The Ultimate Guide to Eco-Friendly and Ethical Furniture/Ecocult

What are some of the big items we purchase?  Are there good alternatives so we can buy
"green"?  If so what are some of the hows and whys?

Today we look at furniture.  Here's a good piece from Ecocult with some friendly advice. As with any consumer line, the styles, stock, design change in a flash.  But building into these pieces sustainable smarts, should never go out-of-stye.

 














One of the toughest challenges to eco-conscious living lies very close to home. It’s actually right in the home—I’m talking about what we live with and on every day: furniture.
Working in the furniture industry for seven years gave me real insight into supply chain and production issues. I learned it isn’t easy to make sustainable furniture. I realized finding it can be even harder, when the tables turned and I was on the customer side shopping for a new sofa. 

This guide is meant to demystify the process of sourcing beautiful furnishings that are eco-friendly and non-toxic. In addition to environmental and social impacts, it’s especially important our furniture is not bad for our health. After all, we spend more time with it than with any other consumer product—mobile devices excepted of course.
While it can seem a bit overwhelming to sort through materials, production methods, and life cycle assessments, there are certain overarching principles to guide us toward low impact sofas, tables, cabinets and chairs. What makes furniture sustainable, and how are we defining that tricky term?

• Materials: low or no environmental impact in terms of sourcing (are the raw materials renewable, recyclable, nontoxic? Does their processing create toxic pollution? Have they been 3^rd party certified?)
• Production methods: small carbon footprint, positive or neutral social impact (fair trade, fair made)
• Finishes: low or nontoxic ingredients, minimal or no off-gassing of harmful fumes
• Life cycle: product’s impact from cradle to grave, end of life—is it reusable, recyclable, biodegradable?
• Durability: is the design enduring? Are the materials and construction durable?

More at:  http://ecocult.com/ultimate-guide-eco-friendly-ethical-furniture/ 

The Real Story Behind Elon Musk’s $2.6 Billion Acquisition Of SolarCity And What It Means For Tesla’s Future–Not To Mention The Planet’s/Fast Company

Great story behind a major corporate merger:

The Tesla CEO’s merger with his cousins’ sustainable-energy company, SolarCity, is totally logical–and hugely risky. With eyes now on the private sector for environmental leadership, can Musk pull off another miracle?

Tesla is betting that its Powerwall battery, combined with its Solar Roof tiles, will entice the design-conscious set. [Photo: courtesy of Tesla]

Elon Musk stands in the middle of a residential street. It’s shortly before sunset at a joint Tesla–SolarCity product launch, held last October at Universal Studios’ back lot in Los Angeles, and Musk, wearing a Gray sweater and black jeans, is perched on a platform erected in the center of the manicured suburbia that served as the set for Desperate Housewives. Musk begins his presentation with doom and gloom—rising CO2 levels, the crisis of global warming—but the audience of 200 or so is beaming. They’re excited to see what fantastical invention he will unveil as a solution. As he stresses the need to transition the world to sustainable energy, an overzealous attendee yells out, “Save us, Elon!”

Musk’s big reveal: “The houses you see around you are all solar houses. Did you notice?” he says, gesturing toward the homes with a grin. They appear to have regular shingled rooftops, but Musk says they’ve actually been retrofitted with a new product called the Solar Roof, a potentially transformative system that’s nearly indistinguishable from a traditional rooftop—and one, he promises, that lasts longer and costs less, all while generating electricity. “Why would you buy anything else?” he says. The crowd cheers.

These roof tiles are the latest component of Musk’s larger plan to wean us off fossil fuels. Inside the garage of each of these homes, he points out, is a Tesla vehicle and next-generation Powerwall, the sleek rechargeable battery Tesla developed in 2015 to store energy for household use. During the day, the solar shingles can generate electricity and recharge the Powerwall. After the sun goes down, the battery takes over, providing power independent of the traditional utility grid. “This is the integrated future. You’ve got an electric car, a Powerwall, and a Solar Roof. It’s pretty straightforward, really,” he says with a big shrug and a smile. “[This] can solve the whole energy equation.”

Musk’s announcement is about saving the planet. But it’s also about saving SolarCity, the company his cousins, Peter and Lyndon Rive—who are in the audience—launched with Musk’s support in 2006 to bring solar power to the masses. The business, an industry-rallying success for nearly a decade, had recently run into challenges. Its stock, once unstoppable, had dropped roughly 77% since its February 2014 peak. Its debt had mushroomed to $3.4 billion, sales growth had slowed, and it faced a cash crunch. Last June, Musk proposed that Tesla acquire SolarCity in a deal valued at $2.8 billion. Today’s event was staged largely to win over Tesla and SolarCity shareholders, who would be voting in three weeks on whether to approve the merger.

