Movie Review: The Power of Community:How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

The documentary The Power of Community:How Cuba Survived Peak Oil looks at how Cubans survived their "peak oil," i.e., when fuel oil imports were cut off after the fall of the Soviet Union. 

With no imports of fuel oil, power cuts lasted up to 16 hours a day, and they had no choice but to abruptly change. Power for everyday necessities like water pumping for indoor plumbing and refrigeration was at best non reliable and at worst non existent. They had a food scarcity, and the average Cuban lost 20 lbs by 1994.

 

Here are some inspiring ways Cuba dealt with their "peak oil" experience.

Transportation:

• The government imported bicycles, which were not a part of the culture, and citizens had to learn how to use them. 
• They developed mass transit service overnight with creative solutions like old trucks with covers acting as buses.
• People in small towns turned to horses and mules for transportation.

Agriculture: 

• In the early days while in crisis mode, they had to have food distribution so the wealthy did not just hoard what was for sale, and relied on “survival agriculture” using no chemical inputs (which were not available).
• There was a drastic effort to convert every inch of arable land to agriculture. Therefore, urban gardening flourished. It's a growing sector of economy, creating jobs (organic farming is more labor intensive, therefore there are more jobs).
• Farmers now among the highest paid professionals
• Many kiosks are located throughout city that sell food grown using urban agriculture
• 80-100% of food in smaller towns is provided by urban agriculture
• Working against nature, in conventional agriculture, you have to use huge amounts of energy. They strive to create a “food forest”—self sustaining like a forest, and then you pick the produce as you would forage in the woods.

Energy:

• In some rural areas, it is less expensive to use solar panels than to connect to grid. More than 2,000 rural schools have supplied with solar panels. 
• The use of solar hot water is an example of variety of small solutions used across the country.
• Cuba imported fuel oil before the crisis, since the quality of their crude oil is poor. Now, crop waste like sugar is used to produce electricity. During harvest, 3-4 months out of the year, 30% of energy is from biomass sources.

The average Cuban consumes 1/8 of the energy of the average American, but their infant morality rate and lifespan are about equal. Obviously Cuba is very different from us, politically, geographically, culturally, and in the climate. But this movie provides great examples of baby steps and grassroots action, adding up and make a difference. Humans are extremely adaptable to change. Because of embargo, everything has to happen from the inside, making this a fascinating isolated, controlled experiment in how to survive peak oil, when it comes for the rest of us. 

See our other blogs on urban agriculture and Seattle's regulations & incentives.

Sun in Seattle

In honor of this rare sunny December day in Seattle, here is an excerpt from Brian Clark Howard's article in The Daily Green, "6 Surprising Places Where People Are Choosing Home Solar Power: You don't have to live in the Sun Belt to take advantage of solar panels."

Follow the link the article to view the map.

"A look at this map shows some of the trends above (wealth and progressive values tend to correlate to interest in solar power in Seattle and Boston, for example, despite a relative lack of sun.) Also worth noting is the hotpots in New Jersey and Colorado, two states with incentive systems that promote adoption of solar technology, in addition to California. But there are also some regions that may surprise some observers. One note is that the interest map does skew toward regions with more dense populations, but even taking that important fact under consideration we think some trends are worth noting:

Washington State

While the Evergreen State does have a concentration of progressive, tech-savvy and green leaning folks in the Seattle area and Bellingham, it's interesting to note that interest in solar power is still fairly strong in rural areas and, to a lesser extent, the eastern part of the state, where incomes are much lower. Further, Washington is the cloudiest state, both in reputation and according to the data. In fact, the first 14 least sunny cities in the nation are all in Washington"

Read more: http://www.thedailygreen.com/living-green/blogs/recycling-design-technology/home-solar-power-461109?src=nl&mag=tdg&list=dgr&kw=ist#ixzz0YZUQLTKb

More solar energy information.

Read more: http://www.thedailygreen.com/living-green/blogs/recycling-design-technology/home-solar-power-461109?src=nl&mag=tdg&list=dgr&kw=ist#ixzz0YZU0HsLY

Solar Panels for Rent

Looking at the rain pouring down outside my window, it is an odd time to be thinking about solar panels in the Pacific Northwest. Solar power is an exciting developing technology, but the huge upfront cost of solar currently prevents it from becoming more widely used.

The solution from Citizenre REnU: "Citizenrē REnU program packages solar power for you in a simple and smart way. Plainly put, the Citizenrē Corporation pays for, installs, owns and operates the solar installation."

http://renu.citizenre.com/

Citizenre Corporation has a calculator to figure your savings and the savings to the environment for renting their panels. Here is an example of savings for someone living on San Juan Island currently paying $60 a month in electricity bills.

Savings Forecast	Today's Rate	End of Year-5	End of Year-10
Citizenre REnU	7.2 cents	7.2 cents	7.2 cents
Current Electricity Provider	7.2 cents	8.7 cents	10.5 cents
Total Savings		$443.75	$1739.99
If you were to invest all of the money that you saved over the term of a 10-year contract, and you received the investment grade bond yield average of 9.44%, then your decision to participate in the REnU Program would yield $1,977.59 by the end of your contract. Additionally, over that same time period, your REnU will eliminate 16 tons of CO2, 61 lbs of NOx, 175 lbs of SO2, 7 lbs of PM, 1 lbs of VOC, and 12 lbs of CO. That is equivalent to taking approximately, 3 automobiles off of the road, or planting 47 trees.