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decarb

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Profiles in Decarb – I Call Ham

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When I started at Michaels millennia ago, we had a brilliant walking encyclopedia of knowledge and engineering know-how. His name was Dave Hamilton, or Ham for short. He was probably 30 years older than me. My boss at the time said Ham knew the answer to any problem. Younger engineers would spend a few weeks to prove he was right. Scaling Electrification A couple of weeks ago, in the final of a series on electrification prompted by the EPRI conference in Charlotte, I wrote in Electrification at Scale that decarb fans need to 1) brace for consequences such as 9,000…
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A Franchise Organization for Decarb

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About every six months, while participating in a strategic planning, leadership, marketing, or business development meeting, I hear “we should be doing decarb,” or “we’ve been talking about decarb for years, and that’s all we do is talk about it.” “We’ll be right back here talking about it a year from now.” Whoa! First, what is decarb? My guess is most people would say reducing the consumption of hydrocarbons in a catalytic process with airborne oxygen to produce heat which may be used for heating, power generation, or locomotion – while producing coproducts of gaseous water, carbon dioxide, and minuscule…
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green energy

Does Green Investing Work? Expert Says No

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I’m just a mechanical systems engineer but assume for a moment that I was a structural or civil engineer, and you asked me what it would take to build a bridge from Los Angeles to Honolulu. We can build anything, including that bridge. If the Golden Gate Bridge could be built in the 1930s, a nuclear submarine in the 1950s, and we put a man on the moon in the 1960s, we can sure as heck build a bridge to Hawaii in the 2020s. The bridge would be easier than zeroing out carbon emissions from the energy sector. See, I’m…
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civic lesson

Civics Lesson in Federal Carbon Policymaking

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As the weeks, webinars, conferences, and workshops click by, I contemplate the barriers to decarbonization policy. Next week in our decarbonization course through AESP (register while there is still time) we will discuss policy on the state and regional levels. This post describes federal policy. This next chapter of the discussion comes via the EE Global Forum, an online conference presented by the Alliance to Save Energy last week. That provided more fertile soil to consider issues and barriers with decarbonization policy. The Alliance is rooted in the Washington area and is committed to efficiency at the national level. The…
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Think Like a Scientist – Let it Go, Hey Oh

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The more I see, the less I know, the more I like to let it go – hey oh. That would be from one of my five favorite bands, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and their hard-driving genius lead singer, Anthony Kiedis. That is what came to mind when I read this article, Why Thinking Like a Scientist is Good for You. The feedback I get from this blog is that it’s honest, critical, discernment of facts and science without bias or emotion. It’s a breath of fresh air – or maybe bad breath from your beloved dog or child…
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