Describe the critical need your solution addresses.

In this carbon constrained world, The GIP replicable model: sequesters carbon, supports economic localization and provides worldwide education addressing the critical need for creating green collar jobs.

Explain your initiative in more depth and its stage of development.

GIP by definition can be a collection of optimized distributed energy resources. An enhancement of that concept takes advantage of a method of integration that permits technologies that normally stand alone to work together in a way where the byproducts of the function of one technology can be the feedstock that improves the performance of another. In this way, the attention to integration of dissimilar components increases the effectiveness of the whole system.

The model, as seen in the system diagram has five different categories of energy elements and one for water treatment. The energy categories can be broken down into supply, conversion devices, products, demand and the hydrogen and electricity energy media.

The energy conversion devices are various available technologies that are capable of converting the local feed stocks into useful energy or other useful material. The products are electricity, hydrogen, biodiesel, biogasoline, biochar, soil amendment and fresh water.

GIP is presently in the engineering stage with several island locations.

How does your strategy and approach respond creatively and comprehensively to key issues?

Isolation Fosters Innovation

The industrial energy systems powering the world today are founded on an increasingly obsolete assumption of cheap and unlimited fossil fuel sources. Depleting reserves and a growing comprehension of the true costs of carbon-based energy will drive the costs of such fuels inexorably higher and promote alternative energy models.

The broad strokes of sustainable infrastructure – greater use of renewable energy, biofuels, energy storage and a dynamic “energy internet” (aka Smart Grid) – are widely known. They development of these solutions, however, will be complicated by the institutional, technological, and political inertia of the fossil-based mainland grid.

Communities that are geopolitically isolated from these limitations, such as islands, therefore represent an ideal environment to deploy and refine next generation municipal-scale energy ecosystems.

With their higher and more easily measurable energy import and waste export/treatment costs, investments in advanced pyrolysis and anaerobic digestion technologies are faster and more easily verified.

Islands typically enjoy abundant sunlight, water, and wind resources to power distributed renewable generation technologies. These multiple networked energy sources are more fault-tolerant and recover more quickly from weather-induced blackouts.

Islands have strong environmental stewardship requirements tied to tourism revenues, and local economies that would benefit greatly from the employment that local energy infrastructure will bring.

These and other natural advantages make islands a cost-effective laboratory for private investors and governments to develop the next generation of fossil-independent, post-industrial energy ecosystems: Green Islands.