I posted yesterday about the Colloquium over at Rochester Turning as a comment to the post on Brighton Going Green and looked back at the additional comments this morning. Found this excellent story on the Maple Ridge wind farm on Tug Hill in Lewis County.

From this article there appear to be some key learnings: 1) get someone local interested by 2) emphasizing the income from the turbines ($6,000 minimum per in this case). 3) And maybe most importantly, find a good site. Maple Ridge is at the east end of Lake Ontario (which is very flat ) and so gets pretty constant wind. Seems to me similar conditions would prevail south of Buffalo all the way to Erie, PA. Anyone know of activity in that part of the state?

I’m considering opening up Greenerminds to guest posters and eventually to open registration. I want to see if I can attract a core group of local sustainability-minded folks first and get that running. This has been on my mind for some time, but I’m settled enough now in my day job that I can bring some focus to it.

As usual, making a decision, the road rises to meet me. I ran into Dave Vail yesterday and posed the question whether he’d want to participate. He said he’s a terrible typist, but I’m sure we can get around that. He mentioned the Natural Building Colloquium coming up the end of July in Bath, NY, and I started getting excited about the possibilities of attending. Sadly, it’s a Tuesday to Saturday thing, and registration is $400. I might still be able to justify a day or two off and that cost if I can figure out a way to recoup it.

This immediately brings up the question for me on a personal level of how much I’m willing to spend to go green, both monetarily, time-wise and in terms of convenience. I just spent about $550 for a pallet of rock, a yard of topsoil, yard of mulch and 18 lilacs for a hedge. These are capital improvements, so I’d expect to see the return when the house is sold (hopefully not for a long time). A hands-on learning experience seems expensive at $400, but what’s the return and when? I might learn something that could save hundreds in heating next winter, or meet someone which results in a ten thousand dollar idea.

The D & C ran a story this week on a new, state-of-the-art cellulosic ethanol plant to be built here in Monroe County. I don’t know much about the merits of cellulosic ethanol, but The Oil Drum was not very sanguine about it a few months ago. After hearing Eric Massa wax optimistic on the subject, I sent him an e-mail that he might want to curb his enthusiasm. As I remember, there was an issue with the enzymes and energy inputs needed for production. I’ll try and look into this further.

Interesting to me is that the plant will be located in Greece, a heavily Republican suburb, and not exactly the progressive capital of Western New York. This smells of something.

Then yesterday, they announced another plant to be built in Caledonia.

A couple of weeks ago, our County Legislature passed a budget which included shifting $175K from Cornell Cooperative Extension to a new thingy at MCC. Reasons given included things like “we’ve been getting complaints from the agricultural community about CCE.” Almost on the same day, the announcement was made that Mr. Bob King, formerly the CCE head in Monroe County, would head up the new venture. So if you were getting complaints about a thing headed by this guy, do you expect something different about something headed by him again? Rochester Turning was looking into this some.