Urban Energy

Vision for Affordable Energy Even if Indian Point Nuclear Plant Is Shut Down

2012-01-12T19:14:00.000-08:00

January 12, 2012

By JIM DWYER

New York Times

If anyone, or any business, can get a good deal on electricity, it ought to be Consolidated Edison, which buys loads of it every year and then sells it to three million customers in New York City and the suburbs. Like most traditional utility companies, it has gotten out of the power generation business in recent years and is now a distribution company. It buys the electricity that it delivers from generators run by independent companies.

So when Con Ed goes shopping, where does it find the best prices?

The question came up Thursday at a legislative hearing in the city on the future of the Indian Point nuclear power plant, which Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo wants to close. Whether he succeeds or not, the action will be a pivot in the history of New York City. The state has plenty of relatively cheap and clean electricity from hydropower and wind farms, but it is trapped in the northern reaches of the state by a distribution system that hits a traffic jam of electrons before it gets near the city.

Indian Point, however, is in Westchester County, south of that congestion, and its electricity flows without obstacles into the city, just about 30 miles away. That very geography is also driving the effort by the governor and others to close the plant, which is getting old.

There is little confidence that people would be able to evacuate the region, much less the most densely populated big city in the country, in the event of a serious accident. (A leak of radioactive water in a cooling pump forced the plant to shut down one of its two generators this week.)

If the plant closes in the next few years, the 2,000 megawatts of electricity that it produces will have to come from somewhere else — that is, somewhere either in or near the city. Business and union officials spoke Thursday, as they have before, in support of the continued operation of Indian Point, arguing that the economy would be hobbled by the loss of so much cheap electricity.

Interestingly, the current electricity prices are kept secret by the generating companies and the utilities.

But by poring through Con Edison’s annual reports, James F. Brennan, a Democratic member of the Assembly from Brooklyn who also represents the Working Families Party, managed to figure out the prices it paid in 2010 to four of its leading suppliers.

Here are the numbers Mr. Brennan found for each kilowatt hour:

¶ 12.8 cents, from a wholesale market based in Albany.

¶ 8.2 cents from a gas-fired power plant in Astoria, Queens.

¶ 7.7 cents from the Indian Point nuclear generators.

¶ 6.8 cents from a gas-powered co-generation plant operated in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Mr. Brennan thinks that New York can get by without the electricity generated by Indian Point and that the city will not be putting itself at a financial disadvantage. Other cities actually make their own electricity, and do so at lower costs than some commercial suppliers, he noted at the hearing. Asked by a city official if he thought that the city should get into that business, Mr. Brennan paused for a minute. “Yes,” he said.

Certainly, the cost of making electricity has declined drastically in the last few years, in large part because the price of natural gas has been dropping. The decrease in price has made electricity from natural gas competitive with nuclear power. In 2008, the price of natural gas was $12 or $13 for a quantity known as a decatherm.

“Right now, it is $3 for a decatherm,” said Joseph P. Oates, a vice president at Con Edison.

Newer gas-generating plants are far more efficient than the ones they are replacing, and the city has helped developers build new ones in Queens. Con Edison, which used to own Indian Point, does not have a position on the continued operation of its old plant, but Mr. Oates said: “If you close it, it has to be replaced with something. The question is, what is that something?”

Natural gas plants have low emissions, but Norris McDonald, the president of the African American Environmentalist Association, said during a break in the hearing that Indian Point had virtually no emissions. “Where it is now, it is an environmental asset,” he said. “If you shut it down, whatever you’re going to replace it with is going to increase emissions in communities like Harlem.”

Other environmentalists argue that much of the slack can be made up with a combination of greater efficiency and more renewable energy, like solar, wind and tidal power. But when?

A wise colleague once gave me a warning on another dense topic: If you think you understand the problem, he said, then it hasn’t been properly explained to you.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/nyregion/vision-for-cheap-power-even-if-indian-point-nuclear-plant-is-closed.html?pagewanted=print

Darker Nights as Some Cities Turn Off the Lights

2011-12-30T09:07:00.000-08:00

By MONICA DAVEY

New York Times

Published: December 29, 2011

HIGHLAND PARK, Mich. — When the sun sets in this small city, its neighborhoods seem to vanish.

In a deal to save money, two-thirds of the streetlights were yanked from the ground and hauled away this year, and the resulting darkness is a look that is familiar in the wide open cornfields of Iowa but not here, in a struggling community surrounded on nearly all sides by Detroit.

Parents say they now worry more about allowing their children to walk to school early in the morning. Motorists complain that they often cannot see pedestrians until headlights — and cars — are right upon them. Some residents say they are reshaping their lives to fit the hours of daylight, as the members of the Rev. D. Alexander Bullock’s church did recently when they urged him to move up Saturday Bible study to 4 p.m. from the usual 7 p.m.

“It’s just too dark,” said Mr. Bullock, of Greater St. Matthew Baptist Church. “I come out of the church, and I can’t see what’s in front of me. What happened to our streetlights is what happens when politicians lose hope. All kinds of crazy decisions get made, and citizens lose faith in the process.”

Cities around the nation, grappling with what is expected to be a fifth consecutive year of declining revenues and having exhausted the predictable budget trims, are increasingly considering something that would once have been untouchable: the lights.

Highland Park’s circumstances are extreme; with financial woes so deep and long term, it has extinguished all but 500 streetlights in a city accustomed to 1,600, utility company officials say. But similar efforts have played out in dozens of towns and cities, like Myrtle Creek, Ore., Clintonville, Wis., Brainerd, Minn., Santa Rosa, Calif., and Rockford, Ill.

What distinguishes these latest austerity measures is how noticeable they are to ordinary residents. If health care cuts, pay cuts, layoffs and furloughs — and even limits on enforcing building codes or maintaining parks — are most apparent to the people inside city halls, everyone notices when his streetlights go dark (and some cities, like Colorado Springs, where the issue boiled over, have already resumed some lighting when revenues allowed).

Turning off the lights has drawn grumpy crowds to city council meetings, stirred jealousy among neighborhoods and neighbors, and set off conversations about crime.

“I go around town, and even I think some areas seem a little darker than they should be,” said Tim Hanson, the public works director in Rockford, where officials turned off 2,300 of the city’s 14,000 lights. “It was not anything that I wanted to do, and it was nothing that the mayor or aldermen wanted to do, but it’s like your own budget at home — we can’t afford this anymore.”

Here in Highland Park, that had been true for a while. Over a matter of years, the city accumulated a debt of about $4 million to DTE Energy, the utility company. The city was paying less than half of its $60,000 monthly bill for an antiquated lighting system that was costly to maintain. So the company and city struck a deal. The company could turn off and take away 1,300 of the city’s lights, add 200 lights in strategic locations, and the debt would be forgiven, said Scott Simons, a spokesman for DTE.

The result in this 2.9-square-mile city feels like this: Lights are still abundant along Woodward Avenue, the crowded commercial strip. But a block away, along the quieter, residential streets, lights now remain mostly at intersections. Long stretches of blocks are dark, silhouettes of people are barely visible and potholes appear suddenly beneath tires.

Some people here say they learned of the plans this fall only when a truck pulled up outside their homes and workers began pulling the poles from the ground. (Though the added step of removing the lights — not just turning them off — seemed an affront to residents, company officials said it had to be done for liability reasons and to avoid continuing reports of power failure and the risk of metal theft.)

“The people were basically left in the dark,” said DeAndre Windom, who was elected mayor in November. He said the disappearing streetlights were the top concern of residents as he campaigned door to door.

“When you come through at night, it’s scary; you have to wonder if anyone is lurking around waiting to catch you off your guard,” said Juanita Kennedy, 65, who said she had installed a home security system and undergone training to carry a handgun in the weeks since workmen carried away the streetlight in front of her house. “I don’t go out to get gas at night. I don’t run to any stores. I try to do everything in the daytime and to be back before night falls.”

Highland Park, home of Henry Ford’s first moving assembly line, was once a well-off enclave of 50,000 residents. Ford left long ago, and Chrysler’s corporate headquarters moved away in the 1990s. Now it has fewer than 12,000 residents — half the size it was just 20 years ago.

So for this city, a shrunken tax base and financial crisis have been long in the making, and the recent national downturn has only made matters worse. More than 42 percent of Highland Park’s residents live in poverty, unemployment is high and the median income here is nearly $30,000 below that of the state.

“To understand our street lighting situation is to understand the wealth that Highland Park once had; it was a situation where we had the best of almost everything and an abundance of lights,” said Rodney Patrick, whose father insisted on moving his family to Highland Park in the early 1950s because of its advantages — its status, in his words, as the shining city on the hill. “But we don’t have the residents to have the luxuries we had when we were a city of 50,000.”

If the outcome seems imperfect to many residents, not everyone views it as dire. “The lights are not out in Highland Park,” said Mr. Patrick, who serves on the City Council. “We’ve had a reduction, a responsible reduction.”

It is too soon to judge whether the lights have affected safety here. Officials from other communities and studies on the question of streetlights and crime draw mixed conclusions.

In Highland Park, yard lights and even strings of Christmas lights are helping to illuminate some streets, and some leaders have urged residents to add their own lighting if they are worried about security — leading to complaints that the city is trying to shift items it cannot afford to residents who cannot afford them either.

In cities around the nation, similar ideas have emerged: streetlight user fees, private security lights, even optional “adopt-a-light” programs comparable to road sponsorships.

In Oregon, officials in Myrtle Creek turned off 78 of the city’s 297 streetlights in 2010, to save $11,000. A streetlight sponsorship program suggests that nerves have calmed. Last year, people paid to keep six of the lights on. Now, only two of the lights remain adopted and lighted. “Nobody’s talking about it anymore,” said Aaron K. Cubic, city administrator in the rural community, 90 minutes south of Eugene.

Not so in Highland Park, where the measure is newer and the darkness more pronounced. There is hope for new lights, though no money for them. The mayor-elect, Mr. Windom, said that he was in conversations with groups that might consider Highland Park as a pilot project for some more energy-efficient, environmentally conscious, experimental lighting system.

“We can’t go back,” said Mr. Windom, who has, for now, urged residents to turn on their porch lights.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/us/cities-cost-cuttings-leave-residents-in-the-dark.html?_r=1&src=rechp&pagewanted=all

Yale Environment 360: Map Projects When U.S. Cities Will Achieve Grid Parity for Solar

2011-12-30T08:43:00.000-08:00

Yale Environment 360: Map Projects When U.S. Cities Will Achieve Grid Parity for Solar

If energy cost trends remain consistent — with the price of retail electricity rising and solar power falling — solar energy could become cheaper than power from the grid in most major U.S. metropolitan areas

Click to enlarge

Energy Self-Reliant States

Grid parity in U.S. states

by 2027, according to a recent projection. In a new map published on the Energy Self-Reliant States website, energy policy analyst John Farrell has predicted which U.S. cities will achieve so-called “grid parity” first — and the order in which other cities will follow through 2027. Farrell, a researcher with the group, Local Self-Reliance, based his projections on recent regional retail rates for electricity, which have seen the cost of solar energy decline by an average of 7 percent per year and the cost of retail electricity increase by 2 percent annually. If that trend holds, Farrell predicts that San Diego will become the first city to achieve grid parity, in 2013, followed by New York City in 2015. By 2020, 17 metropolitan areas nationwide will have reached grid parity; the number will jump to more than 40 by 2027, Farrell projects. According to a recent study, the wholesale price of solar panels dropped 70 percent from late-2009 to mid-2011.

http://e360.yale.edu/digest/map_projects_when_us_cities_will_achieve_grid_parity_for_solar/3265/

Ship’s Espresso-Fueled Mission: Laying Cables Beneath the Hudson

2011-12-27T08:13:00.000-08:00

By PATRICK McGEEHAN

New York Times

Published: December 26, 2011

For several minutes on Thursday, Al Figueroa was up to his neck in mud nearly 70 feet below the swift-moving surface of the Hudson River.

Mr. Figueroa, who has been diving in and around New York Harbor for 24 years, was well acquainted with the river’s shifting currents. Not so for the sailors and engineers on the hulking ship floating above him: almost all of them had traveled from Italy in the fall to stretch several miles of power cables beneath the river between Midtown Manhattan and New Jersey.

The cables, coiled in huge steel baskets on the deck of the ship, were custom-made in a factory near Naples to survive for decades in the muck and clay beneath the Hudson. The ship, the Giulio Verne, is one of only two in the world capable of laying so much heavy cable across ocean floors and deep riverbeds.

“The ship is filled like an egg,” said Sebastiano Aleo, an executive who oversees installation projects for its owner, Prysmian Powerlink. “There is no more room on it.”

The Giulio Verne left Naples in late October and, after 25 days on the Atlantic Ocean, arrived in New York, where a crew of 70 began preparing for a project that had been years in the planning. By Monday, it was halfway to its destination of Edgewater, N.J.

The cables on the ship were designed to carry as much as 660 megawatts of electricity — about 5 percent of the power consumed in New York City on the hottest summer days — to Midtown Manhattan from the main power grid west of the Hudson. The power could replace some of the supply that would be lost if Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo succeeds in his quest to shut down the Indian Point nuclear plant, 35 miles north of Midtown.

The New York Power Authority, which buys electricity for many city and state agencies, strongly supported the cross-Hudson cable plan. But the $850 million project is a privately financed venture, managed by PowerBridge, the same company that ran a cable from New Jersey to Long Island in 2007.

PowerBridge has sold most of the capacity on the cable to the power authority. But it can sell additional capacity to Consolidated Edison or other power providers. The laying of the cable accounts for about $175 million of the total cost, said Edward M. Stern, the chief executive of PowerBridge.

The electricity that is to run through the cables, three of them bundled together with two thinner fiber-optic wires, is from the grid that serves New Jersey and several other states. It is usually significantly less expensive than electricity made in the city.

But first, the men on the ship — they are all men and almost all Italian — must get the cables buried. That was why Mr. Figueroa was deep in the water, feeling his way around a plow that had been lowered to the river bottom.

After plunging into the 48-degree water about 700 feet from the west end of 53rd Street, Mr. Figueroa reported his observations through a microphone inside his bright yellow helmet. He had a camera too, but it was virtually useless in the murk of the Hudson.

In the “dive shack” — a steel freight container filled with hoses and gauges — on a barge tethered to the ship, two supervisors listened to Mr. Figueroa’s transmissions. Beside them stood a member of the Giulio Verne’s engineering crew, who translated the information into Italian and relayed it to the control room on the ship’s main deck.

Inside the control room, Mr. Aleo and his engineers kept up a spirited debate as they surveyed the 21 computer screens mounted on one wall. Some displayed video of the situation underwater from different angles; some showed data about the angle of the plow and the tension on the cables passing through it into the riverbed.

The discussion rarely ceased, with one notable exception: Every hour, a crew member circulated with a pot of espresso and a stack of two-inch-tall plastic cups.

If an army travels on its stomach, an Italian ship’s crew floats on a steady stream of coffee. They eat well, too. On Thursday, lunch was fettuccine alla bolognese with an antipasto spread, oranges and, of course, espresso.

The Christmas tree in the mess hall served as a reminder that the crew would miss the holidays with their families. Their work in the Hudson was not likely to wrap up until just before or after New Year’s Day.

“Unfortunately, it’s not the first Christmas we have passed on this ship,” Mr. Aleo said.

The ship has traveled the world, laying cables across seas from Sardinia to Australia, he said. Mr. Aleo said that the length and depth of those crossings presented more vexing technical challenges than the Hudson project, which will run only a few miles underwater, from West 52nd Street to Edgewater. The construction on the two sides of the river is not scheduled to be completed until mid-2013. So, on Thursday afternoon, when the brief lull between the strong tides of the Hudson passed before the crew of the Giulio Verne could get the plow moving upriver, Mr. Stern, the chief executive, remained sanguine.

“I’ve waited four years, I can wait another few hours,” he said, leaning against the ship’s rail, BlackBerry in hand.

On Friday, the plow, using jets of water to cut through the silt and clay, began threading the cables into the trench at the tortoise-like pace of about 325 feet per hour. Almost immediately, it ran into some industrial junk. But after finding a way around it, the crew resumed laying the cables.

They expected to reach New Jersey before the end of this week.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/nyregion/crew-lays-power-cable-beneath-the-hudson.html?ref=nyregion

In China, Power in Nascent Electric Car Industry

2011-12-27T08:02:00.000-08:00

By KEITH BRADSHER

New York Times

Published: December 26, 2011

GUANGZHOU, China — Three years ago, as part of its green-energy policy, the Chinese government set an ambitious goal: by the end of 2011, the nation would be able to produce at least 500,000 hybrid or all-electric cars and buses a year.

