Meet Mike Mercurio, a friend of mine in Long Beach Island, NJ. The image shows his PV Solar installation and small wind turbine. The turbine sits 34 feet above the ground. The 6-foot blades make the tip 40 feet above the ground.

Mercurio’s wind turbine and solar panels produce power without pollution – without greenhouse gases, mercury, and radioactive wastes. And with an annual bill of $114. Click Here for Treehugger

, or Here for the International Herald Tribune.

His neighbors prefer smog. They prefer the hacking cough of polution related “health effects” and other “externalities” to the gentle whirr of wind power. And electric bill of $2500 per year and $3500 per year, as opposed to his grid-connect charges of $114. What are they thinking? Are they thinking?

Mercurio is a real patriot who believes in intelligent action, not empty words. His wind turbine and photovoltaic solar panels show us how to achieve energy independence, and national security, with clean safe energy, with lower costs, with no pollution.

He should be applauded and emulated, not sued and shut down.

Amory Lovins

, of the Rocky Mountain Institute

, lives in a solar powered and super-insulated home in Colorado. He coined the term “Negawatts” for energy saved via conservation and has been working for the last 30 / 35 years for sustainable and intelligent energy policy.

I met Lovins 31 years ago, in Albany, NY, in 1976. I was an energy intern for the New York Public Interest Research Group, NYPIRG, studying nuclear power, nuclear economics, and clean energy alternatives under Dr. Marvin Resnikoff at SUNY – Buffalo.

We were in Albany to testify before the New York State Legislature’s Committee on Energy, the Economy, and the Environment. And argue:

1. Their priorities were wrong. As shown by their title, they put energy first, the economy second, and the environment came last.
2. Rather than nuclear power, we should be looking at clean renewable energy. “Theoretically,” we argued, “we could power the New York City Subways with wind turbines positioned off-shore of Long Island.

Little has changed. However, I wouldn’t use the term “Theoretically” today. Look at the Arklow Bank wind farm, (built by GE and Airtricity) and the 11.6 gigawatt of wind power generating capacity in the United States today.

We can power our cities, towns, suburbs with solar panels on the roofs, geothermal in the basement or the backyard, and wind turbines on the mountains and off-shore. The people / nations / economies who do this first will leap far beyond those who try to play catch-up.

Dr. Hermann Scheer, on the Eurosolar page.

The mythical Prometheus was banished from Mount Olympus for giving control over fire – technology – to man. Dr. Hermann Scheer, a contemporary Prometheus, an economist, and member of the German Parliment, and board member of Eurosolar

, says “A Solar global economy will enable the total demand for energy and raw materials to be met. … By the systematic use of solar … all material needs of humanity can be satisfied on a permanent basis.” (For the text of the article, click here.)

President Kennedy once said “Ich bin Ein Berliner.” To paraphrase Kennedy, “Ich bin ein Scheermench.”

Sunpower Corp, which trades using the symbol SPWR, makes photovoltaic “modules” that turn sunlight into electricity. These can be small enough to power a calculator and large enough, when linked together, to power homes, stores, warehouses and office buildings. Johnson & Johnson uses solar power at its Cordis facility in Warren, NJ. As does Whole Foods in Princeton, NJ. and Timberland in various factories around the world.

Sunpower, through its Powerlight

subsidiary ‘designs, deploys, operates and maintains the largest solar power systems in the world.’ Other publicly traded solar energy companies include Akeena

, Evergreen Solar, First Solar, World Water and Power. They compete with BP Solar, a subsidiary of British Petroleum, Kyocera, Nanosolar, Sanyo, Sharp. Home Depot sells BP Solar’s best panels.

Microsoft Corp, which trades using the symbol MSFT, is a software company. It writes computer programs such as Microsoft Windows, Office, Exchange, SQL Server, etc.

