An assortment of solar roof designs
By Shel Horowitz
(Excerpt from Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World by Jay Conrad Levinson and Shel Horowitz)
- Green thinking has so infiltrated the building industry that some Realtor associations are demanding that the Multiple Listing Service database of homes for sale be updated to allow green rating criteria.169
What’s possible is limited only by your imagination. Consider the brief (six-minute) video, “Solar Freakin Roadways,” which went viral following its May, 2014 release. As of February, 2015, 19,183,035 people had seen it, and 23,727 had commented on it. And by November, 2014, someone had built a 70-meter (229-foot) demonstration project on a bikeway in the Netherlands.
Lots of other promising new technologies will provide ground-floor business opportunities for entrepreneurs, and good green jobs for those who don’t want to start a company. A few examples:
- The Bloom Box, a fuel cell that creates energy by oxidizing fuel, with no need to burn it—which has sold to such corporations as Google, Walmart, and eBay
- Mushrooms that can clean up oil spills and then add to the food chain as they decompose and are eaten
- A magnetic-levitation wind turbine that requires no electricity, generates no friction, rotates on a vertical axis, and can successfully generate power for 750,000 homes at wind speeds as low as a third-of-a-mile per hour (compared with 13 mph for conventional horizontal-axis tower-based wind-farm turbines) and as high as 89 mph
Wind power, incidentally, is an area where dozens of innovations are on the horizon that will likely make the technology quieter, more affordable, less environmentally intrusive, and safer for birds. The mag-lev system described just above claims a 500-year lifespan and requires just 1/960 of the land to generate as much wind power as a typical windfarm. There are even people working on utility-scale wind systems that have no turbines, as well as smaller no-blade systems. The developers of the smaller system claim their Saphon Zero Blade offers 230 percent greater efficiency than conventional wind turbines, while reducing costs 45 percent.
What niche will you create?
Green/social change business profitability expert Shel Horowitz, “The Transformpreneur,sm” shows you how profit by greening your business, turning hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance, and marketing these commitments. Reprinted with permission from Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (with Jay Conrad Levinson; Morgan James Publishing, 2016). The book highlights profitable and successful socially responsible strategies used by companies from Fortune 100 to solopreneurs: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/ To discuss your next project with him or schedule a no-charge 15-minute strategy session: shel [AT] greenandprofitable.com, 413-586-2388 (8 a.m. to 10 p.m., US Eastern Time), Twitter: @ShelHorowitz