Twenty-six projects have won funding of up to $200,000 each to develop their concepts in the 2009 IDEAS Energy Challenge. Jointly sponsored by Global Village Energy Partnership International, GTZ, IDB and the Government of Korea, the competition supports project ideas which demonstrate an innovative response to tackling the energy challenges facing Latin America and the Caribbean today.

GVEP International highlights three cases where the scheme is expected to facilitate considerable growth in the renewable energy framework of impoverished regions of Central America.

Amid the valleys, mountains and volcanoes of the highlands of southern Guatemala lies one of the country’s largest lakes, Lake Amatitlan. Located just 16 kilometers south of Guatemala City, the unique landscape surrounding the lake means it is used by many people as a recreation area.

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With the United States of America’s ever-mounting trade and budget deficits, unemployment above 10 percent (and, dependent on counting, un- and under-employment above 20 percent), looming peak oil and other resource (water, for example) limitations, environmental challenges, and ever-mounting climate chaos , America faces a very serious situation.

In fact, to one degree or another, these same intertwined challenges (with the exception of trade/budget deficits for some countries) are those face by societies and nations throughout the globe in our networked, systems-of-systems global community.

These serious challenges are a networked system-of-systems that interact and reinforce each other. As we strive to stop digging the holes deeper and climb our way out, we can seek to deal with these challenges in a stove-piped manner or address them with W6 solutions that have wins across multiple arenas:

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I recently finished reading  a book I strongly recommend to anyone interested in sustainable development and energy. It is packed with figures and findings that I believe will easily start discussions among CleanTechies.

The author, David JC MacKay, is Professor in the Department of Physics at Cambridge University and was recently appointed Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change responsible for the Low Carbon Transition Plan.

One of the main findings of this book is that electrifying our cars and installing heat pumps in our buildings would enable us to cut significantly both our greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel consumption. Both solutions are much more efficient than the current traditional ones and could benefit from massive electrification to answer all our energy needs.

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I recently caught up with Paul Frankel, Managing Director at Califronia’s Clean Energy Fund. As we discussed Renewable Energy and the greater economy he referred the paradigm shift that places a premium on and a natural incentive towards “Sustainability and Responsibility” Largely for the same reasons I’m discussing in this series, we agreed that will be a move away from unsustainable and irresponsible business practices in every business sector.

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