Blooming Cherry Blossoms, hints of green sprouting out of every corner, and a Crayola crayon box of tulips giving their gratitude of salutation to the sun. Its spring time in Colorado which means a couple things: crazy 80 degree weather on Saturday and 21 degree flurries on Sunday; It means planting my carrots and broccoli; and it means (mostly) sunny days that beckon graduate students daily, through the creaks and cracks of windows and skylights, peering into the temperature-controlled and fluorescent-lit boxes they reside in all day, saying ‘come, adventure, enjoy! Forget your responsibilities!’
Alas, it’s already week three of a ten-week quarter and there is much work to be done.
I’m catching up on some reading this morning on new innovations in sanitation efforts around the world, you know, composting toilets and methane gas generators from human excrement – pretty sexy stuff. If all goes well I will have my first assignment of the quarter turned in by Friday, an analysis of a solar electrification farm out in the Sonoran Desert of California. Solar? Renewable Energy? A cure-all to our carbon-emitting woes, you say? Well, as I’m only now learning, there are all kinds of trade-offs for powering our world with “clean” solar technology. Its a water-intensive project that is located in a place where there is not much water to retrieve, the components are made of some rare earth minerals that are only found in China (thwarting any effort to solve that “energy independence” issue) and the 1800 acres of photovoltaic cells would displace some seriously cute (and threatened) wildlife. I guess my assignment might not be as easy as I thought.
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