With only about a week to go, it is clear China will fall far short of that target. Despite dozens of electric-vehicle demonstration projects around the country, analysts put China’s actual annual production capacity at only several thousand hybrid and all-electric cars and buses.

“It’s pretty trivial at this stage — they hardly sell any,” said Lin Huaibin, the manager of China vehicle sales forecasts at IHS Automotive, a global consulting firm.

Obstacles include continued technological hurdles, disputes over technology transfers by multinational automakers, and a broad wariness by the Chinese public regarding alternative-technology cars.

But it would be shortsighted to count out China’s electric car efforts just yet. Only a few months ago Prime Minister Wen Jiabao called for Beijing to create a new “road map” for energy-saving vehicles.

Unlike in other nations, where automakers are leading the push for electric vehicles, in China the effort is being led largely by one of the country’s most powerful industries — the state-run electric companies that operate the national power grid. With China expected to surpass the United States in the number of all vehicles on the road by as early as 2020, the government-run utilities see it as their job to provide an alternative to imported oil as a way to power several hundred million cars, trucks and buses.

This month in this sprawling southern industrial city, for example, the giant China Southern Power Grid company opened a sales and service center for electric cars.

The new three-story building, resembling a giant lizard egg of lime-green glass, is a showcase for technology supplied by Better Place, a start-up based in Palo Alto, Calif. Under the Better Place business model, customers do not recharge their electric cars but instead periodically stop at an electric filling station to swap their nearly depleted batteries for freshly charged ones.

And just because there are no customers kicking the tires now doesn’t mean China Southern Grid, as it is commonly known, isn’t in the electric-vehicle game for the long haul. The power company and Better Place are in talks to sell electric cars to the Guangzhou municipal government and to taxi fleets, according to Shai Agassi, Better Place’s founder and chief executive.

The demonstration project showcases imported Renault Laguna sedans and Nissan Dualis crossover utility vehicles whose gasoline-fueled power trains have been replaced with electric motors and swappable batteries. But the companies are in talks with Chinese automakers to produce battery-powered cars, for which no price has been set.

In a separate bet, meanwhile, China Southern Grid has also built recharging stations in another big southern industrial city, Shenzhen, for electric buses and cars made by a Chinese automaker, BYD, which has Warren E. Buffett among its investors.

Though automakers in other countries have supplied charging equipment to be installed at homes and parking lots, China’s power industry has already made it clear that it wants to dictate when and how plug-in gasoline-electric hybrids and all-electric cars are charged, by owning the charging equipment and setting technical standards.

“It is more and more difficult to manage the grid; we need more flexibility,” by controlling how cars are recharged, said Zhang Diansheng, the deputy general manager of China Southern Grid.

After initially seeking to leapfrog Japan and the West by moving straight from internal combustion engines to cars powered only by batteries, Chinese policy makers are now paying more attention to hybrids that combine gasoline engines with electric motors. (As battery-fire problems with the Chevrolet Volt in the United States have recently indicated, technical problems still bedevil electric automotive technology.)

Even some of the Chinese companies like BYD that have bet most heavily on all-electric cars are now investing in plug-in hybrid cars that have gasoline engines as well as batteries.

“More and more companies are certainly going to do it like this,” Wang Chuanfu, BYD’s founder and chairman, said in an interview at his company’s headquarters in Shenzhen. But he quickly added, “there is still tremendous potential in the Chinese market for electric cars.”

Some of the obstacles that have slowed deployment of all-electric cars in China also exist in other markets. The cars’ range, less than 200 miles even under ideal conditions, falls steeply in cold weather, if the air-conditioner is turned on or if the car was not fully charged overnight.

“I’m not interested in them — I worry I’d run out of electricity and get stuck,” said Mu Zhongbao, a 31-year-old businessman who paid the equivalent of $130,000 for an Audi Q7 minivan on a recent afternoon here at one of the many dealerships near the Better Place site.

Southern China Grid’s Better Place demonstration project indicates that powerful interests in China still back the development of all-electric cars.

“I see the Chinese fully committed on a path toward electric vehicles — the time frame may shift, the volume numbers may shift,” said Raymond Bierzynski, the executive director of electrification strategy at General Motors China.

Some executives say that China has fallen behind its schedule for hybrid and all-electric cars because it has put heavy pressure on multinationals to transfer technology to their Chinese partners to be eligible for generous subsidies for the sale of alternative-energy vehicles in China. Some foreign manufacturers have responded by withholding some of their latest models from the Chinese market — as Nissan has with the electric Leaf.

G.M. has put the Volt on sale in China, despite the Chinese government’s decision to make it ineligible for renewable energy subsidies of up to $19,300 per car. That is because G.M. has not transferred enough of the technology to satisfy Beijing, although G.M. did agree this autumn to share some electric technology in the coming years.

“By forcing foreign technology sources into a junior role, that’s going to significantly slow the development of the technology in China,” said Bill Russo, a former auto executive who oversaw the Chinese and Korean markets for Chrysler and is now an industry consultant in Beijing.

But the betting in China is that China Southern Grid and another big grid operator, the State Grid Corporation, and their allies among the country’s five main electricity generation companies have much more influence in Beijing than the auto industry.

The Chinese auto industry was tiny until the last decade, and very few of its executives have wound up in senior government positions. By contrast, specializing in electric power has long been a path to the top of the Chinese Communist Party for leaders like Li Peng, the former premier.

And as long as the electric companies are influential, all-battery cars may hold the political edge over hybrids.

But what is not clear is which of three experimental approaches to recharging will eventually dominate the field: the so-called fast charging of vehicle batteries at recharging centers; overnight charging options at homes and parking lots; or battery swapping à la Better Place.

Meantime, World Trade Organization rules are also influencing how China approaches electric cars, said a Chinese official close to the decision-making who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss transportation policy.

The government wants to build an electric car industry that can export vehicles all over the world. But it does not want to someday face W.T.O. trade complaints from other countries that might accuse China of violating free-trade export rules by subsidizing the industry’s development. With China having raised trade tensions with the United States earlier this month by slapping additional tariffs on a range of American imported autos, Beijing may need to tread more carefully than ever.

The most promising trade strategy for China to avoid legal pitfalls might be for the government first to subsidize the development of a network of charging stations for electric buses and other municipal vehicles, the Chinese official said. Mass transit subsidies are hard to challenge at the W.T.O. because they involve an almost purely domestic government service.

The bus recharging stations, and the lessons learned in building them, might then be used in a more extensive network of electric car recharging stations. Subsidizing the charging stations could help make electric cars more affordable, and in turn help Chinese automakers achieve economies of scale in their home market that would help them build up an export business.

Already BYD is expanding its annual capacity to manufacture all-electric buses — 1,000 this year, up from 500 last year and with a target of 5,000 next year.

Mr. Agassi of Better Place predicted China would become a large-scale maker of electric cars and then start exporting them. “This is the fork-in-the-road moment” for China, Mr. Agassi said. “You get to a trade deficit on oil imports, or you get to a trade surplus with a lot of car exports.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/business/global/chinas-push-for-electric-cars-flows-through-grid-operators.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

ConEd Could Be Raising Rates Even Higher As The Size Of The City's Electric Vehicle Fleet Explodes

2011-12-05T18:43:00.000-08:00

Jaclyn P. Bouchard | Dec. 5, 2011, 3:23 PM
Business Insider

In order to power the largest electric vehicle (EV) fleet in the nation Manhattan is about to have as many charging stations as gas stations.

The city is home to 48 old-school filling stations while the number of charging stations is currently at 40 and growing by the month.

Under PlaNYC, a comprehensive sustainability program, the City of New York partnered with Consolidated Edison, has invested $130 million in 26,500 hybrid and EVs across all city agencies such as the fire and police departments.

Over 4,000 Smith Electric hybrid commercial trucks are already streaming across Manhattan with that number expected to increase to 140,000 over the next decade, with even the New York Taxi & Limousine Commission committing to a Nissan Leaf pilot program.

Con Edison is watching these numbers closely and has set up a section of their website outlining specific charging plans that won't disrupt energy flow to the city. Plugging in during off peak hours after 10:00 p.m. and before 10:00 a.m. will be key.

To that end the utility company could raise its already high rates to keep drivers from plugging in any time but off peak.

Whether New York is ready or not, change is coming, money is invested, and the plan has been set — now we know where all that tax money goes.

‘Clean Heat’ in Washington Heights Means Better Air, Perhaps Bigger Bills

2011-11-30T11:15:00.000-08:00

By Elizabeth Harball on Nov 29th, 2011
The Uptowner

Wood-burning fireplaces have long been obsolete in New York City, but as winter hits in Washington Heights, many chimneys still discharge dark smoke, dotting the skyline with smudgy clouds.

“About once every two hours or so, a great deal of black smoke comes out of a chimney on the roof of a neighboring building,” a resident wrote on Washington Heights and Inwood Online Community Forum. “Does anyone know if this is normal or if it’s something I should report?”

“Is this building near 186th and Bennett? If so, I’ve seen that too,” another member replied. “Huge puff of black smoke.”

Later, a third resident complained about a neighboring building: “They extended their chimney which now pumps black, noxious smoke directly into my apt.”

The smoke in question was likely emitted by boilers burning No. 6 heating oil, used in many Washington Heights and Inwood buildings. New legislation banning its use will make this sight a thing of the past by 2015.

No. 6 heating oil, also known as residual oil, is a byproduct of the distillation of crude oil, and contains high amounts of dirt and sediment.

“I still regularly see black smoke pouring out of apartment buildings in the 160s where I live, and have no doubt that it contributes significantly to poor air quality in the neighborhood,” Washington Heights resident Matthew Gallaway said via email.

Such complaints date back years. In May 2009, Gallaway posted to his blog a video titled “A Note To WaHi Landlords: Fix Your &$! Boilers.” It showed black smoke pouring from a chimney across from his apartment.

In April, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced New York City Clean Heat, a plan to eliminate heavy heating oils in New York City buildings. It’s a response to the 2009 New York City Community Air Survey stating that heating oil emissions account for much of the city’s air pollution. By July 2012, building owners will no longer be able secure a permit to use No. 6 heating oil and must convert their heating systems to use lighter fuels such as No. 4 oil, No. 2 oil or natural gas. By 2015, No. 6 oil will be prohibited.

Among city neighborhoods, Washington Heights has the sixth highest number of buildings using heavy heating oil. About 110 buildings burn No. 6 oil, according to a 2009 report by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Urban Green Council. These buildings can be identified on an Environmental Defense Fund map, where buildings using No. 6 oil are marked with red dots. Several Washington Heights streets, like Bennett Avenue, Fort Washington Avenue and Cabrini Boulevard, are lined with dots.

The use of heavy heating oil is blamed for much of the air pollution in Inwood and Washington Heights. Eliminating its use is the “single highest impact strategy we can have” to reduce pollution, Steve Caputo of the Mayor’s Office of Long Term Sustainability and Planning said at a September town hall meeting. He referred to No. 6 oil as “really dirty stuff.”

During the winter of 2008 and 2009, the New York City Community Air Survey discovered high levels of pollutants associated with heavy heating oil in Washington Heights and Inwood. The survey detected fine particulate matter, known as PM 2.5, at concentrations 33 percent greater than the citywide average and sulfur dioxide levels 75 percent greater than the citywide average.

The survey will continue monitoring air quality until June 2014, said Professor Holger Eisl of Queens College. Eisl expects to see improvement in air quality after reducing heavy oil use. “How dramatic it will be, I don’t know,” Eisl said, but “air will be cleaner, no question about it.”

Poor air quality has had health consequences in northern Manhattan. Asthma has been a longstanding concern, although asthma hospitalization rates have decreased in recent years. One in 20 adults in Inwood and Washington Heights has asthma, the New York City Community Health Survey reported in 2002.

Members of the New York City Clean Heat Task Force admit that phasing out No. 6 oil will not be easy for building owners. Owners will have to bear internal conversion costs, and according to this fall’s New York Energy Consumers Council newsletter, they will likely have to replace much of their heating equipment, which could cost more than $1 million in some buildings

New York City Clean Heat is encouraging building owners to convert to natural gas, which is demonstrably cleaner, cheaper and more efficient. In a case study by Cooper Square Realty, a Queens condominium reported annual savings of more than $98,000 after converting to natural gas.

Con Edison, the natural gas provider for Manhattan, is attempting to provide natural gas lines to as many interested building owners as possible. “We’re working with different stakeholders such as the New York City Mayor’s Office, the Real Estate Board of New York and the Environmental Defense Fund,” said Joe McGowan of ConEdison.

However, ConEdison cannot guarantee that all building owners will have access to natural gas by 2015. “What drives the installation of gas is the demand and commitments of customers,” McGowan said. “We don’t do speculative building.” McGowan said that ConEdison is urging building owners to first assess whether they can afford the conversion costs of switching to natural gas. “Gas may have significant up-front costs,” he said. “If it doesn’t make sense to go to gas, that’s OK.”

McGowan explained that ConEdison was encouraging building owners to join forces. If many neighborhood buildings want access to natural gas lines, the company is more likely to consider their application, because it will minimize construction costs and disruptions.

If Con Edison is unable to install natural gas lines for a building before its No. 6 oil permit expires, the building owner must substitute No. 2 or No. 4 heating oil. This transition could cost the owners of 550 Fort Washington Ave. in Washington Heights up to $150,000 up front, said James Maistre of Veritas Property Management. Maistre said the building, an affordable housing co-op, will likely not have natural gas lines by 2015 and is exploring transitioning to No. 2 oil. He says that the board will hire an engineer to evaluate the cheapest way to proceed. “It is a burden,” he said, adding, “It’s been on the wish list to upgrade.”

“It’s very costly,” said another Washington Heights building owner, who declined to be named. “Economically, it’s not convenient for me.”

The Energy Policy Research Foundation estimates No. 4 oil costs 50 cents more per gallon than No. 6 oil, resulting in a 35 percent increase in heating costs. The report goes on to say, “The transition to No. 4 oil will most dramatically affect lower-income residents whose rents could increase by over 10 percent,” though economic conditions and city regulations may prevent some rent hikes.

“There is only so much you can cut back on your heat,” said Ben Montalbano, an analyst at the Energy Policy Research Foundation who contributed to the report. “How much that will decrease from quality of life, I don’t know.”

Isabelle Silverman, an attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund who was instrumental in passing the new legislation, readily acknowledges that the cost of converting to cleaner fuels is significant. But building owners could also save money, she says, explaining that boilers using No. 6 oil require extensive maintenance. “There is a lot of opportunity for efficiency measures,” she added, including thermostatic radiator valves, programmable thermostats and systems that prevent overheating and fuel waste. “If you combine the switch to No. 2 oil with efficiency measures, you will see real savings,” Silverman said.

As New York City buildings begin the transition to cleaner fuels, Washington Heights residents speculate about the day when smoke from No. 6 oil no longer rises above their rooftops. “In the future,”one member of Washington Heights and Inwood Online wrote, ”after all the boilers have been converted to burn Number 2 oil, or natural gas, I wonder if the air in Manhattan will become so clean that mosquitoes will become a big problem.”

http://theuptowner.org/2011/11/29/clean-heat-in-washington-heights-means-better-air-perhaps-bigger-bills/

Smith Electric to Build Trucks in the Bronx

2011-11-30T10:54:00.000-08:00

November 16, 2011, 12:15 PM

By JIM MOTAVALLI

New York would never be mistaken for the Motor City, but on Tuesday, Smith Electric Vehicles announced that it intended to assemble electric trucks in the South Bronx, adding 100 jobs to the region. A package of more than $6 million in state and city incentives sweetened the deal.

Smith, based in Kansas City, Mo., manufactures battery-powered box trucks suitable for urban deliveries and has already found customers in New York, including the Duane Reade pharmacy chain and Down East Seafood. Coca-Cola and Frito-Lay have also bought trucks.

“Sitting in Kansas City and trying to figure out how to locate a factory in New York City was a little daunting,” said Bryan Hansel, the company’s chairman and chief executive, in an interview. Mr. Hansel said the company had leased a 90,000-square-foot warehouse space near Hunts Point and would begin producing its electric Smith Newton trucks there in the second quarter of 2012. He added that the factory would be set up to assemble 100 trucks a month in a single one-shift line, but the company could add shifts and lines as demand dictated.

A crowd, including many public officials, assembled under historical murals at the Bronx County Courthouse and applauded the job announcement.

