For most off-grid locations, it is possible to put together a pretty good business case to use renewable instead of diesel to produce electricty.
Les Routledge
Cel Phone Class Action
The Merchant Law Group is leading a big class action against cel phone companies.
Shale Gas Activity in the UK
Several companies are chomping at the bit to get their hands on one of the new licences the government is planning to issue.
Mobile Data – What is Unlimited?
A bit of truth in advertising is called for.
Featured News
Free to Fly Wants Friendly Skies for Unvaccinated Canadians
Should Canadians be free to fly without a COVID-19 vaccination? Four Canadian pilots thought so and founded Free to Fly at the end of August. By now, the organization has attracted 14,300 members, including 1,900 airline staff. In an interview, Free to Fly co-founder...
More Repression Does Not Save More COVID-19 Sick
The most mentioned reason for lockdowns has been the protection of health systems. The claim is that such protection saves lives. So, it is fair to ask how health systems are performing in their lockdown life-saving duty? There are several points from which one can...
New “extreme” Urbanism
I think that the City of London in the UK is taking efforts to decrease urban sprawl a bit too far. The National Post
Don’t Throw the Baby Out With the Bath Water
The Globe reports on the need to develop secure funding to support scientific research in Canada's North. “How else would we expect to learn about the Arctic, if we don't do it ourselves?” asks James Drummond, professor of physics at Dalhousie University and principal...
On-line Medical Information
A study has discovered that Canadians may be receiving inaccurate health information off the Internet. In comparison, residents of the US receive direction to government information as part of a Google search. The authors of the study recommend that a comparable...
Big Business Wants Higher Sales Taxes
....the Business Council of Manitoba asks the city to pursue a one-point increase in Manitoba's seven per cent provincial sales tax to raise additional revenue for infrastructure. It also urged the province to hold a referendum to make that possible. The business...
Solomon Off Target – Part II
Quote from Solomon’s Article:
Smart-grid additions have no economic justification – they merely support large-scale wind and solar generation, which also have no economic justification. The National Post
The above is a very strong categorical statement that reminds me a lot of the dogmatic insistence of global warming advocates that the “science is settled.” In this case, the insistence is that the technology has failed, the markets have spoken.
The problem with Lawrence’s assertion is that technology does not stand still and markets are dynamic when they are allowed to function. Producing oil from oil sands and natural gas from shale formations was once uneconomic. Today, those energy production techniques produce billions of dollars of profits and offer us a secure supply of energy. Is it possible that renewable production techniques might follow that path?
Solomon Off Target
The south zone would be treated more as a green zone, to have the province’s politically correct southern voters bear the lion’s share of the costly “smart-grid” additions to the grid. Smart-grid additions have no economic justification – they merely support...
Plastic Bags – More Comment
Plastic options are “almost 200 times less damaging to the climate than cotton hold-alls favoured by environmentalists and have less than one third of the CO2 emissions than paper bags.”
Community Power – An Alternative Path?
Caution: Readers who reject the concept of feed in tariffs are advised to hide any objects that can be damaging to a computer before reading the following post.
Paul Gipe has produced an interesting article profiling the state of energy development in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. This state has migrated towards a quite different model of utility asset ownership and control, one with broad-based participation by independent power producers instead of one dominated by a handful of large corporations.
Nordfriesland has one of the highest concentrations of wind generating capacity on record: more than 400 kW per square kilometer. And more than 80% of that is owned locally, either directly by farmers, or by local investors. In 2007 wind turbines owned by some 6,000 farmers and local investors–4% of the population–in Nordfriesland generated 1.3 TWh
Canadian Media Content Doesn’t Sell Well Internationally
Don’t tell that to the folks at The Score.
Apps are a key part of this strategy. Having plunged into the market early, theScore boasts the number-one sports app for BlackBerry, and is a strong global player on the iPhone. Across all platforms, ScoreMobile is drawing 2 million unique visitors a month.
It’s easy to imagine apps are just a bonus for loyal TV viewers, but theScore’s numbers suggest otherwise: 60 per cent of their mobile traffic comes from outside Canada, where the network doesn’t air.