With the oil disaster in the Gulf, “green energy” and energy conservation efforts have received some much overdue attention.  For families, helpful tips like how to save money heating and cooling and your home and how to save money on utilities with emerging technology.  However, there hasn’t been a whole lot of information for the local government and business environment.  Well, the EPA recently addressed the need to “go green” by releasing the “Sustainable Design and Green Building Toolkit for Local Governments”.

Yes, it’s long on title, but it’s also filled with useful information local governments can use to research and implement energy saving measures into new local building projects.  Good for the environment and energy conservation, “sustainable design” is also another means to address long term savings in local budgets.

According to a news release posted by the EPA, “The Toolkit is designed to assist local governments in identifying and removing permitting barriers to sustainable design and green building practices. It provides a resource for communities interested in conducting their own internal evaluation of how local codes/ordinances either facilitate or impede a sustainable built environment, including the design, construction, renovation, and operation and maintenance of a building and its immediate site.”

You can download the Toolkit directly from the EPA at: www.epa.gov/region4/recycle/green-building-toolkit.pdf

We’ve all seen the footage of slimy, brown birds, crabs and other sea life.   The devastation brought upon us by the BP oil disaster is truly heart breaking.  And infuriating.  Who’s to blame?  The energy companies?  The government agencies?  Maybe it’s even our own selfish needs.  Whoever is ultimately held responsible, the blame, is not what’s important.  Taking ownership, moving forward and learning from our mistakes, that’s what’s important.

Steve Christ, at Seeking Alpha, does a great job of helping us see the bigger picture.  Whether you blame the environmentalists for the requirements to drill so far away or if you blame the energy companies for simply drilling at all, there’s a lesson to be learned.  The mess in the Gulf is a filthy illustration of the need to explore alternate energy sources.  Wind farms are great idea, as are solar panels, but neither produces the amount of energy this country absorbs on a daily basis.   That’s why many eyes are, once again, turning to nuclear power.

Christ writes a powerful endorsement by stating, “For all of its potential faults, nuclear power is the one energy source with the scale to meet our needs that can still be considered environmentally friendly — especially considering the movement to reduce greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.”  Is nuclear energy safe?  In the wake of the tragedy in the Gulf, nuclear energy even appears to be the safer alternative.  In fact, France actually generates the majority of its electricity from nuclear power.  It seems to work well for them.

While discussing alternative energy solutions as “green energy”,  Christ quotes Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, as plainly stating, “You can’t be serious about carbon unless you’re serious about nuclear.”

Hopefully, some good will come from the BP oil leak.  Will it be the reemergence of nuclear energy in America?  Perhaps.  Using a portion of the recently tripled nuclear power loan guarantees, The Southern Company recently began construction on the first two nuclear power plants erected in the US in over 30 years .

One of the easiest steps you can take to reduce energy consumption in your home starts with your lights. Think about how many individual light bulbs are in your house. Now, think about how often those lights are actually used on a daily basis. Reducing global warming won’t happen over night, but reducing your energy bill is a great place to start.

Traditional incandescent light bulbs use heat to produce light. If you’ve ever changed a recently burnt out bulb, you’ve probably felt the heat that one bulb produces. It’s hot to the touch! Not only does the incandescent bulb use large amounts of electricity, but it also produces large amounts of heat. That’s a double whammy to your energy bill and the planet.

Compact fluorescent bulbs, on the other hand, generally use 75% less energy than traditional light bulbs. A fairly recent trend, compact fluorescents are easily recognizable by their swirl of white tubes. Once thought to be too obtrusive for traditional light fixtures, manufacturers have adopted a more traditional “light bulb” shape. Still using the swirled tubes, compact fluorescents now look and feel like your energy hogging incandescent bulbs. However, they use far less energy and produce almost no heat.

According to ENERGY STAR, a joint venture between the EPA and Department of Energy, “If every American home replaced just one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR qualified bulb, we would save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes for a year, more than $600 million in annual energy costs, and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of more than 800,000 cars.”

Now, not every fixture in your home will be able to use compact fluorescent bulbs. That’s likely to be your track lighting or chandeliers. However, if you changed all of your overhead fixtures, lamps, and ceiling fan bulbs to compact fluorescents . . .

When it comes to energy efficiency, many of the ideas and programs from our energy companies are in their infancy. However, the ability to remain flexible and adapt at home will help lead us to energy independence and efficient use of our current technologies. Today’s energy companies recognize we’re ready to help and are working to bring new products to every market. We’re all in this together and together we can make a difference. It’s up to us to make the small changes now, so we can make a big impact later.

There are several easy things you can do to make your home more energy efficient.

• Use caulk and weather stripping to properly seal windows and doors. This will reduce drafts, heat loss, and over air conditioning.
• Use ceiling fans in the summer and winter. A counter clockwise rotation will provide a breeze in the summer, while a slow, clockwise rotation will push heat down in the winter.
• Regularly replace your furnace air filters. A clogged air filter makes your furnace and air conditioner work extra hard to deliver hot or cool air to the rooms of your house. Routinely replacing your furnace air filter removes the blockage, letting the air flow through more easily.
• Replace energy wasting incandescent light bulbs with energy saving compact fluorescents. Compact fluorescents typically use 75% less energy and produce far less heat than traditional bulbs.

It all starts in the home. It all starts with you. The energy companies are the driving force behind the research to make a better future, but it’s up to us to embrace energy efficiency right now. It might not seem like we’re doing much, but if everyone completed the four easy steps above we’d be in a much better place than we are today.

There’s a new green energy in town, and its name is “recycled natural gas,” sometimes called “biogas.” Natural gas suppliers get recycled natural gas from a few different sources:

1. Landfills: This type of natural gas is a byproduct generated from the decomposition of landfill waste, with no other additives.
2. Agricultural waste: Typically referred to as “biogas,” this natural gas comes from manure waste on farms, placed in a machine called a biodigester, which harnesses the normally dangerous methane that comes from manure into a natural energy source.

Currently, many natural gas suppliers add recycled natural gas processed from landfills into their conventional gas supply, creating a greater supply of natural gas without tapping into our nation’s precious, nonrenewable resources.

Technology is still being developed and perfected to capture the methane from manure and use it to supplement existing natural gas supplies.

Both sources of natural gas solve the problem of what to do with the dangerous waste produced by both farms and landfill sites, while supplementing our nation’s existing natural gas supplies with a renewable, green resource.

The advent of recycled natural gas has even resulted in lower prices from natural gas suppliers in areas where it is used.