Producing energy from renewable sources is clearly a  growth industry judging from the number of federal agencies  receiving stimulus money dedicated to renewable energy  and carbon neutrality.

While rural America is not a direct  recipient of most of the stimulus money, especially in  Oregon where it is being divvied out to more populous  areas, being able to produce energy locally opens the door  for indirect investment.  Developing manufacturing capability for solar and wind  generators on the South Coast allows public agencies to  spend their stimulus dollars here bringing in badly needed  outside capital.

Still, as written here before the real opportunity  in renewable energy is in the ongoing production and  sale of electricity.  It is this concept that motivated the development of the  Western Oregon Wind Project to help earn additional revenue  for local schools. Once again I want to personally  thank Congressman Peter DeFazio for supporting this project  and encourage everyone reading this to call or write the  Congressman or stop by The Sentinel and sign a letter of  support for this project.  Despite the tremendous potential of renewable energy it  is important to understand that clean storage technology  must be developed to fully capitalize upon clean energy.

Clean storage, the ability to capture power from clean  sources for later use, is the proverbial ‘holy grail’ of the  renewable energy industry.  Presently, renewable energy must be used, stored in batteries  or lost or fed back into the centralized grid as a credit  against future use. Using a coal-powered grid for clean  energy storage is counter-intuitive. For quite some time I  have been working to acquire the rights to an emerging  clean storage system to replace batteries and this week  made significant progress in that direction.  Ultra-capacitors are a clean storage source capable of millions  of charge and discharge cycles, utilize organic electrolytes  and dielectrics and unlike batteries need never to be  replaced. A capacitor roughly the size of refrigerator could  store sufficient power from clean sources to run an average  home for almost a week.

The capacitor technology will not be available for a couple  of years but I hope that it is encouraging to devotees of  renewable energy to know great strides have been made in  this area. With luck and perseverance the Southern Oregon  Coast may be a leader in the implementation of this technology  as well as wide scale distributed energy.