There was a lot for shareholders to think about—and even more for corporate governance experts and company analysts to scrutinize. Tesla’s and SolarCity’s boards and investors represent a weave of overlapping interests, both financial and familial. Six of Tesla’s seven directors have clear ties to SolarCity. Tesla’s board includes SolarCity’s former CFO, a SolarCity director, and two VCs whose firms also have seats on SolarCity’s board, along with Musk’s brother, Kimbal. Musk chairs both companies and is SolarCity’s largest shareholder. He has taken out $475 million in personal credit lines to buy more shares in SolarCity and Tesla when advantageous. SpaceX, his aerospace company, has purchased $165 million in bonds issued by SolarCity. Some analysts cautioned that Musk might be self-dealing, rescuing his own investments and his cousins’ company through this purchase. Hedge-fund manager Jim Chanos, who had shorted Tesla and SolarCity, called the acquisition a “shameful example of corporate governance at its worst,” a “bailout” of SolarCity that “strikes us as just the height of folly.”

Musk’s investors, though, have grown accustomed to naysayers. They know his actions are often fraught with risk, but they believe in his mission—and his products. Three weeks after Musk’s presentation, 85% of shareholders approved the Tesla–SolarCity merger, an outcome even more impressive considering that the first Solar Roof tiles wouldn’t be installed on a real customer’s home for at least another seven months. The ones atop the Universal Studios homes weren’t functional.

But that’s the magic of Musk. Few entrepreneurs in his stratosphere could make such a grandiose pitch land so solidly. His cousins, the Rives, had struggled to sell a fraction of this vision to Wall Street during their latter years running SolarCity as a public company; Musk did it in 14 minutes. To him, this future—in which his combined companies will save us from the destructive forces of climate change—is simply “logical” and “quite obvious,” phrases he repeats to me a few months after the deal closed. “It’s totally logical that we’ll have sustainable energy in the long term, because unsustainable energy, by definition, is unsustainable,” he says. “So how quickly do we get there? And to what degree do we negatively impact the environment by getting there slower?”

Musk has always approached innovation this way: as a massive bet on the inevitability of tomorrow, rather than what he can deliver today. He designs the future and wills it into existence, despite the disbelievers. Tesla and SpaceX, which many viewed as the wild gambles of a stretched-thin entrepreneur keen to waste billions of his (and others’) dollars, have proved more risky to bet against. This year, in fact, Tesla became the most perilous stock to short, costing speculators billions—more than the combined losses of those trading against Apple, Amazon, and Netflix. In that sense, Musk has become the face of salvation to some, and motivation to others. “BMW is using a picture of me to scare their executives into taking electric vehicles seriously. I’m not kidding,” Musk says. “It’s sort of a backhanded compliment.” All of this makes him the—to use his word—obvious person to lead the solar-energy industry forward: Lyndon Rive, SolarCity’s CEO, announced on May 15 that he’d be leaving the company.

Even so, within Tesla, there were serious doubts about the merger. “There was almost no understanding for what SolarCity was inside the broader company, and that includes Elon,” says a knowledgeable source. “They didn’t understand the business.” Yet Musk is famous for mastering information quickly, and again, who’s going to bet against him? If he’s wrong, SolarCity could prove to be a serious strain on Tesla’s resources. Solar power might be an undeniable part of our future—the industry created double the amount of jobs as coal did last year and accounts for nearly 40% of new electric capacity added to the grid, more than wind or even natural gas—but SolarCity itself isn’t. In its last reported earnings quarter before the merger, SolarCity saw a 26% year-over-year decrease in its megawatts installed, a key growth metric of solar power.

If he’s right, however, he’ll move a big step closer to realizing his vision for a cleaner planet. With President Donald Trump announcing the U.S.’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement last week, all eyes are now on the private sector for environmental leadership, with Musk leading the charge.

Not surprisingly, Musk says he isn’t worried. “Oh, it definitely will work,” he says. “It’s just a question of when.”

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Since the acquisition, Musk has been regularly making the 2-mile drive from Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, to SolarCity’s R&D center to look at Solar Roof prototypes. I glimpse a number of designs myself, during a visit to Fremont in April. They’re installed on two model roofs sitting in the office’s back parking lot, like parts of a prefab house waiting for pickup. “When we think something is ready, we’ll bring Elon out here,” says Peter Rive, formerly SolarCity’s CTO and now Tesla’s VP of solar products, standing outside near the models on the cloudy afternoon. “He’ll tell us if it’s pass or fail.”