“Today is an amazing day in God’s country, the wonderful borough of the Bronx,” said Borough President Rubén Díaz Jr. of the Bronx. “This is a huge deal,” he added.

James Vacca, a city councilman and chairman of the transportation committee, said in an interview, “The electric trucks are welcome because they address both environmental and quality-of-life issues. Long-term, this will mean jobs, but also quieter traffic and less pollution.”

The trucks have proven popular with customers. Michael Fowles, director of distribution at Duane Reade, said the company had bought two trucks and had another two on order. Duane Reade’s fleet of 60 delivery vehicles circulates primarily in city limits, making it well-suited for battery power. Mr. Fowles said the fleet could eventually be all electric. Charles Hayward, the pharmacy chain’s fleet manager, echoed Mr. Fowles. “We have 6,000 to 7,000 miles of road time with the electrics, and they perform as well or better than the diesel trucks,” he said.

Truck prices vary depending on battery pack size and other considerations. According an e-mail received from a company representative, the basic cab and chassis, made by Avia and imported from the Czech Republic, costs $75,000, but packs ranging from 40 to 120 kilowatt-hours add another $25,000 to $75,000 The batteries are sourced from A123 Systems and Valence Technology. Final assembly of the trucks will occur in the Bronx.

Working with the bus fabricator Trans Tech, Smith will also be producing electric school buses, a 24-seat example of which was on display at the Bronx courthouse. The buses will be assembled on the same electric Newton chassis as the trucks. Dan Daniels, president of Trans Tech, based in Warwick, N.Y., said in an interview that the company was looking for a suitable location to build the buses, including sites in New York.

According to Smith, New York State is developing an incentive program that would offer vouchers of up to $20,000 to help businesses purchase medium- and heavy-duty all-electric trucks (over 10,000 pounds). Smith would benefit from that program, as would other manufacturers that might want to deliver zero-emission trucks.

http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/smith-electric-to-build-trucks-in-the-bronx/

EnergyScoreCards Will Monitor Energy Savings for Bank of America's $55 Million Energy Efficiency Finance Program

2011-11-28T16:50:00.000-08:00

NEW YORK, NY, Nov 28, 2011 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- EnergyScoreCards(TM), an online software-as-a-service benchmarking tool specifically geared toward multifamily and other multi-tenant properties, was competitively selected to provide data collection and analysis for Bank of America's Energy Efficiency Finance Program. This innovative program will fund energy retrofits of an estimated 15,000 residential units as well as commercial buildings, community facilities and charter schools.

EnergyScoreCards organizes energy and water usage data, supports financial planning for energy improvements, and tracks the progress and success of energy and water-saving efforts.

"EnergyScoreCards provides ongoing analysis of energy retrofit performance that is both accessible to investors, owners and occupants, and benchmarked for accurate comparison to other projects," said Jeff Perlman, president of EnergyScoreCards and Bright Power, Inc. "We look forward to working with Bank of America and the winning CDFIs on their innovative data-driven energy efficiency financing initiatives."

The Energy Efficiency Program will provide nine Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) with $50 million in low-cost, long-term loans to finance upfront costs of retrofits, and $5 million in grants to cover operating costs of green programs. EnergyScoreCards will conduct rigorous energy data collection, monitoring, and reporting to help influence energy usage behaviors and measure program outcomes, including impacts on energy and water usage and associated financial savings. Results are expected to be published in 2015.

The CDFIs selected for the program were announced on November 15, 2011 and include Boston Community Capital (Boston), Community Investment Company (Chicago), Enterprise Cascadia (Seattle and Portland), Enterprise Community Partners (nationwide), Grow America Fund (New York), IFF (Chicago), Low Income Investment Fund (San Francisco and Los Angeles), Self Help (Charlotte), and The Reinvestment Fund (Baltimore and Philadelphia).

About EnergyScoreCards: EnergyScoreCards(TM) grew out of the extensive energy benchmarking, auditing and consulting experience of Bright Power, Inc., an energy consulting firm based in New York. Since 2004, Bright Power has been honing in-house energy analysis tools that provide its consultants with information about a property's energy performance in order to target inefficiencies and estimate realistic savings from efficiency measures. Bright Power founder and president Jeff Perlman saw that these tools could be built into a simple, centralized platform. With the additional functions of utility data aggregation, project management and portfolio analysis, EnergyScoreCards serves as a central destination for those managing energy on a portfolio scale.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/energyscorecards-will-monitor-energy-savings-for-bank-of-americas-55-million-energy-efficiency-finance-program-2011-11-28

2011-11-28T16:00:00.000-08:00

by John Cook

GeekWire

EnergySavvy is marching into the Bay Area, inking a deal with the City of San Francisco to help homeowners reduce energy costs through specialized online home audits. The program will allow residents to compare their energy usage to other homes across the city, and receive information on energy rebates and contractors.

It’s also designed to take into account unique San Francisco building structures, such as bay windows, and specific weather patterns, such as fog zones where temperatures might be lower.

“San Francisco has a notoriously mild climate and as such, relative to the rest of the country, is very sensitive to minor changes in heating needs resulting in different levels of energy use,” EnergySavvy CEO Aaron Goldfeder tells GeekWire. “So, we use fog-zone as a proxy for micro-climates which quantitatively amounts to different estimations of Heating Degree Days. HDD is a building science term which roughly indicates how much heat would be needed inside of a building based on applicable weather patterns. That in turn, based on other home characteristics enables us to estimate current energy use, and the potential for energy savings, money savings and sensible upgrades.”

In addition to San Francisco, EnergySavvy also announced a deal with Local Energy Alliance Program, serving the Charlottesville and northern Virginia metropolitan markets. Its other customers include Clean Energy Works Oregon, Community Power Works in Seattle and Utah Home Performance with ENERGY STAR.

EnergySavvy has been growing its team as of late, recently adding 11-year Microsoft veteran Charlie Ellis. The company was founded by former Microsoft employee Aaron Goldfeder, former Amazon.com and Redfin employee Leo Shklovskii and former aQuantive executive Karl Siebrecht.

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/san-francisco-taps-energysavvy-homeowners-cut-fog-energy-bills

Could big cities lead the fight against climate change?

2011-11-28T09:39:00.000-08:00

By Eoghan Macguire, for CNN

November 28, 2011 6:33 a.m. EST

(CNN) -- They are the world's cultural capitals, the nerve centers of innovation and the engine rooms of economic growth, but could cities also hold the key to cutting carbon emissions long-term?

A 2010 study from the World Bank found that the 50 largest cities and urban areas on the planet are now home to roughly 500 million people and spew out some 2.6 billion tons of greenhouse gasses every year.

As urban migration continues apace, these figures are only expected to rise in the short term. While this may initially lead to more pollutants being pumped into the earth's atmosphere, some experts believe it could work out better in the long term. They say that the ecological efficiencies cities can offer, aligned with their financial and political influence, could lead to the development of more effective ways to curb carbon emissions.

As the world's leading environmental figures gather in Durban, South Africa for the 2011 United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP17), CNN asked two urban climate change experts to explain the complex role of cities.

Dr Stephen Hammer is co-director of the Urban Climate Change Research Network, a consortium of academics and institutions dedicated to the analysis of climate change mitigation, and an adviser to New York City's Energy Policy Taskforce.

Mike Hodson meanwhile is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures at the University of Salford and co-author of the book, World Cities and Climate Change.

How much do cities contribute to climate change?

Stephen Hammer (SH): Cities are the where the majority of global energy use occurs, by far.

The irony is, however, that the dense nature of cities can actually reduce the level of carbon emissions by introducing different kinds of efficiencies. The sheer number of people, however, just means that you just end up with a large volume of energy use and emissions.

Mike Hodson (MH): Cities are increasingly being characterized as significant producers of climate change.

Just over half the world's population lives in cities, around three-quarters of global energy consumption is linked to cities and around four-fifths of global greenhouse gas emissions are linked to cities.

In what ways can cities help to address the issue of climate change?

SH: Cities are often the laboratories for central government policies. Central governments don't often create these things on their own. They're looking at what others have done including sub-national governments and saying "well if it worked there, we can make it work nationally."

Therefore, in the absence of national-level action, it is possible for cities to take very concrete steps to influence overall emission levels.

MH: The biggest cities are pretty powerful in terms of positions within their national economies.

They've got pretty well-developed government structures; they've got mayors and related agencies. But not only have they got those sorts of resources -- and therefore the ability to lobby and influence central government -- they also encompass quite significant national resources, whether it's financial centers, centers of business and centers of media.

Given that they've got that range of expertise, knowledge, social networks and financial resources ... they can start to paint that picture that they are the places that can actively and effectively start to build (climate change) strategies and deliver on them.

Why is it in cities interest to act in a way that negates the impact of climate change?

SH: I think it's very safe to say that climate change threatens the long-term economic viability of many cities in addition to creating public health risks.

Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans is a great example of that ... although not an event that was necessarily caused by climate change. The city suffered hugely in terms of the economic impact of an extreme weather event ... and these types of events are assumed to become more commonplace as the climate changes.

MH: I think the flipside of this sort of argument about cities being producers of climate change is that they're also increasingly being seen as victims of climate change.

This is particularly the case with rising sea levels, coastal cities and riverside cities that are at risk from rising sea levels but also those susceptible to drought or urban heat islands.

What can cities do to negate or prepare for the impact of climate change?

SH: It becomes particularly important for cities, as they expand rapidly, to make the decisions today that will constrain emissions in the future.

So, again, going back to some of the first things I was talking about, the way the city is designed, having it so that it promotes density that that then supports public transportation ridership; designing the city in a way that makes it bicycle-friendly or eco-friendly or pedestrian friendly, so you're not always forcing people into automobiles.

You must make the right decisions right now and as the city expands going forward you must constantly revisit them to see how can we be changing the old city to be more efficient but also how it can maintain efficiency when we are designing the expanding city or the new city.

MH: One of the things that strikes me is that, whether it's global cities or more ordinary cities, to different degrees they have started to get their strategic act together by developing strategies, setting targets, setting timelines.

But as of yet, they've not managed to translate that into any sort of effective way. They've really got to get to the more practical elements of how to translate that into tangible actions and deliver on them.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/11/25/cities.climate.change/

Consumers paying for cleaner coal; Some utilities passing along costs of tighter environmental regulations

2011-11-27T19:34:00.000-08:00

By Julie Wernau, Chicago Tribune reporter

November 27, 2011

MARISSA, Ill.—

– Some 285 feet underground, miners trudge behind a hulking remote-controlled machine that spins metal spikes into the earth and grinds out 20 tons of coal every 30 seconds.

Within months this mine will disgorge 20,000 tons of coal per day via conveyor belt into the boilers of Prairie State, the largest coal-fired generating plant built in the U.S. in 30 years. The 1,600-megawatt power plant, which will become fully operational in 2012 and produce enough electricity to power 2.5 million homes across eight states, is outfitted with more than $1 billion in environmental controls.

The Prairie State Energy Campus — an hour's drive from St. Louis, with a smokestack 70 feet taller than that city's famous Gateway Arch — likely wouldn't exist had its developers not locked in long-term contracts that pass on construction costs to consumers.

"This is the cleanest coal plant you can get. I don't know how you could make it much cleaner," Tom Foust, reliability manager for Prairie State, recently told visitors. The cost of Prairie State already exceeds $5 billion partly due to the expense of meeting tightening environmental regulations.

In the face of such requirements, some utilities are closing coal-fired plants. Roughly 8,000 megawatts of coal-fired power has gone offline since 2005. An additional 21,000 megawatts is expected to be lost by 2018.

Still, other utilities believe they can meet federal Environmental Protection Agencyregulations through retrofits or utilizing new technologies that lessen costs to comply.

"The impending EPA regulations on fossil-fuel-fired power plants are likely the single most important thing happening to the utility sector over the next five to 10 years," said Michael Lapides, vice president and senior analyst who follows utilities for Goldman Sachs & Co.

Consider Texas-based Dynegy, which is expected to complete by the end of 2012 a host of environmental retrofits at its 1,800-megawatt coal plant in Baldwin, Ill. The company decided that the cost of upgrading at $360 per kilowatt is less expensive than losing revenue by shutting down.

Between 2005 and 2012, Dynegy's environmental upgrades will total nearly $1 billion at its Illinois facilities to comply with a 2006 settlement to clean up those plants. Parties included the U.S. Justice Department and EPA and the state of Illinois.

To meet mercury emission limits imposed by the state, the company is spending millions of dollars annually to purchase a product called activated carbon to absorb mercury before it enters the air.

The upgrades were funded from internal sources, Katy Sullivan, a spokeswoman for Dynegy. "It is more cost-effective to maintain and continue operating safe, reliable and compliant plants like Baldwin rather than retiring them," she said.

The Baldwin plant sits on a 3,000-acre site, allowing room to add environmental control equipment. Just one piece of pollution control equipment at Prairie State, stacked on its end, would exceed the height of the NBC Tower in downtown Chicago.

Some older plants simply do not have room for certain upgrades.

Midwest Generation, for example, operates two plants in Chicago that illustrate that situation.

Its Crawford facility sits on just 72 acres; Fisk on only 50 acres. Those sites essentially rule out adding certain sulfur dioxide scrubbing equipment — which can be as tall as skyscrapers and require a huge swath of land for storing materials that are injected into the scrubbing system — as well as massive cooling towers that could be required under U.S. EPA regulations next year. So far, the company is betting that the cooling towers won't be required. And whether or not electricity markets recover from the recession also figures into the company's decision.

The type of coal a plant burns also plays a major role in how a company responds on environmental controls. Midwest Generation, which burns low sulfur coal, has determined that injecting a mineral called trona into the combustion process cuts lung-damaging sulfur dioxide emissions to meet new federal and state standards, said Douglas McFarlan, a spokesman for Midwest Generation.

Four years ago, Midwest Generation estimated that retrofitting its fleet of six coal plants in Illinois would cost $3.5 billion. With the discovery of trona, that estimate has been trimmed to $1.2 billion because of decreased capital costs. But if the plants burned high sulfur Illinois coal, the technology would not be sufficient to meet those standards.

Previous investments have also worked in favor of keeping the plants open. Midwest Generation reduced nitrogen oxide emissions — a precursor to acid rain and ozone — by about 60 percent at Crawford and Fisk between 2001 and 2002. This year, the company spent $20 million to add additional nitrogen oxide controls.

In 2008 and 2009 Midwest Generation spent about $12 million at both plants to remove about 90 percent of mercury, which is associated with impaired neurological development.

Regardless of whether utilities add more pollution controls, some environmentalists say shutting coal-fired plants makes the most sense because such plants will always produce emissions that are harmful to public health.

While coal has long been one of the cheapest and most reliable sources of power available, other sources of power carry a fraction of the emissions.

"Given the age of these plants and their location, the far more sensible approach is to retire them and replace them with something cleaner instead of continuing to keep these aging dinosaurs alive," said Shannon Fisk, a litigator with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

St. Louis-based Ameren Corp. is doing just that, shuttering by year-end its Hutsonville and Meredosia power plants in Illinois.

The Meredosia plant, about an hour west of Springfield, has two units — one coal and another oil — with a combined capacity of 369 megawatts. The 151-megawatt Hutsonville coal plant sits on the border of Illinois and Indiana.

"These plants were the oldest and smallest in (our) fleet," said Mark Eacret, vice president of business services and controller for Ameren. "Their fuel, other variable costs and fixed costs are high relative to the rest of (Ameren's) coal-fired fleet. At the same time, the prices for the energy that the plants would have produced have been adversely impacted by the current economic climate."

Shutting down the plants will also allow Ameren to retain its emissions allowances for sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide for another three years and put off upgrades that would reduce those emissions at its Edwards power plant in Illinois — saving $70 million through 2015.

At Prairie State, a cold rain evaporates to mist above a sky-high mountain of coal. The fuel is moved here along belts and chutes from the mine across the road. The coal deposit took 1 million years to form, but Prairie State's owners expect to consume it within 30 years.

The coal to fuel Prairie State is extremely high in sulfur, which means it requires more cleaning to remove toxic pollutants. And that adds substantially to costs.

To build Prairie State, Peabody Energy, the world's largest private-sector coal company, partnered with eight public power agencies that are bearing 95 percent of the project's cost through their customers: suburbs and municipalities who purchase electricity for their residents. Of those nine owners, three are Illinois-based municipal electricity cooperatives that purchase wholesale electricity on behalf of residents in municipalities across the state.

Bruce Ratain, clean energy associate at Environment Illinois, suggests that plants like Prairie State shouldn't be built because consumers are subsidizing the costs.

