This environmentally friendly parking lot at Dells Round Rock Texas headquarters will generate 130,000KWh of green electricity annually. This is great use of a parking lot and is something I have been actively researching for our school district.

An easy do-it-yourself project that should offer an immediate payoff in lower bills is to insulate your water heater. Particularly if your heater is in an unheated part of the house, a fitted water heater blanket can pay for itself quickly. Also insulate at least the first 6-10 feet of hot water supply pipe with pipe insulation, available at any hardware store.

Take matters into your own hands by checking for drafts and sealing them with caulk or putty. Expanding foam sealant can be used to fill larger areas that are protected from moisture and sunlight. Add weather stripping around the edge of doors and seal any cracks or gaps around windows, light fixtures and plumbing.

Leave shades and blinds open on sunny days, but close them at night to reduce the amount of heat lost through windows.

All of these steps add up to savings, comfort and environmental responsibility.

Many wine connoisseurs will have a hard time with this. If the aging is done in the barrels and the wine produced will be consumed within a year, the box should have equal quality wine arrive at the table as a bottle. To go a step further, the box does not allow air back into the container unless it is miss-handled. The airlock on a box wine allows the wine to last up to 6 weeks after the first glass is dispensed.

In a boxed wine, only about 5% of the distribution weight is the package, where in bottled wines 50% is the bottle. The carbon footprint to deliver the wine in bottles is very large. Also, there are chemicals used to process the glass bottles that can be avoided when we use the box.

The related link has a lot of information. The bottom line is that we will see more boxed wines as we learn to be more responsible with our impact on the environment.

Another good link to read: Yahoo Green on Boxed Wine

The Department of Energy says 5 to 15% of fuel economy is used for overcoming rolling resistance. This means your existing car could benefit by 5% or more from low rolling resistance tires. The trick here is that this tire type is almost never produced for your basic or larger vehicles. There seems to be a production focus for hybrids and electrics for this type of tire.

Next, the independent study information: Tire Rack is a group that does tire performance testing. This group has studied various LRR tires against a control tire for a standardized comparison. Note that they do not have separate measurements for city vs highway driving.

Matt Edmonds, a Tire Rack vice president, said that almost none of the tires would save money for the people who bought them. In the best case, you'd save about $52.50 per year if you drove 15,000 miles a year. But carmakers will inevitably be drawn to these tires as they try to meet the new 35.5 mpg federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard for 2016.

Incidentally, you could do a lot to help your fuel economy if you just properly inflate your tires. A Bridgestone study found that 93.5% of European cars have under-inflated tires, wasting 2.14 billion gallons of fuel a year. Americans are definitely no better. And forget about inflating your tires with nitrogen. It sounds great, but Terry Jackson of Bankrate.com points out that nitrogen already accounts for 78% of the air in your tires. Pure nitrogen doesn't make enough of a difference to be worth the effort.

The way I see it, we can have the most impact right now by keeping our tires properly inflated. Make it part of your gas station pit-stop.

There is a great chart with comparisons of brands on the related link.

This really is a happy ending. I figured I better post this in case someone stumbles on this entry sometime in the future.