Word: powerize
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...corner of this Earth now recognize that energy supplies are growing scarcer, energy demands are growing larger, and rising energy use imperils the planet we will leave to future generations. And that's why the world is now engaged in a peaceful competition to determine the technologies that will power the 21st century. From China to India, from Japan to Germany, nations everywhere are racing to develop new ways to producing and use energy. The nation that wins this competition will be the nation that leads the global economy. I am convinced of that. And I want America...
...resources we have in abundance, everything from figuring out how to use the fossil fuels that inevitably we are going to be using for several decades, things like coal and oil and natural gas; figuring out how we use those as cleanly and efficiently as possible; creating safe nuclear power; sustainable -- sustainably grown biofuels; and then the energy that we can harness from wind and the waves and the sun. It is a transformation that will be made as swiftly and as carefully as possible, to ensure that we are doing what it takes to grow this economy...
...says Daniel Richter, professor of soils and forest ecology at Duke University. They are different from ordinary plants that generate electricity by burning wood. In a piece in the journal Science last March, Richter wrote that 90% of the solar energy stored in wood is transformed into heat and power by AWC technology, compared with 20% to 40% by simply firing wood. Furthermore, AWC burns so efficiently that it is considered to be virtually carbon neutral. (See an interactive graphic of a green home...
Even though such power plants have very little political backing, they have been popping up from New England to the Pacific Northwest. The new technology does have support - for now. Fuels for Schools is a six-state program funded by federal and state money that helps to retrofit school boilers, switching them from burning oil and gas to wood. Starting in Vermont, it spread westward, giving budget-strapped local districts huge savings and a way to cut into buildups of forest deadfall that might otherwise fuel wildfires. However, it is now almost out of federal money. Even after the program...
...itself in fuel savings, plus selling CO2 emission offsets through the Climate Trust. Meanwhile, Vermont's Middlebury College is completing a central thermal biomass system that will provide heating and cooling, saving $2 million a year on fuel-oil bills, plus generating one-fifth of campus electrical-power needs. Middlebury is planting fast-growing willow shrubs on 10 acres, in the hopes that it will provide as much as half the woody fuels that are needed by the new system. Says Duke's Richter: "It's a technology whose time has come...