>> Hey, everyone. I'm Mark LaSaya [phonetic] and this week City Soul's sun-powered concert, an electric dirt bike and a printer that saves trees. The Green Show starts now.
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City Soul is a celebration in Manhattan that features a mini-music and arts festival powered entirely by solar energy. Take a look.
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>> Right now this is our annual City Soul festival. It's a solar-powered music and advocacy festival now. So we basically invite a lot of different mostly indie rock and rap acts that are mostly from the local area to come and perform on our stage, which is entirely solar powered. Solar One, one of our pieces of our mission is we try to really, really push for policies that will help make solar more supportable and widespread in New York. Right now, what we're pushing for is the policy that's been proven to be the most effective at really ramping up and scaling up renewable energy wherever it's been adopted. And that's called a feed-in tariff [phonetic]. That's a very common policy in several European nations, in Germany, Spain, France now, Italy. What it is, basically, is it allows renewable energy system owners that produce electricity to sell their electricity to the utilities, the utility has to buy it for a period of 15 to 20 years. And they also have to pay those renewable energy systems owners a premium for their electricity. But I think the biggest thing is eliminating driving the cost down, making it more affordable. Solar is becoming cheaper as conventional electricity is becoming more expensive. It's becoming cheaper because it's growing as an industry. And as it reaches the scale, the price goes down.
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>> A lot of the attendees at the event lent their support to Soul One by writing a letter for the I-Heart TV campaign. The campaign communicates with congressional representatives to encourage the use of renewable energy. Of course, the incentive was a free beer ticket, so that probably had something to do with it.
Now if you were to spill your free beer on this electric dirt bike, you wouldn't have to worry. It's waterproof, or beer-proof. The Evolt Bowl One [phonetic] is an electric dirt bike that the company claims can be immersed in water -- although that would not serve any purpose.
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The Evolt Bowl One weighs 105 kilograms or around 231 pounds, and can reach up to 90 kilometers or 56 miles per hour.
The batteries can go for about two hours off a standard charge and it's expected to hit Italian markets later this year for around $12,465 US dollars.
From solar-powered concerts and electric dirt bikes, we move onto something even more exciting: printing. Lexmark is coming out with new all-in-one touch screen printers that feature an eco-mode button to save paper. The mode automates two-sided printing, faxing and copying, which obviously cuts your paper trail by half, although a few quick setting adjustments can be made on most printers to do this very same thing without making a new purchase. If you'd rather wait for Lexmark's new line of green-friendly printers, they'll be out in early September ranging from $199 to $399.
Let's move onto a quick explanation on smart-grid technology. You may already know what this is; nevertheless, our green-tech expert, Martin LaMonica [assumed spelling], put together an article just what this technology could mean for the future. So let's sum up. Smart-grid technology aims to make energy consumption more transparent so consumers will know how much energy they
spend, whether or not the energy source is clean and ways to better conserve it. The process of building a grid would require companies to pair their power use with technology that enables them to track energy the way we track information on the web. In turn, we would know exactly where our energy is being spent and, ideally, information on power consumption would show up in real time so there would be no surprises on your power bill. Services like Microsoft Home and Google Power Meter are a few companies that are working to better connect consumers with their utilities companies. Duke Energy is also testing out a virtual power plant in Charlotte, North Carolina that operates on solar energy. Companies like Cisco, IBM and GE are working in their respective fields to mold the future of smart-grid into a reality. You can read more information on this at cnet.com/greentech. And that's it for this week. Send in your feedback to greenshow@cnet.com. I'm Mark LaSaya. Thanks for watching.
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