Ashden Awards Reward Energy Innovation

It's seems easy for Americans to complain about the cost of gasoline, even as they line up to buy the latest eight-cylinder behemoth offered by one of the Big Three US Automakers. Of course, not as many of us are showing up at US dealerships as they once were, so maybe we are finally beginning to see the error of our ways.

Meanwhile, the US government has done little to offer its citizens any useful power alternatives. And it's not just about the price of gasoline.
It's how much it costs to heat our homes, schools and hospitals; how we have major power outages because it snowed too much and the power lines snapped, or because it was too windy.
How we have all the ugly power lines draped across our beautiful countryside in the first place--through every town, every city, from every church and school and hospital, and how we still don't have enough energy to make available to everyone.

Heating oil, natural gas, coal--every fossil fuel known to man has been tried, tested and integrated into our national infrastructure as surely as "Mom" and "apple pie." All while we look askance at any attempt to make things better. No electric cars or even mass public transportation systems are being floated as possible solutions to the US energy crisis.
And it is a crisis.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels has created a fund for wealthier citizens to donate money to citizens unable to pay their heating bills as a way of keeping people from freezing to death this winter. But the city is only facilitating the giving, not offering any solutions to the long-term problem.

At this point people usually ask, "What can the city do?" My answer: PLENTY.

But if you don't believe me, look at what's being accomplished in places we commonly refer to as the "Third World."
Since 2003, The Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy have rewarded what they call "developing communities" for devising renewable sources of energy such as, micro-damming projects, solar energy and bio-gas plants.

Some villages in Northern India are now completely solar-powered; prisons in Kigali, Rwanda, totally supplied by renewable bio-gas for cooking; fuel efficient stoves for women in Pakistan; even a small roof-mounted wind turbine developed by a fellow in the UK that produces up to 80 percent of household power usage are all recent Ashden Award winners.

In Afghanistan, where US re-building efforts have seemed to do some good, the entire nation is using wireless communication networks to keep in touch, foregoing the need for wires strung from corner to corner of their mountainous nation. And while they might not have to worry about an errant snow-storm wreaking havoc in the desert, the effort has also prevented terrorist disruption of the communications grid.

It seems to me the US is in a dangerous place: Working so hard to maintain its edge against other "developed nations" it may soon find itself at the mercy of smaller nations with more technologically advanced infrastructure, and therefore, much lower fuel consumption bills.

In the meantime, I will continue my exploration of new, simpler energy alternatives by spotlighting some of the many previous Ashden Award winners at SpaceBlog Alpha. Maybe one of their ideas will appeal to one of my readers, and maybe that reader will revolutionize the way his small town gets its power and that will make neighboring towns jealous and seek to copy their ideas and maybe that will lead to a nationwide energy revolution...

We can only hope.