Third day - 08/04/09

Third day ...

In the boat that takes us along the Douro River, sitting on the side of the vessel, the cold feel of the "invicta" sticks into my bones, and creates an opportunity to reflect a little bit about my perspective on renewable energy, now that I am alone and in a meditative mood.

Yesterday I spoke of the link between energy and the way we live in the world, and also explained that the Earth gives us all the tools to build our own future in a sustainable manner.

Having this kind of "questions and answers game" in the head, i am not tired of thinking that the answers to my questions are within the reach of my hand, simply by reflecting a bit, and even by looking to the concept of life, because life is always about our existence.

When thinking of life, I remember what I know about it, as a little scientific and literary man that I am. Life started in water, with an unusual mixture of nitrogen, carbon and hydrogen. From the water to the land, started the evolution of animal to animal, and in the end mankind appeared in all its mightyness.

I know that there are theories that define the line of human evolution as a pyramid, where there is a growing cognitive expansion of the human being just to come to an end point where, from then it regresses.

I do not believe in this but the concept of regression is not so bad if we can look at it. Mankind has much to learn from what we have done in the past, especially if looking for its own development.

We are at a time where development requires a critical change in our daily habits and how we see basic questions that before we thought to be of universal and immediate response.

Today nothing is certain.

We are at a time where we talk about renewable energy and ways to obtain energy in a sustainable way. We are at a time where we witness a landmark in the history of the evolution of man:

Change the way of consuming what is fundamental to our survival as an evolving specie: Energy!

And it is precisely by looking ahead to another step of evolution, that, in my opinion, we must look back to where it all began. I just need to look around me, here in the middle of the River Douro...

Water.

For me the answer is in the water. 71% of the land surface is covered with water. In energy terms, it contains more stored energy per unit volume than the solar radiation or wind, and can be used in different ways, such as in sea currents, or in the movement of tides, or the force of waves...

For me, the future of humanity, in the energy field, is exactly the same thing from where came all forms of life: water.

Of course there it is always a problem: Technology

The technology of renewable energy is still heavily in development. We need large investments and high amounts of money to estabilish, for example, a wind farm as what we saw today, in the hills of Caramulo.

But the popular wisdom says that money generates money and there is no doubt that not only humanity is evolving, but technology too! Increasingly there are new technologies to harness the energy contained in water, quite apart from dams or windmills in the tide. Increasingly there are new projects and new ideas ready to be exploited...

In Portugal, looking back in the evolution of man, we can also look at your past and remember that there were times when we were the owners of the Ocean. Through it, we got to places that were once only imagined, get wealth and name around the world, all thanks to water and our spirit of conquer it.

Portugal is a land of sea and sun, with all the strength of the Mediterranean people, so we all want to be a renewable power even greater than we are now. Therefore, we have an obligation to move, looking into the past in order to build the moral of the future, without giving ear to Velhos do Restelo or greedy and selfish lobbys.

We are a nation of sailors, the people with the largest coastline of Europe, a kingdom that sleeps with the Atlantic at the door.

We are portuguese, we are energy sailors and our power lays in the sea.

So, as Captain Jack Sparrow would say:

"Now... bring me that horizon... and really bad eggs."

Our week! Our video!

For those who are interested in seeing the video of this fantastic week, here it is:

http://videos.sapo.pt/mei2009

Second day - 07/04/09

Second day ...

I travel on the bus, with my head held in the glass, looking to the outside world that passes by at the vehicle's speed.

Yesterday I spoke about God, today I speak about myself, because I am a god. We all are small gods. We all have within us the ability to make Paradise on Earth or set off the Apocalypse.

It is this awareness that travels within me in the entire morning, in the visit to the dam of Alto Lindoso, and it is precisely by looking at the dam that I see that we are really small gods, small as a grain of sand on an endless beach that is the universe, and gods by building works such as this dam, capable of diverting rivers and carve mountains...

Realizing that we are small gives us a very humble and very different perspective from everything that surrounds us. We look with other eyes to the air we breathe, to the sound of the water hitting the rocks, the dry smell of the machinery inside the dam, to the world around us.

And only then we come to a conclusion: The world is tremendously beautiful and perfect.

I am sure of this in the wind farm of Ventominho when I feel the cold on the skin, the wind in the face, and looking to the horizon, where the Towers lay upon the modern world, rotating their blades at the same pace as if they were at the tune of a song that nobody hears.

The music of the wind.

