Green Wombat

The California Public Utilities Commission’s ban yesterday on future purchases of electricity produced by coal-fired plants will not stop utilities from making spot purchases of out-of-state "dirty" power to meet peak demand. As part of California’s efforts to fight global warming, the commission on Thursday implemented an interim emissions standard that effectively prohibits utilities from investing in new coal-fired power plants or signing long-term contracts with plants whose emissions exceed those of lower-polluting natural gas plants. Commission spokesperson Terrie Prosper confirmed today that the standard does not apply to spot power purchases. During the summer months, as Californians crank up their air conditioners, California utilities like PG&E (PCG), Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) turn coal plants in Utah and other bordering states for electricity to stave off brownouts. However, it is expected such spot purchases will go by the wayside once California regulators impose statewide caps on greenhouse gas emissions to implement the state’s landmark global warming law enacted last September. According to a California Energy Commission report, out-of-state electricity imports produced about 61 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2004.

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Green Wombat and family are in Sydney for the holidays.  Posting will be sporadic over the next two weeks but keep checking in. Happy New Year to all.

cheers

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The Green Wombat has landed back in San Francisco and will taking a few days off from posting over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Cheers.

(In case you were wondering, at left is Wiggles, a 14-month-old Southern Hairy-Nosed Wombat.)

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GreenCitizen, the San Francisco Bay Area electronics recycler, recently launched an online classifieds service to hook up people wanting to donate or sell old computers and other gear with non-profits and those who can’t afford to buy the latest iMac. The idea: extend the life of yesterday’s computers and cell phones rather than throw them on the ever-growing electronic waste heap. So far, the service appears to be off to a slow start but the idea is on the money.

Silicon Valley-based GreenCitizen takes a TreeHugger approach to an environmental business usually associated with the smokestack side of town: make it hip, understandable and convenient. Today, I walked over to GreenCitizen’s downtown San Francisco store (my cruddy cell phone photo above) and dropped off a circa 1999 laptop for recycling. More a boutique than a junkyard, the stylishly designed store sells T-shirts, shopping bags and coffee mugs alongside information on the 3 billion gadgets that will be discarded annually by 2010. Glenn Fajardo, director of the company’s drop-off centers, took the laptop off my hands and explained that GreenCitizen will track the ancient Toshiba to ensure that it’s recycled properly and not put on some scrap ship destined for a Third World landfill. Speaking of a company that knows a thing or two about stylish marketing, Virgin Mobile today began providing postage-paid recycling envelopes with every cell phone it sells. My colleague Michal Lev-Ram reports on Third Screen that when consumers’ current phone becomes hopelessly uncool – say in about six months – they just drop the old handset in the post and Virgin will take care of the rest.

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Alas, working for the world’s largest media company is no guarantee that you’ll be online 24/7. The T1 line, or whatever it is that keeps Business 2.0 connected to the Time Warner mother ship in New York and the rest of the world, went down this morning and remains out of commission. The wombat has emerged from his San Francisco burrow on the 29th floor of One California to forage for latte and Wifi at Tully’s.

Posting shall resume tomorrow from the Solar Power 2006 confab in San Jose.

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Green Wombat covers the intersection of the environment, technology, business and policy. The enviroblog is written by Todd Woody, a senior editor at Fortune magazine who is based in San Francisco. Todd formerly was the assistant managing editor of Business 2.0, where he oversaw the magazine’s green tech coverage. He previously was the business editor of the San Jose Mercury News in Silicon Valley and worked as a senior writer and senior editor at The Industry Standard magazine in San Francisco. He covered environmental issues for seven years at The Recorder, a San Francisco legal daily, and wrote about the environment and technology from Sydney, Australia, for Wired magazine and other publications. And the wombat? A wombat is a marsupial found mostly in southeast mainland Australia and Tasmania. It spends its days in a burrow, emerging at dusk to feed on grasses. The common wombats in the Green Wombat logo were
photographed by Todd on June 23, 2006, at Tasmania’s Narawntapu National Park. (The green wombat above was painted by Sydney artist Tanya Roocci for Green Wombat.)  The northern hairy-nosed wombat (photo at right from the Wombat Foundation) is among the world’s most critically endangered large mammals, with a single population of 115 animals surviving in the Australian state of Queensland. For more info, go to the Wombat Foundation.

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