Friday, August 28, 2009

Analyzing Paved Parking Per Town or City

I'm working on a personal project that I'm quite passionate about! I'm analyzing paved parking per town or city. I'm targeting churches primarily because I want to raise people's awareness as to the viability of generating electricity via solar arrays from these digustingly extensive areas laying about doing nothing but burning our bare feet and heating up our atmosphere.... plus the net metering laws in most states serve to protect the utility industry's profit and need changing. I was out in Greensboro NC yesterday (where I attend UNCG) taking pictures of parking lots to include with the maps. Seems rather boring, but I'm hoping they will make a big impact. Especially when you consider that church parking lots sit empty all week long. There are 991 church properties in Guilford County NC. I'm working on doing a spatial join so as to get the specific areas of the paved parking planimetric data that belong to the churches... hard because I don't have a field in both attribute tables that is the same with which to accomplish a join or a relate. Getting professional help on that one - thanks Chris F.! I'll be in touch soon! I'm also hoping to target a few more select cities (Greenville SC, Jacksonville FL, Winter Park FL, Knoxville TN, and somewhere in AL and somewhere in MS) and do the same for them. The annual SEDAAG (Southeastern Division of Association of American Geographers) meeting is Thanksgiving week in Knoxville TN this year and being the environmental activist I am, I'll be laying these nifty informative flyers all around! Plus posting on my blog. Plus I hope to have some sort of a business card printed up within the month and attend concerts just to hand them out.... you can reach LOTS of folks by hanging out at the entrance of a concert! Busy, Busy! Gotta scoot! btw..... Happy Birthday to me!

Note added Nov 5, 2009 -
Well, plans change.  Didn't get to SEDAAG this year and have been too busy to do any paved parking analysis this term.  Hopefully soon.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Found a great blog on SketchUp

Greetings all,

The semester is in and I've been busy getting my projects lined up, hence the absence of late. I found a great blog (thanks to SketchUp on Twitter) on (of course) SketchUp that I'd like to share: http://sketchupisland.blogspot.com/

As I have ideas of getting this solar parking lot movement going on, I analyzed the paved parking of Greensboro NC last fall. Total and also all churches as identified in the city's parcel data. There are over 900 properties defined as churches in Greensboro. Covering up all those parking lots with solar panels will be a definite foot in the door for solar power here in North Carolina! And it will also raise the awareness of the people as to the need to change the net metering regulations here in this state. As of now they protect the utility's profit margin: renewable energy devices are allowed to connect only until that utility company's net profit of .2% is reached - at peak load. Talk about money talks and politics walks that talk! So, I figured that the best way to get renewable energy going on in this state (which happens to necessarily import ALL of its energy!) is to get the church folk aware of the benefits of solar parking lots! (Plus, they're the ones with the money in this bumbling recession!).

I hope to start posting pictures of the churches in Greensboro and was going to actually make them into a 3D model for Google Earth using SketchUp, however I'm busy this semester with my favorite subject: weather & climate! I have another plan and will use an idea from the above blog - just pull up a shape in the form of the church and then post the statistical data on the walls of the church. Hopefully, the pictures will also have the GPS coordinates right on them (still pricing cameras!) so that interested folk may know exactly where I'm talking about!

Ok, confessional here: I'm also going to put a PayPal button on my blog in hopes of donations for my endeavors..... (had to admit that!)

SketchUp is great and I found a link (www.3dvinci.net) that publishes SketchUp student books and books for K-12 teachers too. I'll be purchasing one for my son's upcoming birthday and will let ya'll know how it is later on in September.

Until next time....... :)