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How would you like to get your electricity from wind power, and at cheaper rates than the ESB?  It’s really easy to switch to Airtricity online, all you need is your ESB account number (on your bill), and if you have the number of the meter reading to hand it makes things even quicker.  Within 5 minutes you can be finished with ESB and fossil fuels!

Airtricity is owned by Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE).  The renewable-energy company, established in 1999, was the first independent supplier of green energy to customers both in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.  It has now built up a considerable infrastructure of wind farms across Ireland, with 17 onshore wind farms generating 878 mega watts of electricity – enough to power 180,000 households. At present, the company provides green energy to just over 60,000 customers across the island of Ireland, of which 45,000 are SMEs and 15,000 are domestic customers.

Airtricity has also just announced that they are to create 200 jobs in the Irish market, in the areas of sales, customer support, billing and support services. Fifty of the positions will be created in Airtricity’s headquarters in Sandymount, Co Dublin, with the remaining 150 comprising outsourced roles.  Green, clean, and profitable: these are the kind of green shoots that matter.

It’s not all bad: the old “death zone” between East and West Germany is now a unique nature preserve, where many species who were almost exctinct are now thriving; the ancient and underappreciated black bee could be the salvation of plummetting bee populations across Northern Europe; and thanks to the economic downturn recycling waste is suddenly a very profitable business.  Could someone please alert the media?

As a sometime film technician, for me the most noticeable impact of climate change in Ireland has been the increasing wind speeds – in the past 18 months I’ve been on two commercials that were closed down because it was too windy to shoot; that had never happened to me in the previous 15 years. However, there are may be some positive side effects to this new phenomena, energy independence being chief among them.  The creators of Spirit of Ireland view Ireland as infinitely rich in the sustainable and ecological power of wind.  The group’s idea is clever because it addresses the issue of wind’s intermittent nature by storing the energy in the form of reservoirs, which then create hydroelectricity on demand.  It’s pretty neat. And for proof that energy independence is not just possible but profitable, Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker article is a must-read: she describes how the residents of a Danish island went from impoverished to wealthy in a matter of a few years, simply by using the wind that was already rushing across their land every day.

Besides capturing the wind itself, the future of wind power technology in Ireland is promising as well, as last week’s announcement of 250 new jobs in Mayo testifies.

So if you agree that the future of wind is mighty, you can start using it yourself today: Airtricity gets at least 70% of their electricity from Irish wind farms, it’s cheaper than the ESB and it only takes 5 minutes to switch: isn’t that as refreshing as a cool breeze?

Amidst all the doom and gloom and very real economic pain, one happy effect of the recession, at least in the UK, is a massive reduction in waste.  Instead of carelessly throwing out food, people are buying less and using more. In England, local councils and waste management companies are reporting a drop of up to 10 per cent in waste collection in recent months, a fall that the UK environmental charity Waste Watch estimates could result in a massive reduction of 2.5 million tonnes in waste production in 2009 – enough rubbish to fill Canary Wharf five times over.  I don’t have the figures for Ireland but suspect the same is going on here.  Which makes you wonder how much people were throwing out in the first place!  There are a few reasons offered for this change: a shift in public attitudes away from extravagant living; a drop in the amount of white goods (like washing machines and TVs) being thrown out; and a fall in construction waste, as the recession affects the number of building projects.  But there’s also a rise in recycling, which indicates a social shift beyond economics. One young mother says “I suppose it is a combination of not wanting to waste money and concerns about the environment. Not being wasteful does save you money. I think a lot of people feel the same as me about not wasting things.”  Less is more might be the new black!

Meet Filomena Gonzales de Chambi, shopkeeper and entrepreneur, from La Paz, Bolivia.  She’s just one of the hundreds of people eligible for a microloan to develop her business.  Kiva Microfunds is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website.  If you have 20 euros to spare, you can choose an entrepreneur you’d like to lend to: perhaps a water spinach farmer in Cambodia, a grocer in Tajikstan or a shoemaker in Tanzania…?  The entrepreneurs are referred by local microfinance institutions, and shown on the website with their photo and details about what they would use the loan for.  Loans are usually repaid after about 6-12 months, during which time you can receive email journal updates and track repayments. Once you’re repaid, you can relend to someone else in need.  Power to the people! 

