Huffiington Post, March 29, 2013 We all know the banking system is broken. It’s easy to become pessimistic in the face of corporate and political corruption, but the system can be changed. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again. One pathway to genuine reform is “public banking”: the establishment of banks which are … Read More
Grist, March 29, 2013 I (David Roberts at Grist) wrote a (rather heady) post this morning about the move from centralized to distributed energy systems. Thanks to John Farrell — who, by the way, is the guru of distributed energy — I just came across a great example of how it’s beginning to happen. NRG Energy … Read More
Telecompetitor, March 28, 2013 There are numerous things municipalities can do to help bring high-speed broadband networks to their communities, said participants at an FCC workshop on gigabit communities yesterday. The workshop was held as a follow-up to FCC Chairman Genachowski’s announcement earlier this year that set a goal of having at least one gigabit community … Read More
IEEE Spectrum, March 28, 2013 Bright sun and high utility rates help rooftop solar energy compete with grid power. The map shows how much residential demand could be fulfilled by solar more cheaply than by the grid in 2018. Source: Institute for Local Self-Reliance Photovoltaics are still, on average, a pricey, subsidy-dependent source of electricity. However, … Read More
Wall Street Journal, March 27, 2013 The Bay Area is experiencing a rebirth of municipal Wi-Fi networks, after a decade of fits and starts in such efforts. Last week, Santa Clara launched a free public wireless network that blankets nearly the entire city of 120,000 residents, or about 19 square miles. The new network replaces a … Read More
St. Paul Pioneer Press, March 25, 2013 Comcast is doubling the download speeds of some of its most popular Internet broadband services in the Twin Cities, the cable giant said Monday, March 25. The faster speeds for its three most popular residential service tiers — Performance, Blast and Extreme 50 — became effective at 12:01 a.m. … Read More
Free Press, March 21, 2013 “Solar was like a dream,” said Appleton resident Kal Winer as he recalled the first few years homesteading with his wife Linda Tatelbaum in the late 1970s. “Back in the ’70s when we had the first oil shock, I could see what I thought was a very real crisis for people. … Read More
Motherboard, March 21, 2013 Google just announced that it plans on expanding its high-speed fiber-optic service beyond Kansas City, and into another fast-growing nearby city, Olathe, Kansas, home to some 120,000 people. “The Olathe City Council approved an agreement to bring Google Fiber to their city,” Google Fiber Community Manager Rachel Hack wrote in a blog … Read More
The Plain Dealer, March 12, 2013 A Cleveland company that has been turning scrap tires, plastics and medical waste into crude oil in its Akron plant for the past few years is planning a large-scale expansion on the cusp of a residential area on Cleveland’s East Side. Vadxx Energy intends to build a 10,000-square-foot facility near … Read More
