Today was our first day learning about the issues being dealt with out west. The first shareholder that we spoke to was a lady from the National Renewable Energy Lab in Denver. This was a great introduction into all of the different types of renewable energy being used. Especially for me since I am not an environmental major this was a really good introduction for the entire trip. Even thought I had a pretty good concept of what the lady was talking about, I still learned a lot. For example the sheer size of the wind turbines. I always knew they were very large but I never knew they were as big as a 747.
Another issue that I did not know about was that the Dakotas could potentially get 40% of their energy from wind but large oil companies like Peabody own large areas of
land out their and own the mineral rights incase their are resources that they want under ground so they do not want people to build on the land. That is why there are no wind turbines out west.
It was interesting to see inside their building was a small museum highlighting the different techniques and how they have changes over the years and it also showcased new technologies and the technologies that they invented. The one invention that I thought was really neat was the transpired solar wall on the side of the FedEx building. Since the technology worked very well and it seemed to be quite easy to install it seems like a really smart thing to start implementing more often.
The second part of the day we spent listen to a presentation
by a lady from the Western Resource Advocates. Since the lady from the first talked told us all we needed to know about renewable energy out west, it seemed like this lady told us all we needed to know about the Colorado River and land use. The statistic that I found the most interesting is when she started talking about how much of the west was owned by the government. She told us that 57% of Utah was federally owned as well as 85% of Nevada. To compare that to the east coast only 0.8% of New York is owned by the government and 0.4% of Connecticut. Since I grew up on the east coast it is hard to understand that a 85% of a state can be owned by the government.
She also talked about water use and water rights along the Colorado River. This was our first introduction to the Colorado River, which will turn into the main topic of our trip. One of the things that she talked about that was interesting was that the dams along Colorado River were not built for hydropower. That is a plus to having them but they are really made for water management. For example there is a coal power plant in Arizona that is not connected to the grid at all, its only purpose is to create energy to pump water from the Colorado River to be used in the Central Arizona Plan.
Picture Citations:
"Turbines Getting Larger." Sandia National Laboratories. Web.
http://i124.photobucket.com/albums/p7/NBBooks/WTGTurbinesGettingLargerSM.jpg
"Who Owns the West? U.S. General Service Administration. Web.
http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/map-owns_the_west.jpg
No comments:
Post a Comment