It is now over but this commentary notes some of the neat stuff that showed up.
Strategic Green
If you want to make money, you better have a contingency for a future where there’s global cooling, and brokers populate the streetcorners with signs that say “will trade carbon credits for food.” No rational investor fails to prepare for likely eventualities - and the precautionary principle that informs global warming alarm will not help your portfolio when global temperature trends are on the downside of even. The true believers will rejoice that Polar Bears lived, and you will paper walls with green stocks, pasted right on top of the internet stocks, and the membership units in the condo complex that flipped ten times and crashed before it was built.
Today was the last day of the Green California Summit at the Sacramento Convention Center, and nearly the entire main hall in the sprawling building was filled. Of the many exhibitors, our absolute surprise winner had to be Miles Motors, a company that has stealthily accumulated sales of what is now thousands of all-electric cars, sold and being operated by customers. Miles Motors has been doing a lot of fleet sales; they offer trucks; their unit sales of freeway-capable EVs have started to climb beyond a pilot phase. Why isn’t this company front page news?
At the 2008 Green California Summit there were inspiring displays of biodegradable utensils and plates and cups made from sugar cane or corn from Nature Friendly Products and Stalk Market. There were inexpensive, solar-friendly rooftops from Carlisle, and turf rooftops from GreenGrid. There were photovoltaic panels you can unroll onto a roof and walk on from Solar Integrated, building-deployable vertical-axis windvanes that look like giant corkscrews from Helix Wind, and two of the most efficient residential solar installers to-date, the meteoric Solar City and Akeena Solar.
Not to be ignored, there were a couple of companies who have developed and are selling green urinals, Zurn and Falcon, which use nearly negligible water. Moreover, unlike wave power devices, urinals do not have a lot of embodied energy. And along with Miles, and Zap, and Zenn, there were the photovoltaic powered golf carts (the flat shade roof is covered with photovoltaics) from Cruise Car; some models collect about 1.5 miles of range each day in full sun - greatly supplementing the onboard battery.
Exciting progress is being made in integrated walls, cheap, incorporating all structural elements, and employing green materials. Perform Wall manufactures (approximately) 1′ x 1′ x 2′ bricks of a foam and concrete mixture that can be stacked like Legos and filled with rebar and concrete, Sipcrete manufactures structural panels with a steel web reinforced, fairly thin concrete exterior, with foam-filled interior space interlaced with a steel frame consisting of diagonals connecting the thin exterior walls by integrating into the wire mesh.
Also exhibiting at Green California was ARXX, who manufactures a structural wall solution equally unique and innovative. ARXX manufactures approximately 1′ x 1′ x 2′interlocking rectangular blocks that have rigid foam exteriors (roughly 2″ thick foam exterior walls) that are set about 6″ apart, the interiors linked with plastic diagonal struts that include snap-in indentations for inserting rebar. Once these blocks are assembled with rebar inserted, they have concrete poured in and can have various surface treatments. This is an extremely interesting innovation.
If you care about the rivers and springs, along with using desalination plants to pump water back into aquifers who desperately need positive water inflow to guarantee their future viability, you would want to see concrete that could allow water to flow through it to facilitate aquifer replenishment. Enviro-Crete has porous concrete that allows rain and runoff to drain through its surfaces into the earth. Such a surface might often dramatically reduce runoff if it were used for parking lots, or roads and driveways, or any suface ordinarily surfaced with nonporous concrete. Porous road surfaces is an excellent idea.
