We had a chance to interview Ariella at the Sustainable Operations Summit in Monterey, California.

Thanks to SOS for letting us attend and to everyone who sat down with us.

Ariella Maron, Deputy Director for New York City’s office of Long Term Planning & Sustainability, believes that living in New York City is one of the most sustainable choices a person can make. The average New Yorker produces one-third the greenhouse gas emissions when compared to the average American citizen. With smaller personal footprints and with more transit oriented communities, the density of New York is scaled such that its planners and citizens are forced to consider the social implications of sustainability.

Maron plays an integral role in developing and implementing Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC 2030 master sustainability plan. This includes a number of different initiatives, from catering to local green businesses and entrepreneurs, to making New York City’s streets more pedestrian-friendly to reducing building emissions and energy consumption.

By being so close to businesses and industries every day, Maron believes that New Yorkers are quicker to innovate and understand the concepts of sustainability sooner. With little pockets of green designers and manufacturers sprinkled across the five boroughs, Maron believes that the growing number of New Yorkers will see more and more sustainable solutions in their communities and the City as a whole.

Related Post

This video was filmed during the Metropolis Magazine conference @ ICFF - Design Entrepreneurs: Make Good and Prosper.Sponsored by ASID and Lonseal.

The Kimpton Hotels are stylish, comfortable, and leading the pack in green practices. Ron Sheldon, vice president of development and construction, and Ron Vlasic, regional vice president, will reveal the genius behind this great hotel chain.

Related Post

This video was filmed during the Metropolis Magazine conference @ ICFF - Design Entrepreneurs: Make Good and Prosper.Sponsored by ASID and Lonseal.

Eric Olsen, the 2008 Next Generation Design Competition winner, discusses his revolutionary project.

Related Post

This video was filmed during the Metropolis Magazine conference @ ICFF - Design Entrepreneurs: Make Good and Prosper. Sponsored by ASID and Lonseal.

RugMark’s independent certification label appears on the back of more than 40 different rug brands, ensuring that manufacturers have complied with its no child labor standard. A percentage of its sales support education in South Asia. Nina Smith, RugMark USA Executive Director shares this inspiring story.

Related Post

This video was filmed during the Metropolis Magazine conference @ ICFF - Design Entrepreneurs: Make Good and Prosper.Sponsored by ASID and Lonseal.

Emily Pilloton, founder of Project H Design, a website that encourages and supports humanitarian product design solutions, talks about her vision, and the recent success of the new Greener Gadgets Conference.

Related Post

This video was filmed during the Metropolis Magazine conference @ ICFF - Design Entrepreneurs: Make Good and Prosper.Sponsored by ASID and Lonseal.

If You Can Make it Here…

Tanu Kumar, director of business services, and Tzipora Lubarr, project manager of sustainable initiatives, at the New York Industrial Retention Network speak about Spec It Green, an initiative to raise green building awareness and connect local green manufacturers with designers and builders.

Related Post

Here’s a video our neighbor Don’s friend Josh made about something I’ve wanted to push solar companies on for a while. In the same way that Samsung and Sony make flat screen TVs that I can buy in a box, bring home, plug in and start watching, there should be a similar ease of use for small solar kits.

Q: What makes a Solar-In-A-Box hub different from existing solar power inverters?
There are two types of solar inverters available today - grid-tied and non-grid-tied.

Grid-tied inverters take the electricity generated by the solar panels and feed it back into the electrical grid. This is a very complicated process because the inverter must be exactly in sync with the electrical power being generated by the local utility. The grid-tied inverter must also meet very stringent regulatory requirements because it could potentially effect a large number of people. The existing grid-tied inverters are fantastically engineered to meet all these difficult requirements, but all this extra functionality makes them expensive to produce. Because they feed power backwards, they must be hard-wired into a dedicated breaker on your electrical system. This usually has to be done by a qualified electrician.

Non-grid-tied inverters are not attached to the grid at all so they are much simpler and cheaper than grid-tied inverters. Because they are not connected to the grid, they typically must rely on batteries to supply power when a cloud goes by or at night. Batteries are big and expensive and inefficient.

The Solar-In-A-Box hub is the best of both worlds. Because it only sends power to the directly connected load and never back into the grid, it does not need all the extra complication that a grid-tied inverter needs. When the solar panels are not supplying electricity, the hub can draw power from the grid as needed, avoiding the need for batteries.

