Remapping Debate, February 13, 2013 Hurricane Sandy, which blew through the New York metropolitan area late last October, left millions of households and businesses in the region in the dark. Few places were unplugged for as long as the service territory of the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA), the state owned electric power distribution company where … Read More
Greentech Media, February 8, 2013 Minnesota’s solar resource is the same as that of Jacksonville, Florida or Houston, Texas, according to Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) Senior Researcher John Farrell. Its installed solar capacity is 13 megawatts. Farrell is part of a drive to have the legislature set a standard requiring 10 percent solar by 2030, … Read More
Christopher Mitchell was recently interviewed by Bill Lindeke from streets.mn. Bill, a PhD Candidate in Geography, published the podcast as part of the streets.mn blog. He wanted to talk to Christopher about the work at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Bill discussed fiber optic infrastructure investment in the U.S. and touched on the Minneapolis City Wifi … Read More
Waste & Recycling News, February 4, 2013 John Campanelli does well to focus attention on garbage collection workers in our industry that are working difficult jobs for poverty wages (“Texas recycling death highlights wage, safety issue in the industry”). Workers along picking lines at recycling processing plants are in woeful straights as well. In Atlanta and … Read More
Washington Post, February 3, 2013 Roy Derrick maneuvered his forklift with a pallet of neatly boxed expired produce and flowers and dropped it into an industrial compactor at Safeway’s cavernous return center in Upper Marlboro. As the compactor hummed, compressed food and floral scraps spilled through a chute into a 40-foot trailer, one of five that … Read More
The Guardian, February 2, 2013 As President Obama’s second term takes shape, many of his top appointees are leaving – a standard pattern for all two-term presidencies. While most of the press attention has been focused on the major cabinet posts such as Treasury, State and Defense, some important posts below that tier are also being … Read More
Greentech Media, January 25, 2013 With solar prices dropping in the U.S. and around the world, John Farrell noticed that the German solar boom was not flagging despite the slow, steady reduction in its subsidy. “The trajectory looked very good for solar to be something that would work, not only from a distributed energy and ownership … Read More
Solar company Renvu created a delightful whiteboard animation of the results from our Rooftop Revolution research, which automatically makes them cooler than the average solar company. Check it out below or on Youtube.
Gigabit Nation, January 24, 2013 FCC Chairman Genachowski just announced an initiative to get a gigabit city in every state by 2015. Is this a meaningful policy objective or, as some critics claim, “empty rhetoric”? Five community broadband industry leaders tackle this question. More importantly, they detail the heavy lifting necessary to get a gig to … Read More
