Living Like Ed by Ed Jr. (whitelam books .txt) 📗

accident is also real. Keep in mind that the worst energy-related accident from having solar panels on your roof is that you might get bonked on the head if you didn’t bolt down a panel well.

Choosing a Shade of Green

You know, there are different shades of green. Burning biomass is greener than burning coal or burning crude oil. But we must all recognize that it’s best to pick the deepest shade of green that is available on our budget and in the realm of common sense.

For you, that might mean installing a solar electric system or a residential wind turbine. Or it might mean signing up for your local utility company’s green power program.

And I’d encourage everyone to sign up for TerraPass or one of the other carbon offset programs being offered today, so no matter where your power comes from, you help to add new green power to the grid and help to reduce the need for smoke-belching power plants.

What else can you do to choose a deeper shade of green? You can grow your own food and you can support your local organic farmers.

Solar is clearly a renewable source of energy. So is wind. So is geothermal power. And so is power generated by burning biomass or by burning methane gas at a landfill or by burning waste.

According to the EPA, the process of generating electricity is the single largest source of CO2 emissions in the United States. It’s responsible for 38 percent of all man-made CO2 emissions.

The way your utility company generates power—and the cost and availability of whatever type of fuel it uses—has a lot to do with the price you pay for electricity.

By buying most of your power off-peak, clearly you can save a lot on your electricity bill. If it’s cloudy 180 to 200 days out of the year in your area, don’t put up solar; it’s not worth it economically. But for the rest of the country—nearly all of the country—solar panels make economic sense.

Without subsidies, it can take nearly twenty years to amortize the cost of installing a solar electric system. With subsidies, it’s eight or nine years—depending on where you live and how much you pay for power to begin with. With net metering, the power you feed into the grid literally spins your electric meter backward. You’re selling that power to the utility company at the exact same price you pay for the electricity you buy.

The sun supplies enough energy to Earth in one hour to supply all of our energy needs for an entire year.

How do we get power from wind? First, you have to understand that wind is kinetic energy, or the energy of motion.

According to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), a single 5- megawatt wind turbine can produce more than 15 million kilowatt-hours of electricity in a year—enough to power more than 1,400 households.

Today, U.S. wind farms generate enough electricity on a typical day to power more than 2.5 million homes. More than six hundred regulated utility companies in more than thirty states have begun offering green power pro grams.

Getting involved is easy. On your utility bill, check the box: I would like green power.

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IN THE GARDEN AND KITCHEN

GROWING YOUR OWN FOOD, BUYING ORGANIC, AND SOLAR COOKING

If you have a patch of dirt to call your own, you can save money by growing your own produce. I grow about 25 percent of the food we eat on my property, and if I had a bigger property, I’d grow even more.

Gardening is great exercise, plus it gives you much more control over the food you eat. You know it’s fresh and you know it’s organic, because you’ve grown it that way.

There’s something about the flavor of produce eaten right off the vine, right off the tree, right out of the garden. Nothing can match a fresh-picked tomato that’s truly ripe, rather than one picked green for ease of shipping. The sugar that makes sweet corn so delicious turns to starch in a matter of hours, so even the corn you buy from a produce stand or a farmers’ market won’t be quite as delicious as fresh picked.

Even if you didn’t reap the rewards of your labor in terms of better-tasting food, it’s still worth growing your own. It’s simply a lot more energy efficient to grow food yourself than to have it shipped long distances.

Today, with supermarkets routinely offering such once-exotic foods as mussels from New Zealand and winter raspberries from Chile, it has become the norm to cook and serve food that has come hundreds, if not thousands, of miles every single day. Obviously, a certain amount of fuel is required to transport food over such long distances. If you can cut down on that, it’s a really good thing.

And when you grow your own food, you’re using water that’s already piped in at your home, not supporting the diversion of millions of gallons to commercial farms’ irrigation systems that are far from the water’s source. There’s an environmental cost to bringing water into your home, certainly, but that water is there in the pipes already. You can collect rainwater to use for watering some of the plants in your garden, too.

Even if you’re in a condo or an apartment, you may be able to grow some of your own food. And if you don’t have any space where you live, there’s another wonderful option: You can participate in a community garden.

You have other choices, too, when it comes to food. When you shop for food, choose food that’s organic and buy food that’s local. You can also choose to prepare food in an energy-efficient way.

So let’s start by looking at what you can grow at home, then get into what you eat and how you cook it.

Why I Garden

When I was a kid I had this thing about self-sufficiency that was born from a very unfortunate mind-set. I