The National Solar Tour is October 3 – 5 and we will be hosting in-person visits as part of the Minnesota Sustainability Tour. With installation of our Mitsubishi Hiper-Heat cold climate air source heat pump (ccASHP) in January 2024, we are essentially fully electified for all home energy uses. What this means is we no […]
Our Electrified Home Read More »
Key Takeaways We recently completed a 2160 mile round trip to Fort Collins, Idaho Springs and Frisco Colorado in our 2025 Polestar 3. With many thousands of miles of Tesla roadtripping under our belts, this non-Tesla road trip was as easy as, and way more comfortable than many of the Tesla ones. The very first
Polestar 3 First Road Trip Read More »
On June 24 I joined a group of Climate Reality – Central Minnesota Chapter members on a tour of the Xcel Energy Sherco Solar Project. When completed, Sherco 1, 2 and 3 will form one of the largest solar power plants in the United States at 710MWac nameplate generation capacity covering 4680 acres (7.3 sq
Sherco solar plant tour Read More »
On Sunday, April 27 the MOPLY community will celebrate Earth Day with a Vegan/Vegetarian Lunch, Eco Fair, and Electric Vehicle car show. Details are at https://www.moply.org/solar-at-mo. The headline news is that the church is having a large solar panel system installed on the roof. This system will have a 123 kW nameplate capacity and will
Earth Day Celebration at Mount Olivet Lutheran Church of Plymouth Read More »
This is one of those nerdy topics that doesn’t matter, and yet, can be a source of ongoing debate. At least, I intend to make it so, even if I am screaming into the void. This is going to be a bit of a ramble, but hopefully you will find your self entertained and maybe
No, Virginia, There is (Technically) No Level 3 Read More »
I had the pleasure of meeting and talking to the Brooklyn Park Rotary club on April 15. Given the time that has passed since I last presented, I updated some of the slides that had several year old data with up-to-date information. These include counts of DC fast charger locations and dispensers, and manufacturer and
Electric Vehicle talk for Brooklyn Center Rotary Club Read More »
I am on several Sierra Club North Star chapter mailing lists and recently got an invite to a Degrowth Team meeting. The meeting invite included a link to an article for shared reading by Christopher Marquis, published on the Harvard Business Review and titled, In Defense of Degrowth. I saved a copy of the article
In (Real) Defense of Degrowth Read More »
I was recently contacted by Martin, a school volunteer at an extracurricular science program. Martin related that a student in the program had come across an earlier blog post I had written, as well as an informative article on electric school buses, and wondered if I would be willing to put a link to that
Electric school buses are a triple win Read More »
A few months ago, the idea of an alternative reality occurred to me: What if our personal contribution of green house gasses from driving a car was confined to our own share of the global atmosphere? This is not how the world works, of course. Every time we burn a fossil fuel, the CO2 produced
What if you had to live with your own CO2 from driving a car? Read More »
