Harvesting Clean Energy

Harvesting Clean Energy

Harvesting Clean Energy. I’m Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report.

The 2011 Harvesting Clean Energy Conference will be October 23rd through 25th in Boise and plans are currently underway. John Gardner, Associate Vice President for Energy Research, Policy and Campus Sustainability at Boise State University is one of the conferences’ steering committee members and he discusses the date change.

GARDNER: I don’t think it’s anything that’s terribly significant, it had a lot to do with the schedules of the organizers. They definitely want to do it in times when it’s not busy times for the farmers and ranchers so if you are going to delay it a little bit you got to pretty much delay it over the whole next season so I think it’s typically in January and now we’re pushing it back to October and I think it’s going to work out real well. I think it fits real well with other things going on in Boise at the time as well.

Gardner talks about the 2011 conference.

GARDNER: This is a particularly interesting one and I think a particularly exciting one because it’s not being driven by the environmental movement or by a lot of activists or even the developer, it’s being driven by the agricultural community and the rural community who see this is an opportunity for them. A lot of the resources required for renewable energy are things they’ve got in abundance. Lots of space away from cities for example for wind and solar development.

Not to mention the feedstocks for biofuels. 

GARDNER: So it’s really, I think almost an economic development conference and this just happens to be the topic of it so because of the different motivation it tends to be much more pragmatic, down to earth how to do stuff kind of sessions rather than sort of lofty goals of we need the government to do this for us and that’s not what it is. It’s about how you get it done yourself.

The conference has been around for quite a few years now and Gardner says they are looking at two ideas for the 2011 meeting. One is energy efficiency.

GARDNER: And there’s alway a discussion about the role of policy in renewable energy and of course even though we talk about it every year, every year it’s a very different policy landscape and of course this year is no different. What happened in November changes everything and I think hopefully by next August we’ll have some idea what that meant and have a way to talk about it. But even outside the federal level this conference spans these 4 states that have all taken very different policy approaches to renewable energy.

For additional information on clean energy and the upcoming Harvesting Clean Energy Conference in Boise, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.

www.harvestcleanenergy.org

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