The Ozark Renewable Expo is this weekend

Are you interested in learning about solar panels, wind turbines, and alternative fuels? Curious if your city is actively combating climate change? Do you wonder if there are ways you could lead a greener life?

Visit the Ozark Renewable Energy and Sustainable Living Expo at Les Bourgeois Winery in Rocheport, Missouri on September 22-23 to find answers to these questions and more.

Learn ways to integrate renewable energy and sustainable living into your life at the Expo's workshops, exhibits, hands-on demonstrations, and speaker panels. Bring the family along to enjoy the weekend's live entertainment, organic and local food and wine, children's activities, and more. Visit www.OzarkRE.org for directions, a list of exhibitors, and the workshop schedule.

Tickets may be purchased at the gate or online at www.OzarkRE.org.

Buy your ticket online and be entered to win a Solar Gift Basket from MidAmerica Solar ( www.midamericasolar.com). Gift basket contents include a portable 6.5 watt solar panel, an outdoor solar lantern, a portable solar energy charger, and a four pack of Solar Flat Glass Pathway markers.

Ticket Prices:
$15 - Weekend Pass
$10 - Adult One Day Pass
$7 - Seniors 65+ and Students One Day Pass
Kids 12 and under Free

Do you want to get involved? Additional volunteers are needed. Volunteers receive free admission and a free t-shirt. Sign up to volunteer at www.OzarkRe.org.

Workshops Include (partial list):

• Turning your Diesel into a Greasel
• Photovolatics + Wind Power = Hybrid Home Energy System
• Show Me Natural Wonders: Experience Nature Sites - Near and Far
• Global Warming: Answer the Call
• The Solar Kitchen: Solar Cookers and Cooking With the Sun
• Missouri Cities Combating Climate Change
• Home Performance with Energy Star
• Fuel Cells as an Alternative Energy Source
• Green Residential Construction Methodologies
• Vegetable Based Fuels
• Utility-Scale Wind in Missouri
• Wilderness Skills
• Renewable Energy and Agriculture
• Nuclear Energy: A Sustainable Choice?

For a full speaker list and schedule, visit www.OzarkRE.org.
Hope to see you there!

Great Day

Fair visitors enjoy a "candid" conversation beside a mobile solar cart.

Thanks to all of you who made it out to our Memorial Day energy fair!

By our estimates, nearly 300 made it to New Bloomfield for the event – perhaps our biggest show yet! Our registry shows that you came in from all over Missouri, and a surprising number too from out-of-state. We’re glad you came, and we hope you had a good experience.

We certainly had a good time ourselves, and enjoyed meeting a lot of you. My wife, Jen, and I led tours of our house (across the street from the center) where we showed how a normal house can be converted, bit-by-bit, toward life “off the grid.”

And of course, at the center itself, we had some of our old faithful demonstrations – the building and design of dome homes, the making of bio-fuels like biodiesel and ethanol, our electric and hybrid vehicles and mowers, and the use of various kinds of solar and wind energy – from high-tech photovoltaics (solar panels) to homemade solar cookers and passive heating methods. We hope you also got the chance to see our new solar carts – we’re extremely excited about them. Maybe, though, I’ll leave them for another post.

Any rate, hope you all had safe travels home, and if you didn’t make it to this one, we’ll hope to see you at the next…

Memorial Day Festival

Missouri Renewable Energy is having its annual
Memorial Day: Free Energy Festival, this Monday, May 28th, from 10am-4pm,
in New Bloomfield, Missouri.

Rain or shine, we will be there and we are planning on Barbecuing!

Hope to see you then!

Green Priorities?

Image (c) Fred First www.fragmentsfromfloyd.com

Recently my wife and I have enjoyed conversing with a new acquaintance in Columbia: Monta Welch, founder of the Columbia Climate Change Coalition (check out the CCCC's online group). One especially thought-provoking conversation in particular has reopened, at least for me, the question of “green priorities.” As we – as green-minded Missourians, Americans, and earth-dwellers in general – continue to moved toward a united voice and mission, we must ask ourselves, “What for?” Why find and expand our “green community?”

Some of the ready answers are powerful in and of themselves. First, of course, clichéd though it may be, we are a stronger force together than we would be alone – in lobbying, in outreach, in mutual encouragement. We educate one another; we stretch and challenge each other’s perceptions. There is something good – something both utilitarian and ‘holistic’ – about all of this. All things “green” have their value; all green actions have their place.

And to be sure, we should indeed avoid the temptation to hold as more “valuable” any one ecological interest over another: One person’s goal to protect a fragile, local ecosystem is not more “valuable,” per se, than another’s focus on harnessing wind power or teaching conservation to children. But here’s the thing: all “values” aside, are there not, in this hour, some issues more pressing – more worthy of our combined energies and passions as a green community?

If the climate scientists are right, the answer, it would seem, is a resounding “Yes.” The Climate issue, that is, is strikingly “pressing” in that the rivers, the forests, the ice-caps and endangered species, the coastlands, and all that we are trying to protect, are themselves “endangered” by the prospect of what might come in the next few decades if we as a species don’t change our course.

To be sure, whatever we have already been doing, we need to keep doing it, and with no less fervor --- whatever our passions (rivers or forests, alternative energies or endangered habitats) we should not let them go. But for those of us whose main environmental concern has NOT, to this point, been global warming (and I count myself as on that boat), the time has passed for passing the responsibility to “someone else.” If we have no more room on our “front burners,” then clearly we need a bigger stove.

Nathan First
Missouri Renewable Energy

Earth Day is approaching!

If you live near the Columbia area, don't forget about the Earth day event on April 22nd,
MORE Energy will be there, so stop by and say hello!

And if you live near Marshfield, Missouri, MORE Energy will be having a free energy festival from 10am-4pm. We hope to see you there!

Advancing Renewables Conference, March 28

A friend of ours in the area's sustainability society, David Mars (more on him, and them, soon?), tells us this conference in Columbia is a don't-miss event for the renewable-energy savvy (or for those of us who'd like to be...). Something like 200 people made it to last year's all-day event, and it looks like they've got another impressive line-up of speakers for this one (the keynote speaker this year is Julia Judd, executive director of SEPA -- Solar Electric Power Association).

Still, I look forward just as much to milling around during coffee breaks, seeing what's new on the "renewable" market, and meeting other likeminded folk.

See you there?

A New Renewable Group Starting

Missouri Energy Survival