes to your porch will use just 0.1 KWh per day, whereas a 25 watt CFL left on all night will consume 0.25 KWh per day. You'd save 0.15 KWh per day ($8.48 per year) with the incandescent bulb that's on only when needed.
• Consider putting in a timer switch or a motion switch for bathrooms and other rooms where lights can be left on accidentally. A bathroom vanity with three 75 watt light bulbs left on while your family is away for a week's vacation will consume 37.8 KWh, costing you $5.86.
• The average household in Maine uses 500 KWh per month, or about 16 KWh per day. Take a look at your power bill. If you consume more than average, chances are that you have some vampire loads. Make some changes, then see if you notice a change on your power bill -- and in your bank account!
  

Featured Product

A Kill-a-Watt home electricity meter is an indispensable tool in tracking down vampire loads. More info »

Promoting Renewable Energy in Maine

Here's an editorial piece I wrote about how we can promote renewable energy in Maine:

As energy prices increase, many people in Maine are unable to pay their fuel and electricity bills. The long-term solution to this crisis is to heat and power our homes and businesses with the free energy from the sun that is already being delivered every day to every part of our state.

I believe we Mainers should begin weaning ourselves from an unhealthy addiction to foreign oil. We should let the market determine the price of gasoline and fuel oil. Artificially subsidizing the costs of burning fossil fuels through government programs simply makes the problem worse by retarding the necessary investment in sustainable local energy solutions. The rising price of fossil fuel levels the playing field for solar, geothermal and tidal energy.

Although market forces are probably the most efficient way to allocate resources toward viable energy solutions, it is unrealistic to expect politicians to restrain themselves from trying to use governmental power to help people struggling with the unprecedented fossil fuel crisis. Several proposals are circulating now about how to reduce the price of fossil fuels (dragging us further into a hopeless situation) or to reduce the price of renewable energy (arguably moving us closer to a sustainable energy future). All of these proposals suffer from the same problem: lack of government funding to sustain the subsidies in the face of increases in the real costs of fuel.

In particular, I think efforts to re-regulate our electricity market through feed-in tariffs are particularly misguided. Experience with regulated energy markets worldwide shows that central planners are unable to predict real costs and technological advances. As a result, tariff pricing leads to massive inefficiencies, higher prices and poor public infrastructure investments.

A better approach, in my mind, is to pursue our current policy of renewable portfolio standards. Rather than dictating a particular price as in a tariff scheme, regulators dictate acceptable standards for how energy is to be generated. For example, regulators may require energy providers not to pollute, or to use only renewable fuels. The market is then free to set efficient prices and make investments in technologies that meet the production standards set by regulators. Regulators enforce the rules by fining or imprisoning violators.

The major risk to both a tariff scheme and a renewable portfolio standard is that the regulators may set an unrealistic target that simply cannot be met by the market in a cost-effective manner. A renewable portfolio standard, however, is better able to allow prices to increase to attract the necessary additional capital to make the required investments. In the end, regulators will have to confront the reality that they can control price or they can control quality, but they can't control both. At this stage in our energy crisis, I believe we must focus the efforts of our regulators on improving the quality of our energy supply and allow prices to rise to reflect the true costs of our energy systems.

There are several ways to capture and use solar energy:

• wood, potatoes, straw, ethanol, biodiesel and other "biofuel"
• passive solar design
• active solar heating
• active solar power
• wind power

Forcing a tariff rate on the various options is likely to be extremely difficult. However, there are clear standards that could be established and enforced by state regulators under a renewable portfolio standard. For example, emissions can be measured and standards adopted that would eliminate coal and wood-fired power plants, shifting investment toward cleaner sources by simply fining or imprisoning producers that exceed pollution standards. We could nudge along the adoption of clean energy systems by expanding our current "net-zero" policy for home-owner clean energy systems to be a "net-positive" policy. Home owners who have installed solar panels on their grid-connected properties should be paid for all of the net power they feed back to the grid, not just a portion of it as is currently the law.

Whatever policy the state adopts, it must take steps to provide long-term predictability to the market. Since we have recently adopted electricity price competition with renewable portfolio standards, I think it would send the wrong signal to go back to a regulated tariff scheme. My message to regulators is this: "Set high standards, enforce them strictly, and give private investors the confidence that the rules of the game aren't in flux."

