August 28, 2007 by Mark.

Dear YERTians,

We thought that we knew all there was to know about the Cape Wind controversy in Nantucket Sound. Then we talked to the folks involved, and you might say our pre-conceptions were "blown away." We encourage you to join us in our newfound indecision as we grapple with some intriguing windy nuances…

Just click here or the picture below to watch "YERTpod7: Words of Wind-dom in Massachusetts"

This could well be an oil executive’s dream: proponents of clean energy pitted against conservation-minded environmentalists. Cape Wind is hunting for a location for their wind farm, but folks represented by Cape Cod’s Save Our Sound have cried NIMGV! (Not In My Gorgeous View). After meeting with Mark Rodgers, Communications Director of Cape Wind Associates, and Charles Vinick, President and CEO of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, we learned that there is much more to this issue than NIMBY or NIMGV, but for every minute that the siting issues for Cape Wind remain unresolved, we burn more fossil fuels to fill in the gap.

Wind energy has become one of the fastest growing power sources in America, but still remains miserably low on the energy totem pole, generating less than 1% of all power in the U.S. (1) YERT believes that offshore wind turbines sitting beyond the visible horizon (roughly15 nautical miles from shore) make the most sense, and could generate as much as 907 gigawatts. Folks from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory say that number exceeds the "current installed U.S. electrical capacity." Oddly, we’re currently tapping a whopping 0% of that potential. What are we waiting for? Hopefully not the release of our little video. Take a look, then take a stand by clicking below on YERTpoll4: Wind Energy Opinionations — quickly!

Wind-ing Down for the Afternoon,

Julie, Ben, and Mark (Your YERT Team)

team@yert.com

<a href="http://www.micropoll.com/akira/MicroPoll?mode=html&#038;id=50081">View MicroPoll</A><br /> <a href="http://www.micropoll.com/">Web Survey</a><br /> <a href="http://www.micropoll.com">Free Web Polls</a><br />

P.S. And now for Breadcrumbs! If you want to learn more about the topics in this video, check out these three resources:

• Save Our Sound. From the web page: "The [Save Our Sound] Alliance was formed in 2001 in response to Cape Wind’s alarming proposal to build a 130 turbine wind farm in Nantucket Sound." "Nantucket Sound and the waters surrounding the Cape and Islands are famous for natural beauty and abundant, diverse and unique wildlife. The Sound is also famous for recreational boating and fishing and draws over six million visitors annually to Cape Cod & the Islands. Nantucket Sound is central to our entire economy precisely because of its natural appeal."
• Cape Wind. From the web page: "Cape Wind is proposing America’s first offshore wind farm on Horseshoe Shoal in Nantucket Sound. Miles from the nearest shore, 130 wind turbines will gracefully harness the wind to produce up to 420 megawatts of clean, renewable energy. In average winds, Cape Wind will provide three quarters of the Cape and Islands electricity needs."
• If land and sea-based wind power seem too costly or problematic for you, how about high altitude wind power? Folks at SkyWindPower seem to have a very compelling idea in and (literally) over their heads. From their website: "In mass use, our calculations show that FEGs [Flying Electric Generators] of Roberts’ design should be able to produce electricity at a life cycle cost of LESS THAN TWO CENTS PER KILOWATT HOUR using tether materials now available. And new tether materials with even stronger strength to weight ratios are being developed.." Here’s the detailed paper: Harnessing High Altitude Wind Power. (For reference, land-based wind and coal power cost around 3-4 cents per kilowatt hour, per this clever estimate in Science.)

Footnotes:

• (1) Energy Information Administration, "Electric Power Monthly, March 2007," http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/ftproot/electricity/epm/02260703.pdf
• (2) National Renewable Energy Laboratory. W. Musial and S. Butterfield. "Future for Offshore Wind Energy in the United States," June 2004. http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/36313.pdf

Posted in YERTpoll, Video | 1 Comment »

August 28, 2007 by Julie.

Grandmother.
What a wonderful word. What can it mean to realize 90 years on this earth and to be able to look in the faces of 10 grandchildren and 8 great granchildren and see your own parents’ and grandparents’ DNA in iterations of individual beauty? For my grandmama it is to have have bred babies and lost babies, to have worked at home and held down jobs, to have taught herself to cook, to crochet, to do needlework, to have supported her kids through dancing school… to have been a steady and constant wife and companion until holding the hand of her beloved as he passed from this earth, to have moved far from home to be close to her daughters and to have watched her only son pass away before her…
I don’t think i’ve often been in town to share my Grandmama’s birthday, since we’ve lived in different cities for 20 years. So this year, when YERT discovered that we were going to be just a few hours’ drive from her, the boys conspired with me to make it happen. We left Chicago Saturday afternoon and drove directly to St. Charles to meet my St. Louis family. I warned Mark to expect a somewhat raucous reception as there are many women in my family with lively blood. The girls did not disappoint. Jubilant calls greeted us from the street before we even set foot out of the car and were only compounded by sheer numbers once inside my aunt’s house. I love my family.

Grandmama sat in her chair at the kitchen table looking pretty but smaller and paler than the last time I saw her. The skin on her hands, always brown and tan, seemed almost translucent. She looked stunned to see us, and a little confused. “I’m so surprised,” she said, in her still gentle Georgian accent, “I didn’t know you was coming!” Her eyes cried a little, for the house’s being filled up with still more of her dearly-loved ones. And she told us stories that began and began with no endings and moving on to limbs of other stories we might have heard before…

The next day all relatives reconverged on the house and the food came in waves, with presents, cards, and my aunt Karen, Grandmama’s caretaker for many years now, brought a new pink walker out of the garage, tied up with ribbon, complete with a little pink horn and its own headlight. And then there was the cake. The cake was decorated with Grandmama’s portrait, (something I had never seen before) and had 9 candles, one for each decade. When we started singing Happy Birthday, she hid her face in her colorful bib and wept. She tried to talk but could only say that she had only asked for plain yellow cake, which got us all to howling. Aunt Karen asked her if she was sad and Grandmama said, “No, I’m so happy!” And she was.

Still, she cried pretty hard when my mother left this morning with my brother and his wife. Which of course made my mom cry, even harder. sigh. So today I spent all afternoon with Grandmama going through old photos in her room, as I know it is a thing of rare satisfaction for her, revisiting pictures of people she loved and times she remembers. She loves to remind whoever will listen of how we are related and whatever became of Tardy Fensterbush…She doesn’t have her stories quite as crisp as she once did and certain names start becoming interchangeable…but she nevertheless has her wits about her and remembers the most important stuff…who was “a really nice man,” who was “a lovely person,” who “never did have any children…”

After supper, Aunt Karen pulled out a box with more old photos, some of which I placed into Grandmama’s album so that she can see them easily. Her eyesight is no longer what it was either, so she can’t always see exactly the person in the picture, and we are finding her habit of labeling backs of photos in ink a rather useful tool for identifying relatives who died before we knew them.

It is getting late and I’m losing my thoughts so before I wane like the moon outside, I’ll say to the grand matriarch of our family, our true southern belle: We love you, Grandmama, and we hope you know how much we do.

Posted in Events, Julie | 1 Comment »