When seen from below, the tiles appear to be opaque, like Tuscan or slate shingles. But from above, the glass covering the tiles is transparent, allowing the sun to reach the solar cell underneath. SolarCity’s engineers have received feedback from Tesla designers to refine the products, spending weeks, for example, experimenting with different shades of black. Musk’s reaction so far? “ ’Not good enough,’ ” Peter says Musk told the team earlier this year. “ ’Make this look better.’ ”

Musk stresses that such collaborative engineering couldn’t have happened before the merger. Because they were previously separate public companies (with those many conflicts of interest), SolarCity and Tesla were required to operate at an “arm’s length.” Whatever partnerships they pursued had to be audited to make sure they were in each company’s interest. “Every time we wanted to do something, it had to go through two org committees. It was incredibly slow,” Musk says. “Now we can make decisions immediately instead of it taking a month.”

Lyndon acknowledges that Musk, his and Peter’s older cousin (their mothers are twins), instantly brought much-needed product skills to SolarCity. “There are often technical challenges ahead where people say, ‘No, that’s impossible, a brick wall,’ ” says Lyndon. “Elon is smart enough to know how to go through that brick wall, to come up with solutions to address the problem. It’s very rare to encounter someone with his all-of-the-above qualities.”

Musk feels that aesthetics, in particular, will be crucial for SolarCity, which hopes to win over the kinds of consumers who might balk at installing traditional solar panels on top of their houses. After all, Musk has explained that Tesla grew from his view that electric vehicles were “ugly and slow and boring like a golf cart.” He created the Powerwall, he has said, because all existing batteries “sucked… They’re expensive, unreliable, stinky, ugly, bad in every way.” If there was one implied criticism of his cousins during the product event last fall, it was that they were never quite able to pull off this transformation, from the useful to the beautiful. “The key is to make solar something desirable,” Musk said onstage, so “you want to put it on the most prominent part of your house, call your neighbors over, and say, ‘Check out this sweet roof!’ ”

Musk’s tiles might prove as sexy to customers as his vehicles. Gavin Baker, who runs a $13.8 billion portfolio at Fidelity, increased the firm’s investment in SolarCity right before the acquisition, and he has said he’s bullish on the product. But the residential solar industry is still Byzantine and fragmented, involving things like building permits, regulatory roadblocks, and individual roof assessments. And then there’s the issue of price. The SolarCity roof requires a complete re-roofing job, unlike traditional solar panels, which can be mounted on top of existing shingles. Apple sells its customers on a portfolio of products—iPhones, iPads, MacBooks—but that same kind of integration isn’t as feasible when you’re dealing with a $70,000 Model S, a $6,000 Powerwall, and a Solar Roof that can cost $65,000 or more.

The combined companies aim to develop financing models that will make the technology affordable, streamline the rollout process (thanks to SolarCity’s army of installers), and take advantage of Tesla’s retail footprint to sell the vision. While the up-front price for its Solar Roof looks high, SolarCity asserts that tax credits and the estimated value of energy created over the product’s 30-year power warranty will save customers money in the long run. Solar is a massive market, the company notes, with about 5 million new roofs built every year in the U.S. alone, and SolarCity hopes to capture 5% of that business, or 250,000 homes annually, an ambitious goal considering the company only made 325,000 solar installations in its decade of operation before the merger.

SolarCity isn’t the first company ever to produce a solar tile, and most in that space have floundered. But the merger with Tesla allows the company to offer vertical integration, potentially meeting all of its customers’ energy needs. “If you just created a solar shingle, you’re kind of fucked,” Peter Rive says. “I don’t think anybody but the combination of SolarCity and Tesla can pull this off.”

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When it was founded, SolarCity wasn’t concerned with product at all. The Rive brothers—who grew up with Musk in Pretoria, South Africa, and built (and later sold) an IT software company in the Bay Area—were looking to make a bigger impact with their next startup. Musk, Lyndon recalls, suggested they look into solar. They launched SolarCity in 2006 with a $10 million investment from Musk.

