The Sundance Channel; Big Ideas For A Small Planet: Power (Airs Tuesday, April 01, 9pm E/P)
Runtime approximately 30 minutes.
Featuring comments by environmental activists David Suzuki, this episode of the Sundance Channel's spring series for The Green, "Big Ideas For A Small Planet," Power covers the three major players in renewable energy.
Beginning with solar energy, the documentary uses the Washington DC annual "Solar Decathlon" as its example of what is going on in the world of solar energy. While focused on solar housing, the event coverage gets into enough of the underlying technologies to grant the viewer a good basic understanding of what can be done, and graphically displays how beautiful and unique solar housing can be. The event itself features many solar homes designed and built by teams from universities all over the world that compete on several levels.
Continuing on with wind power, Power focuses mainly on one wind farm development in a former coal town as its example, and covers the basics of the titan of renewable energy technologies that wind power has become. The documentary gives a good overall view of the issues and challenges facing the wind industry, as well as the benefits of successful wind development. The graceful cinematography in this segment for the most part was appealing. Wind power is the fastest-growing and most cost-competitive renewable energy technology to date, and thus rightly deserves our attention.
Finishing with biomass power generation, specifically methane digester-produced electricity on a dairy farm, Power rounds out the big three of renewable energy quite well. I was especially pleased with the coverage in this segment, as details of methane digester electricity production are not as readily available as those for wind and solar power. As with the other two segments, Power used a specific example of one farm's installation to illustrate its case. One gets a good sense of the daily operation of this system and how it fits into the farmers' lives and routine.
In all, the film is solid, and gives a good general knowledge of the three most-viable renewable energy sources currently in use. Power also manages to touch on some of the future potential of these technologies. Given the limitations of a thirty-minute time frame, the film packed as much as was possible in so short a time, leaving this viewer interested enough to seek out more details. If you are at all interested in caring for the planet without sacrificing comfort and modern technology, I STRONGLY recommend catching Power on the Sundance Channel on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 9pm Eastern and 9pm Pacific.
Best of all, this film is solutions-oriented, rather than just presenting a problem. That is something we always need more of.
Regards,
Dan Stafford
Publisher - The Great Lakes Zephyr - Wind Energy & Hydrogen Journal
http://www.whizzyrds.com/Windblog.html
A personal quest to promote the use of wind energy and hydrogen technology in the Great Lakes area of the United States. The Great Lakes area is in a unique position to become an energy exporting region through these and other renewable energy technologies. *Update 2014: Just do it everywhere - Dan*
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