I’ve done some posting about my electric bike research over the past few weeks. I thought I’d go ahead and offer some more personal detail on the why and how of all that to cap off this week.

Okay. The situation so far. I decided to take a look at electrifying a bike. Initially, I was looking at electric scooters, but they are really expensive and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I really want to bike. I’ve tried commuting from my home in Oak Park to my job in the South Loop many times. Before Maxie was born, I was regularly commuting on my bike, until I heard that someone got knocked off their bike by some of the nice young men that have nothing better to do at 9AM on a weekday morning. That kinda freaked me out.

The neighborhoods between my home and work aren’t totally horrible. There is actually a lot of development happening between Oak Park and downtown Chicago. There are some sketchy stretches though, and there is rampant double parking in the bike lanes, clueless drivers and aggressive drivers, glass pretty much everywhere (but hey that’s what teflon tires are for right?), etc, etc. In short, all the little annoyances that can make urban cycling unpleasant are very well represented in West Chicago.

So, my thought was, “what if I can zip through the bad stuff at 25 mph and take the more scenic areas at my leisure?” I think having an electric bike would go along way toward mitigating some of these factors and give me a little more confidence in commuting in. (more…)

Hooray for Spain! Well, for Navarra, anyway. And definitely not for the Spanish nat’l football team. Them I don’t like. But, turbine building Spaniards, they’re alright by me.

The region of Navarra, in Northeastern Spain, better known in the U.S. for the “running of the bulls” in Pamplona. But in this region, approximately 70% of the electricity comes from the wind and the sun. With no coal, oil or gas of its own, this mountainous region deliberately went for renewable energy in the late 1980s. The first wind farm was built in full view of the regional capital Pamplona, so that people could get used to it. Now, with some 1,100 windmills dotted all over Navarra, this tiny region is capable of generating more electricity from renewable sources than big EU countries like France or Poland. Navarra plans to reach 100% renewable energy generation by 2010.

Originally from TreeHugger on March 22, 2007, 4:57pm

[tags]urbaneco, wind power, solar power, turbine[/tags]