Mankind unlearned much of what he knew before. In the past we knew how to hear the wind and hear the earth. The Indians have made this even before there was what we call "culture" in the world. Now the earth is muffled by the sound of civilization and the wind can not sing when it is polluted by thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere.

I exited the park with another conclusion, one much darker percolate in my mind:

We are making the world ugly and destroying our home.

And the more appalling is that we do not see it, or do anything to change it. The land continues to howl and the wind no longer sings, it shouts!

Shout us to look at the world as it is and try to use our reasoning to understand. But we do not understand!

Yesterday I spoke about God. For everything that humanity does not understand there is God, whatever its religion. Faith is the life of Men until he is no more than dust and ashes.

So there it is! My faith advert here:

I have faith in the God that exists in every man and woman who trample this small and beautiful world. I have faith that there is something superior to us in the form of positive and negative energy which governs all that surrounds us.

But mostly, I have faith that everything has a meaning. Nothing is by chance.

Mankind always related the "good" gods with the sky and the "bad" gods with the depths of the earth. It is not by chance that the sky give us sun and wind, but oil is stored in the bowels of the world, hidden from everyone with meters and meters of rock and sand above it.

The wind sings ...

Can you understand the relationship? Can you see the links formed in your mind and a light more powerful than every sun, flood your spirit?

Everything has a meaning. And the wind is never quiet. So we just need to know how to listen.

This was the lesson I learned today:

We are very small. We may be gods, but still be small. However, the Earth is big and live with more intensity than us. Already survived three glacial eras, resisted the shock of meteorites, natural disasters and changes in their planetary cycle. What is Men compared to that?

Nothing!

The God within us can make an Apocalypse in this world but will always be a human Apocalypse.
The Earth will have no end! It will survive! but our end will arrive when the survival of earth passes over us!

The man has the answers to everything! Just look at the world, to our world, to our little blue sphere in a black cloak of darkness, as the first man stepping on the Moon once said.

The Earth gives us all the answers, including the answer to our survival!

This is the second day of the Energy Week. They said that God made the angels on the second day of creation ...

But the wind tells me something very different:

When the god within mankind turns this world into an Armageddon, there will be no angel that can help us!

And may god, or whatever being that controls the universe, have mercy on our souls!

Amen!

Remember a Day Before Today (Pt. 1)

In a room with glassed walls you can see the ocean throws itself as waves against the rocky beach. One of the participants, born in Serbia and a student in the United States of America says to me that we have a beautiful country: “A million dollar view”, says about what she’s seeing through the glass. This happens during lunch at Hotel Flor de Sal, Viana do Castelo.

The self-service lunch went well. Some words were spoken by the enormous Bernardo Sotto-Mayor, followed by the Administrator of Enercom factory, which we were going to visit next. The beauty of the place seemed to tell us that we were in some piece of heaven, forgotten by all, except by the man who build the Hotel. However, at a clean glimpse of the eye, we can see that we are in a strongly industrialized area. We walk to the industrial facility, and something occupies our sight. Those enormous blades laying on the ground. These are sleeping giants anxious to retrieve from nature the Energy that feeds civilization.

Cameras are flashing. Walking through the exterior of the plant, I introduce an American Student to a very particular kind of Portuguese music, the Fado. For now, she knows it as a word. When she listens to the cries of the Portuguese Guitar, she’ll know it as a feeling.

The plant! Brave women work there! Some of them have passed through hell, as they lost their jobs in a previous economic crisis of textile manufacturing. A Portuguese expression explains what they have lived: “They have eaten the bread backed by the devil!” Now they work with their own hands for this new life, layering fiber glass over fiber glass over pine wood. The same pine wood that once led our Country to through the glorious epopee that still echoes in the world’s ears. Like in those days, wind still guides our fate. Portugal paved the way to new worlds! Now, we do it not by throwing our sails to the wind, but by mounting these giants on windy mountains! And an army of giants is fighting to give us a new world of clean energy!

CABELTE! Power cables! Don’t let them fool you by its simple appearance. The simple manufacturing process! The obvious assignment! They are like roads! They are like rivers! They are like veins, feeding energy for each home, each cell of this amazing organism. Circulatory system revealed! The heart is pumping on the top of steep hills, in the waters of a dam, above a rectangular shadow in Alentejo’s plains.

