Horses pulling vehicles can be fitted out with ‘apple baskets’. You’ve seen them in urban areas. Provide places for horse owners to dump the poop and move it to a digester.

Add it to the sewage system output and collect the methane from as many inputs as possible. We should be tapping all our sewage systems and landfills. That would let us cut back on natural gas use.

“The electricity being generated and transmitted to this island is not strictly from renewable energy so the electric scooters and golf carts would not be 100% renewable.”

B-
“There are a couple large wind turbines within a couple miles from Mackinaw City too!”

A + B = build more renewable generation.

There’s no reason to live like the Amish in order to shun fossil fuels. As we switch from fossil fuels to renewables most people won’t even be aware of anything changing. Their lights and TVs will work exactly as they did when we got 57% of our electricity from coal. Have they noticed any difference now that we’re down to 37%?

Do you think driving a 200 mile range EV with rapid chargers readily available would be like living Amish-style? You wouldn’t even hear the clip-clops and horse farts….

Think of the problems moving these many bushels of road apples to biodigesters.

Electrify transportation. It’s a perfect solution for most of our surface travel. We can power it with 100% renewable electricity and because battery charging times can be controlled by grid managers it makes the job of creating a renewable grid easier.

One problem I see with horses being the main means of transportation is that horses poop a lot. In Lancaster, and the surrounding areas, there is a problem with animal poop entering waterways and destroying the fishing (check out the Chesapeake Bay initiative). One way to combat this problem is using waste to energy generation plants. In Harrisburg, about a 45 minute drive from Lancaster, the local community college, Harrisburg Area Community College (HACC), has a waste to energy generation plant that takes the animal waste and turns it into energy. After the process, what’s left is carbon that can be used for fertilizer. I am interested to see what the end consumer price would be for this electricity. I think people in the area would be willing to pay a little more to know that there isn’t excess animal waste in their waterways.

Maybe someone could answer this question I have in regards to means of generation like waste to energy. Obviously pollution is a negative by-product of economic growth. Seeing as this means of generation eliminates other negative effects on the environment of the area as well as producing electricity (replacing the emissions of fossil fuels) do you guys think that there is room for growth in this market. Obviously, it would need to be a place with a lot of animal waste, but I think this could be a good thing for niche markets.

Machinac seems to use horses for its deliveries
rather than electric vehicles, but this article about them (
http://www.mackinacislandnews.com/news/2010-02-13/Top_News/Horsemen_say_Winter_Work_on_Mackinac_Takes_a_Speci.html
) refers to the whine of the snowplow in winter along with snowmobiles
and airplanes.

Both of these places are car-less as a way to
promote tourist income. If we want to examine more closely what it
means in human values to “shun” fossil fuels then we have to turn our
gaze to the Amish communities.

On another note the island is in between the lower and upper peninsula of Michigan. The article says the island is in Lake Huron and I guess you could technically say it’s located in Lake Huron, but it is in the area where Lake Michigan meets Lake Huron, also known as the Straights of Mackinac.