The question is not will Sunpower start writing software, but will Sunpower’s stock price, or that of any of their competitors, follow a tragectory like Microsoft’s. What trajectory? A $3 Thousand investment in Microsoft stock at their IPO March 1986, would be worth something like $1 Million today. Each share of stock purchased in 1986 is worth 288 shares today, after splitting 9 times. (Click Here and Here) Because Microsoft, along with Intel, Apple, Sun, Oracle, Compaq, and other companies, changed the way we work, play, learn, and, think. They shifted the paridigm.
Solar panels turn sunlight into electricity without pollution, toxic wastes, radioactive wastes, mercury, greenhouse gases. There is no fuel, so there are no fuel costs, fuel spills, etc. There are no greenhouse gases as there are with fossil fuels and no security ramifications, as with nuclear power.
And Clean Energy costs less. Solar power costs about $7 per watt not counting any tax breaks or government subsidies. Wind is $3 per watt for offshore turbines, less for land based turbines, altho the maintenance costs are higher. Nuclear is hard to price because it relies so heavily on government subisdies. When you factor in the “externalities,” the time required to build, the fuel costs, nuclear power is probably on the order of $20 to $50 per watt.

So as Otis said, ‘Sittin in the mornin’ sun. …’ I can feel the paradigm shifting.

*
In the intrests of disclosure,. I am not a licensed financial advisor and I do not currently work in the financial industry. I do, however, own stock in some of these and other companies.

Has Lee Iacocca, former CEO of Chrysler, who 5 years ago started building electric cars, become a spokesman for the American Left?

In Where Have All the Leaders Gone? posted on Depression 2 and referenced on the Daily Kos, Iacocca thunders against the mistakes of the Bush Administration, the “do nothing Congress” in session 97 days in 2006 (hey that’s more than 1 day out of 4), the media which sees no evil, speaks no evil, and hears no evil, and the citizens who work, watch tv, and hope they don’t get sick cause of the medical insurance situation.

Excerpt: Where Have All the Leaders Gone? By Lee Iacocca with Catherine Whitney

“Had Enough? Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.” Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out! You might think I’m getting senile, that I’ve gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don’t need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we’re fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That’s not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for.”

What’s next? Will Jack Welch build wind turbines? Will an oil company build solar panels? (Wait a minute GE is building wind turbines and is using Donovan’s “Catch the Wind” to advertise them. British Petroleum is building solar panels. I can feel the paradigm shifting.)

NPR’s Marketplace broadcast Nuclear Power Redux on March 27, 2007, a predictable piece on nuclear power. Marketplace interviewed an industry spokesman, a business lobbyist who said “It’s ok, we only worry sometimes,” and a environmental activist who used to work for the nuclear industry but became disillusioned when she realized that nuclear power is “a crappy way to boil water.”

The industry spokesman repeated the same tired old fallacies about solar and wind power “that there is insufficient capacity to make a meaningful difference. Marketplace didn’t challenge him, but he’s wrong. Just about any house in New Jersey can be retrofitted with enough solar panels to meet its needs for electricity and hot water. Similarly, much of the power needs for single family homes in every state, except Washington and Oregon, could be met through solar power.

Solar panels don’t produce power or hot water at night. That’s where wind power comes in. VestasGeneral Electric and Airtricity built and installed on the Arklow Bank of Ireland, if installed in sufficient number off the coast of New Jersey, could also take care of much of the state’s power needs. If installed along the Gulf Coast, up the Atlantic Seaboard, along the Pacific, in the Great Plains, in West Texas, wind power could provide much of the nation’s electricity needs.harnesses the wind to produce 33% of Denmark’s electricity. Today. The kind of wind turbines that

Solar and wind provide power with no pollution: no greenhouse gases, no mercury, no radioactive wastes. There is no fuel so there are no fuel costs. No mines, no mills, no wells, no spills. Unlike nuclear, evacuation plans and extraordinary security measures are not necesssary. There are none of the external costs that are associated with nuclear, coal, or oil.

Land based wind costs about $1.5 million per megawatt of generating capacity, offshore wind costs about $3.5 million per mw, rooftop solar costs about $7 per watt, $7 million per mw. At $6 Billion for a 1,167 mw plant, Watts Barr cost about $5 million per mw. So when you look at the hard costs to build, forgetting the externalities and the massive government subsidies for nuclear power, the technologies cost the same.

When you factor in those externalities: the costs of safety, security, waste management, and fuel for nuclear, versus practically nothing for wind and solar; when you factor in the 23 years to build Watts Barr versus a few months to build the Arklow bank wind facility; you realize that wind and solar can be brought on line faster and cheaper and without the kinds of public relations challenges or government subsidies nuclear requires.

So what’s the best answer for tomorrow’s power needs today? The answers, to juxtapose Bob Dylan and Otis Redding, are Sittin’ in the morning sun

andBlowin’ in the wind.