The green movement has no doubt tipped into the public’s consciousness, and yet still hasn’t been consolidated into a feasible, economic starting point. I attempted to unify the myriad of renewable energy and consumption/waste innovations in my last post with the concept of ‘nature to the grid’, and will now attempt to expand on it further. The question is where can the average person start incorporating this concept into their life to not just benefit their ecolistic mentality and environment, but to save and make more money?

In continuance of our nature to the grid dialogue, I’ve come to the conclusion that it starts, from both an ecological and economical standpoint, with people taking a proactive role in turning their home into a renewable power station… turning their home into a ‘tree’ if you will.

This intuition has been a long build for me, from the passion that has developed over my life as an environmental scientist, to my first company doing insurance adjusting assessment and appraisals on homes damaged by hurricanes, to the Powering the Planet event at the World Science Festival in NYC last year where representatives of all areas of green power concluded that the home needs to become a power station, to the West Coast Green conference in Silicon Valley last September, which I thought was going to be filled with crazy energy innovations, and was instead 90% green building companies, not to mention a huge model green home in the middle of the trade floor. When you take all this into consideration and add on the bad debt/mortgages causing the current economic collapse, the realization hits. Our world is dealing with a natural resource crisis in building our homes and buildings, and the place to innovate and make money, the place to really seed this whole green movement is with the home.

Turning the home into an energy efficient power station is the way to take the green/clean/sustainable movement to the world and actually change it… one home at a time. If you use thermoregulated windows and wall materials, energy efficient home appliances, and solar installations and fuel cells, you’re on your way to having a self-sustaining renewable home that doesn’t need energy from the grid. It’s almost like a revitalization of the cottage industry, in which everyone can get involved with their own home, and those that are successful with energy efficiency and renewable energy systems will reach zero energy (needing no energy from the grid), and even produce a surplus to sell back to the grid! Add in growing your own food or buying locally, collecting your own rainwater, recycling systems that pay you for your garbage and prevent materials from heading to the landfill, and you’re home becomes a renewable system that contributes to a renewable community. Think of the home as an individual tree contributing to the forest… it needs to pull it’s own weight by generating its own energy and then sharing that with the ecosystem in a symbiotic relationship. Now that’s nature to the grid.

I had a great time with my friend Doug of Faithful Investments in Philadelphia this past week. Doug is a property investor/developer who likes to buy worn down houses, perform complete renovations, and then rent out to tenants. Say we test out various green building technologies over the coming years, making the homes more energy efficient, allowing us to charge a premium on rent by lowering utility bills for tenants, and upping the asset value of the house… not to mention helping the environment.

This seems likes such a practical solution to restore faith in the banks and the mortgage industry, as it will drastically boost the asset value of the home as well as the passive income potential! It’s investors like Doug that are in a position to make great change, as most people are clueless and aren’t able to afford green consultants to tell them what to do, and certainly aren’t in a position to get a loan with the state of the economy.

So let’s take it a step at a time. Work with real estate investors and developers (who have clout with banks) to implement green innovations that will make homes more profitable, while allowing the economy to gradually recover. Basing off this experience, develop a green building program to help the average person upgrade their home with energy efficient materials and renewable energy systems, which they can capitalize on when the lending industry has restored confidence and is granting loans again.

Conserve energy, lower utility bills, generate your own power that reverses the grid and puts passive income in your pocket. The home is the testing ground. This is where it begins.

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The clean tech economy is taking off, and it’s going to be very interesting to see what will actually work. What concept will bring it all together?

From a production (energy) standpoint, you’ve got solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, hydro, and ethanol. And with consumption, you have to ask how are we going to create products, how are we going to deal with waste, and where are we going to get our food and water?

When you start looking at all these variables, you seem to get to the root of the sustainability problem… it’s very fragmented. There needs to be a new holistic approach that attacks the whole issue. Where do we get our energy, our food, and a new paradigm for products and waste? To us, the answer is quite clear… it’s found in nature, where the essence is growth. Grow our food, grow our energy, grow our resources. It’s all about growth energy… bioenergy.

Currently, the word ‘bioenergy’ is somewhat limited so I’m going to define how it’s currently perceived and then go into how its meaning has the ability to grow itself.