They came up with a plan to drive costs down by controlling the experience from sale to installation (while third-party manufacturers provided the panels). They hired 150 employees, the majority of them construction workers, and by the next year, the company was installing about 70 solar systems per month around Northern California. Having sold panels himself in the early days, Lyndon knew that the biggest barrier to adoption was price: Customers simply didn’t have capital to purchase the system, which typically costs upwards of $40,000. What if they could lease it instead? Other companies had explored similar financing models in the commercial space, but banks told them it was impossible to bring that to the residential market. “But we just kept hammering and hammering at it,” recalls Lyndon. The company pioneered an arrangement that allowed it to offer systems to homeowners without any down payment. SolarCity would handle all the up-front costs—for the consultations, rooftop designs, panels, and installation—and worked with banks to help front the capital, giving SolarCity long-term recurring revenue. The customer would pay back SolarCity and its financial partners over the course of a 20-year lease, ideally at a monthly cost that would be lower than their traditional utility bill. (This financial model was feasible in part thanks to a 30% federal solar tax credit, which SolarCity could claim on the value of each installation.)

Business began to grow, and the company eventually expanded to more than a dozen states. Musk, who was at the time busy building Tesla and SpaceX, wasn’t involved much beyond the board level. But the Rives—who share a passion for extreme sports such as mountain biking (Lyndon also plays underwater hockey, which involves holding your breath and shuttling a puck across a pool floor)—brought a Muskian intensity to their jobs.

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When SolarCity went public at the end of 2012, at $8 a share, the stock surged 47% on its first day of trading, and the company effectively doubled its sales every year thereafter. In early 2014, it boasted more than 70,000 customers, and its stock hit $86 per share, an all-time high. Lyndon set a Musk-size goal for his employees: 1 million installations by 2018.

Of course, as with any booming startup, there was also chaos. Peter and Lyndon were successfully bringing residential solar mainstream, but the company culture began to shift, especially with the ascent of two particularly polarizing executives, Tanguy Serra and Hayes Barnard, the latter of whom arrived via SolarCity’s $120 million purchase of his direct-marketing firm Paramount Solar. The atmosphere, many employees felt, became testosterone-fueled and sales-obsessed. “It was a radical change, like the tree huggers got replaced with a fraternity house,” says a former sales leader, who describes the sales group demographics as becoming more male dominated, filled with “guys who were used to selling mortgages in a boiler room...."

Tesla Completes Its First Solar Roof Installs

Another milestone reached in our bid to migrate away from fossil fuel and build a clean, healthy future on renewables.

Thank you, Tesla, for helping to push the envelope.

Tesla Completes Its First Solar Roof Installs

by Tom Randall

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One of the first completed installations of a Tesla Solar Roof.

Tesla completed its first solar roof installations, the company reported Wednesday as part of a second-quarter earnings report. Just like the first Model 3 customers, who took their keys last week, the first solar roof customers are Tesla employees. By selling to them first, Tesla says it hopes to work out any kinks in the sales and installation process before taking it to a wider public audience.

Tesla opened up its online store in May and began taking $1,000 deposits for smooth black and textured-glass roof tiles that are virtually indistinguishable from high-end roofing. From most viewing angles, the slick modern shingles look like standard materials, but they allow light to pass through onto a solar cell embedded beneath a tempered surface. The first installations were supposed to start in June. Tesla didn’t say when the actual installations took place.

The company has been adopting an Apple Store strategy for solar power since acquiring SolarCity Corp. last year for $2 billion. The idea is to cut down on the high price associated with actively identifying new customers, and instead attract them passively through its upscale auto stores in shopping malls and other high-traffic locations. Initial trials found the new approach was 50 to 100 percent more effective than at the best non-Tesla locations selling SolarCity products. Tesla halted SolarCity’s door-to-door sales earlier this year and is staffing up more than 70 stores for solar sales.

For total quarterly solar installations, Tesla rebounded a bit from an underwhelming first quarter—its first full quarter after it bought SolarCity. It deployed 176 megawatts, up from 150 megawatts the prior quarter, but less than the 201 megawatts that SolarCity installed in the second quarter of 2016.

At least part of the slowdown may be due to the cessation of door-to-door sales. The company said it expects to see growth again in the fourth quarter.

Production of the tiles began at Tesla’s Fremont solar plant in California, but will shift later this year to its new factory in Buffalo, New York, with additional investments from Tesla’s partner, Panasonic. Musk said previously that initial sales will be limited by manufacturing capacity. As production ramps up into 2018, sales will begin in the U.K., Australia, and elsewhere, along with the introduction of additional sculpted terra cotta and slate versions of the solar roof, according to previous reports from the company.