"Every year, we've seen plants come to the Illinois Legislature looking for sweetheart deals to build coal plants that weren't viable on the open market," Ratain said. "Often, ratepayers are proposed as those forced to bear the burden of increased rates and cost overruns to subsidize old-fashioned, polluting technology.

"If we are going to use public policy to distort the market and favor a particular source of energy, then logically we should only do so for the best options — those which pollute least (or not at all), create the most jobs, and move our country forward," he said, suggesting wind, solar and other forms of renewable energy.

In Illinois, developers of two coal gasification projects, in Chicago and Jefferson County, persuaded Gov. Pat Quinn and the Legislature this year to force the state's major gas utilities to purchase their gas to heat Illinois homes despite the fact that natural gas prices are expected to remain low for the foreseeable future and a plentiful supply already exists. One utility refused to sign the 10- and 30-year contracts and another has sued.

"No one has been able to build a new plant without significant help — either tax breaks, long-term contracts or multiple ownerships," said Sarah Wochos, a policy advocate with the Environmental Law and Policy Center, a Midwest environmental advocacy organization.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-1127-bf-prairie-state-20111127,0,6641031,full.story

Suburban Chicago races to unplug from ComEd

2011-11-27T19:30:00.000-08:00

By: Steve Daniels November 28, 2011

Chicago Business

A wave of Chicago suburbs, including many of the largest, is preparing to bargain for cheaper electricity deals next year with competitors of Commonwealth Edison Co. on behalf of their residents.

City councils from Aurora, the second-largest municipality in the state, to Elgin and Evanston will decide in coming weeks whether to ask voters in March referendums to approve plans to solicit bids from ComEd competitors. As many as 130 cities, villages and towns next year could follow the 19 suburbs that already have left the utility, consultants say.

While the suburban exodus from ComEd should generate double-digit-percentage savings on the electric bills of as many as 2 million households, it's going to lead to unpredictability and volatility for residents and small businesses continuing to buy from the subsidiary of Chicago-based Exelon Corp. That includes residents of Chicago, which has no immediate plans to test the electricity market on behalf of its inhabitants.

Under state law, municipalities can buy power for residents and small businesses, but only if voters back the action in a referendum.

If trends hold, enough households and small businesses could leave for alternative suppliers by the end of 2012 that ComEd could move to have state utility regulators declare the residential market officially competitive. That would mean customers still buying from ComEd could be subject to spot-market electricity prices rather than the negotiated, firm, annual price they currently get. The earliest that could happen would be 2013. The tipping point is the departure of one-third of customers in a specific class.

In Texas, which runs a spot-market system, “the price volatility is huge, and they've had troubles with some of the vendors going under,” says Mark Pruitt, former director of the Illinois Power Agency, which buys electricity on behalf of utility customers statewide. “I don't think this is what people had in mind” when Illinois deregulated its power market 12 years ago.

For its part, ComEd says in a statement that it interprets state law to say that it will be obligated to provide a fixed electricity price to residential and small commercial customers regardless of how many customers it loses. But the Illinois Commerce Commission, which enforces the law, disagrees, saying utilities can move to force residential customers onto the spot market once the 33% threshold is reached.

WILD CARDS

Even if ComEd doesn't move to subject its customers to spot pricing, the IPA probably won't be able to drive the same bargains with power generators that it has in recent years, given the unpredictability in the demand it's trying to fill, Mr. Pruitt says. Under the recently enacted law giving ComEd automatic yearly delivery rate hikes to finance grid

modernization, the IPA is directed to solicit bids for a four-year power contract. But municipalities that leave the utility can return anytime their contracts expire, making forecasting long-term demand difficult.

One big wild card: Will Chicago opt to leave ComEd for the competitive market? Thus far, the city has made no move to follow Oak Park, its immediate neighbor to the west, which recently won a 25% reduction from ComEd's current energy price for a product made up of renewable power sources. Farther to the west, Oak Brook negotiated a 29% savings with Chicago-based supplier Integrys Energy Services Inc., a sister company of Peoples Gas.

Increasingly, suburbs aren't waiting. Take Elgin, Illinois' eighth-largest municipality, with 108,188 inhabitants. “We believe we have at least a two-year opportunity to save our community 20% to 25% in their electricity prices,” says Colby Basham, public works superintendent. The Elgin City Council will vote on the issue as early as Dec. 7.

In Evanston, city officials are watching other communities that have left ComEd, says Catherine Hurley, sustainable programs coordinator. “We're definitely interested.” The Evanston City Council will discuss the matter on Tuesday.

Municipalities are scrambling to meet a Jan. 3 deadline to put the issue on the March 20 primary ballot.

A spokeswoman for the city of Chicago says it currently has no plans to buy cheaper power on behalf of residents.

Experts say there's a relatively short time frame in which communities can generate the 20%-plus savings they're getting now because ComEd's power prices are expected to more closely mirror the overall market within two years, as high-priced power-supply contracts expire.

“The window of easy headroom is closing,” says David Kolata, executive director of Chicago-based consumer watchdog Citizens Utility Board. “You're not going to see these kinds of deals, say, a year from now.”

http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20111126/ISSUE01/311269976/suburban-chicago-races-to-unplug-from-comed#ixzz1ey1bkRa2

From Shore to Forest, Projecting Effects of Climate Change

2011-11-17T06:02:00.000-08:00

By LESLIE KAUFMAN

New York Times

Published: November 16, 2011

While the long-term outlook for grape-growers in the Finger Lakes region is favorable, it is less than optimal for skiers and other winter sports enthusiasts in the Adirondacks. Fir and spruce trees are expected to die out in the Catskills, and New York City’s backup drinking water supply may well be contaminated as a result of seawater making its way farther up the Hudson River.

These possibilities — modeled deep into this century — are detailed in a new assessment of the impact that climate change will have in New York State. The 600-page report, published on Wednesday, was commissioned by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, a public-benefit corporation, and is a result of three years of work by scientists at state academic institutions, including Columbia and Cornell Universities and the City University of New York.

Its authors say it is the most detailed study that looks at how changes brought about by a warming Earth — from rising temperatures to more precipitation and global sea level rise — will affect the economy, the ecology and even the social fabric of the state.

Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at Columbia’s Earth Institute, said the report was much broader in scope than earlier efforts by New York City that tried to evaluate how best to prepare for climate change.

“New York City’s report focuses on how climate change will affect critical structures” like bridges and sewage systems, she said. “This report also looks at public health, agriculture, transportation and economics.”

The authors drew on results from global climate models and then created projections for variables like rainfall and temperatures for seven regions across the state. Then they tried to assess how those alterations would play out in specific terms. They also developed adaptation recommendations for different economic sectors.

If carbon emissions continue to increase at their current pace, for example, temperatures are expected to rise across the state by 3 degrees Fahrenheit by the 2020s and by as much as 9 degrees by the 2080s. That would have profound effects on agriculture across the state, the report found. For example, none of the varieties of apples currently grown in New York orchards would be viable. Dairy farms would be less productive as cows faced heat stress. And the state’s forests would be transformed; spruce-fir forests and alpine tundra would disappear as invasive species like kudzu, an aggressive weed, gained more ground.

If the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melt, as the report says could happen, the sea level could rise by as much as 55 inches, which means that beach communities would frequently be inundated by flooding.

“In 2020, nearly 96,000 people in the Long Beach area alone may be at risk from sea-level rise,” the report said, referring to just one oceanfront community on the South Shore of Long Island. “By 2080, that number may rise to more than 114,500 people. The value of property at risk in the Long Beach area under this scenario ranges from about $6.4 billion in 2020 to about $7.2 billion in 2080.”

The report found that the effects of climate change would fall disproportionately on the poor and the disabled.

In coastal areas in New York City and along rivers in upstate New York, it said, there is a high amount of low-income housing that would be in the path of flooding.

Art DeGaetano, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell, said that its findings need not be interpreted as totally devastating.

“It would be all bad if you wanted a static New York, with the same species of bird and the same crops,” he said, “but there will be opportunities as well. We expect, for example, that New York State will remain water-rich and we may be able to capitalize when other parts of the country are having severe drought.”

The next step, the authors said, is for them to meet with state agencies and try to work with them to carry out some of the report’s recommendations of ways to cope with climate change

One would be to get the state to routinely incorporate projections of increased sea levels and heavy downpours when building big infrastructure projects. They also suggested protecting and nursing natural barriers to sea-level rise, like coastal wetlands, and changing building codes in certain area for things like roof strength and foundation depth in areas that would be hit hardest by storms.

“If there is one thing we learned from Hurricane Irene,” Dr. Rosenzweig said referring to the tropical storm that pummeled the state this past summer, “we have a lot more we could be doing to prepare.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/nyregion/climate-change-to-affect-new-york-state-in-many-ways-study-says.html?ref=nyregion

PG&E to end carbon offset plan after few sign on

2011-11-12T09:53:00.000-08:00

David R. Baker, Chronicle Staff Writer

Friday, November 11, 2011

Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s ClimateSmart program, which lets the utility's customers go "carbon neutral" for a price, will close at the end of the year after signing up far fewer people than expected.

Begun in 2007, ClimateSmart gives participants a way to offset greenhouse gas emissions from the power plants that supply their electricity.

PG&E customers who joined the program pay a little extra on their monthly bills - about $3.30 for a typical homeowner. PG&E uses the money to fund projects that fight the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as preserving forests from logging or capturing methane from cow manure.

But the program attracted just a fraction of the roughly 168,000 customers that PG&E predicted. Enrollment peaked in 2008 at just under 31,000. By the end of last year, it had slipped to 29,623.

ClimateSmart was created as a three-year experiment, and California energy regulators extended it until the end of this year despite concerns about weak participation. PG&E did not seek a second extension, said company spokeswoman Katie Romans.

The program, she said, accomplished its most important goal, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 1.3 million metric tons. Participants contributed a total of about $10 million over four years, she said.

"It was a demonstration program, and it's successfully concluding after meeting its goals," Romans said. "Certainly we would have loved for more customers to have participated."
Those who did will receive a notice in their November utility bills thanking them for joining the program. The company also posted a notice on its website last week saying the program will end this year.

For much of its brief history, ClimateSmart was dogged by criticism that it wasted PG&E customers' money. Although participation in the program was voluntary, all of the utility's customers paid for its administrative and marketing costs, which totaled $16.3 million for the entire four-year run.

Critics also questioned whether the money coming from participants actually made a difference.

A report this year by the nonprofit news organization California Watch argued that some of the forest projects funded by ClimateSmart had already received taxpayer money from the state government, meaning PG&E customers paid twice for the same forests. PG&E insisted that the money from ClimateSmart helped save more trees and sequester more carbon dioxide than would the state funding alone.

In addition, under rules imposed by the California Public Utilities Commission, PG&E was obliged to hit the program's target of cutting greenhouse gases by 1.3 million metric tons even if the money collected from participants wasn't enough to reach that goal. Any shortfall would have to be covered by PG&E shareholders, said Matt Freedman, staff attorney for The Utility Reform Network. So contributions from ClimateSmart participants merely reduced the amount of money PG&E itself would have to spend on greenhouse gas reductions, he said.

"We're not opposed to giving customers choices that will improve their environmental footprint," Freedman said. "But you have to look very carefully at what's being offered to see if it will make a meaningful difference."

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/11/BUPR1LTB45.DTL

The Dark Side of the ‘Green’ City

2011-11-07T18:14:00.000-08:00

By ANDREW ROSS

New York Times

THE struggle to slow global warming will be won or lost in cities, which emit 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. So “greening” the city is all the rage now. But if policy makers end up focusing only on those who can afford the low-carbon technologies associated with the new environmental conscientiousness, the movement for sustainability may end up exacerbating climate change rather than ameliorating it.

While cities like Portland, Seattle and San Francisco are lauded for sustainability, the challenges faced by Phoenix, a poster child of Sunbelt sprawl, are more typical and more revealing. In 2009, Mayor Phil Gordon announced plans to make Phoenix the “greenest city” in the United States. Eyebrows were raised, and rightly so. According to the state’s leading climatologist, central Arizona is in the “bull’s eye” of climate change, warming up and drying out faster than any other region in the Northern Hemisphere. The Southwest has been on a drought watch 12 years and counting, despite outsized runoff last winter to the upper Colorado River, a major water supply for the subdivisions of the Valley of the Sun.

Across that valley lies 1,000 square miles of low-density tract housing, where few signs of greening are evident. That’s no surprise, given the economic free fall of a region that had been wholly dependent on the homebuilding industry. Property values in parts of metro Phoenix have dropped by 80 percent, and some neighborhoods are close to being declared “beyond recovery.”

In the Arizona Legislature, talk of global warming is verboten and Republican lawmakers can be heard arguing for the positive qualities of greenhouse gases. Most politicians are still praying for another housing boom on the urban fringe; they have no Plan B, least of all a low-carbon one. Mr. Gordon, a Democrat who took office in 2004, has risen to the challenge. But the vast inequalities of the metro area could blunt the impact of his sustainability plans.

Those looking for ecotopia can find pockets of it in the prosperous upland enclaves of Scottsdale, Paradise Valley and North Phoenix. Hybrid vehicles, LEED-certified custom homes with solar roofs and xeriscaped yards, which do not require irrigation, are popular here, and voter support for the preservation of open space runs high. By contrast, South Phoenix is home to 40 percent of the city’s hazardous industrial emissions and America’s dirtiest ZIP code, while the inner-ring Phoenix suburbs, as a legacy of cold-war era industries, suffer from some of the worst groundwater contamination in the nation.

Whereas uptown populations are increasingly sequestered in green showpiece zones, residents in low-lying areas who cannot afford the low-carbon lifestyle are struggling to breathe fresh air or are even trapped in cancer clusters. You can find this pattern in many American cities. The problem is that the carbon savings to be gotten out of this upscale demographic — which represents one in five American adults and is known as Lohas, an acronym for “lifestyles of health and sustainability” — can’t outweigh the commercial neglect of the other 80 percent. If we are to moderate climate change, the green wave has to lift all vessels.

Solar chargers and energy-efficient appliances are fine, but unless technological fixes take into account the needs of low-income residents, they will end up as lifestyle add-ons for the affluent. Phoenix’s fledgling light-rail system should be expanded to serve more diverse neighborhoods, and green jobs should be created in the central city, not the sprawling suburbs. Arizona has some of the best solar exposure in the world, but it allows monopolistic utilities to impose a regressive surcharge on all customers to subsidize roof-panel installation by the well-heeled ones. Instead of green modifications to master-planned communities at the urban fringe, there should be concerted “infill” investment in central city areas now dotted with vacant lots.

In a desert metropolis, the choice between hoarding and sharing has consequences for all residents. Their predecessors — the Hohokam people, irrigation farmers who subsisted for over a thousand years around a vast canal network in the Phoenix Basin — faced a similar test, and ultimately failed. The remnants of Hohokam canals and pit houses are a potent reminder of ecological collapse; no other American city sits atop such an eloquent allegory.

Andrew Ross is a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University and author of “Bird on Fire: Lessons From the World’s Least Sustainable City.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/opinion/in-phoenix-the-dark-side-of-green.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

Alternative energy companies form united front

2011-11-07T11:52:00.000-08:00

David R. Baker

San Francisco Chronicle

Monday, November 7, 2011

In the debate over our energy future, solar, wind and electric car companies don't speak in a single, unified voice. Tom Steyer and Hemant Taneja want to change that.

They have formed an organization, called Advanced Energy Economy, that the two hope will grow into a nationwide chamber of commerce for alternative energy companies. The organization, which they will formally announce today, already has state and regional chapters representing 700 companies.

"There is no business voice for advanced energy, and there has to be," said Steyer, founder of the Farallon Capital Management hedge fund in San Francisco. "There has to be on a local level, and there has to be on a national level."

The organization will promote the growth of American alternative energy companies and technologies at a time of intense global competition to dominate this young industry. For membership, Advanced Energy Economy will cast a wide net, including nuclear power companies as well as businesses that create energy-efficient buildings.

A crowded field

Several national groups, such as Environmental Entrepreneurs and the American Sustainable Business Council, already pursue similar missions. Wind power has its own nationwide trade association, as does solar. Northern California, the nation's premier clean-tech hub, boasts business organizations such as the San Francisco Bay Area Green Chamber of Commerce.

In other words, the field is already crowded.

Steyer and Taneja say Advanced Energy Economy will try to forge alliances with many of those groups. One of them - the Clean Economy Network, a national advocacy group based in Washington - will merge with Advanced Energy Economy. Others, such as the New England Clean Energy Council, will become chapters of the new organization.