Right now, bioenergy means the act of using organic waste products and/or algae and other microorganisms to create ethanol fuel or some other type of crude oil replacement. The company leading the way is Coskata, backed by legendary Sun Microsystems founder Vinod Khosla. It was recently voted Hottest Company in Bioenergy. They are doing some incredibly innovative stuff, and claim to be able to produce ethanol for less than $1/gallon with their hybrid gasification and fermentation system. As Khosla says, he is a pragmentalist, not an environmentalist, and his company is surely capitalizing on the growing market for ethanol fuel. Yet, you have to believe that although ethanol burns much cleaner than gasoline, it is only a short term fix… it’s almost like putting a band-aid on a cut that needs stitches. More so, with an electric car infrastructure on the horizon, doesn’t it seem ethanol may not even be a part of our future?

This leads us to our broader concept of bioenergy. The grapethinkers are obviously inspired by nature and have always found photosynthesis fascinating. The method by which the chlorophyll molecule uses sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to create energy in the form of glucose and oxygen, ultimately the components that power nature and our own bodies. Some incredible scientists at MIT, one of which (Dan Nocera) I was fortunate enough to meet at the World Science Festival in NYC last May, are currently all over this and have invented a contraption that mimicks photosynthesis. The device uses sunlight to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, which can be stored in the form of hydrogen fuel. This is ground breaking because it makes solar energy, more specifically photosynthesis, seem to be the sustainability solution. Right now, solar cells are completely reliant on silicon (and a few other innovations), making them cost ineffective due to the price of materials, and more so because of the inefficiency of the PV cell in converting sunlight to energy and having the capacity to store this energy. By incorporating these new photosynthetic systems into solar panels, homes and office buildings will be able to generate power for their operation during the day and store excess energy in the form of hydrogen fuel in an on-site fuel cell, which can then be used at night for normal usage and electric vehicle recharging.

If you install these photosynthetic solar cells into buildings, use biodegradable innovations like Ecovative Design’s products, and start the process of urban farming, we will begin to grow our homes and buildings into living, breathing, self-sustaining bio-towers that produce enough energy, food, and other bio-materials to supply the inhabitants of that location as well as excess to send/sell back to the grid. With this, we will truly start to model the growth of nature.

Maybe if we can succeed in incorporating this paradigm shift into the way we produce our materials, food, and energy, then the mindset can move into the public mentality. Then we can grow our minds and our relationships and our businesses. Organic growth opposed to the fundamental mindset of immediate gratification and synthesis that has manifested itself in Big Pharma, Big Oil, and all the big consumer product companies. A whole new perception of bioenergy.

I’ll expand more on renewable homes, urban farming/biotowers, bio-materials as well as the ‘growth’ theory in future nature to the grid posts. It comes down to developing a symbiotic relationship with nature and embracing what has evolved over billions of years as inspiration for an ecolistic world.

Nature to the grid!

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His team includes:

Lisa Jackson, Administrator of the EPA: former commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection

Nancy Sutley, Chairman of White House Council on Environmental Quality: former energy advisor to California governor, Gray Davis

Carol M. Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change: former EPA administrator under Bill Clinton

Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior: Colorado Senator

Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture: former Iowa Governor

The carbon tax is favored obviously because it lends predictability to energy prices, whereas the cap-and-trade system tends to be more volatile and discourages investment in carbon-free technologies (clean coal, energy efficiency, renewable energy).

The way cap-and trade works is the government sets a cap or limit on the amount of pollution that can be emitted. Companies are then issued a set number of emission allowances/permits, with which they trade amongst each other based on the amount of pollution they need to emit for operations. This system obviously rewards the seller for limiting emissions and punishes the buyer for needing to emit more. If the monitoring and enforcement of this system is sound and the ‘cap’ limit and initial allocation of allowances is determined using an appropriate process such as grandfathering provision based on historical emissions, then the cap-and-trade system can actually be more effective than a carbon tax by creating a marketplace of competition to solve the issue. However, the stipulations and costs to enforce this system may be too great, not to mention the potential corruption the system tends to encourage.

The carbon tax might be the simplest, most straightforward way to address emissions. The tax revenues would not only offset other taxes, be used to fund environmental projects, and give incentives for clean tech investment, but could also be allocated to start paying off the insane amount of debt that the US has racked up this year trying to prevent our economic collapse!

Whatever course of action we take, I’ve got faith Obama, Chu, and gang will figure it out.

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Here’s a company that’s doing something very special. I watched Ron’s presentation at VLAB (MIT/Stanford Venture Lab) Green Tech for the Consumer Market this past January and got very excited. Then after hearing Trae Vassallo’s glowing presentation at the Silicon Valley West Coast Green conference, I knew they were out to change the world.