Let’s see, who stands to gain from this swine flu “pandemic,” that has so far killed just seven people in Mexico and one Mexican child in the US.  Hmmm.  Check out what Dr. Mercola has to say about it, and relax.  And don’t get a vaccine!!!

As anyone who read the blog on electric cars below will know, I’m skeptical of just changing the symptom without addressing the cause.  The big problem with electric cars (as with computers, phones, and even wind and wave power) is that batteries, to date, are uneconomical in terms of the energy that is lost in storage.  A team at Boston’s MIT university have come up with a solution that is part terrifying and part exciting.  These braniacs have genetically engineered a virus that builds rechargeable lithium-ion batteries in the form of a plastic film. 

Whatsmore, these nanocreatures were created using green processes: the researchers bred the viruses to self-assemble nanoscale battery films by creating billions of random variations, then using the survival-of-the-fittest principle to select those that best performed desired tasks. (One man’s breeding is another man’s genetic engineering…!) And the batteries can be constructed in an environmentally-friendly manner, avoiding toxic solvents and energy-intensive procedures:  “Because the viruses are living organisms, we had to use only water-based solvents, no high pressures and no high temperatures,” says Angela Belcher, the study coauthor.

The viruses were selected from common bacteriophages, which infect bacteria but are harmless to humans. To the Buddhists in the house who say “But what about the bacteria?  Aren’t they living creatures too?”  I can only answer – if we keep using the old batteries there won’t be any bacteria left to care…!

In demonstrations, batteries made using the micro-contact printing method were able to be recharged hundreds of times with no detectable drop in performance – now that truly is incredible. We still have the problem of how the charge will be created, but this is extremely interesting news for greeniacs everywhere who can overlook the Frankenstein element of living creatures creating things – but wait!  Isn’t that what farming is all about?  In this case, the farm is just nano size – not as picturesque, but then global warming isn’t too pretty either…

Eventually, they plan to commercialize the printable battery films. Last week, MIT President Susan Hockfield demonstrated the prototype to U.S. President Barack Obama.  This wasn’t just a courtesy: funding for the research was provided by the U.S. Army Research Office Institute and the U.S. National Science Foundation.  Here’s hoping Obama will use it for the right purposes….

The proposed city centre car ban, and its opposition, are examples of the adversarial thinking that is becoming out of date. People need to drive into the city, and businesses need them to do so. The problem isn’t the number of people coming in, or that they need to drive: the problem is that they’re driving alone. Facilitating carpooling would solve the problem: the park-and-ride facilities at the Red Cow roundabout and Sandyford industrial estate could easily handle carpoolers as well as Luas users, and there are plenty of industrial estates that could handle a little more parking now that less employees are coming to work. The same conditions exist at most cities across Ireland. Why don’t businesses and city councils cooperate to promote carpooling? Shoppers and workers could save on petrol and parking, as well as sharing information on good deals…Who knows, maybe someone would even carry your shopping!

A report in today’s London Independent suggests that over the past few decades the sun has quietened its sunspot activity, thereby cooling the earth, at exactly the same time as greenhouse gasses were heating the planet to dangerous temperatures.  Is this pure coincidence, or could it be that the Gaia theory doesn’t just hold for the earth but for the entire solar system? How comforting and awesome to imagine that this system, and who knows, perhaps the whole universe, is a sophisticated organism, self-regulating and self-healing – much as our microcosmic little bodies are…?

Just when I thought you humans were really barking mad, you go and redeem yourselves! According to the February brief on Trendwatching.com, corporations are preparing to ditch greed and embrace generosity! They’re getting the message that countless humans have already started doing this: giving is the new taking, and sharing is the new giving. It’s how I feel about car-sharing and carpooling and why I love it so much!

TripMia, the dog-blogger