"Fragmentation is exactly the problem we're trying to solve," said Taneja, a venture capitalist who founded the New England Clean Energy Council. "There are issues that require the industry to come together in an organized fashion, and that just doesn't happen today."

Steyer and Taneja bring a degree of star power to the project.

Steyer is a noted Democratic political donor who also led the fight against a 2010 California ballot measure that would have suspended the state's milestone global warming law. Taneja is a managing director of General Catalyst Partners and a noted clean-tech investor. Together, the two men have recruited a board of directors for Advanced Energy Economy that includes former Secretary of State George Shultz and former Colorado Gov. William Ritter.

State chapter in works

Given the current gridlock in Washington, Advanced Energy Economy will concentrate much of its initial effort on state and regional issues, pushing for policies that help the industry. The organization already has chapters representing nine states, although not yet California. (That's in the works, Steyer and Taneja said.)

Advanced Energy Economy also will become a clearinghouse for information on the costs, benefits and potential of different kinds of energy production, with data drawn from universities and think tanks. The size of government subsidies, the impacts on air quality and human health - all of those details need to be considered, Steyer and Taneja said.

"What we need is an open conversation," Steyer said. "It's important to bring all the hidden costs to the surface."

Both men will provide seed money for the organization, although they have not announced the exact amounts. The bulk of Advanced Energy Economy's funding will come from dues paid by its members.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/06/BUTK1LQQ5Q.DTL#ixzz1d3DSnzHL

4 from Denmark look at Juneau for cruise ship port development

2011-11-06T16:44:00.000-08:00

By Sarah Day

JUNEAU EMPIRE

Four representatives of Copenhagen, Denmark, were in Juneau on Friday learning more about Juneau’s cruise ship berths.

Copenhagen is in the process of constructing three new cruise ship berths, taking down others for urban development and reclaiming an area near the cruise terminals for shipping containers and cars. The construction will be a small expansion of the cruise ship capacity the port can handle.

The comprehensive project will cost 1.1 billion Danish krone, or approximately $250 million U.S. dollars.

The team is investigating the possibility of making shore power hookups at the planned cruise ship terminal mandatory — that includes what the investment would take, if the market would support it, and what the consequences of doing so would be.

Bengt-Olof Jansson, chief technical officer of the Copenhagen Malmö Port (CMP) came with electrical consultant Dennis Huusfelt with Ramboll Buildings and Design and BY&HAVN representatives Kirsten Ledgaard, senior head of planning, and Hans Vasehuse Madsen, head of construction. BY&HAVN is the city of Copenhagen’s development corporation for both city and port.

“This trip is to end up with a paper for the politicians giving a recommendation what to do,” said Vasehuse Madsen.

Jansson said he works for both the Danish side of port operations, but also the metro of Malmö in Sweden. Malmö is across the Oresund Sea from Copenhagen and connected by a bridge.

The port is one of the largest Northern European cruise ship terminal operators and has a sizeable share of the car and oil transport market.

Ownership of the port, Ledgaard said, is 45 percent state and 55 percent city owned, and both must agree to the final plan. CMP is a joint venture company registered in Sweden and is half owned by the Copenhagen City and Port Development, 27 percent owned by the City of Malmö and 23 percent owned by private investors. Vasehuse Madsen said it took more than three years to get approval and funding for the project, which has a tight deadline of two years for construction.

That’s a rather short time frame considering the project will significantly transform the port. They have until 2014 to complete three terminal buildings along the new cruise ship berths because of a late change order. The initial draft had tent-like structures and they found it would be cheaper to just construct buildings.

This past season Copenhagen had 250 calls to port and they have 2.5 new ships coming into port every year — so their tourism niche is growing. In the entire global cruise industry, the Baltic Sea service is the third largest.

“We are close to fully occupied in the season to dates that are booked by the cruise managers,” Jansson said. “We haven’t said ‘no’ to date.”

Jansson said one component of looking at shore power is environmental. There is a benefit to having shore power for cruise ships because it means they aren’t burning diesel in port. One dilemma that may come with Copenhagen’s consideration is the amount of wind power available. If the cruise ships take their energy from the city’s second large source of power — coal — it negates the environmental benefit, Ledgaard said.

Choosing an energy source isn’t the only hurdle. Vasehuse Madsen said the cruise ships connect with 60 hertz, while the city is equipped for 50 hertz, so converters would be required.

Another challenge their studies have found is that the majority of cruise ships coming to their port are 20-30 years old and only about two ships per season are equipped with the capability of accessing shore power.

Jansson said it’s currently looking like a bad business case, but positive environmentally. It would cost about 6 million Euro (about $8.26 million) and take 15 years to pay off, based on current potential users.

But they are charged with finding out costs, benefits and challenges of developing shore power at all three new cruise ship berths. Construction includes conduit to run those lines to the berths, but actual connections will be further out once Copenhagen decides the best course.

Jansson said they are a little afraid of pushing forward as a solo port because ships are not easily converted and if the city were to make shore power hook ups mandatory that could push them out of the market. If the other ports along the route — Helsinki; St. Petersburg, Russia; Stockholm and Tallinn, Estonia — also developed shore power requirements, it could be more successful.

Jansson said their study also found the majority of energy spent by cruise ships is actually at sea, not at shore.

The study also investigated how many cruise ships can utilize shore power and found approximately 38 globally.

The group chose Juneau (along with Seattle, Vancouver and San Diego) because it was one of the first to install shore power at a cruise ship terminal and it’s environmentally friendly electricity provided by hydropower. The group wanted to get information on Juneau’s “best management practices” because of the environment aspect.

Kirby Day, who spoke for Princess Cruise Lines, told the contingent about Juneau’s unique situation. He said Juneau, at the time, had excess hydro power and the Lake Dorothy project was in progress. Day said part of the reason for considering the change was because cruise ships had a stigma of creating a smoggy-like atmosphere in a town like Juneau where the port is situated in a bowl.

“This was the one most impacted by visible emissions,” Day said. “Also having a local presence here, having cruises here for 40-50 years, we wanted to find a way to environmentally be a good neighbor and try to solve this issue with at least one of the berths. Back in 2001, people said that will never work. No one had ever tried this before. It’s not like plugging in a coffee pot.”

Day explained how power is now more limited and that if there is limited power for city operations, cruise ship power is cut off.

Day said that there were v80 calls to port at the Franklin Dock this past season and they hooked up to shore power about 70 times, but the 10 or so that had problems were related to software and other technical issues, not necessarily a lack of available hydropower. Day said that about 11 of Princess’ 17 cruise ships are shore-power capable, with the smaller ones generally not having the option.

Drew Green, of Cruise Line Agencies of Alaska told them in Alaska, ports have to grow with one another or they learn a hard lesson and get wedged out of the market.

Green said they’ve also been dealing with environmental issues regarding wastewater discharge. He said Alaska has the strictest rules in the world on it and CLA is working to find a balance by looking at the science behind the rules.

The group also heard from Bryan Farrel from Alaska Electric Light & Power, Jim Dorn about wastewater and from presenters on cruise ship tracking and the Ocean Rangers program.

For more information on the Copenhagen project see bit.ly/tKDmlY.

http://juneauempire.com/local/2011-11-06/4-denmark-look-juneau-cruise-ship-port-development#.TrcpfWCq3e4

Social Sites See Games as Key to Power Grid Savings

2011-11-06T10:48:00.000-08:00

Written by Robert McGarvey

Internet Evolution

Can Vasillis Nikolopoulos do what Larry Page, Steve Ballmer, and John Chambers could not? That trio of tech titans has thrown in the towel when it comes to harnessing computer innovation to lower our energy consumption.

Meanwhile, Nikolopoulos, a spunky entrepreneur based in Greece and co-founder of the energy usage monitoring firm Intelen, believes differently.

“There is a huge opportunity here. In an Athens pilot, we drove energy savings of 35 percent,” says Nikolopoulos.

He just may know something the US CEOs don’t. So may Mark Zuckerberg (more on him later).

The core idea in Silicon Valley has been that by using powerful tools -- WiFi, RFID, and the like -- to build out a so-called smart grid, it will be easy to know how much energy a home or business uses and then to find ways to reduce it.

Just one problem: In a down economy, willingness to spring for energy-saving technologies -- such as solar panels or upgrades of attic insulation -- is challenged. And willingness to spend on energy monitoring tools is even scarcer. When you are struggling to pay a utility bill, spending more -- even when it's associated with a promise of eventual cost reductions -- is a tough sell. And this is not changing soon. (Witness the Google-Microsoft-Cisco surrenders.)

Execs on the front line admit as much. Honeywell Automation and Control Solution CEO Roger Fradin recently told India’s Economic Times: "In all honesty, I know smart grids make good press but I think it will take 10 years for it to become a meaningful part of my business... Everybody talks about it, but very few companies are actually doing anything about it."

Nikolopoulos gets that difficulty, but he thinks it will be easy to persuade us to play games where points are earned for cutting energy use. And it gets easier still when the game occurs on the social Web. Call this Energy Efficiency 2.0, says Nikolopoulos; previous efforts have gotten the order of things reversed.

Typically, the effort involved encouraging high-tech investment that would drive behavior change, he said, but that has not worked. What he preaches is using social networks -- at little or no cost -- to drive behavior change that may in turn trigger willingness to invest in greater energy reduction.

Think of this as Farmville, or Mafia Wars, except with positive social benefits involved.

This is where Mark Zuckerberg enters the fray: Facebook recently announced it has joined forces with a firm called Opower to unveil a new app that will turn energy savings into a game. The app is tentatively slated to launch in the first quarter of 2012.

Facebook won’t be the only player in the attempt to drive energy efficiencies via social nets. Nikolopoulos, for instance, says his company, Intelen, is busily developing similar games that he hopes soon to pilot in Boston and San Francisco.

Other players are on the horizon -- such as a startup aptly named Efficiency 2.0 -- because suddenly it seems a solution to this longstanding problem just may be within reach.

And it will be a solution implemented by consumers playing games. Not by technology giants.

Says Nikolopoulos, “In a social net, you will be able to compare your usage with your neighbors, with quick glances at graphs that we can update continuously. This will provide real motivation. People will want to save energy.”

Are there potential problems? Nikolopoulos acknowledges a hot button is privacy; just about anybody could tell if you are home or away, in the office or not, when energy use graphs are online. That needs to be addressed -- probably by camouflaging player identities -- but Nikolopoulos says those are nits that will be picked.

The exciting bottom line is that if these social gurus are right, we are on the cusp of seeing significant energy reductions -- just because of games people play. “When we harness the social network effect, we will see very good results,” says Nikolopoulos.

— Robert McGarvey has been online and writing about the Internet for nearly 25 years.

http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=852&doc_id=235127&f_src=internetevolution_gnews

Newark Housing Authority Inks Energy Performance Contract with Constellation Energy Guaranteeing $78 Million in Savings

2011-11-06T09:18:00.000-08:00

CoGeneration and Onsite Power Production

Constellation Energy and the Newark Housing Authority (NHA) announced the signing of an energy performance contract (EPC) for approximately $50 million in energy conservation measures at 39 housing developments.

Under the terms of the EPC, the water and energy efficiency improvements provided by Constellation require no upfront capital from NHA and are guaranteed to provide more than $78 million in energy cost savings over a 15-year period.

According to a release, NHA will use the guaranteed cost savings to fund the installation of its energy conservation measures. The EPC with Constellation Energy's retail business is a first for NHA, and the third largest for a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) public housing authority.

"This EPC with Constellation Energy allows NHA to conduct another round of physical improvements at our properties while saving millions of dollars on energy costs," said Keith Kinard, executive director for Newark Housing Authority. "Additionally, these improvements will help to reduce NHA's carbon footprint and ensure a healthy and sustainable community for our more than 10,000 residents."

By implementing these energy and water conservation measures, NHA expects to conserve an estimated 102 million gallons of water and avoid the creation of 16,596 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. Conservation measures include: energy efficient lighting; boiler controls to reuse waste heat and balance heating system input with outside air temperature; low-flow toilets, shower heads and faucet aerators; cogeneration equipment to produce heat and power; and the decentralization of heating and hot water systems to improve efficiency and resident comfort.

"NHA's actions are a positive step for our city in terms of the environment, the local economy and benefits to taxpayers," said Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker. "I applaud NHA for its continued commitment to energy conservation and to building and maintaining affordable housing for the people of Newark."

Constellation Energy will employ approximately 60 people in the Newark area during the design and construction of NHA's energy efficiency upgrades, and estimates that 200 individuals in total will be involved in providing materials and services for the scope of the project. In addition, Constellation Energy will employ two full-time associate site superintendents through HUD's Section 3 jobs program to assist in monitoring and maintaining energy conservation measures for the duration of the EPC. Energy efficiency work is scheduled for completion by fall 2013.

"During a time when many agencies are looking for ways to do more with less, energy performance contracting is a valuable resource for public entities to leverage their existing operational budget for needed capital improvements," said Michael D. Smith, senior vice president of green initiatives for Constellation Energy's retail business. "Constellation Energy looks forward to working with the Newark Housing Authority to help maximize energy savings and improve resident comfort."

In addition to energy and cost reductions under the EPC, Constellation Energy will support NHA's sustainability goals by providing energy and water conservation education programs to residents.

An NAESCO-accredited Energy Services Provider, Constellation Energy has worked with more than 40 housing authorities throughout the U.S. to implement HUD's Energy Performance Contracting programs.

Constellation Energy is also one of seven National Super Energy Savings Performance Contract suppliers chosen by the U.S. Department of Energy to improve the efficiency of federal buildings through energy retrofit projects, energy saving performance contracts and deployment of renewable energy systems.

http://www.cospp.com/news/2011/11/1534243245/newark-housing-authority-inks-energy-performance-contract-with-constellation-energy-guaranteeing-78.html

China to phase out energy-inefficient light bulbs

2011-11-06T09:14:00.000-08:00

November 4, 2011

BEIJING (AP) — China announced Friday it will phase out incandescent light bulbs within five years in an attempt to make the world's most polluting nation more energy efficient.

China will ban imports and sales of 100-watt and higher incandescent bulbs from Oct. 1, 2012, the country's main planning agency said.

It will extend the ban to 60-watt and higher bulbs on Oct. 1, 2014, and to 15-watt and higher bulbs on Oct. 1, 2016. The time frame for the last step may be adjusted according to an evaluation in September 2016, the National Development and Reform Commission said.

State-run Xinhua News Agency quoted Xie Ji, deputy director of the commission's environmental protection department, as saying China is the world's largest producer of both energy-saving and incandescent bulbs.

Last year, China produced 3.85 billion incandescent light bulbs, and 1.07 billion were sold domestically, the agency said. Lighting is estimated to account for about 12 percent of China's total electricity use, it said. Xie said the potential for energy savings and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is huge.

The planning agency said China will save 48 billion kilowatt hours of power per year and reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 48 million tons annually once the bulbs are phased out.

Several countries plan to phase out traditional light bulbs. The United States is to ban the making and sale of incandescent light bulbs beginning in 2012. The 27-nation European Union agreed in 2008 to phase out the bulbs by 2012. The most common replacements are fluorescent and LED lights.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jYOCxJCUyqDW3ODBUQtjuB2qHPjw?docId=55963ab48a674ea2a73f40d9afd09743

Twin Cities to put urban heat island to the test

2011-11-06T08:50:00.000-08:00

A University of Minnesota project will examine urban heat with dozens of sensors, possibly leading to ways to reduce it.

Article by: BILL McAULIFFE , Star Tribune
Updated: November 4, 2011 - 11:35 PM

It's long been known that urban areas generate and hold heat. But now two University of Minnesota researchers are trying to uncover the devilish details about the phenomenon, to help develop ways to reduce energy use and protect human and animal health.

Atmospheric science professors Peter Snyder and Tracy Twine are looking to place 200 temperature sensors around the Twin Cities -- in grassy back yards and bricked-and-paved downtowns -- where the devices will measure temperature every few minutes for the next four years. Snyder and Twine hope their results will show in detail where the metro area's warmest and coolest spots are, and perhaps why. They also hope to reveal the dynamics of urban heat in ways only guessed at until now -- tracking, for example, the differences between the temperatures of surfaces and the temperatures of air, and the southeastward drift of urban heat on prevailing winds.

Beyond that, they envision their study as pushing city planners, architects and others to find ways to make urban areas cooler, particularly in warm-weather months.

"We have a fairly good idea what causes urban heat islands," Snyder said. "I think the interesting part comes when you put that together with the impacts, which are poorly understood, on the urban ecosystem, energy consumption and economics."