Recycle Bank is influencing the creation of a cutting edge process called single stream recycling. They supply their customers with a Recycle Bank garbage bin in which they can throw all of their paper, plastic, metal, and glass. The bin has an RFID microchip inside, which is read by special levers retrofitted onto city garbage trucks that weigh the amount of garbage. This value is sent to each individual consumer’s online Recycle Bank account, where it is converted into Recycle Bank Reward Points at a ratio of 2.5 reward points for each pound of garbage. These Reward Points can then be redeemed at local businesses that consumers normally buy from, such as Whole Foods, Bed Bath & Beyond, and many more. What an incredible incentive to get people recycling!

With such a dynamic program that will certainly increase the recycling rate, RB gains the credibility to negotiate exclusive long term contracts with city municipalities to deliver garbage from Recycle Bank customers to material recovery facilities (MRF) and in essence divert trash from going into a landfill. This creates great economic value for the city by allowing them to sell the trash to manufacturers such as Coca Cola or Pepsi instead of paying landfills to take the garbage. Wow, make money instead of pay money? and Recycle Bank takes a cut off the money saved from landfill diversion rather than the money earned from sales to manufacturers. A very smart marketing decision that influences cities to broadcast how much money they made in a year, which in turn gets other cities excited about the Recycle Bank program.

This is big for 3 reasons:

1) high profitability with exclusive municipality contracts and a valuable online advertising engine

2) environmental health through the elimination of waste

3) the ability to influence consumption behavior

This 3rd reason is what really fascinates me.  With other green businesses, sure it’s great to benefit the environment, but obviously the price has to be right for adoption. And yet, even when the price is right, people are lazy and don’t want to change their behavior. They might call their utility company and say I want green power, if and only if its cheaper (Austin Energy). With Recycle Bank, the single stream recycling program that they’re pioneering is enough to influence people to actually start recycling. And even more so, RB gains the ability to influence consumer purchases with their Reward Points system. For example, they’re planning to roll out a program that gives people greater rewards for shopping at ‘green’ businesses.  Organic food stores, LEED certified establishments, and even specific products.

This is a business that’s right in front of the American consumer’s face… they can touch it, they can feel it, they can put more money in their pocket, while being guided to a healthier life and changing their local environment. Recycle Bank becomes an incredible solution to the entire consumption side of the sustainability equation. We still need the west coast to figure out solar and fuel cells so we can get off coal and oil, but this is a practical solution to get us moving in the right direction. I’m lovin it!

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They’re already pioneers in the practical use of renewable energy and organic growing. Couldn’t they become the model for sustainability that spreads to the cities?… nature to the grid. Producing healthy food and renewable solar, wind, and bio-energy that power the earth. These places could become some of the most spiritual, environmental, and profitable organizations in the world.

Biodynamic wine gets into the holistic approach to agriculture, which is a step beyond organic. It’s built on the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner known as anthroposophy, which includes understanding “the ecological, the energetic, and the spiritual in nature.” Sometimes I feel insanely ideological about this type of stuff, especially bc I was into renewable energy before I ever even thought about wine, but for some reason I see the worlds merging together. There’s something real to this… something tangible that people can touch.

Image via Wikipedia

We know that the crises facing our world are calling for a transcendence in consciousness, but what does that mean? How do people touch that… how do they feel it? I believe wineries that incorporate these philosophies into their practice will create environments that inspire people. International winery tourism is already an astounding figure as is. What if they grew into biodynamic environments that help people feel enlightenment rather than just contemplate it as an intellectual idea. They taste the organic food that’s grown, they see the renewable energy that’s generated, they feel how they’re a part of a greater living system.

I’m still not feelin the word ‘wine’ tho… there’s just too much whining goin on in the world. I do like Elixir. Also, here’s something practical that a friend shared with me. It’s called Outstanding in the Field.

Read More: Our Sustainable Future

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For those of you who’ve been reading our blog for awhile, you know we’ve focused on wine as a unifier in the sustainable development of our lives. We’ve woven it into the core values of economic, social, and environmental health in an effort to exemplify its unifying power. The GrapeThinking passion has always been to create a sustainable world, and we feel the time is now to grow from our wine roots.

Wine, water, organic food, holistic medicine, and other natural supplements that create healthy bodies and minds. Renewable energy, green building, and recyclables that grow a vibrant environment. Information technology to ensure the establishment of a smart energy grid and a deep social connectedness among community. And most importantly, a rich understanding of the intense economic times we face ahead and the pragmatic ways by which we will turn our ideals into profit and pay it forward.

