Hunt Green LLC provides strategic advising for decision makers in business, government and not-for-profit arenas on a range of renewable energy, sustainable mobility, agriculture, and green design challenges.

News

New Windmill at Hunt Country Vineyards!

September 29th, 2009

Windspire at HCV small

Our new Wind­spire ver­ti­cal axis wind tur­bine is up and spin­ning on the hill at Hunt Coun­try Vine­yards! I will be at the win­ery on Octo­ber 9th for the ded­i­ca­tion of the Wind­spire. We will also be intro­duc­ing the newest win­ery addi­tion, which fea­tures heavy insu­la­tion, in-floor heat­ing capa­bil­ity, auto­mated tank cool­ing, and energy effi­cient light­ing, and has already resulted in a sub­stan­tial drop in energy usage.
Our 30 foot tall Wind­spire pro­duces 1.2 kW of power. Mariah Power man­u­fac­tures Wind­spires in Michi­gan, in a refur­bished auto parts plant employ­ing for­mer autowork­ers using Amer­i­can mate­ri­als. The tur­bine pro­duces 110 volt 60 cycle cur­rent, which feeds directly into the res­i­den­tial grid.  It has an auto­matic safety fea­ture whereby it can­not pro­duce power unless the grid is oper­at­ing. As one of the first Wind­spire mod­els in oper­a­tion in New York State, it will be used to demon­strate not only its unique advanced design, but also that small wind tur­bines can be a grace­ful part of the farm land­scape and can con­tribute to local self-reliance and regional sustainability.

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“Futurama II: Mobilizing America’s Transportation Revolution” White Paper Released!

September 29th, 2009

We are please to announce the recent pub­li­ca­tion of the OnGo­ing­Trans­porta­tion White Paper, titled Futu­rama II Mobi­liz­ing America’s Trans­porta­tion Rev­o­lu­tion.  The White Paper was co-authored by David Muyres, for­merly a Vice Pres­i­dent at the Art Cen­ter Col­lege of Design and Exec­u­tive at John­son Con­trols Inc. and now with Hunt­Green LLC, and Geoff War­dle, the Direc­tor of Advanced Mobil­ity at the Art Cen­ter Col­lege of Design.  OnGo­ing­Trans­porta­tion is a siren call for a bold new approach to the future of Amer­i­can trans­porta­tion. The OnGo­ing­Trans­porta­tion ini­tia­tive calls for the cre­ation of a team of the best and bright­est minds to develop a new long term vision that will  serve as a blue­print for the next 50 years of trans­porta­tion needs in the U.S. The vision will inspire well-designed, envi­ron­men­tally and eco­nom­i­cally sus­tain­able options  as part of a totally inte­grated national trans­porta­tion sys­tem. The blue­print will inform sound, long-term pol­icy and leg­is­la­tion, facil­i­tate inno­v­a­tive tech­nol­ogy and financ­ing, and encour­age entirely new busi­ness mod­els, allow­ing Amer­i­can entre­pre­neurs to cre­ate jobs and lead the world in trans­porta­tion solu­tions. To down­load the paper click here.

Deutsche Bank Launches Carbon Counter

August 16th, 2009

carbon counterOn June 18th Deutsche Bank launched a 70-foot bill­board with a red car­bon counter tick­ing upwards as the amount of car­bon in the atmos­phere increases (data sup­plied by MIT) and a mes­sage read­ing “Cli­mate Change Affects Everyone”.

Climate-altering pol­lu­tion — nor­mally invis­i­ble and out of mind — will now be highly vis­i­ble to hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple in NY City near Penn Sta­tion and Madi­son Square Garden.

I made sure to go to the launch and lun­cheon since the project was man­aged by a friend and col­league on the Deutsche Cli­mate Team. It was great to see the finan­cial com­mu­nity dis­cussing cli­mate change and its impli­ca­tions for busi­ness in depth and with urgency.

Now I’d like to see banks all over the US and the world have the Car­bon counter on their signs next to the date, time and tem­per­a­ture.  And… I’d like a per­sonal car­bon counter app for my iphone. I just looked, and yes, they already exist!

Gigaton Throwdown

August 16th, 2009

Today the “Giga­ton Throw­down” results were released pub­licly in Wash­ing­ton DC with a num­ber of the Obama Administration’s clean tech and green gurus (namely John Hol­dren – direc­tor of the White House Office of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy Pol­icy, Van Jones – Obama’s Green Jobs Advi­sor, Cathy Zoi – Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of Energy for EE and RE, and David San­dalow – Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of Energy for Pol­icy and Inter­na­tional Affairs) and their staff in atten­dance.  But with a name like “Giga­ton Throw­down”, this is obvi­ously not a Wash­ing­ton ini­tia­tive.  It was con­ceived of by a group of Ven­ture Cap­i­tal­ists in Sil­i­con Val­ley who won­dered – beyond whether their invest­ments would make the money – would they make a dif­fer­ence?  So they enlisted the help of other investors, entre­pre­neurs, exec­u­tives and lead­ing aca­d­e­mics, to ana­lyze which clean tech­nolo­gies have the poten­tial to lower green­house gas emis­sions by 1 bil­lion met­ric tons (a giga­ton) per year by 2020. Read the rest of this entry »

Viking Road Rally — May 2009

July 23rd, 2009

suz and leilani EV largeIn 2007 I went on a month-long road rally across the US, Mex­ico, and most of Cen­tral Amer­ica using waste grease and biodiesel. Pic­tures and descrip­tions from our vis­its to sus­tain­able biodiesel pro­duc­ers along the way can be found here. One of my fel­low trav­el­ers was Bjorn Kruse, the advanced vehi­cle spe­cial­ist for the Nor­we­gian envi­ron­men­tal non-profit orga­ni­za­tion “Zero”.  Bjornar decided to orga­nize a shorter rally for high tech Zero Emis­sion Vehi­cles in Nor­way.  Ford Motor Com­pany and the Hynor Group spon­sored myself and race car dri­ver Leilani Munter and pro­vided us with a Hydro­gen fuel cell Ford Focus, and on May 10th we were in Oslo and ready to go. Unfor­tu­nately the vehi­cle had been dam­aged in trans­port and we went to sleep think­ing that we were out of the rally.

Twenty min­utes before the start our car arrived and we were off.  At one of the first stops we were greeted by a num­ber of car fanat­ics with their clas­sic vehi­cles and repli­cas like the one shown here of the first elec­tric vehi­cle.
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