Since I just posted about my thoughts on sustainable energy in Africa, I might as well follow up with more musings on sustainable development there. Although most of my time in Kenya was spent in Nairobi, I also had a chance to explore Lake Naivasha’s industry and ecosystem. I met, for example, with the VP of Finance and Administration of Homegrown Ltd, a huge floriculture company specializing in roses, exporting hundreds of millions each year. A few things struck me from the encounter.

First, Lake Naivasha, the source of water for the entire local flower industry, is changing. It is drying up and its water is becoming more polluted. While this is partially due to natural cycles, it is mostly attributed to man. Homegrown and other florists in the Lake Naivasha Growers Group surprised me with their recognition of culpability and their proactivity in addressing the issue despite no government requirement to do so. For example, they have planted local shrubs along the banks to slow runoff and filter the water that enters the lake.

Second, Homegrown is committed to reducing its environmental impact through elimination of chemical-based pesticides. However, the need to reduce rose-eating pests remains. To strike this balance, Homegrown founded another company, DuduTech (“Dudu” means “insect” in Swahili.), which develops “pesticides” by using naturally occurring insects that prey on the pests. This includes predatory insects, parasitic bugs, and a host of other approaches that all have the same objective: neutralize the pests without introducing chemicals into the environment. Cool stuff.

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Tim Bond, head of Global Asset Allocation at Barclays, an investment bank, has put forth that the Swedish crisis of the late 80’s and 90’s will be a good model for the current, much wider, global financial crisis likely ensuing economic consequences.

In the Swedish example intervention was resisted, there was a tight downward spiral, there was a recovery, and while the economics caught up with the bailouts there was an extended period of negative growth as credit was tight and earnings declined. Whether the US and Global economy rebounds at the same rate or not, there are certain realities that will likely take shape – and a growing unemployment rate is most certainly one of them.

The G7 is working very hard on addressing our financial turmoil. I’ll leave much more qualified people to address the impact of the bail out packages on investment and more, and I hope to motivate someone to write about those effects here on CleanTechies. I will take a shot at suggesting implementing measures that address at least one aspect of the wide spread panic that is gripping so many these days – how this solution could have an effect on employment, education and the preparation of a grid more adequately equipped to accept electricity from intermittent and distributed renewable sources.

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Acronyms galore!

Well the good news at CleanTechies is that we are starting to roll forward with some ideas – incorporating a discussion board for job seekers and integrating a more complete job board. If you are a developer and want to give us a hand… write to Hilary(at)CleanTechies.com She’d be psyched to hear from you!

For you career changers that are still wrapping your mind around new terms – Renewable Portfolio Standards commonly referred to as RPSs , are central to stimulating renewable energy production in many US states by mandating that utilities incorporate a certain amount of renewable power in their power mix. Ideally they can actually source this power from their own power plants, but sometimes they have to buy this power from other independent power producers, IPPs (also referred to as non-utility generators). To make matters more complicated for you, in some states producers can actually uncouple the environmental attributes and incentives associated with the energy produced and sell those Renewable Energy Certificates (or simply RECs ) to a utility while selling the energy produced to a consumer. To give you some perspective on how that impacts a utilities thinking you can look at how power purchase agreements (PPAs) are put together in a previous post .

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