Book cover via Amazon

I remember conversations between Ruarri, Jake, and myself back in the summer of ’06 about starting our company. We talked in depth about the sustainability movement and how it’s going to change the world in our lifetime… usher in a new golden age if you will. This got us thinking heavily about the ancient philosophers of our past… Plato, Socrates, Aristotle. The greats that helped us gain a better understanding of life. In Plato’s well known work, Symposium, he attributes the rise of the golden age of Greece to the symposia, better known to them as drinking parties. Where society’s elite would gather and drink wine together. The magic started when everyone became equally inebriated on their elixir and the eros or arete as they called it would start to flow. Everyone would share ideas clearly and with intellectual humility and grace. They started feeling the connectedness of everything and each other beyond the realm of space and time, realizing it’s all energy. We share one life together and everything we do as individuals affects the whole. This collective awareness spread throughout society and created their golden age.

We found this fascinating and started believing in a mystical significance to wine. Something that inspires us and brings us together. That can help cultivate the tranquility and enlightenment that we need to build a sustainable world. We still haven’t quite figured out what it is and may never find the answer, but we do feel it has something to do with how wine is alive. How it ages and matures and becomes better with time.

These types of ideals and feelings are what drive the grapethinkers to their core, and we feel that as an organization, it is time to grow. We must address the sustainability movement and become a better way of living… a better way of thinking.

I just spent a week in Chicago in the wake of Obama’s historic Presidential acceptance speech and had a chance to attend the Midwest Alternative Energy Venture Forum. It felt great to represent Grape Thinking and promote it not just as a liquid but as a way of thinking. A better way to live and a better way to think.

To Ruarri and Jake, we’ve come a long way over the past few years since talking about how wine can save the world, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am to have such amazing partners and friends. What we’ve built is something that binds our deepest passions for life and I look forward to the road ahead.

Cheers guys

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A couple cool projects over at Terracycle are ironically enough related to the wine industry. Go figure! To quote George Chavelier at Terracyle who recently contacted us regarding our writings: “Greg, I agree about vineyards and wineries becoming the poster children for the green movement – who’s more likely to go that way than people with such a passion for that which comes from the Earth?”

Terracycle is offering refurbished old Kendal Jackson wine barrels as The Rotary Composter and Rain Barrel water storage containers. They’re also getting wine enthusiasts, bars, restaurants, and wineries around the country to send in used corks, which they upcycle into cool new products like doormats. Both the upcycled cork products and wine barrel composter and water storage units are available in major retailers nationwide, including Sam’s Club and Home Depot.

Here’s a video on how to create your compost bin with Terracycle’s Rotary Composter:

Terracycle is doing something incredibly innovative that is going to help completely renovate capitalism. They are essentially taking trash off peoples’ hands and innovatively recycling it into sellable products. What a business model, and what a benefit to the environment. Check out their Eco-Capitalist guidebook for more info and check out the other products they’re selling. Seems to me that their creating a new type of marketplace… a renewable marketplace.

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I stopped by Troy, NY back in August at the beginning of my cross continental journey into nature to visit Eben at his Ecovative office on the Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute campus. I had recently become fascinated with the mycelium substance that they’re using to grow… that’s right, grow… a polystyrene substitute. As many of you know, polystyrene, also known as styrofoam, is one of the most non-biodegradable products made by man, and utilizes a ridiculous amount of energy to produce. It is a peak product of egoic, ecological destructive manufacturing that must be eliminated from our supply chain and environment.

Ecovative Design’s flagship product, Greensulate, combines local agricultural products with cellulose to form a particulate that is then bound together using the magic of mycelium. The finished product is a grown biological composite. The world’s first sustainable rigid board insulation that serves as a direct replacement for polystyrene. This is fascinating stuff!

Here’s an endorsement of PICNIC by President Clinton that I thought was interesting:

Also, here’s some sci-fi mycelium perspective for you:

1) The largest and oldest living organism in the world is a mycelium patch in eastern Oregon

2) If we were to terraform Mars, we would start with mycelium (fungi) in a symbiotic relationship with algae to make the soil inhabitable for seedlings and create photosynthesis to oxygenate the atmosphere.

3) More and more studies are showing that this stuff is natures neural network and that our minds have evolved from it! Check out Paul Stamet’s book Mycelium Running for more info or his TED talk on 6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World… this is going to be big.

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Village Green Energy is a really cool startup that is buying renewable energy certificates, also known as RECs, from a regulated marketplace of solar fields, wind farms, and other renewable energy producers, in which they compete with utility companies and then broker the RECs to a variety of partners. A few wineries just so happen to be some of their first customers, our friends over at Windsor Vineyards and Girard being one of them. VGE is also doing some clever things with consumer particpatory apps and programs that gain marketable exposure to the partner businesses, thus giving them greater incentive to purchase the RECs from Village Green.

