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S1 in the News: Here Comes Solar on Fox5NY
In case you missed it, Here Comes Solar, Solar One's community solar initiative, was featured on Fox 5 News at 6, in a segment that's pretty substantial for a half hour local evening news show.
You can watch the segment here, but it features HCS Program Manager Anika Wistar-Jones showing a Fox 5 team around a solar array installed on the roof of an affordable housing development on the Lower East Side. Then HCS Director Noah Ginsburg talks in the studio with anchorman Ernie Anastos, who has been on the air in New York for 40 years, about the growing solar power market in NYC.
Still haven't signed up for community solar? What are you waiting for? Sign up with Daroga Power, help spur solar development and reduce your electricity bill, all at the same time!
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How Hot Is Too Hot? India May Be Finding Out
India's climate has long been noted for its hotness, but climate change is now threatening to make cities in the South Asian country- the most populous democracy in the world- unlivable.
Extreme heat isn't just uncomfortable, or energy-intensive. It can be deadly. According to the NY Times, alarm bells rang for India's National Disaster Management Agency after a heat wave struck the normally hot city of Ahmedabad, in western India, in May, 2010, and temperatures soared to 118 degrees Fahrenheit, or 48 Celsius: It resulted in a 43 percent increase in mortality, compared to the same period in previous years, a study by public health researchers found.
Among the 100 most populous cities where summer highs are expected to reach at least 95 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, according to estimates by the Urban Climate Change Research Network, 24 are in India. Worldwide, by 2030, extreme heat could lead to a $2 trillion loss in labor productivity, the International Labor Organization estimated.
You can read more about this on the NY Times website here.
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Can Some NYC Freight Traffic Be Moved Off the Roads and Onto the Water?
If there was one single event that elevated New York City into a global capital, it was surely the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. Linking the Hudson River, the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes made moving goods in the pre-Interstate days exponentially easier than overland transport at the time. Right now, as I type this, a giant barge full of containers is sailing past the windows of the solar 1 building, accompanied by tugboats, much as they have for the past 100+ years.
But today, most freight is not shipped to the Port of New York. Instead, it goes to either the Port of Albany or the Port of New Jersey, where it is sorted and then loaded onto trucks for delivery to New York City and points east.
Activists hoping to reduce emissions and ease traffic congestion have long called for a return to freight shipping on the Hudson and East Rivers. Now the NYC Economic Development Corporation (EDC) is launching the Freight NYC Initiative to make the port more active by creating new shipping hubs and adding light rail infrastructure.
EDC believes that 4,000 jobs can be created, air quality in neighborhoods that bear the most truck traffic will improve, and modernizing the whole system will improve the quality of life for all New Yorkers. The city is prepared to spend $100 million on the project, which is backed by the Waterfront Alliance and the New York League of Conservation Voters.
Not everyone is sold, though, and questions remain about how to warehouse the goods that would be arriving by water, which normally go to huge distribution centers before being loaded on trucks to their final destination. Waterfront property, cheap and undesirable during the heyday of the Port of New York, is now expensive and mainly redeveloped for residential use.
Aside from the possible downsides, using the waterways more efficiently for transportation via the NYC Ferry service or freight-by-water is basically an environmentally sound idea, to our way of thinking. You can read more about this on the NYLCV website here.
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