> Turning A Public Park Into An Edible Forest Free-For-All: It’s like a community garden on steroids. The concept is pretty simple: planners recreate a forest ecosystem with edible plants and trees in a public space. Then, in a deviation from most community garden models, they open it up and allow people to forage for food for free.
“It is a forest. It is a park. But it’s all edible, so the whole community can come in and sit under the apple tree and eat from the apple tree,” said Stephanie Syson, manager at the Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute.
Genesis Farm, in Blairstown, New Jersey (Angela Evancie)
> Nuns With a New Creed, Environmentalism: While many of their aged peers are living out their days in quiet convents, these women are digging gardens and offsetting carbon.
> Report - Western wildfires growing more intense, insurers deeply concerned: As part of a company that reinsures insurance companies, and can take a large financial hit when an especially costly disaster occurs, the Exposure Management team at Lloyd’s of London is particularly interested in events like wildfires.The team released a report titled “Wildfires: A Burning Issue For Insurers?” earlier this year outlining in great detail the reasons why wildfires are growing in intensity, how these fires translate to financial losses, and ways to reduce the frequency and damage caused by future events.
> Volvo's New Electric Vehicle Battery Technology Stores Energy in a Car's Body Panels: Conventional batteries that power today’s electric cars and hybrids take up space and add a lot of extra weight to the vehicles. Volvo just announced that it has developed a concept for lightweight structural energy storage components that could improve the energy usage of future electrified vehicles. The material (which consists of carbon fibers, nano-structured batteries and super capacitors) allows the battery components to be integrated into a car’s body panels, thereby taking up less space than conventional batteries.
> This ingenious way to build bridges will fix our crumbling infrastructure.
> Google makes its 13th clean energy investment in 3 years: Google continues to lead when it comes to Internet companies supporting clean power. It’s latest investment is in a solar panel project in Southern California.
The trough-shaped mirrors of the Solana project in Arizona. Image: Shayla Chase/APS
> Arizona Utility Tries Storing Solar Energy for Use in the Dark: In a closely watched new solar project called Solana, the energy is gathered in a three-square-mile patch of desert bulldozed flat near Gila Bend, about 50 miles southwest of Phoenix. A sprawling network of parabolic mirrors focuses the sun’s energy on black-painted pipes, which carry the heat to huge tanks of molten salt. When the sun has set, the plant can draw heat back out of the molten salt to continue making steam and electricity.
> Video: A Staff of Robots Can Clean and Install Solar Panels: Working in near secrecy until recently, the company, based in Richmond,
Calif., is ready to use its machines in three projects in the next few
months in California, Saudi Arabia and China. If all goes well,
executives expect that they can help bring the price of solar
electricity into line with that of natural gas by cutting the cost of
building and maintaining large solar installations.