Tesla’s basic premise is to make solar ownership more attractive and affordable by eliminating the need to install both a roof and solar panels. Tesla says it will manage the entire process of solar roof installation, including removal of existing roofs, design, permits, installation, and maintenance. The company estimates that each installation will take about a week.

RI OER Suspends Electric Vehicle Rebate Program

A good, state program to encourage use of EV's runs out of money:

You can look at this two ways:  One, the cars should lease or sell without govt intervention; or, this is a worthy state program and money should be found.

Our experience has been a lot of these programs are not well publicized, many car dealers don't understand them or communicate the advantages to their customers and, hence, does not have a major impact on sales.  Yet, given the advantages EV's provide to communities--cutting air pollution and air-borne health risks--there should be an investment made in their growth.



The Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources has suspended a year-old program that provided cash incentives for locals who bought electric cars. 

The program, Driving Rhode Island to Vehicle Electrification, also known as DRIVE, launched in January 2016 and offered up to $2,500 in rebates, depending on the car's battery capacity. 

Since its launch, DRIVE has provided $575,000 in incentives to more than 250 customers, and has increased electric car ownership in the Ocean State by 55 percent.

However, the OER said in a statement that funding for the program has run out.

The department said it "is actively working to identify other funding sources to support DRIVE and other clean transportation initiatives in the future."

"We remain hopeful the program may be restarted," the OER said.

The department said there are still incentive programs offered by other organizations, including the IRS and People’s Power and Light, a local environmental nonprofit. 

Previously, DRIVE received $100,000 in funding from the state Attorney Generals' Office from American Electric Power settlement funds;  $200,000 came from the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management's administration funding from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative; and the remainder came from federal Stripper Well Petroleum Violation Escrow funds, which were one-time allocations to the state. 

None of the funding came from local tax dollars. 

The perversity of the climate science kangaroo court/Boston Globe

We like the reference to the "kangaroo court" in this piece from the Boston Globe.  Setting up the pro-con sides of climate change is a colossal waste of time.

How about if we simply agree that migrating away from fossil fuel is the next great industrial revolution on our world history?  Can we agree that we should move forward, not backwards?  Should we reach a consensus on embracing new technology?

Emissions is just a piece of the puzzle.  Cutting dependence on oil and gas, the essence of balancing the environment, does so much more than clean the air.  How about its value of moving energy production back into local communities--along with it, keeping the money and jobs at home?   How about creating new jobs?  How about inspiring millions of new inventions and start-ups?  How about bringing historic, global collaboration to our world?

This shift works on every level, most importantly, economic and environmental.  Let's stop the silly discussions and get on with the job of taking advantage of this moment--what has been described, accurately, as a 7 billion-dollar investment opportunity.  

EPA administrator Scott Pruitt is reportedly giving serious consideration to investing the taxpayers’ money in a “red team-blue team” effort to determine whether current scientific understandings about climate change are actually right. The idea is that a “red team” made up of officials from government agencies with responsibilities related to climate would try to poke holes in mainstream climate science, while a similarly constituted “blue team” would have the task of defending the mainstream consensus against this critique. Supposedly, this process would shed new light on what is known and what is not about human influence on the global climate. But the argument that such a process would be helpful is some combination of naive and disingenuous.

All of science works through the continuous application of the skeptical scrutiny of key findings by essentially everybody working in a given field. This happens in part through the peer-review process that findings must survive before being published in a scientific journal. It happens far more widely through the scrutiny of the wider community of experts in any given field once the findings have been published. That scrutiny is intense, not least because scientists make their reputations in substantial part by providing corrections and refinements to the published findings of others. This is the essence of the cumulative and self-correcting nature of the scientific enterprise as a whole.

Precisely because climate science has policy implications that appear to challenge the status quo in global energy supply, moreover, the degree of professional skeptical scrutiny to which key climate-science findings have been subjected has far exceeded even the already pervasive and rigorous norm. Climate science has been repeatedly “red-teamed,” both by groups of avowed contrarians sponsored by right-wing groups and by the most qualified parts of the world’s scientific community. The right wing’s “red team” efforts have consistently been characterized by brazen cherry-picking, misrepresentation of the findings of others, recycling of long-discredited hypotheses, and invention of new ones destined to be discredited. Almost none of this material has survived peer review to be published in the respectable professional literature.

