Dan Haugen

Way too much on my plate this morning, so I need to keep this brief. I’ll be unpacking my thoughts/notes today on last night’s Policy & A Pint on “Cities, Bicycling and the Future of Getting Around.” I’m also going to be talking/playing phone tag with a few more entrepreneurs I want to feature in next week’s issue of The Line.

I’m going to get straight into the links now:

SUSTAINABILITY
The Seward Co-op celebrated its new 32-kilowatt rooftop solar photovoltaic system with a “commissioning party” on Thursday. The array was installed by Solarflow Energy, a Seward neighborhood company that is trying to prove a solar leasing model. I wrote about ‘em this week for The Line.

MEDICAL DEVICES
ProUroCare , an Eden Prairie medical device startup, announced an extra infusion of cash from its existing investors. The company makes an imaging product that it believes can help doctors diagnose and document prostrate cancers. Thomas Lee wrote late last year that the company may have a hard time convincing reimbursers that the product is necessary. I was humming the Yeah Yeah Yeahs after reading this story in the Star Tribune this morning: an airline worker in Arkansas came across a container of human heads and head parts on their way to Medtronic that were apparently not packed or labeled properly. The state confiscated the body parts until it can confirm they were obtained legally.

ECONOMY
The Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development announced May job numbers on Thursday. Minnesota employers created a net 5,600 jobs during the month while unemployment fell to an even 7 percent from 7.1 percent in April. It was the second consecutive month of job gains — a first since Jan.-Feb. 2008. U.S. Census hiring is responsible for a large chunk of the increase, but private employers in the state still created 2,600 jobs. Construction and financial services were the only sectors that didn’t see growth. I spoke with an official from an IT staffing agency in the Twin Cities, who told me that it’s placing a lot more web and app developers than it was a year ago, although much of the activity is temporary contract work.

A student group at the University of Minnesota wants the school to set a time line for phasing out the burning of coal on campus.

Students Beyond Coal, part of a national Sierra Club campaign, will stage a rally today against the fuel, which is a major source of greenhouse gases and other pollution.

“We want to support what the University has done already” to reduce its coal use and energy consumption, said Siri Simons, a sophomore environmental studies student, “and we want to pressure them to keep moving in that direction.”

But is completely cutting coal from the equation realistic? Read the rest of this entry »

Greenhouse gases are trapping heat in our atmosphere and warming the planet at an alarming rate.

Climate scientists believe if we don’t respond appropriately in the next decade or so, global warming will cause oceans to rise, disease to spread, droughts to prolong, storms and wildfires to intensify, and scores of species to go extinct.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, however, foresees a different apocalyptic vision: a future in which American businesses are forced to do their part to help avert the crisis. (Continue reading…)

Tommy Creal builds motorcycles that are meant to catch the eye’s attention.

That effect is intensified here in this sprawling, basement shop room beneath Minneapolis Community & Technical College (MCTC) where a pair of Creal’s custom choppers and all their flashy chrome curves share the space with rows of dull, boxy fans and air ducts used by the college’s HVAC program.

Creal, 23, made a name for himself in Chicago teaching people how to build these bikes from scratch during a series of three-day boot camps. The motorcycles he and his students built over the past four years are one-of-a-kind bikes. And that will certainly be true of Creal’s latest machine. Its most distinguishing feature: It’ll run on purified water instead of gasoline. (Continue reading…)

It’s known as the Windy City, but its vehicle fleet could someday be powered by the sun.

Chicago unveiled its first solar electric-vehicle charging station this month as part of a campaign to bolster the city’s green cred in its bid to host the 2016 Olympics. The 2.4-kilowatt battery system is small, but it demonstrates how city vehicles might someday be powered by a completely carbon-free fuel source: the sun.

The station is among only a handful of solar-powered vehicle chargers in the United States, and perhaps the first in the Midwest. They’re few in numbers in part because electric vehicles are still few in number. Solar-powered charging stations are also more expensive than stations that draw electricity from the grid.

But the solar-powered chargers make a powerful symbolic statement: These vehicles run on clean energy, not fossil fuels. (Continue reading…)