I can't believe the news today

E-word,

It's strange waking up to NPR in the morning, because I tend to half sleep through it for the first fifteen or twenty minutes. Evidently U2 won 5 grammys yesterday? I didn't even know the Grammys were on last night, but I know that U2 won 5 of them.

It was good seeing you, man. Hanging out brought back memories of the time you were commuting up from Richmond, and we'd get to hang out more frequently. Walking around Dupont Circle was fun. Maybe next time we can walk another DC neighborhood.

Speaking of renewable resources, I have to do a project on renewable resources. The guidelines are specific but broad, if you understand what I'm saying. I need to write about a renewable resource, but I have to go into topics such as energy output, system costs, environmental impacts, and viability of the project. Yesterday, I started thinking about how my neighborhood (more specifically the townhouse development I live in) could use renewable energy. I figure thinking small might help me focus a little. Since we're talking about renewable energy, I focused in on how my neighborhood could rely less on power from the grid. Certain things obviously couldn't work in my neighborhood, specifically hydro-electric power and anything water related (wave motion, ocean temperature variations, etc). I also have severe problems with using wind energy in my neighborhood, for perhaps the obvious reasons of noise, appearance, space limitations, and the danger of having kids playing close to these things.

After ruling out a couple of more unreasonable energy sources such as geothermal (we're not in Iceland!) and biomass (we're not a corn field, either!), it basically comes down to two specific things that my neighborhood can do to be rely less on coal or nuclear electricity; soloar thermal, and solar photovoltaic.

That's as far as I've gotten, but you can already see how limiting depending on renewables can be. Thus far it's been an interesting exercise.

Um, gotta go to a meeting, I'll update later.

Toe