Costs of urban heat

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the annual mean air temperature of a city with 1 million people or more can be about 2 to 5 degrees warmer than its surroundings. In the evening, the difference can be as much as 22 degrees. That means higher energy demand and utility bills for air conditioning, greater threats to the health of people unable to escape the heat, and increased risks to aquatic life due to warmed-up runoff. More than 700 deaths were attributed to the effects of record heat in Chicago in July 1995.

Snyder and Twine, whose project is funded by the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment, aren't limiting their research to the Twin Cities. They want to use satellite data to develop fine-grained pictures of heat in 100 cities around the world, in hopes of being able to determine the effects of landscape, land use, transportation, industry and other factors on temperature.

Cities occupy a small share of the landscape, "but we're concerned with them because that's where most people live," Twine said.

Heat waves and other phenomena "will continue to occur," Twine noted, "but when they occur in urban areas that already have higher temperatures, it can exacerbate the conditions."

The next step will be for policymakers and builders to figure out how to reduce urban heat. In the Twin Cities, vegetated "green" roofs at Target Center, Central Library and Minneapolis City Hall are major examples of efforts to convert what could be large, heat-absorbing surfaces into cooler ones. But there are other ideas out there that could change the way cities look.

White rooftops

Looking out the window of her Oakland, Calif., office recently, Lisa Gartland, a heat island mitigation consultant, could see white rooftops, now required under California law to reflect heat, rather than absorb it, ideally reducing air-conditioning needs. She has also been trying to persuade developers and even road builders that asphalt need not be black. With pigment, it can even be white, she said.

"Part of it is changing people's ideas of what a city should look like," Gartland said. "Lots of education is needed -- most of it at the level of contractors, municipalities and architects. "

The city of Sacramento realized a savings of $26 million in 1997 through cooling techniques -- mostly from tree planting, said city planner Erik DeKok. More recently the city has required that 50 percent of all parking lot surfaces be shaded. DeKok said developers have taken that requirement beyond trees and have been furnishing parking lots with carports, whose roofs in turn are covered with energy-generating solar cells.

Grass, trees and vines may be the simplest materials for reducing urban heat, Gartland said. Phoenix is one city that is cooler than its surroundings because people have planted so much greenery in what had been a desert, Gartland said. That isn't a panacea there, however, because the city also has water-use issues.

In the Twin Cities, residents might want to hang on to every degree they can in the winter, Snyder acknowledged. And Kathy Klink, a University of Minnesota geography professor who has studied urban heat in the winter, found in a recent study that Minneapolis in winter is already slightly more than 1 degree warmer than surrounding areas, because of a combination of heat from buildings and traffic, as well as plowed pavement.

But heat mitigation strategies would be unlikely to cool the cities in the winter, Klink said. Short days and reflective snow cover both limit the amount of radiation the Twin Cities might absorb and would probably overwhelm any heat-reduction efforts.

Urban American Gothic

Snyder and Klink are relying on volunteer property owners to accept a thermometer, from which students will periodically download data for the next four years. About 50 have been placed so far.

Snyder noted that a digital, urban temperature-reading network is likely to have different demographics from the far-flung collections of farmers and stay-at-homes in the standard picture of weather observers. In fact, the project's title, "Island in the Sun," was "loosely borrowed" from that of a song by the alternative rock group Weezer, Snyder noted. Twine added that being home to jot down numbers every day -- after milking cows, presumably -- won't be a requirement.

"People are busy. But this is easy. You just leave it alone," she said.

http://www.startribune.com/local/133280613.html?page=all&prepage=1&c=y#continue

Seattle City Light's usage comparison report irks some

2011-11-06T08:46:00.000-08:00

By Denise Whitaker Published: Nov 4, 2011

KOMO News

SEATTLE -- Some may say information is power. But some Seattle City Light customers don't like the utility's pilot program that compares their energy usage to their neighbors'.

Seattle City Light spokesman Andrew Gibbs said the home electricity report was designed to inspire homeowners to think of new ways to conserve energy.

"We've weatherized a lot of houses, helped people install a lot of efficient light bulbs. We needed to do something a little bit different," he said.

The report lists how many kilowatt hours the customer is using, then compares the figure to that of the customer's neighbors. The report also ranks the customer in comparison with 99 others in the area.

Some customers say the report is a waste of money, paper and resource. Others say it's just downright intrusive. But Gibb says it's just information, and the report includes tips on making the customer's home more efficient.

"It's not trying to judge anyone," he said. "It's not trying to say you're a bad person (if) you're using more energy."

Consumer looking to identify the electricity vampires in their house can check out a kill-a-watt meter from the local library. The meter measures how much electricity each appliance uses. Consumers may then decide to switch to a more efficient model of appliance or change the settings on their computer.

"And that's really the most powerful thing -- to give people information about actions they can take to make their home more efficient, save money," Gibb said, adding consumers can save $25 for every 300 kilowatt hours cut.

Customers who do not want their energy use outlined in a home electricity report can choose to opt out.

Puget Sound Energy also provides a home energy report to customers in East King County.

http://www.komonews.com/news/local/133282843.html

Boulder Votes for Municipal Utility

2011-11-03T06:16:00.000-07:00

By STEPHANIE SIMON

Wall Street Journal

DENVER—Voters in Boulder, Colo., narrowly backed the creation of a municipal power authority to replace Xcel Energy Inc., the biggest electricity provider in Colorado.

In a related measure, voters on Tuesday also agreed to pay additional taxes, up to about $15 a household a year, to cover millions in expected legal and consulting costs.

The city can't cut all ties with Xcel right away. The shift to a municipal utility will take at least three years and could be derailed over issues such as how much Boulder will pay Xcel for its infrastructure.

The two sides enter negotiations far apart; Boulder officials have estimated the city could launch its own utility for less than $230 million, while Xcel suggests costs could top $1 billion. The final figure is likely to be settled in court.

"Although we are disappointed in the outcome, we know this is just the first step in a long process," said Ben Fowke, chairman and chief executive of Xcel. He said Boulder had underestimated its costs, and he expressed skepticism that the city would be able to match Xcel's rates.

Boulder city officials have said they would halt the switchover if costs grew too high.

Supporters of the move argue that a public utility would allow Boulder, a liberal college town, to embrace renewable energy and sharply reduce carbon emissions. Xcel relies heavily on coal-fired plants, though the company is converting some to natural gas and has committed to getting 30% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.

Xcel spent nearly $1 million to try to defeat the Boulder ballot measures, outspending supporters about 10 to 1.

"People like a David-and-Goliath story, and that's absolutely what this is," said Ken Regelson, who led a community group supporting a public utility.

Nationwide, 16 new public power authorities have been formed in the last decade, including 13 that have taken over from private utilities. Nearly all serve communities of less than 10,000, said Ursula Schryver, a vice president of the American Public Power Association, a trade group. Boulder's population is nearly 100,000. The last large-scale municipalization took place in 1998, on New York's Long Island.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204621904577014231689288216.html

U.S. Embassy air quality data undercut China's own assessments

2011-10-30T20:12:00.000-07:00

By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

October 29, 2011,

Reporting from Beijing—

Perched atop the U.S. Embassy in Beijing is a device about the size of a microwave oven that spitsout hourly rebukes to the Chinese government.

It is a machine that monitors fine particulate matter, one of the most dangerous components of air pollution, and instantly posts the results to Twitter and a dedicated iPhone application, where it is frequently picked up by Chinese bloggers.

One day this month, the reading was so high compared with the standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that it was listed as "beyond index." In other words, it had soared right off the chart.

"You couldn't get such a high level in the United States unless you were downwind from a forest fire," said Dane Westerdahl, an air quality expert from Cornell University.

But China's own assessment that day, Oct. 9, was that Beijing'sair was merely "slightly polluted."

Not even the most fervent propagandist would call the city's air clean, but the Chinese government made great efforts to improve air quality for the 2008 Olympic Summer Games. Beijing authorities moved huge steelworks out of the capital, switched city dwellers from coal to natural gas heating, raised emissions standards for trucks, and created new subway and bus lines. The cost of the cleanup was estimated at $10 billion, not including the investment in mass transit.

Three years later, the difference between the Americans and the Chinese is at least in part about what they're measuring. And it highlights the rapid growth in the number of cars in Beijing.

Chinese monitoring stations around the capital track large particulates of up to 10 micrometers. The number of those particles has dropped as a result of reforestation programs that lessen the dust storms that blew in from deserts. The Chinese have also been successful in reducing sulfur dioxide emissions by limiting coal heating and imposing stricter emissions standards.

The U.S. monitor tracks tinier particles — less than 2.5 micrometers — that physicians say are capable of penetrating human lungs and other organs. Car and truck exhaust is a major source of fine particulate pollution, a particular problem in Beijing, where the number of registered cars has skyrocketed from to 5 million from 3.5 million in 2008.

for the rest of the article: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-china-air-quality-20111030,0,4899208.story?track=lat-pick

Making Bikes a Part of the Neighborhood

2011-10-27T08:34:00.000-07:00

Tom Angotti

Gotham Gazette

The brouhaha in the press about bike lanes seems to have subsided for now and the buzz has turned to New York City’s plan to launch the largest bikeshare program in the country. Highly publicized efforts to erase new bike lanes, like the failed court case against the Prospect Park West bike lane in Brooklyn, may have run out of steam. But in the long run, the battles over street space are bound to move beyond downtown and City Hall to the city’s hundreds of neighborhoods where there are many cyclists and very few bicycle lanes, raising complex and long-neglected issues of transportation justice.

Next year New York City’s bikeshare program New York City’s bikeshare program will place 10,000 bicycles at 600 locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn, so that for a minimal charge New Yorkers can get around the city – as an alternative and supplement to private cars, taxis, walking and mass transit. People will be able to pick up a bike at one station and leave it at another. Boston, Washington, DC, Paris and scores of other large cities around the world already have successful bikeshare programs that are expanding bicycle use and changing the way streets are shared.

For the remainder of the article: http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/Transportation/20111025/16/3625

Speeding Up Denver Ski Season Traffic ... By Going Slower

2011-10-27T07:56:00.000-07:00

ERIC JAFFE
OCT 26, 2011

The Atlantic CITIES

On a Sunday in late September, at about a quarter past 11 in the morning, a police car flicked on its emergency lights and raced ahead of traffic heading eastbound toward Denver on Interstate 70. No doubt one or two drivers near the front of the herd thought they were getting pulled over. But the officer driving didn't have speeding tickets in mind. Instead, the cruiser settled in front of the pack and immediately began to travel at exactly 55 mph.

The goal was to act as a pace car for the 2,000 or so drivers making the 27-mile trek from Silverthorne to Empire Junction, toward Colorado's big city. The officer's primary job was to make sure no eager lead foot burst out ahead of the others — in short, to keep everyone in the pack near 55 mph. The event was repeated every ten minutes or so until a quarter past 3 that afternoon. It was the second in a series of trial runs for a traffic management program called "rolling speed harmonization."

for the remainder of this article, http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2011/10/slowing-drivers-speed-roads-denver/352/

Pipeline Plan Stirs Debate on Both Sides of Hudson

2011-10-27T06:50:00.000-07:00

By MIREYA NAVARRO

New York Times

Published: October 26, 2011

A debate that pits energy needs against safety risks is playing out in the New York region as federal officials weigh approval of a natural gas pipeline that would terminate in the West Village in Manhattan.

The $850 million project, developed by Spectra Energy of Houston, calls for 15 miles of new pipeline to run from Staten Island to Bayonne and Jersey City before crossing into Manhattan. Five miles of pipeline between Staten Island and Linden, N.J., would also be replaced.

The new pipeline, the first major one to be built in New York City in decades, has drawn firm support from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and barely a shrug from environmental groups. But with a decision by federal regulators expected early next year, an opposition campaign is gaining some heft. Critics of the natural gas drilling method known as fracking have also leapt into the fray, arguing that the pipeline would abet an environmental ill by carrying some gas extracted through fracking.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, whose approval is needed for the pipeline’s construction, is receiving public comment through Monday.

At a raucous public meeting it held last week in Greenwich Village, more than 300 antidrilling and Occupy Wall Street protesters joined forces to assail the project.

“You’re about to mainline an ecological disaster for the rest of the state,” the actor Mark Ruffalo, the celebrity face of the antifracking movement, said to a standing ovation. “I’m begging you people to stand up for something that’s bigger than our bureaucratic system.”

Mayor Jerramiah T. Healy of Jersey City has steadily denounced the project, saying it would threaten some prime development areas and jeopardize the safety of many of the city’s nearly 250,000 residents. He also asks why six miles of the pipeline would run through Jersey City but only graze Manhattan, given that New York City has greater fuel needs and would be the main beneficiary.

“We run all the risk, and our friends to the east get all the benefit,” Mr. Healy said in an interview on Tuesday.

In the West Village, residents only recently began mobilizing against the pipeline, citing accidental gas line explosions elsewhere, like the one that killed eight people and burned down dozens of homes last year in San Bruno, Calif.

Many seem incredulous that such a project could even skirt their upscale neighborhood, where the meatpacking district was recently gentrified, lush green spaces have been added and ground has been broken on a new Whitney Museum of American Art.

“Why would you develop Hudson River Park if you were going to do this?” Christy Robb, who lives on West Fourth Street, asked in an interview.

Spectra points out that the project has undergone several revisions to meet safety concerns and that it now exceeds federal requirements for pipeline safety. “We’re committed to building one of the safest pipelines in the country,” Marylee Henley, a spokeswoman for the company, said.

The federal energy commission has already concluded in an environmental review that any adverse impacts could be reduced “to less than significant” levels and has recommended approval.

Mayor Bloomberg supports the pipeline as a cleaner and greener alternative to dirty heating oil, which thousands of buildings are expected to phase out under tightened city regulations over the next few years. While some will simply switch to a cleaner oil, others are expected eventually to make the transition to natural gas, which creates fewer emissions than oil and is now at historically low prices.

“In terms of cleaning up the city’s energy supply, this is a great investment,” Mr. Bloomberg’s deputy for operations, Caswell F. Holloway, said of the pipeline.

New York City officials call the need for additional natural gas supplies critical, with two other interstate pipelines connecting to the city’s underground distribution grid already operating at or near full capacity.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey expressed “serious concerns” about the pipeline early this year but has not taken a public position on the project, which is expected to create 1,400 new construction jobs but will also pass by some highly populated residential neighborhoods, particularly in Jersey City.

The Spectra pipeline, up to 42 inches in diameter, would cross the Hudson River from Hoboken to the West Village, connecting with Consolidated Edison’s distribution system beneath West Street via the Gansevoort Peninsula. It will range from 6 to 200 feet below ground.

Spectra says the pipeline will be built in segments of 200 feet each. Construction will rip up roads and disrupt traffic for weeks at a time, the company said, but over 60 percent of the pipeline will be laid in areas where industrial infrastructure, like other pipelines and railroad tracks, already exists above and below ground.

The pipeline would transport up to 800 million cubic feet of gas a day. The company says that 20 percent of the gas has already been reserved by Con Edison to meet the demand in New York City and that the rest will be available to the metropolitan region as demand rises.

Gusti Bogok, a West Village neighbor and a member of the Sierra Club’s Atlantic chapter, said that natural gas posed dangers, including radon contamination, and that New York should be moving toward renewable energy sources rather than creating more demand for a fossil fuel.

“We need a comprehensive plan with different options — biofuels, energy reduction programs, retrofitting,” she said. “That’s where the effort needs to go.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/nyregion/gas-pipeline-to-manhattan-stirs-debate-in-2-states.html?nl=nyregion&emc=ura1

Extending 7 Train to New Jersey Could Cost Less Than ARC Tunnel

2011-10-27T05:18:00.001-07:00

Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - 05:16 PM

WNYC

By Andrea Bernstein

WNYC radio

A draft study done for the city has found an extension of the number 7 subway to Secaucus, New Jersey, would cost far less than the NJ Transit tunnel Governor Chris Christie killed last fall — but would lose only about 5,000 of an expected 130,000 riders per day.

"The idea of having good transportation and mass transportation is something that is very appealing to this city," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a Wednesday press conference. "I’ve always argued that if you’re going to depend on cars to come into this city, we’re always going to have delays."

Mayor Bloomberg’s administration began looking into the idea of extending the 7 train to Secaucus shortly after the NJ Transit tunnel, known as the ARC tunnel for “Access to the Region’s Core,” was killed.

