Our Electrified Home
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
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Sherco solar plant tour
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
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Earth Day Celebration at Mount Olivet Lutheran Church of Plymouth
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
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In (Real) Defense of Degrowth
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
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Electric school buses are a triple win
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
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What if you had to live with your own CO2 from driving a car?
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
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First Universalist Community Dinner
The Environmental Justice group at First Universalist is running a Drawdown Carbon program to help members learn about what they can do to reduce their carbon footprint. After their community dinner on April 19, 2023, I was invited to provide my EV presentation as part of the Drawdown program. The slide deck did not change
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Community Ed class in Rochester
I am doing another community education class on behalf of Rochester Public Utilities (RPU) on September 27. Details are on the Rochester Community Education website (class page). The title is “Electric Vehicles – Are They Right for You?”, which I think is a great title since that is the question a lot of people are
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Welcome fellow MOPLY members!
Shout out to my church, Mount Olivet of Plymouth for recognizing the importance of the UN Climate Change conference (aka COP26) being held now through November 12 in Glasgow Scotland. As noted in the Moply elert, this site is chock full of EV (and solar power) goodness and I’m always up for answering questions you
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