I am unable to think of a single good reason to have a gasoline-powered lawn mower. Perhaps someone can enlighten me.

In the meantime, I noticed an excellent tutorial on how to convert gasoline mowers to electric, and recharge them with solar.

Compare the silent, clean and simple electric/solar model to even the smallest lawnmower gasoline engines that pollute 93 times as much as an automobile engine.

The NYT points out that 6 million gasoline mowers were shipped into California in one year. That is the equivalent of 600 million car engines pumping toxic fumes and noise into residential areas. Why?

What do you get when you cross a Volkswagen modern diesel engineer with an electric vehicle engineer from GM?

If you guessed a hybrid electric-diesel we have all been waiting for, you are wrong. No, this dynamic duo has reinvented the two-stroke engine using the horizontally-opposed piston concept from diesel engines of the early 1900s.

Interestingly, the OPOC engine design was conceived by Peter Hofbauer, the former Volkswagen powertrain engineer that designed the German automaker’s first high speed diesel engine. Additionally, EcoMotors’ CEO, Don Runkle, is a former employee of General Motors and one of the key men behind the EV1 all-electric car.

They call it the OPOC (Opposed Piston Opposed Cylinder)? Heh. Sounds like they have a sense of humor. I wonder if EcoMotors International will allow anyone to name a vehicle the Alypse.

The article suggests the OPOC will run diesel or gasoline. Who would bother with gasoline? That might be the biggest news of all. Small efficient diesel engines everywhere! Most excitement right now seems to be directed towards the efficiency of the engine (50% higher) and the big money backing the company ($23mil from Bill Gates and Vinod Khosla). Maybe they had to include gasoline in the business plan to get support.

Ethiopia Insight reports that a Kenyan green group seeks ban on Ethiopian power

A Kenyan conservation group has appealed to the nation’s high court to prevent the government and an energy company from buying power produced by the vast Gibe 111 hydropower dam in neighboring Ethiopia.

The impact of the dam is in question. This is a familiar tune. The conservation groups in this scenario represent risk managers who are concerned that the dam will affect 500K people and their ability to live without aid.

A typical way to avoid this situation is for security and risk assessments to be done up front and with the support of risk managers. That does not seem to have been done here; risk assessments left until the project is underway are likely to bring significant new costs/impact into focus. At least concerns have been raised now instead of 2013, the expected completion date.

Google has released bicycling directions for their maps:

A quick look at their map shows a thin web of connections even for a city that claims to be bike friendly

What’s really missing is topology. Notice the weirdly isolated green lines at the intersection of California and Stockton in the upper left corner…it’s on a big hill, as you can see in the topographical map.

Google could integrate vertical distance as part of the calculation for optimal path. That would be innovative.

The SF bike coalition already provides an overlay of the Google data online, but they do not calculate the climb and descent.

All this combined with crime data, as I mentioned earlier, would make for an excellent bicycle map. You could have bike paths rated by elevation using theft, robbery, assault and actual topography.