Because after a week when everyone’s nerves are frayed to a frazzle by worry, hassles, and tail-chasing speculation, we could all use some good news.

The town of Greensburg, Kansas, shows how a community used a horrific event — a monstrous tornado that leveled nine-tenths of the city — as the spur to rebuild in a sustainable, and green, way.

That reminds me — we are, as a nation, cutting back on our energy use.  (Cutting back on energy use also means cutting back on our greenhouse gas emissions, as even American businesses are starting to see is necessary to our survival on this planet.)  And this isn’t just due to the economic slowdown, either:

The Wall Street Journal, quoting our own Xcel Energy execs, says we’re using less of that, too — 3 percent less August through September; other utilites report bigger drops.

The plunge is apparently so unexpected — 1 to 2 percent growth is the locked-in norm — that it could screw up utilities’ capital investment plans.

[...]

I know what you’re thinking: the drop is due to foreclosures. Nope, says Xcel CEO Dick Kelly. Other industry leaders say the recession isn’t the reason, either.

This is good because it will help our transmission system handle it when electric cars such as the Chevy Volt start hitting American roads in large numbers. (Since most of these cars will be charging up at night, when power plants are not being severely taxed, that will help, too.)

As for what will produce the electricity:  The green industries springing up all over the place, that’s what.  Wind turbines made in places like Newton, Iowa — the former home of the Maytag corporation — will help with that, as well as keep jobs in America.  Like Greensburg, Newton was compelled to go green to reinvent itself — but in this case the catastrophe was the closing of the Maytag plant last year after Whirlpool purchased the company, causing the loss of 1,800 jobs.  But even as the Maytag plant was shutting down, TPI Composites was preparing to open up its wind-turbine blade factory.  TPI now provides 300 jobs for Newtonites, with plans to eventually provide at least 500 (and closer to 800) in spite of the economic slump.  In addition, another company provides the bases on which the completed turbines sit, which means even more new jobs. 

Flint, Michigan — the dying car town immortalized in Michael Moore’s film Roger and Me — is busy, like so many other Rust Belt cities, reinventing itself as a green city.  To that end, it’s enlisted the help of a Swedish company to turn its municipal seweage into fuel for its bus fleet, which not only provides fuel but saves the cost of incinerating the sewage sludge solids left after traditional wastewater treatments.

And how could I forget the town of Rock Port, Missouri? Four wind turbines provide enough power to this town of 1,400 persons that they often have enough to sell back to the grid.

Looking over the rest of the globe, we see good news there, too.  For example, check this out:

South Australia’s ninth wind farm just opened on the Barunga Ranges near Snowtown. Its 47 turbines, installed by Trust Power of New Zealand, (who already operate that countries largest wind farm at Tararua), are said to have the capacity to deliver over 98MW of electricity. The company reckon this output should provide sufficient power for around 70,000 Australian households.

Not only was this project completed ahead of schedule, but it allows the state of South Australia to claim that they now produce almost 60% of Australia’s wind power. Additionally it means that South Australia is poised to meet Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s target for all states to produce 20% of their energy from renewable sources by 2020.

Got that? They’re going to meet Rudd’s target a full decade ahead of schedule.

The Queen of the UK’s getting into the act, no doubt prodded by her environmentalist son the Prince of Wales:  She’s gone and bought the world’s biggest wind turbine, which will be installed in an offshore location.  (By the way:  A UK study shows that wind turbines do not negatively affect most birds.   Pheasants are the one type of bird that suffers from wind farms, and since wind farms do better away from pheasant habitat (typically low-lying and wooded areas), the turbines can be kept away from those areas.)

Even China, the world’s biggest CO2 emitter, is working to wean itself off of coal and onto renewables.  In fact, they’re working so hard at it that they’re already the world’s fifth-largest wind-power country, with 6 gigwatts of capacity installed and plans to bring that to at least 10GW by 2010 (and quite possibly as much as 20 to 27GW by that time!).

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