Calling All Clean Energy Supporters

Recent clean energy policies are coming under attack by several NC legislators. NCSEA's Registered Lobbyists, Julie Robinson & Tom Bean, reach out to legislators each week. But we need you and other clean energy supporters to help educate them and ensure our state's clean energy economy stays successful and vibrant.  

Tune in for a special webinar tomorrow at 3 pm: 2012 NC Legislative Session Kick-Off: What You Need to Know! …

It sounds like Hertz is positioning itself to enter the car-sharing market in a pretty serious way with Hertz-On-Demand. The program offers hourly rentals with no annual membership, no late fees, and one-way rentals, which are all significant advantages over Zipcar. The service was launched in March and already has over 90,000 members in the US—Zipcar has ~700,000—with minimal marketing and only a fraction of the number of vehicles available compered to Zipcar. Given that ZipCar is just now starting to make a profit and Hertz has a huge existing customer base, locations, and convertible fleet, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Suggest A Location

Hertz is expecting to roll the program out over the next 12-18 months as more of their fleet is outfitted with the hourly rental technology. At this point, the only location in NC that I can find is Charlotte. Wouldn't it be nice to bring…

MARK TIMES: Socializing begins at 5:30 PM; Programming at 6:00 PM, Wednesday, 5/22 

LOCATION: Posana Cafe, 1 Biltmore Ave, Asheville, NC 28801

Join us as we launch Asheville Beyond Coal! 

Join Bruce Nilles, the Sierra Club’s Senior Director of the national Beyond Coal Campaign, to help launch Asheville Beyond Coal!

Named by Rolling Stone as one of American’s 100 Agents of Change,Bruce Nilles has a decade long history of fighting the coal industry and winning. Since 2002, Bruce has led the Sierra Club and its partners and allies…

Via the Guardian:

Apple plans to power its main data centre entirely with renewable energy by the end of this year, taking steps to address longstanding environmental concerns about the rapid expansion of high-consuming computer server farms.

The maker of the iPhone and iPad said on Thursday it was buying equipment from SunPower Corp and startup Bloom Energy to build two solar array installations in North Carolina, near its core data center.

Full article here.

Each year, the Department of Engineering and Technology at Western Carolina University launches a two semester Senior Capstone Project course for our soon to be graduating students.  Projects should allow them to integrate as much of their education as possible.  This course is multi-disciplinary-- mixing students from all three of our programs (electrical engineering, electrical and computer engineering technology and engineering technology).  This year we will have forty-six (46) students:  twenty-eight (28) engineering technology, eleven (11) electrical and computer engineering technology and seven (7) electrical engineering.  Student teams tackle open ended real problems in a realistic setting.  We adopt a stage/gate process progressing from project proposal, conceptual design, preliminary design, critical design review, fabrication and test.  In addition to the course instructor, each team is provided a faculty mentor to help guide the project.  To satisfy the academic goals…

On Friday, March 9, 2012, Blue Ridge Biofuels sold its one-millionth gallon of B99 biodiesel. That means 1,000,000 gallons of petroleum diesel not consumed in North Carolina and over 8,700 tons of carbon dioxide kept out of our atmosphere. In 2011, we reached a record annual production level of 250,000 gallons of B99 and we are on track to double that this year. We have been purchasing new equipment that is opening up bottle-necks in our production process which makes the production plant more efficient. This has allowed us to keep our prices low even without the federal tax credit.



Despite the imbalances in the subsidies granted to the petroleum industry compared to the biodiesel industry, the biodiesel industry is growing in the US and biodiesel is, on average, less expensive than petroleum diesel. Blue Ridge Biofuels' fuel is typically priced 5-10 cents less per gallon than diesel fuel and is produced exclusively from waste cooking…

A low-income neighborhood including the Pisgah View Apartments is the first in the Carolinas to benefit from a new energy conservation and efficiency project from Progress Energy. Neighborhood Energy Savers (NES) is designed to help low-income customers save electricity and money on power bills — at no cost to them. 

Progress Carolinas CEO Lloyd Yates, Congressman Heath Shuler, Mayor Terry Bellamy, and other dignitaries were on hand to launch the program at the Pisgah View Community Center on October 19.

Read the full article at the Urban News.

From the Winston-Salem Journal:

[Swinson and her team] won an additional $90,000 from the EPA's P3 competition to continue the research and develop a system to recycle the rinse water at Haircut 101 for a two-year project. The team also received an additional $1,000 from the Chemical Engineers Society and will give a presentation at the group's annual conference.

Wastewater from bathing, shampooing, dishwashing, mopping or other household uses is known as graywater. It's often cloudy, unlike clear drinking water, but it also differs from sewage, which is known as blackwater and contains human waste.

Full article here.