Q: Is this net metering?

No. With net metering, when you make more power than you need you send the excess power back to the grid and that turns your meter backwards. Then, some other time when you need more power than you are generating (at night) you draw from the grid and your meter runs forward again.

With Solar-In-A-Box, you never send electricity back into the grid. You use any available solar power when it is generated, and use grid power when solar power is not available. This means that Solar-In-A-Box typically does not reduce the amount of electricity you buy at night, but only during the day when the sun is shinning (unless you also plug a windmill power source into your hub).

Q: Is this better than net metering?

Theoretically, net metering is perfect - if you make more solar power than you can use, you can share it with everyone else on the grid. This typically happens on hot, sunny days which is exactly when the grid really needs some extra power. Even better, the power you are making is put on the edge of the grid where you and your neighbors live, so it doesn’t have to travel over long transmission lines to get to where it is needed most (lots of power is lost during transmission). Then, later that night when you need some power to watch TV, you can take back some of what you gave at a time when there is not as much demand on the grid.

Unfortunately, there are some complications. The biggest one is that net metering depends on you sending power to your local electric company. This means dealing with lots of regulation and bureaucracy. In practice, this makes grid-tied solar systems difficult and expensive to install. You are not even allowed to do net metering in some states. I wish it were not true, but it is- and there is no realistic way to change it in the near future.

Because Solar-In-Box never sends power back into the electric grid, the whole system works just like any other electrical product you’d connect to your electric company. There are no special regulations or agreements, you just plug it in.

I think net metering would be the cure to all our woes in an ideal world. Alas, we need practical solutions that can actually work in the world we live in today. Solar-in-a-box is all about doing something now that has a real and practical impact.

Q: What happens if my solar panels are making more power than my load is using?

Because the Solar-In-A-Box hub can not send excess back into the grid, any solar power that is not used is lost. To make sure you efficiently use all the solar power that is being generated, you need to plug in appropriate sized loads into the hub. Ideally, you’d want to to plug in enough stuff to a hub to use slightly more electricity than the solar panels can produce, this way you’ll always use all the power generated. Loads that use a constant amount of power during times when the sun is shining are perfect (think computers, air conditioners). You don’t get any benefit by connecting something that you only use at night.

For more visit Josh’s website. He makes some good points about the difference between an ideal world and creating solutions for the world we live in.

Related Post

Here’s an interview with the founder of Cambridge Mass based Green Fuel.

moving on to Lab Testing:

Related Post

This interview took place at the Sustainable Operations Summit in Monterey, California.

Jim Hunt, the Chief of Environment and Energy for the City of Boston, believes that some of the best drivers for sustainability are innovative financial models, not new technologies. Though solar panels and wind turbines are promising to both governments and businesses, it is the funding and support of these technologies that gets them off the ground and into people’s hands.

Hunt has seen more and more sustainability coordinators in government offices since his position was created by Boston mayor Thomas Menino three years ago. On the corporate side, Hunt has seen more social responsibility officers at the executive level.

However, Jim Hunt believes that the most fundamental position that both businesses and governments can create is that of an energy manager. The person in this position would be tasked with implementing energy-efficiency initiatives, as well as monitoring realtime energy performance in buildings and operations.

Creating these new positions and applying more informed sets of financial support are key to creating a culture of sustainability at every level of business and government.

Related Post

An interview with Wallace Broecker of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory gives some insight into his ‘carbon scrubber‘ project. The idea sounds good, though having to manufacture something on the scale of 17 million 10′ x 50′ scrubbers sounds like major undertaking of energy and resources. Why not use algae and terra preta for carbon sequestration instead? Fixing carbon into an ancient fertilizer, while producing oxygen and valuable lipids via algae is more appealing than deploying an army of machines that require energy to manufacture and operate. The idea of pumping co2 into the ocean floor or deep underground isn’t all that comforting either.

The second article delves into corn-derived bioplastics or PLA (Poly Lactic Acid), a topic tied to the popular misgivings about corn-derived ethanol. Bioplastics are a promising and, perhaps, necessary innovation, but the feedstock needs to be something other than corn, which has been shown to be environmentally damaging, energy-intensive and vulnerable. Reducing the amount of oil-derived plastic is key, but there are better sources for lactic acid out there, such as dairy waste (whey) or biomass, such as, say, algae.

Noble effort Smithsonian. Let’s talk phycology next time, k?  ;^P

Related Post