Of course, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself, which works under the auspices of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, can be regarded as a “red team-blue team” operation, in which every conclusion must pass muster with a huge team of expert authors and reviewers from a wide variety of disciplines and nations (including from Saudi Arabia and other major oil producers inclined to be skeptical). The IPCC has produced five massive assessments of climate science (in 1990, 1995, 2001, 2007, and 2013-14), each more emphatic than the last in its conclusions that human-produced greenhouses gases are changing global climate with ongoing and growing impacts on human well-being.

Climate-change science has likewise been reviewed regularly by committees of the US National Academy of Sciences, the United Kingdom’s Royal Society, the World Meteorological Organization, the American Geophysical Union, and many other reputable bodies, all of which have contributed to and confirmed the overwhelming consensus of knowledgeable scientists on the five key points that really matter for policy: (1) The Earth’s climate is changing in ways not explainable by the known natural influences; (2) the dominant cause is the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that has resulted from burning coal, oil, and natural gas, and from land-use change; (3) significant harm to humans and ecosystems from these changes is already occurring; (4) the harm will continue to grow for decades because of inertia in the climate system and society’s energy system; and (5) the future harm will be much smaller if the world’s nations take concerted, aggressive evasive action than if they do not.

What, then, could explain the interest in a new “red team-blue team” effort on climate science organized by the federal government? Some proponents may believe, naively, that such a rag-tag process could unearth flaws in mainstream climate science that the rigorous, decades-long scrutiny of the global climate-science community, through multiple layers of formal and informal expert peer review, has somehow missed. But I suspect that most of the advocates of the scheme are disingenuous, aiming to get hand-picked non-experts from federal agencies to dispute the key findings of mainstream climate science and then assert that the verdict of this kangaroo court has equal standing with the findings of the most competent bodies in the national and international scientific communities. The purpose of that, of course, would be to create a sense of continuing uncertainty about the science of climate change, as an underpinning of the Trump administration’s case for not addressing it. Sad.

John P. Holdren is a professor of environmental science and policy at Harvard University and codirector of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. He served as president Barack Obama’s chief science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

For Today's Show/City of Sacramento/ TRANSPORTATION DIVISION

Our guest will be Mark Stevens, Fleet Manager, as we talk about their first EV Waste Truck:

The Transportation Division’s primary focus is maintaining and enhancing traffic operations, traffic safety and multimodal mobility for our citizens and customers. The Division has several unique business lines and is responsible for traffic operations, design, management, studies, entitlements, education, investigation, traffic signs and markings, and traffic signals and street lighting. Transportation staff manages many projects such as transportation studies for new development areas and controlling the traffic operations center. The programs managed by the Division range from bicycle and pedestrians to angle parking and children’s education about traffic safety.

Maintenance functions of traffic signals, signs and street lighting ranges from new installations to repairing knocked down street signs and reinstalling stolen copper wire to reestablish neighborhood lighting. To report street lights or traffic signals that are out, missing/knocked down street signs, or other repairs needed, you can call 311 (within the City) or 916-264-5011 (outside the City), use the 311 smartphone app, or contact us by email

World’s First Floating Wind Farm Underway/RNN

Great news as wind starts to truly find its place in the world of energy, buttressed here, with floating platforms, by new technology.

The world’s first full-scale floating wind farm has started to take shape off the north-east coast of Scotland.

Statoil is installing a 30 MW wind turbine farm on floating structures at Buchan Deep, 25 km offshore Peterhead, harnessing Scottish wind resources to provide renewable energy to the mainland. The wind farm will power around 20,000 households. The revolutionary technology will allow wind power to be harvested in waters too deep for the current conventional bottom-standing turbines.

It hopes to cash in on a boom in the technology, especially in Japan and the west coast of the US, where waters are deep.

“This is a tech development project to ensure it’s working in open sea conditions. It’s a game-changer for floating wind power and we are sure it will help bring costs down,” said Leif Delp, project director for Hywind.

So far, one giant turbine has already been moved into place, while four more wait in readiness in a Norwegian fjord.

By the end of the month they’ll all have been towed to 15 miles (25km) off Peterhead, Aberdeenshire, where they’ll float upright like giant fishing floats.

While the turbines are currently very expensive to make, Statoil believes that in the future it will be able to dramatically reduce costs in the same way that manufacturers already have for conventional offshore turbines.

“I think eventually we will see floating wind farms compete without subsidy – but to do that we need to get building at scale,” said Mr Delp.

Hywind is a unique offshore wind technology developed and owned by Statoil. The concept has been verified through six years of successful operation of a prototype installed off the island of Karmøy in Norway. Hywind with its simplicity in design is competitive towards other floating designs in water depths of more than 100 metres.