Living Life on the Halfbeat

5//Worldpress.org, US--PORTUGAL ANNOUNCES NEW WAVE ENERGY PROJECT (The viability of harnessing waves as a lucrative renewable energy source received a boost last week following the announcement that the world's first commercial wave energy project will begin delivering wave-generated energy to the north of Portugal later this month. The first stage of the European Union-funded program, the result of two decades of research at Lisbon's Superior Technical Institute, will bring the first 2.25 megawatts ashore at Aguçadoura, in northern Portugal, and will power 1,500 homes through the national state run electricity grid system according to an Inter Press Service [IPS] report. Funded by a consortium headed by leading Portuguese renewable energy company Enersis, the venture uses groundbreaking Pelamis wave devices manufactured by Edinburgh firm Ocean Power Delivery, considered the world's leading wave technology. "This project, begun in 2003, is now in the world vanguard," said Rui Barros, Enersis director of new projects, to IPS.)
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such good news from Portugal
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I often wonder why, when I look inside the windows of the local gyms, why all that energy isn't harnessed and used to heat and light the building and warm the water heaters for the showers? Has anyone ever done that? It would turn what I perceive to be a narcissistic self-absorbed energy burn into a reasonably positive and self-sustaining one. Just a thought.

And the half-beat is a good place to be. I'm on the miles and miles of boardwalk tonight by the lake and I encounter one runner and three too-young-for-a-driver's-licence cyclists out there. In a city of 3 million. And it was only 10.30 p.m. and it is staggeringly beautiful and the other nearly 3 million people, I see some of them in the apartments overlooking the boardwalk, TVs (mainly), computers, cleaning up, none that I saw just sitting and staring at their million dollar views. Not one.
And most of the time I feel like the wealthiest woman in the world when I nightwalk this city and breathe it all in.