I am horribly swamped at the moment. I won’t go into the details, but suffice to say that I have some writing commitments that have all come due at about the same time. So I don’t have much time to blog at the moment. On the plus side, I finally did my taxes this weekend. In more than 20 years of doing my taxes, this is the first time I completed them as late as April. I normally have them completed by the first week of February. That is just an indication of how backed up things are.
But I thought I would just throw something quick out there. I have gotten a number of questions about what I was doing in New Zealand. I even had the media contact me when I was down there. As it is my nature not to hype things, I have been largely silent about the things we are working on. I was also largely silent with the media. Call it the anti-Range strategy if you will: Keep expectations manageable, and talk only when necessary.
I honestly didn’t even think I had given the media enough information to do a story, but I was e-mailed the following over the weekend:
Wood waste could be key to keeping us green
The story vaguely details what we were doing down there. In a nutshell, we are looking for locations where specific renewable technologies can compete on the basis of the technology merits, and not the subsidies. New Zealand has some very attractive features, and we were just scouting out the logistics, local technologies, etc.
Too early to tell what we will decide to do. I have put my technology report together, and I think I have a grasp of the opportunities and challenges. Incidentally, I was to go back down in a couple of weeks and present at the EECA Biofuels and Electric Vehicles Conference 2010 – and had told some people I would catch up with them there – but after reviewing my overloaded schedule I decided I better pass on that right now.
If you are interested in my impressions of New Zealand, I put up a short entry on my travel blog. Given that I have added New Zealand and India, I probably need to change the name of the blog, which is currently Traveling in Europe.