Christie said he killed the $9 billion project because the actual cost could run as high as $15 billion, and he was concerned that New Jersey taxpayers would be left holding the bag.

But city officials said the new project would have a broader base of financing — from the city, the Port Authority, the state, NJ Transit, the federal government, and the MTA.

And the preliminary study, which exists only in draft form and has not been made public, projects the “Secaucus 7” project would cost less than the ARC because it wouldn’t go as far into Manhattan, or require the construction of a train station in midtown Manhattan, as the ARC tunnel would have.

Bloomberg pushed the extension of the number 7 line train when the city was vying for the 2012 Olympics. That bid failed, but the city is spending $2 billion to bring the 7 train to the Hudson Yards, where the city is planning a major development project. The extension to 34th street and 11th Avenue makes it that much closer to New Jersey.

But the MTA response was lukewarm: “Right now our focus is on finishing the three biggest transportation projects in the entire country, and in making sure that we have the funding we need to keep our capital program moving forward.”

The MTA faces a $10 billion shortfall in its capital plan through 2014. The Port Authority is also short of cash. The bi-state agency recently raised tolls to support reconstruction efforts at the World Trade Center Site and other major infrastructure projects, including replacing all of the suspension cables on the George Washington bridge.

Both the MTA and the Port Authority have new leaders, who have been tasked by Governor Andrew Cuomo with containing costs.

The money that would have been spent on the ARC tunnel has been re-allocated elsewhere. Privately, transit experts expressed doubts that the tunnel could be built so cheaply, or that it could be completed anywhere in the near term. The ARC tunnel was 20 years in the planning.

The 7 extension has the enthusiastic support of the Bloomberg administration, which has convened meetings with all the major transit agencies and representatives from both governor’s offices. Christie is also backing the project, which could — if it’s constructed — end up giving him bragging rights that killing the tunnel produced a cheaper alternative, particular for New Jersey residents.

"We have been intrigued all along by this as a potential alternative to the ARC tunnel project, which was an albatross for New Jersey and its taxpayers with its billions in cost overruns to be absorbed entirely by New Jersey," Christie spokesman Michael Drewniak said in a statement. "We will continue to explore the No. 7 subway plan, its feasibility, benefits and costs with the city and state of New York and the appropriate government agencies in both states."

The project could help New Jersey commuters get to Manhattan faster than by bus, but it would require a transfer to the New York subway system, which is seen as a less desirable ride than a commuter train. A terminus in Secaucus could also provide the possibility to increase bus capacity in New Jersey, since the number of buses traveling to Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel is currently at capacity.

http://www.wnyc.org/blogs/wnyc-news-blog/2011/oct/26/preliminary-study-finds-extending-7-train-new-jersey/

Sports Rally Around Green Projects

2011-10-26T10:39:00.000-07:00

By KEN BELSON

New York Times

Published: October 25, 2011

AMERICAN sports are often an exercise in excess: fans consume large quantities of beer and hot dogs, stadiums with giant scoreboards and retractable roofs are surrounded by parking lots filled with thousands of cars. In many ways, they represent the broadest cross-section of consumer culture and America’s wasteful ways.

But the sports industry — from teams to leagues to stadium and track operators — is becoming more environmentally friendly. In just the last few years, several new arenas have been certified by the United States Green Building Council, and nearly a dozen other facilities have added solar panels. Teams like Seattle and St. Louis have ambitious energy-saving programs at their parks, and the United States Open tennis tournament composts a majority of its waste. Even Nascar, a sport built on gas-guzzling racecars, has introduced a program that includes the recycling of used tires, oily rags and more.

Like many businesses, team owners and event organizers realize that going green can save thousands and even millions of dollars a year, a priority in these recession-stretched times. But many of them are also generating new income from their cost-cutting measures by getting corporate partners, eager to align themselves with hometown teams going green, to sponsor projects like solar installations and recycling bins.

In the process, teams and event organizers are learning that environmental efforts are winning fans not just in the Northeast and the Pacific Northwest, but in less obvious states.

“You would expect it out of a California team, but not an Arizona team,” said Derrick Hall, the chief executive of the Arizona Diamondbacks, which has worked with Arizona Public Service, the local utility, to build a 17,000-square-foot solar canopy at Chase Field, the baseball team’s stadium in Phoenix. “It’s important to a number of companies. They want to know what steps we are taking, and they like to be associated with us and an environmentally conscious team.”

Even though the team is not required to recycle, the Diamondbacks have added 150 new bins for plastic and aluminum bottles in Chase Field and compost all the food and paper waste, helping keep 95 tons of material out of the garbage dump in the first nine months of the year. In 2008, the team added flushless urinals and hand dryers in the bathrooms, and vendors at the stadium now wear shirts made from recycled plastic bottles. To trim its electricity bill, which is several million dollars a year, the team closes its retractable roof earlier in the day to avoid having to turn up the stadium’s air-conditioners.

Like many teams, the Diamondbacks have received no public subsidies for their initiatives. Some measures, like distributing media guides on digital thumb drives, saved thousands of dollars in printing costs. Others, including asking employees to take public transit to work, were part of broader efforts to be greener organizations.

Either way, the initiatives were done voluntarily, not because of mandates from the commissioner’s office. Major League Baseball and other leagues, though, have been sharing best practices among teams and collecting statistics on energy and water use and recycling rates to create benchmarks. The National Hockey League also helps teams send unused food at arenas to local soup kitchens, an effort that that provided 165,000 meals last season and kept 105 tons of food out of landfills. The league has also started buying credits that restore wetlands for every goal scored during the season.

Skeptics say these efforts are a bandage. Stadiums produce tons of waste and use large amounts of energy, teams crisscross the nation on chartered jets and millions of fans drive to games in millions of cars. League officials acknowledge this but say it is all the more reason to promote environmental initiatives.

“You can’t duck it or deny it,” said John McHale Jr., an executive vice president at M.L.B. “But just because you can’t do everything doesn’t mean you can’t do something.”

Environmental activists applaud this marriage of bottom-line vigilance and civic-mindedness, not just because huge amounts of energy, food and other products are consumed at sporting events, but because teams and athletes are so influential in their communities that fans and companies may be more inclined to follow their lead.

“When you get teams looking for efficiency, it gets noticed more than when environmental advocates do it,” said Allen Hershkowitz, the director of the Sports Greening Initiative at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which advises leagues and teams. “People expect it from us, but when it’s the Cardinals, it’s the heartland. It’s nonpolitical.”

The recent rush of projects was led off by the Boston Red Sox, which installed 28 solar panels on a roof above the first-base line in 2008. The project was modest: the panels replace about 37 percent of the natural gas needed to heat the water used at Fenway Park. Other teams took notice, though, because the Red Sox not only saved money, but relied on National Grid, the utility, for technical expertise and financing.

Suddenly, teams everywhere were unveiling green initiatives, or publicizing efforts that until then had been ad hoc and out of view. In 2008, at the depths of the financial crisis, Nascar appointed Michael Lynch as head of green innovation. In cooperation with racetrack operators and racing teams, he introduced a host of measures, including using hybrid vehicles as pace cars and the planting of 10 mature trees after every race. This year, Nascar switched to a 15 percent ethanol blend, which has attracted sponsors as well as critics who doubt its environmental benefits.

“It’s like a small-sized Midwestern town that comes together 36 times a year,” Mr. Lynch said of Nascar races. “If you want to show that something works, plug it in here.”

Race teams and track owners looking to lower their costs took the cue. Last year, the Pocono Raceway installed 40,000 solar panels on 25 acres, enough to power the entire facility. Brandon Igdalsky, the racetrack’s president, said the $15 million cost was paid without government subsidies. The track’s annual energy bill has been cut by $500,000, so Mr. Igdalsky expects to recover the cost of the panels in eight to 10 years.

“We don’t even get a bill anymore,” he said.

Many projects, though, are far smaller and less visible. When the owners of the New Jersey Devils built the Prudential Center in Newark, they spent an extra $1.5 million on a state-of-the-art dehumidifying system that let them keep the air in the arena dry and cool enough to meet the N.H.L.’s strict guidelines for maintaining the ice.

The system automated a process that has long relied on guesswork. To keep the humidity at about 30 percent for hockey, arena operators consider the temperature and moisture outside, the number of fans expected to attend and what time the game begins. They also factor in whether a basketball court or other flooring must be removed.

Teams without dehumidifiers typically run their air-conditioners early in the day at high levels to bring the temperature in the arena down to the low 60s. This offsets the heat from fans and the lights. But by turning their air-conditioners on full blast, they raise their electricity costs, because the rate that utilities charge their big commercial customers is based on the period of highest demand.

At the Prudential Center, hundreds of sensors in and outside of the arena help the Devils adjust dehumidifiers all day, eliminating the need to turn the air-conditioners on all at once.

“That’s where the energy savings come in,” said Jim Cima, the senior vice president of arena operations. Buildings without dehumidifiers, he said, “demand a lot of human judgment. They have to start their air-conditioners very early in the day and pray once the game starts that they are able to hold that temperature.”

The center’s system, Mr. Cima said, had reduced energy use by 22 percent, which in turn had reduced the payback time for the equipment to less than five years. But retrofitting arenas with dehumidifiers has proven to be costly, even in cities where lawmakers and the home team support environmental initiatives, so teams are finding other ways to cut costs.

“The one caveat is it has to make money,” said David Kells, the director of marketing at Bridgestone Arena, home of the Nashville Predators, which instead spent about $100,000 on fast-opening loading doors to cut the amount of cool air leaving the building.

The improvisation is a reminder that when it comes to green measures, one size does not fit all teams. And because sports are so widely watched, fans are likely to take note for some time to come.

“The challenges that the leagues and sports organizations face are not unique; they’re the same ones that we face at home,” said Martin Tull, the executive director of the Green Sports Alliance. “It’s easy to point the finger at the large aggregators of people. But the challenge is the use of resources in general.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/business/sports-industry-expands-its-environmental-initiatives.html?pagewanted=all

Silicon Valley well-positioned to be a leader in smart-grid technology - San Jose Mercury News

2011-10-26T10:30:00.000-07:00

Silicon Valley and the broader Bay Area are well-positioned to be national leaders in the development of smart-grid technologies as utilities, local governments and the privatee sector work to improve the electric grid, a new report by Collaborative Economics of San Mateo concludes.

In 2009, the latest year for which data is available, there were 12,560 smart grid jobs in the Bay Area, defined as Alameda, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. That's up from 5,480 smart grid jobs in 1995, a jump of 129%....

For the rest of the article: http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_19195033

How Essential Is Indian Point?

2011-10-26T10:19:00.000-07:00

October 18, 2011, 12:34 PM

By MATTHEW L. WALD

New York Times

As I reported in Tuesday’s paper, opponents of the Indian Point nuclear power plant assert that its two reactors can be retired in the next few years because alternatives exist that pose less risk and would not cost substantially more. New York City’s position, however, is that retiring the reactors would raise prices sharply and reduce reliability.

So, what would those alternatives be? New York’s electricity infrastructure resembles its highway system, prone to saturation. Once in a while, though, new transmission capacity does gets added.

This month, in a little-noticed development, the Bayonne Energy Center finished a 6.75-mile cable that runs from Bayonne, N.J., under the Kill Van Kull, through Upper New York Bay to Gowanus Bay and then to Con Edison’s Gowanus substation. The company plans to build a 512-megawatt gas-fired power station on the New Jersey side.

In May, work began on a 660-megawatt cable that would run eight miles from Ridgefield, N.J., to Pier 92 in Manhattan, and then to Con Edison’s 49th Street substation. Six miles of it will be underwater.

Opponents are also counting on projects like the Champlain-Hudson Express, a 1,000-megawatt submarine line that would connect Hydro Quebec with New York City. The two Indian Point reactors, in Westchester County, N.Y., produce a bit over 2,000 megawatts.

Opponents of Indian Point commissioned a study from the research and consulting firm Synapse Energy Economics. Synapse acknowledged that the effect of closing Indian Point was hard to predict because it depends partly on the overall level of electricity demand in the New York City area.

Synapse said that part of the portfolio of alternatives should be a high level of improvement in energy efficiency, effectively cutting demand by 1.5 percent from what it would be otherwise.

Under Gov. Eliot Spitzer, New York State committed itself to reducing its energy use to 15 percent below “business as usual” by 2015. At the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the groups that sponsored the Synapse study, Ashok Gupta, an energy expert, acknowledged that the state is “not on target” to meet the Spitzer goal, let alone a tougher one. But he pointed out that some smaller states like Vermont had achieved such reductions.

The feasibility study is part of a broader effort by Mr. Gupta’s group and Riverkeeper, the study’s other sponsor, to position themselves for license renewal hearings on Indian Point that are expected to start in the spring. At the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Scott Burnell, a spokesman, said, “I can’t remember any license renewal proceeding that has been this involved.”

The runners-up in terms of controversy are probably Oyster Creek in New Jersey, which eventually won a 20-year extension but whose owners promised to shut it in 2020 in a deal with state environmental regulators, and Pilgrim in Plymouth, Mass., a renewal process that is still under way.

So far the commission has not turned down any applications for license renewals, although it has instructed some applicants to do more work.

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/how-essential-is-indian-point/?scp=3&sq=con%20edison&st=cse

Lunch, Landfills and What I Tossed

2011-10-26T10:14:00.000-07:00

By MIREYA NAVARRO

New York Times

Published: October 21, 2011

IT was warm and sunny on a recent Tuesday and the lunchtime crowd in Bryant Park was in full swarm. Hundreds of Midtown workers sat on the grass or at round outdoor tables sunbathing, talking on cellphones and typing away on laptops.

But mostly they ate — sushi, pizza, chicken pesto salads, turkey club sandwiches — and much of their food came in plastic containers that had no place to go but into the trash.

As any befuddled, frustrated and guilt-ridden environmentally conscious New Yorker knows, takeout food and its containers — salad bar and deli clamshells; plastic cups and utensils; yogurt containers; fancy three-compartment bento boxes — are the bane of this city’s would-be recyclers. They might reuse plastic shopping bags until they rip and religiously bundle every newspaper and magazine for recycling pickup, only to be undone by lunch.

“There’s nothing I can do,” said Doug Richardson, 25, an accountant eating a chicken salad from a deep plastic bowl. “It annoys me. It’s plastic in a landfill.”

Environmental advocates call recycling the weak link in the city’s green agenda, even after legislation was passed last year to overhaul the 1989 recycling law that made New York a 20th-century leader, not a laggard.

How far behind is the city? A survey by the Natural Resources Defense Council this year found that more than two dozen large and medium-size cities in the United States recycle all kinds of plastic containers, while New York takes only bottles and jugs. Another study this year, sponsored by Siemens AG, the global electronics and electrical engineering company, ranked New York 16th among 27 cities in its handling of waste, though it was third in overall environmental performance.

By now, other cities require recyclable or compostable takeout containers and utensils at restaurants — and bins in which to dispose of them. Cutting-edge green cities, like San Francisco, offer curbside collection of food scraps and compostable items at homes, restaurants and offices. And dozens of places now charge residents for their trash by weight to promote recycling and keep refuse out of landfills.

New York, meanwhile, is going backward: it now recycles about 15 percent of the waste collected by the Sanitation Department, which is primarily from residences, down from a peak of 23 percent in 2001. And while city officials have said they are reviewing so-called “pay as you throw” systems, there is no indication that the city might adopt one.

“This issue is simply not getting the attention it deserves,” said Eric A. Goldstein, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York. “They’ve treated their recycling operation like the after-school clarinet program.”

Environmental advocates suspect a lack of commitment from City Hall. After all, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has tackled idling trucks, dirty boilers and even smokers who foul the air, but in 2002, to save money, he temporarily cut back on curbside collection of recyclables.

Caswell Holloway, Mr. Bloomberg’s new deputy mayor for operations and a former commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, said, however, that while recycling faced significant hurdles, a lack of commitment was not one of them.

“The mayor recognizes that a sustainable New York City means that we need to come up with ways to deal with waste,” Mr. Holloway said. “The clock is running on landfills.”

That said, he added, “We could do better.”

We all could. The amount of nonrecyclable waste generated by just one New Yorker can be stunning, as I found out. Saving all the packaging from a week’s worth of takeout food, I ended up with three plastic yogurt containers, a paper salad box, a paper cereal bowl, two Styrofoam plates, one plastic salad-dressing container and seven plastic food containers — the rigid ones with snap-on lids. Also, five plastic cups (each with a plastic straw), a paper cup with a plastic lid, a plastic water bottle and a plain old paper cup (it held milk for my cereal). Also, one plastic fork, one plastic knife and two compostable plastic spoons, which I threw out rather than composting.

