Wind Farms and Earthships

Hi friends,

Greetings from Albuquerque, New Mexico! We got here this afternoon and gave a presentation tonight at the UU church here in the city. It's beautiful landscape here, so much different from back home - the surroundings didn't really look TOO different until we got down to Louisiana, and since then we've crossed through long plains with less and less vegetation through Texas, then into New Mexico through beautiful mountains and deserts, driving alongside the Rio Grande. The houses have also changed a lot, with a lot more ranch houses, and in New Mexico a lot of adobe buildings (we even passed an adobe-front Wal-Mart).

So since we left Austin we've stopped at two more project locations that were just amazing and inspiring.

We left Austin Monday morning and traveled up to Roscoe, Texas, a small town west of Abilene that is hard to find on the map! Carrick interviewed Cliff Etheridge, who rallied the small town to bring in investors for a large wind farm, and when the project is finished over the next two years it will be the largest wind farm in the world. Just to stand in the field of turbines and turn 360 degrees surrounded by them everywhere was an amazing sight. Mr. Etheridge's story is so inspiring - he is a hero, one individual who has accomplished something amazing, though he is humble as it gets. I can't wait to get to work on the Roscoe video when we return. Just a quick tidbit, standing in a field of several hundred wind turbines, they barely make a whisper, and I didn't see any dead birds on the ground!

We went on from there to Lubbock, Texas where we gave a presentation at the UU church after a great vegan potluck!

Tuesday we arrived in Taos, a small city in northern New Mexico, where we stayed overnight in an earthship. A what? Earthships are self-sustaining houses made from different renewable and waste materials: most prominently 3 of the 4 walls are made from used tires filled and rammed with dirt, and the walls are covered with adobe and cement. These are truly amazing and beautiful houses, and it makes our house in Massachusetts seem so unnatural and designed against nature instead of with it. I'll have to upload some pics we took of the earthships we visited so you can see what I mean. They rent them out for overnight stays so we got to experience living in an earthship and this morning we got a tour of an earthship that was recently built, all on video. There are so many unique elements it will be hard to edit the video down to 5 minutes - I may have to stretch that one out a bit... Carrick and I have toured zero-energy homes at the Solar Decathlon that rely heavily on technology to be off-grid and self-sustaining, but earthships are a different, more natural approach.

Car trouble strikes! Well, not that dramatic really, but I noticed for the last two days the Beetle had hesitation starting and I wanted to get it fixed before we ended up stranded somewhere (out here you can REALLY get stranded, no joke) plus we needed an oil change, so we stopped by the VW dealer here in Albuquerque who of course found other problems too. $800 later we got the car back, a lot more than I was expecting, but left unchecked we could have found ourselves in big trouble. Ugh. I'm grateful at least that they were able to fit us in on same-day notice so we can be on our way tomorrow.

READER QUESTION:
As you ride around and visit all these facilities, does it seem more likely or less likely to you that we could get all our energy from renewables?
Well, we still have the majority of renewable energy sites yet to visit, and I've been a big proponent of being able to produce all the electricity we need from renewables. I do wish people could have stood where I was in Roscoe to experience the wind farm first-hand, and I think if people saw how they looked (graceful and majestic) and heard how quiet they were (right in the middle of hundreds of turbines), there would be far fewer people who are opposed to them. There are just so few chances for people to personally experience that in this country. Although we didn't get to see the wave power buoy off the New Jersey coast, the stats from the Ocean Power Technolgies website show that harnessing wave power in select areas around the world could provide twice as much electricity as the world consumes. I hope that our eco-video series will show people the solutions that exist, and get more people asking 'why can't we do that more?' because the answer is usually that we can if people learn more about it and start making it happen.

Be well,
Colin
www.OurRenewableNation.org