Their first big application is a Facebook app called Green My Vino, where users can donate 1, 5, or 10 minutes of renewable energy to their friends, and if a certain goal of renewable energy donation is met, the partner wineries will commit to buying RECs from Village Green, and thus use renewable energy to power their corporate offices, vineyards, and entire operation. I think this is honestly one of the most innovative ideas and business models I’ve come across in the emerging green space. Kudos to these guys!

We started our company GT in late ’06 with a deep passion for the emerging green movement, and yet at that time there was not a lot of market activity so we chose to focus our efforts on a certain industry… the wine industry. We love the health and connective power of wine, and more importantly how wineries and vineyards are one of the best practical embodiments of the green movement. They’re using renewable energy and organic growing methods, they’re harmonizing civilization and nature, and they’re even starting to do more than just grow grapes and make wine!

We look forward to offering services to all types of companies in the emerging renewable economy and hope to help Village Green in any way we can.

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Wow, what an excellent conference! A game changer. I have to thank my friends over at Village Green Energy for hooking me up with a free pass. I’ve been so passionate about this movement as long as I can remember… ever since 6th grade when I messed around with electromagenetic fields and plants. Early education for me was all about ecology and environment, and that followed with rigorous economics in college, which I didn’t quite understand about myself until now. Having not gone into banking with my degree and now seeing the state of the economy I was like shit… but David Suzuki put it so clearly… it’s (eco)nomics. I can’t believe I never recognized that. I automatically associated economics with the greedy, short-sighted mentality of Wall Street that focuses solely on the bottom line and exploiting the market for cash and egoic status. Yet you realize the bottom line is not the statement of cash flows or the balance sheet… it’s the fuckin planet. Ecology + Economics = Sustainability. This conference was absolutely buzzing! People were feeling alive and connecting and touching each other like I’ve never seen in my life. We all knew the green revolution is ready and about to change the world in a big way.

The keynotes were superb with Al Gore, Jerrry Brown, and David Suzuki really leaving a moving impact on me. Nobody was afraid to go deep. Sure there was plenty of talk about clean tech innovations or green building or policy changes.. but more so people were incredibly open about spiritual and conciousness based changes that are going to take place around the world to solve this crisis. Sarah Susanka even brought the crowd to tears with her moving presentation. It’s so much bigger than green or solar or oil… it’s about enlightening the human race that we are one and we share the same spirit with each other and with the world as a whole. I found it to be quite the religious experience to be at this conference. A few others being recently when I went into the wild of Alaska for a few weeks and when I saw the Dalai Lama speak in Bethlehem, Pa.

Aside from the heavy stuff, there were tons of innovative companies doing everything from cutting edge solar installs, to green acrhitecture consulting, to new age battery storage, smart grid stuff, efficiency software, New Resource Bank (which is exploding with business during this banking crisis… lol gotta love it!) and sooo much more. You had builders, utility reps, entrepreneurs, mad scientists, engineers, and everyone was so open and loving and connecting. I was blown away… it took me 3 full days to digest it all.

There were also brilliant seminars and panels, the best one for me being the State of Investing in Clean Tech, where partners from KPCB, Foundation, Sigma, and DFJ (all the big Menlo Park firms) talked about what companies they’re investing in and what technology is working… and yet something was different. These are VCs and of course money is there first concern, but with this clean green movement we are finally going to enter into a phase of social… or better yet eco-capitalism… where we benefit the environment and the social welfare of all while making a shitload of money and creating a shitload of jobs. This is an unprecendented opportunity in economic human history. Create a concentrically cyclical supply chain and pass the prosperity around the world. I was inspired by the VCs stories of how they’re going green in their own lives and their deep personal commitment.

A few themes from the conference to leave you with:

1) Nature to the grid baby – energy, health, architecture

2) Ecology + Economics = Sustainability (Eco-Capitalism)

3) Sky power will fuel the earth

4) The only thing special about humans is our foresight… our ability to see and shape the future. So lets use it.

5) A new connected conciousness is emerging that will limit the individual ego that has evolved and scorched our earth with fragmented, disjointed, greedy agendas. The only chance at eternal life is if we live together as one.

6) Be the change you want to see in the world!

In my humble opinion, these are unprecedented and magical times in the history of our race and our planet. There’s no better place to be then right here, and right now.

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