Burlington, Vt. is Leading America into a Future of Clean Energy

Vermont’s largest city, Burlington, is illustrating just what a greener future could look like.
The city now touts that 100 percent of its electricity is powered by renewable sources including wind, water and biomass. The Burlington Electric Department reached the notable figure following the purchase of  the Winooski 1 Hydroelectric Facility, located on the Winooski River, earlier this month.
While Burlington’s 42,000 residents have been encouraging electric utility providers to make the switch to greener sources, the city has been talking about achieving the milestone for around a decade. But in 2008, officials began developing an actual strategy.

“The transition in thought from 2004 to 2008 was ‘We want to do this’ to ‘This actually makes economic sense for us to do this,'” says Ken Nolan, the manager of power resources for Burlington Electric.

That “economic sense” means that residents will avoid rate increases, and according to Nolan, once the bonds for the Winooski One facility are paid off (around 20 years from now), the utility will see cost savings.
“A lot of times when you buy plants like this, you end up having to increase rates initially to drop them later,” Nolan tells The Burlington Free Press,  “and we were able to buy it without any impact and then lock in the benefits in the future.”
Of course, there will be instances in which there may not be enough wind and hydro energy to supply the city, which means they may have to generate electricity from traditional fossil fuel sources. But the goal is to amass a surplus of renewable energy when conditions are right — an excess that will be sold to other utilities.
Burlington joins a statewide movement toward ending reliance on harmful fossil fuel sources. The Washington Electric Co-operative, with around 11,000 customers throughout central and northern Vermont, reached 100 percent earlier this year.
The state has set a goal of reaching 90 percent of energy — including heat, electricity and transportation — from renewable resources by 2050. “We’re now in a position where we’re supplying Burlington residents with sources that are renewable,” Nolan says. “The prices are not tied to fossil fuels — they’re stable prices — and they provide us with the flexibility, from an environmental standpoint, to really react to any regulation or changes to environmental standards that come in the future.”
Around the country, more local governments and municipalities are working toward transitioning powering with renewable resources. For instance, after a tornado leveled Greensburg, Kansas in 2007, part of reconstruction included the installation of a 12.5-megawatt wind farm that began generating electricity in excess.
As more cities ponder ways to become greener cities, Burlington is proof that it can — and should — be done.
MORE: The United States’s First Carbon-Neutral City Is…

PowerCube: The Pop-up Power Station Revolutionizing Solar

We’ve all been there. You know, that time your phone dies in the middle of nowhere and you don’t have a charger. In times like those we all wish we had a portable power source for whenever and wherever we need it. Well, the PowerCube, by Ecosphere Technologies may provide the solution we’ve been waiting for…. and then some.
The process is relatively simple, if not astonishing. At the push of a button, a shipping container-sized cube instantly transforms into a pop-up solar power station that churns out up to 15kW of electricity. It won’t be powering the SuperBowl anytime soon, but it does provide nearly five times the power an average household generates in a single day.
The company spent seven years developing the cube to ensure it packed the biggest electrical punch while remaining self-contained and versatile over land, air or sea. This led to its unique design of panels extending outwards from the structure in all directions; that added surface area helps the cube produce as much as 400 percent more electricity than would be possible with panels solely on top.
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Ecosphere touts the PowerCube’s possibilities to assist in disaster relief, military work and humanitarian efforts abroad, but for many Americans this could also be the first step towards living a life “off the grid,” without a carbon footprint. There’s plenty of space in the container underneath the panel for a school, hospital, home, or really “whatever you can come up with,” explains the company’s director of marketing, Corey McGuire.
With small, mobile and environmentally-conscious prefab homes increasing in popularity, PowerCube provides some interesting new possibilities for alternative living. And, of course, a fully charged phone whenever you need it.

See How This University Is Turning Trash Into Treasured Clean Energy

Within the dining halls at the University of California, Davis, tossed-out food scraps have recently become empowered—quite literally.
Waste is being converted to power in the campus’s newly unveiled Renewable Energy Anaerobic Digester (“biodigester” for short), a set of large, white tanks that eat 50 tons of trash per day and burp out 12,000 kilowatt hours of renewable electricity, right into the campus’s grid. That’s enough to power almost 1,000 homes for a year, says a UC Davis release.
The mound of trash feeding the biodigester is composed of not just UC Davis cafeteria food scraps, but also campus yard clippings and waste from local restaurants and businesses. The system is expected divert 20,000 tons of waste from local landfills each year.
Unveiled on Earth Day, it’s the U.S.’s largest anaerobic biodigester on a college campus, and it owes its existence to technology developed by UC Davis biological and agricultural engineering professor Ruihong Zhang.  Anaerobic digestion isn’t exactly a new concept, but the UC Davis biodigester, built using Zhang’s technology, can consume more waste—and a greater variety of it—than previous versions, significantly increasing its efficiency.
Zhang had been working to get her patented technology out of the lab and onto the campus grid for nearly a decade, but found funding to be a major obstacle. When the university partnered with Sacramento-based CleanWorld—a tech company focused on anaerobic digestion systems—the UC Davis biodigester finally had the means to reach commercial scale. CleanWorld paid for the majority of the $8.5 million biodigester with private equity and commercial loans—though $2 million in public assistance came from the U.S. Department of Energy and the California Energy Commission.
Here’s hoping that other U.S. universities take note, and find ways to get their food scraps—and campuses—similarly empowered.