GREEN FOCUS: Cool Things That Are Green
Local News Grab Bag You May Not of Heard 11.01.09 to 11.07.0911/09/2009 Portland area green oriented news you may not have known about from the last week. What kind of news do you like? Email your entertaining items to us!
11/1/09 : I’d like to give a shout again to my favorite uncle, Sam. He has invested $40 million in geothermal energy projects across Oregon from federal stimulus money. It’s being divided up to seven initiatives with more than half going to see if energy can be harnessed from super heated water south of Bend from Newberry volcanic cone.
11/4/09 : Speaking of our money, Unky gave Portland $5.6 million for energy efficiency upgrades. This dough will go to upgrading traffic and cross walk signals citywide and paying for residential energy efficiency loans.
11/3/09 : Treebate! Yup, Portland will give you money for planting trees in your yard that are at least 1-inch in diameter and purchased from a commercial nursery. It’s a one-year-old initiative to reduce the amount of storm water runoff into storm drains, which ends up polluting our rivers and streams. Did you know that a 30-foot-tall tree could drink about 700 gallons of rainfall per year? Portland is estimated to have 20 billion gallons of stormwater runoff each year. That’s a lot of trees! The Bureau of Environmental Services and Friends of Trees hopes to plant 80,000 trees by 2013. That’s a lot of trees!!
11/4/09 : The Oregon Convention Center is going to get 12% of its electricity from a renewable called solar. They are going to build the largest solar rooftop power system in the Pacific Northwest, at least that’s what the convention center says. Are you down with the OCC?
11/5/09 : The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) has put together a business plan with PGE on a $20 million dollar solar project financed with public subsidies that would end up being owned by PGE. ODOT wants a solar grid to offset 1/6 or 16%of the energy now used to light our highways. The ODOT project relies, “on tax credits, accelerated depreciation and utility incentives to finance the installation; that would require working with a private entity such as PGE, because ODOT has no tax liability.” Oh, and they want to put in a trail so that we can see our money at work, which is under controversy as well by West Linn residents.
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