In the end, our state and we residents must confront the basic fact that fossil fuel prices are out of our control. Sooner or later we should switch to local, clean sources of energy: solar, geothermal and tidal. These are the only energy sources that can sustain our future economic prosperity.

Biodiesel Is Not Corn Ethanol

I burn biodiesel (B20) instead of #2 heating oil in my home boiler. Recently several friends and acquaintances have questioned whether this isn't actually worse for the environment.

It's not.

We had an interesting talk here at the store this summer about this very issue.

Pretty much every study done to date has shown that corn ethanol is a bad idea. Biodiesel, on the other hand, looks much more promising. For several years people in Maine have been studying how to produce biodiesel from wood and potatoes. Recent laboratory studies have been done on producing biodiesel from algae, which could be grown in shallow pools on land which is currently not suitable for conventional agriculture (on the roof of Hannafords supermarket, for example). This would avoid all of the impacts studied in the Science article.

The basic difference between ethanol and biodiesel is that ethanol processes convert sugar to alcohol, whereas biodiesel processes convert oils to biodiesel. Corn is used as a feedstock for ethanol because corn has a high sugar content. Other feedstocks with higher oil content (soybeans, for example) are used for biodiesel.

It's important not to throw out the baby with the bathwater in the biofuel discussion. It's easy to demonstrate that subsidizing ethanol from corn the way it is currently grown is not going to solve our energy or environmental challenges. However, there do appear to be solutions available if we diversify our energy crops and begin to replace petroleum with biodiesel for space heating and other situations where liquid fuels are essential.

Many writers in the popular press don't appreciate the difference between ethanol and biodiesel and inaccurately generalize the findings about corn ethanol to all biofuels. The important thing to remember is that the biofuel that you can buy to replace #2 heating oil is not ethanol and is not made from corn.

So, why is B20 better for the environment than 100% petroleum #2 heating oil?

Three reasons:

1. B20 burns cleaner. More of the fuel is burned, leading to fewer particulate emissions.
2. B20 can be produced locally, so less energy and infrastructure is required to transport it.
3. B20 is renewable. That means we can leave the carbon that is safely sequestered in petroleum in place, and instead pull carbon from the atmosphere to grow more biodiesel. Of course, the devil is in the details with exactly how we grow the biodiesel feedstocks, but we have a lot of options--and no doubt we'll soon have more if the market for B20 continues to expand.
   

Flashlights and Radios

It's safer and more sustainable to rely on battery-free flashlights and hand-crank radios for emergencies. Not only will you save money without disposable batteries, but you'll be able to count on having light and a link to the outside world when you need it most.

More to know about flashlights and radios

1. Look for LED flashlights. Long-lasting LED bulbs are far more durable and efficient than old-fashioned incandescent bulbs.
2. Choose capacitors instead of batteries where possible. High-quality "shake" flashlights have no batteries. Instead, they have magnets to generate electricity and capacitors to store it. Beware of cheap knock-offs that have button batteries and toy magnets. We tested a batch of these, only to discover that when the battery lost charge the flashlights stopped working!
3. Recharge your batteries. Some products require batteries, which can store more energy than capacitors. Be prepared to check and recharge batteries on a regular basis. The most common type of rechargeable battery--nickel metal hydride (NiMH)--loses charge faster than disposable alkaline batteries.
4. Recharge in the sun. If your flashlight or radio has a solar panel, you can leave it in the sun to ensure that it is fully charged whenever you need it.

February 2008 Happenings

Wednesday, February 13 -- Friends of Merrymeeting Bay will present speaker Jamie Silvestri, Program Director, The ArtVan at Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick at 7 pm on Wednesday, February 13, for "Environment; Advocacy Through the Arts", a fun hands-on session for all ages. For more information, visit www.FriendsofMerrymeetingBay.org

Tuesday, February 19 -- Frontier Cafe in Brunswick will show a special screening of Kilowatt Ours, a film about energy conservation and alternative energy. For more information about the film, visit http://www.kilowattours.org/

Monday, February 25 -- Join the Brunswick Sustainability Group for its next monthly meeting on Monday, February 25, at 7 pm at Frontier Cafe. Our group is planning a Brunswick Bike Fair for Saturday, April 26, and a film screening of "Return of the Scorcher" on Saturday, March 22. If you want to see more people in the Brunswick region embrace bicycling as a clean, safe and enjoyable form of transportation, please come and get involved! Everyone is welcome. For more information, visit www.BrunswickSustainability.org