Page 6 - North American Clean Energy July/August 2019 Issue

editor's note
news bites
THE GRADUATION SEASON HAS FINALLY
wrapped up. Fancy announcements, Congrats
to the Grad balloons, and other cap and gown paraphernalia are gradually fading from the store shelves. Many of us remember college as four years of liberal arts classes, followed by an entry-level
job at a company that often had nothing to do with our alleged eld of study. e advantage of growing up pre-internet and ubiquitous social media was that we could reinvent ourselves regardless of
the path we thought we would take when were undergrads. Usually, what we studied was not nearly as important as where we got our diploma. Religion and political science majors were just as likely as accounting majors to nd themselves in incubation programs run by major banks looking to train workers with a relatively blank slate.
It’s refreshing to see that, especially in the clean energy industry, the focus is shifting away from where you study, to what you can bring to the workforce right out of the gate. One of the most established and longest-running programs for a career in the solar industry is o ered by the San Juan College in New Mexico. You’ve probably never heard of it, but this unassuming community college has been training future solar industry workers for over 13 years. Now, of course, Going Green is the
cool thing to do, touted by every other social media “in uencer” and mainstream ad campaign out there. At the same time, renewable-related majors have gained traction on university campuses – prospective students can now get their degree from more easily recognized schools like University of Michigan, University of Texas, and even Stanford.
Higher education in the eld of renewable energy is re-embracing traditional technical school values, and producing employable graduates armed with a working knowledge of the industry. is new crop
of thinkers and doers will have a slight advantage over the rest of us. Terms we’ve had to learn from scratch are second nature to newcomers: net-zero, BIPV, SREC, SCADA, Lithium-Ion, Vanadium
ow, microgrid, blockchain, and, more recently, conservation banking. In case you didn’t know, conservation banking o cially began in 1995, as
a natural o shoot of wetland mitigation banking established by the U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service
(FWS) earlier in the decade. Conservation banks share certain qualities with the more widely known carbon credits, which are intended to o set proposed increases to the carbon footprint of a group or individual. (You can learn more about it on page 42).
Earth friendly coins
Ven is a global digital currency used by members of
Hub Culture to buy, share, and trade knowledge, goods, and services. It can be exchanged to anyone with an email address and spent at any Hub Culture Pavilion via the HubCulture.com platform. e value of Ven is determined by the nancial markets in a weighted
basket of currencies, commodities, and carbon futures trading against other major currencies at oating exchange rates. Ven is the rst digital currency to oat, and the rst to include carbon in its pricing, making it
the only environmentally linked currency. Since Ven
is 100% backed by reserve assets equivalent to Ven in circulation, the inclusion of these assets in the reserve basket provide a demand source for carbon, with material bene ts to the environment at large. Over 25,000 acres of Amazon rainforest and other environmental investments have been made as a result of Ven trading. Currently
over 50 million units of Ven have circulated, and it
can be used to purchase anything from commodities
to fashion, to cars to a co ee. Hub Culture recently announced the development of Ven Authorities, a project to enable partners to issue and redeem Ven through integrated ecosystems. is allows large organizations
to use Ven in exible ways and will allow corporations
to turn loyalty and point programs carbon neutral via a proprietary market-to-market accounting platform. Hub Culture members can earn Ven by inviting friends into the network, by sharing knowledge buying directly at market rates. Ven is also on Facebook.
Hub Culture /// www.hubculture.com Ven /// www.ven.vc
Blade runners
Engineers at LM Wind Power and its parent, GE Renewable Energy, have been thinking big... to the tune of 351ft (107m). at’s the length of one blade on the Haliade-X 12MW, GE’s largest and most powerful o shore wind turbine. Just one of these machines will generate enough sustainable energy to power 16,000 European homes. Possibly representing one of the largest single machine components ever built, the Haliade-X blade is longer than a football eld and
1.4 times the length of a Boeing 747,
and workers have popped one out of its factory mold for the rst time. e blades are being built at a plant in Cherbourg, France, by LM Wind Power. In Holland, GE recently laid the foundation of an onshore prototype of the Haliade-X, which will stand 853ft (260m) tall in its full glory, with a rotor diameter sweeping 722ft (220m).
GE /// www.ge.com
Incidentally, the FWS has approved over a hundred such conservation banks since 2011, so you may want to add this terminology to your ever-growing clean energy vocabulary. It’s not easy to keep the status of “expert” in our industry; every year brings new developments and surprises. e land lines, road maps, and banks of today are lining up to be the horseless carriages of tomorrow. At least you can look forward to regaling your future grandchildren with stories of how you not only had to drive yourself to work (uphill, both ways) but could expertly parallel park, bumper to bumper, without the aid of a single computer.
“Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.”
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
Meg
JULY•AUGUST2019 /// www.nacleanenergy.com
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