Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
Green buildings, Planet Walkers and Getting Paid by Eskom
Kenyan blogger Juliana Rotich is the editor of Green Global Voices, which monitors citizen media in the developing world, and is a regular contributor to this page. Thomson Reuters is not responsible for the content – the views are the author’s alone.
Green buildings, a man walking the planet and a net metering law have been inspiring bloggers in South Africa in recent days.
Picture of Green Roof in the western cape South Africa, by Mark Turner on Flickr.
Rory of the Carbon Smart blog posts top ten reasons why we need green buildings
Buildings have a huge role to play in addressing environmental concerns. They contribute around 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions and the same proportion of waste; and since South Africa is in the top 20 list of worst offenders, the building industry in this country has a lot to be accountable for.
The Ethical co-op blog posts a video of John Francis – planetwalker.
Wind power wants a place on your roof, too
Putting solar panels on your roof may be all the rage in California, but what’s a green homeowner to do in less sundrenched parts of North America?
How about powering your home or business with wind, for starters. And no, that doesn’t mean planting a 100-foot-tall wind tower in your backyard.
This week, Grand Rapids, Michigan-based Cascade Engineering launched a wind turbine aimed at residential and business customers. According to Jessica Lehti, the company’s senior sales and marketing manager, the Swift Wind Turbine is as soft as a whisper and fits on the side of buildings, making it “more zoning compliant” for urban and suburban settings.
The drawback for most of us will unfortunately be the product’s cost. The Swift turbine carries a price tag of $10,000, including installation, and is unlikely to rid you of your utility bill entirely.
“It’s really a supplemental system,” Lehti said, adding that it would provide about one-fifth of an average American home’s energy needs. For more conservation-conscious customers, that could go up to about 40 percent.
Depending on state tax incentives, regional electricity rates and the average wind speed at its location, it could take anywhere from 3 years to 40 years for the turbine to pay for itself, Lehti said.
The good news? A federal tax incentive that will go into effect in January could give residential customers a $1,000 credit per system, with commercial customers getting up to a $4,000 credit, Cascade said. Those tax breaks should help the small wind turbine market grow between 18 percent and 20 percent through 2010, according to the American Wind Energy Association.
Right now the cost of wind turbines are still expensive, but there are a lot of turbines! As more and more are built, the cost in production will go down!
