Achieving Greater Sustainability by Adopting More Energy-Efficient Cycles
By Tony Giunta, Director of Project Development, The Nobis Group
It’s only natural to assume that humans would consume the earth’s natural resources in a sustainable manner. After all, if we fail to live sustainably our species will perish. New Englanders have long understood and practiced this.
In fact, New Englanders have for a long time inherited a reputation of being a very “frugal” bunch. Having been born and raised in this part of the country, I can attest to the fact that we “Yankees” can always find a way to stretch life’s necessities. I truly believe this comes from our early European settler history where one either learned how to sustain food, water, shelter, and even energy – or you didn’t survive the winter! Death, it appears, was an effective incentive for ingenuity when it came to preserving and sustaining resources.
Today, technology provides us with a near inexhaustible supply of life sustaining commodities. So much so, that we no longer give thought during our daily life that wasting our natural resources could result in our demise. So how do we become more sustainable? One way is to consume resources as close to their source location as possible. Although a simple, reasonable, and completely achievable concept, this solution is grossly ignored around the world.
As silly as it may seem, it’s commonplace for raw materials to be shipped thousands of miles only to see manufactured products made from these resources shipped right back to their original points of origin. As a result, enormous amounts of our limited energy supplies are consumed during transit alone.
One example close to home is liquified natural gas (LNG). Because of constrained pipeline capacity during times of heavy consumption, Boston receives LNG shipments from Tobago and Trinidad. At the same time, shipments of the same product are transported from Louisiana to Europe and Asia. The finite fossil fuel resources consumed to power those gigantic LNG transport ships only to deliver LNG are staggering. Enormous amounts of energy could be sustainably preserved if we globally prioritized utilizing energy sources and related raw materials based on their proximity to the user.
Our worldwide energy demands are continuing to rise and, ironically, adding to this is our commitment to build a new generation of renewable energy sources and networks globally. But we need to be just as committed to eliminating our wasteful energy practices at the same time.
At Nobis Group, we are committed to moving our world towards a more sustainable energy future. Over the past decade, remaining steadfast to this commitment has resulted in Nobis having permitted more solar projects than any other firm in New Hampshire. We strive to create a society more reliant on limitless energy supplies like solar and wind power and less reliant on finite energy sources such as crude oil, coal, and natural gas.