Changing the paradigm from fuel to renewable energy doesn’t have to be a clash. It is like that past week! People from all over the world mingle into one coherent body! India, USA, Brazil, Venezuela, Angola, Mozambique, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, UK, Poland; Checz Republic, Russia, China, Japan! A vast strip of land and ocean keeps us apart. A strong renewable will will keep us together!

URGENT - Message to Everybody

Hi everybody,

This message will be deleted after the objective is completed.

This blog is intended for EVERYBODY, to write their testimonials about the energy week and, most important, to keep in touch with events that are occuring in your contries and worldwide about renewables and energy eficiency.

So please, send an e-mail for energos2009@gmail.com with your identification and e-mail in order to invite you to be member of the blog.

I dont have the e-mail of most of the people.

I am expecting to hear from you.

Best regards

EDIT:

already invited:


Helder Carneiro
Carmen Victoria
Wenxing Liu
Vitor Lameirao
Bruno Lamas
Abhishek Humbad

Keep sending your emails please and upload everything you want!

Cheers!

First Day - 06/04/09

Looking back, to each step I gave in my life, I come to the subtle conclusion that nothing happens by chance. While writing these lines, in Axis Vienna hotel, I ask myself about other types of lines: the lines that define our path and unite us with the lines of other people.

By this thinking, the question always arises, relevant and even sarcastic. What is the Destiny? What exists beyond all that exists? What led to the floor where we walk and what led to the air that we breathe? What gave rise to any action/reaction pair and the law of physics that led up to this minute 00:34 on 7 April 2009?

God? Jehovah? Christ? Allah? Buddha? Or everything is just chemistry and physics?

Whatever the answer, something arises always like the word repeated so today and in the last months of my life: ENERGY

I never could explain what energy is, almost the same way I could never explain love.

Throughout today, I realized that is a definition that I will never understand. However, I know that energy exists in the same way I know it must be managed.

I know it by seeing all those souls on the bus, so different on the outside and inside but all with the same purpose: purpose to exist.

Because energy can not be defined but can be seen in the eyes of these people, in the motivations that make them be here, at the beginning of a week dedicated to the concepts of Management and Renewable Energy.

So, in the same way that we can speak of thermal energy, kinetic, mechanical, electrical or potential, we can also speak about Portuguese, Japanese, Indian, Brazilian, English, American or Russians.

We are all different forms of the same basic source: energy, the elemental energy that unites us.

Because when we talk about energy, when we seek that definition, as the alchemist in search of the philosopher stone, always we got the same starting point:

Mankind.

This was the lesson that I learned today.

Energy is not only the kinetic energy of wind exploited by the wind towers built in Enercon, and not only is the power contained in the cables produced by Cabelte.

No.

Energy is much more than that. It is the dissolving of stereotypes when an Indian explains to a Portuguese how marriage in India works, or when a Japanese discusses with a Russian about technology.

When we talk about renewable energy I look at all these cultures, traditions and ways so unique of thinking, and think about how flexible can be my thinking and perception of what surrounds me.

When we talk about energy management I do not think only in Earth but in every human being that step, every word exchanged today, each sentence of English scratched by every accent so different.

And I finally come to the conclusion that energy has no language, has no religion, has no tradition or color of skin.

Today, I realized that in order to manage energy we need to know how to manage people around us, because we depend of them as much as we depend of energy.

Before we renew energy we must know how to renew us from within, in order to renew the way we are living, the world we share, and ourselves.

Because we so, we are all energy.

ENERGOS 2009

Welcome to ENERGOS 2009

First of all, why ENERGOS?

the word comes from the Greek meaning “active, working” and the team of Energos blog, besides of being aware of the concept of energy, wants to be pro-active and share the aknowlodgement that we all learned in the energy field.

With this in mind, the minister for economy and inovation of Portugal, the fifth renewable energy producer country in the world, had the idea of creating an Energy Week. This initiative aimed to gather university students from all around the world, to show Portugal, to melt knowlegment and professional experiences and merge them with the will to go further, to open minds going beyond cultural issues, and become people of the world, in the very beginning of what our grandsons will call the Energy Revolution.

The Energy Week started at 6th of April 2009 and hosted students from Brazil, Venezuela, USA, Angola, Mozambique, Morrfoco, Tunisia, Lybia, United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Poland, Russia, India, China, Japan, and, of course, Portugal.

In this Blog we will show the subjects we covered in the Energy Week, talk about personal lessons and experiences, and, most of all, our hope that this Week may become a way to unite people. Like energy, we all are a living force that can change the world for the better.