And to carry all that food I used three paper trays and a handful of plastic bags.

But change is on the way, Mr. Holloway said. To increase recycling capacity, the city has entered into long-term contracts and is building new infrastructure, like a 100,000-square-foot recycling plant at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal in Sunset Park. At the same time, he said, a recently convened team from the Sanitation Department, the mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, the Office of Recycling Outreach and Education, and his office is looking at how to divert more waste from landfills.

They’ve got their work cut out for them.

NEW YORK CITY produces more than 14 million tons of waste a year, and city officials say that roughly half of it is recycled. But most of that is dirt from the construction and demolition industry, which accounts for half of all solid waste.

Recycling efforts are less successful in the two categories that account for the other half of the city’s waste: trash collected from businesses and commercial buildings, which use private haulers to handle it, and residential, government and institutional customers served by the Sanitation Department.

One issue is behavior. City officials say residents sort less than half of all materials that could be recycled; most items are improperly discarded in the trash. Both convenient recycling and the tracking of scofflaws are daunting because of the nature of housing in the city — tall multifamily buildings with large numbers of occupants. (And many residents blame confusing recycling rules.)

The city has less information on commercial recycling, but officials say most businesses, too, are not capturing as much as they could for recycling.

Last year, the City Council passed legislation to require the recycling of rigid plastics — all those containers for yogurt or Chinese takeout, as well as others like medicine bottles and flower pots — and divert 8,000 more tons of plastic from landfills and incinerators each year. But that expansion hinges not just on the opening of the new recycling plant, but also on an assessment of costs.

Still, city officials say that it is more expensive to recycle than to send trash to landfills and incinerators for disposal, and that they have to weigh those costs against environmental goals.

The city also has to give people somewhere to put their recyclables, especially out on the streets. With the heaviest pedestrian traffic in the country, New York has only 500 recycling bins on streets and in parks, compared with about 25,000 wastebaskets. Sanitation Department officials say that to keep costs down, they place the bins mostly in areas along existing collection routes, where volunteers from the community help by replacing and storing bags when they fill up. The new recycling laws approved by the City Council last year call for an expansion, but only to 1,000 recycling bins in public spaces — by 2020.

“I used to live in San Francisco, and there were containers for trash, compost, plastic and glass and paper,” said Yana Rachovska, 26, an architect who now lives in Astoria, Queens. “It was citywide. We had no choice.”

Things are even worse underground in the subways and on commuter rail platforms. Two years ago, a blue-ribbon commission convened by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority recommended better and more uniform recycling on subway and train platforms. But not much has changed, some commission members said. And recycling efforts are far from uniform. Metro-North stations, for example, have recycling bins, but Long Island Rail Road stations do not.

Officials of New York City Transit, the agency within the transportation authority that operates the subways and buses, say that the city’s 468 subway stations are too crowded and spread out for extra bins and that the expense of managing them would be prohibitive. The officials said all subway trash was sent to a processing plant in New Jersey to be sorted through, in a system known as post-collection recycling.

Post-collection, however, is considered a less reliable method of recovering materials like paper that can be easily soiled by other trash, and those materials make up half of the recyclables collected at subway stations.

Michael G. Zacchea, the operations officer who oversees “asset recovery” for the transit system, said about half of the waste from the subways was recycled, but environmental groups and some public officials expressed skepticism.

“There’s just no way that the quality of the paper is going to be usable,” said City Councilwoman Jessica Lappin, a Manhattan Democrat, who has been pressing the transportation authority to provide recycling bins on subway platforms.

“You see everybody getting into the stations with the newspaper and their coffee,” she said. “It drives me crazy.”

The inconsistencies of New York’s recycling test visitors as well. One tourist from Redwood City, Calif., Dawn E. Garcia, wrote on her Facebook page after her visit last summer:

“At the end of an entertaining week as a tourist in New York City, I loved it BUT I have one burning question: Why don’t New Yorkers recycle?”

Ms. Garcia, 52, the deputy director of the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University, said she had wanted to throw away a plastic water bottle during a walk to the Museum of Modern Art from her hotel near Grand Central Terminal — some 15 blocks — but could not find a recycling bin along the way.

“I was just surprised how many places don’t have them,” she said. “I’m loath to drop a can or water bottle in the trash, and I was walking a long time with that water bottle.

“When you ask people, they give you this blank stare. ‘Recycling?’ ”

Indeed, one of the major reasons to have recycling bins on streets and in transit hubs is not to divert waste — they capture just a fraction of a city’s total waste stream — but to build the recycling habit and reinforce the message that recyclables are not really garbage.

“It wouldn’t make sense to say, ‘At work and at home you put your recyclables in one bin, but on the street throw everything away,’ ” said Timothy Croll, solid waste director for Seattle Public Utilities. “Then people start to get confused.”

Seattle has 682 public trash cans on its streets, and more than half of those, 351, have a recycling bin for aluminum cans, plastic bottles and paper parked next to them, city officials there said.

In San Francisco, everyone, including people in charge of restaurants and offices, must separate refuse among three bins: recyclables (paper, glass, metal and most plastics), compostables (food scraps, paper food wrappers and yard waste) and trash. San Francisco also bans plastic foam containers for takeout food, and plastic bags at large supermarkets and chain pharmacies. And like dozens of the nation’s largest cities, it has instituted a system that charges residents for the trash they throw out. “A lot of people are motivated by money,” said Juliana Bryant, zero waste coordinator for San Francisco’s Department of the Environment.

And when it comes to composting, New York really lags. In San Francisco, residents dump the contents of their kitchen compost pails into compostable bags and then into green bins for weekly pickup by the city.

In New York, there is no curbside collection of food scraps, the largest single component of residential waste. Instead, New Yorkers with no backyards who are committed enough to compost typically either freeze their food waste until they can drop it off at a greenmarket or other collection site, or keep worm bins in their homes to do it themselves.

Commercial food waste is an even bigger missed opportunity, city officials said in this year’s progress report of PlaNYC, the mayor’s environmental agenda. About 600,000 tons of food are thrown away each year by restaurants, grocery stores, hotels and other businesses and institutions. The closest facility to process food waste for composting is 150 miles from the city.

The study released this summer by Siemens AG found that while New York trailed only San Francisco and Vancouver in overall green efforts like improving air quality and cutting greenhouse gas emissions, it trailed most other cities in the study in managing waste because it relies primarily on awareness campaigns rather than direct incentives for waste reduction. But environmental groups working to improve recycling rates say any laws must be accompanied by measures to enable people to comply with those laws, simple steps like providing color-coded bins to minimize confusion about where items go, and more costly actions like finding or creating more facilities that can process recyclables.

One such effort is under way in New York by food service chains like Starbucks and Pret A Manger. Under a pilot program with the environmental organization Global Green, the restaurants are collecting soiled coffee cups, sleeves, salad boxes and other paper packaging separately, to test whether they can be recycled.

Annie White, director of the project for Global Green, said results so far were promising — customers were using the right bins, the stores did not find the collections a burden, and many paper mills were interested in the test, though none were actually recycling the materials commercially yet. She said the pilot was expanding to 150 storefronts over the next year, from the initial 10, and was expected to serve as a national model.

“This is material that previously hasn’t been collected,” she said, “but there’s strong demand for fiber.”

RESTAURANTS, of which New York has 24,000, say their customers are demanding more recycling.

The Green Restaurant Association has about 80 certified members in the city, which can earn different star ratings based on their environmental efforts, like reducing energy consumption in dishwashing or hiring companies to compost their food waste.

But collection efforts are still minimal in the “front of the house.” While some chains, like Le Pain Quotidien (a Green Restaurant Association member), compost their own food waste and offer compostable utensils and containers made of recycled paperboard, they do not collect the materials separately, so there is nowhere for these materials to go except the trash bin. There, they will eventually break down and release the greenhouse gas methane along with other organic decay; and they will not be recovered as compost that could be turned into fertilizer.

“A compostable packaging needs to go to a composting facility to be a good environmental choice,” Ms. White said.

Other restaurants are encouraging reuse with discounts and freebies. Just Salad, a New York City chain with seven outlets in Manhattan, sells a special reusable plastic salad bowl for $1 and gives customers two free toppings every time they use it.

Nick Kenner, a managing partner of the chain, said the bowl was a big hit. “One out of four walk-in customers brings back the bowl,” he said.

One of those customers, Stan Shargordosky, 38, a software engineer recently refilling his salad bowl at the West 37th Street store, explained, “I don’t want my plastic bowl to end up in a landfill and take 500 years to decompose.”

Peter Noce, 27, an accountant in Midtown eating a sandwich and carrots with hummus in Bryant Park recently, takes matters into his own hands, bringing food in his own Tupperware plastic container that he takes back home to Long Island for reuse.

“I bring it back, wash it, try to be green,” he said.

Mr. Noce also takes home his plastic water bottles to redeem them for a nickel at the grocery store. “There’s a lot of waste in general. I’m a nonwaster.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/nyregion/on-recycling-nyc-goes-from-leader-to-laggard.html?pagewanted=all

CTA's new trains pulling into the station

2011-10-24T18:13:00.000-07:00

Full production is finally under way on an order of 706 new CTA rail cars, and the first 26 cars have been delivered to the transit agency, officials told Getting Around over the weekend.

The new rail cars recently arrived in Chicago on trucks from Bombardier Transportation's manufacturing plant in Plattsburgh, N.Y., and will enter service soon, officials said.

"We are making final adjustments (to the 26 new cars) before putting them into revenue service in the very near future," CTA spokeswoman Molly Sullivan said. The CTA expects to have 40 more cars delivered from Canada-based Bombardier by the end of the year and another 192 cars delivered in 2012, officials said. The schedule for the remaining cars in 2013 and possibly 2014 is still being worked out, officials said.

CTA is the first customer in the U.S. to receive this new generation of rail cars...

http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/automotive/traffic/ct-met-getting-around-1024-20111024,0,3785794.column

Facebook Unveils 'Social Energy' App

2011-10-22T08:24:00.000-07:00

Written by Matt Hickman

Well hello there, Facebook users. Pardon me while I interrupt that rousing game of Trash Tycoon for just a quick moment to help spread the word about a soon-to-be-launched app — a “social energy application,” if you will — announced earlier today by the folks over at FB in partnership with mighty environmental advocacy group the Natural Resources Defense Council and Home Energy Report-pioneering startup Opower. And no, it doesn’t involve virtual plastic bottle recycling.

Launching in early 2012, this yet-to-be-name app will allow 800 million Facebook users to pull home energy usage data provided by their utility provider (the non-Oprah-Winfrey-related Opower works with a growing network of more than 60 utility companies across the country) and share it, warts and all, with fellow Facebookers.

More specifically, once the data is automatically or manually imported into the Facebook app, users will be able to track their household energy consumption and see how it stacks up against similar homes across the country; access a Friend Comparison Feature to share energy-saving tips and tidbits with like-minded virtual amigos; join in on conversations about home energy use via the Facebook Newsfeed; and partake in online contests and competitions. Writes Katie Fehrenbacher over at GigaOM: “Think if a Facebook app could bring the social power of Farmville to home energy management.”

Commonwealth Edison (Chicago and environs), the city of Palo Alto, Calif. (natch), and Glendale Water & Power (Los Angeles County) will be the first three utilities to allow a combined total of 4 million customers to seamlessly import energy usage data into the new app when it launches. It’s expected that other utility companies will follow.

Elaborates NRDC energy expert Brandi Colander on her blog:

We expect today’s announcement will be one of many collaborations we undertake with Facebook in order to help the company meet its sustainability goals. As a first step, we’re turning to Facebook’s greatest resource, its platform, by empowering people on Facebook to take charge of and improve the way they use energy in their daily lives. One of our primary goals is to move this nation – our utilities, our businesses and everyday citizens – to cleaner, more efficient energy. That’s an aim we have for everyone we engage with, including Facebook.

Although it looks like some details with the app have yet to be fleshed out, the initial set of features are quite intriguing. And if you’re feeling a slight sense of déjà vu, it’s probably because similar consumer-engaging, energy-tracking apps have appeared before including Microsoft Hohm and Google PowerMeter. Both of these ventures tanked after relatively short lifespans, but the powerhouse trio of Facebook, the NRDC, and Opower is confident that this new app will click. Here’s hoping that the third time’s a charm. Once the new app is launched, do you think you’ll use it?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/eco-nomics/2011/10/18/facebook-unveils-social-energy-app/

Lines go up to ferry wind energy to major cities

2011-10-21T10:57:00.000-07:00

By KATE GALBRAITH

Published: October 21, 2011

SWEETWATER — Enormous transmission towers stand beside a West Texas country road, waiting for electric wires to be strung through them. Nearby, the task of threading wires through the steel towers is already under way, as men in hard hats shift equipment into position.

“We’re going to work 12 hours a day through Thanksgiving,” said Pat Hogan, a consultant with McCurley Enterprises, a company helping with the construction. The only real break comes around midafternoon on Sundays when, he said, “you can get your clothes cleaned or go to the grocery store.”

The rush to build transmission lines is part of Texas’ efforts to promote wind power, which provides 8 percent of the state grid’s electricity. Across the state, thousands of miles of wires are being strung at a cost that has soared to an estimated $6.8 billion. The main purpose is to ferry wind energy from remote areas like Sweetwater — already home to many big wind farms — to major cities like Dallas and Fort Worth. Texas leads the nation in wind production, and the lines are intended to nearly double the state’s wind capacity.

The build-out, which Texans will pay for in future electric bill increases projected at about $5 a month per customer for years, has been contentious. Some Texas landowners have fought to prevent the lines from crossing their property, even though they receive a one-time payment for hosting them.

Travis Besier, the manager of transmission right of way for Oncor, a Dallas-based utility overseeing construction of the largest chunk of lines (including the Sweetwater segments), said that payments for an easement could range from around $3,000 to $10,000 or more an acre, depending on factors like the property’s proximity to a large city.

In some cases, Mr. Besier said, Oncor has needed eminent domain proceedings, in which the utility can take the land if negotiations with the landowner fail.

For businesses in Sweetwater, which normally cater to energy-company workers and tourists attending the town’s springtime Rattlesnake Roundup, the construction has brought a boom. One recent morning at Big Boy’s Bar-B-Que began with Oncor ordering $265 worth of sandwiches, according to Gaylan Marth, the restaurant’s owner.

“What a way to start off!” Mr. Marth said.

Christy Silva, general manager of the Best Western hotel in Sweetwater, said that her business had increased by about 35 percent because of the transmission work — although she is aware that at some point the construction will end and the workers will leave.

All lines are supposed to be completed by the end of 2013. Work is going smoothly, builders say, though there are hitches. Workers must always beware of rattlesnakes and bad weather, including high winds.

Andy Weaver, co-owner of Weaver Construction Texas, a company doing grading work for Oncor, said that because of the drought and tighter water restrictions, he had trouble getting enough water (necessary for processing the material) while preparing a substation site near Brownwood. “You couldn’t find a driller in Texas to drill you a water well,” he said. He was eventually able to buy water from ranchers and farmers with wells.

Wind developers, for their part, are eagerly awaiting the completion of the lines, which should spur more activity in West Texas, including the area around Sweetwater, where currently some turbines must stop spinning at windy times because there are not enough wires to carry out the power. The Panhandle, the windiest region in the state, albeit one with relatively few turbines because of its remoteness, is also poised for more development.

But Andy Bowman, president of Pioneer Green Energy, a renewable energy developer, said that much near-term wind activity is focused on South Texas — where the state has not ordered construction of new transmission lines for wind. Austin Energy, for example, recently announced plans to buy coastal wind power for a relatively low price. (Coastal winds tend to be slower but better matched to electricity use patterns than West Texas winds.)

“It’s an interesting turn of events that we’re seeing wind being competitive on the market again,” even before the lines are built, Mr. Bowman said.

kgalbraith@texastribune.org

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/us/lines-go-up-to-ferry-wind-energy-to-major-cities.html?src=recg

Green public power for San Francisco clears major hurdle

2011-10-12T06:48:00.000-07:00

By: Joshua Sabatini | 10/12/11 4:00 AM
Examiner Staff Writer

The City’s ambitious plan to offer residents greener power than PG&E took a significant step forward Tuesday.

The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission approved a term sheet Tuesday with Shell Energy North America to run CleanPowerSF, The City’s proposed public power program, and next week Supervisor David Campos will introduce it to the Board of Supervisors.

CleanPowerSF would offer consumers the choice of paying extra for electricity derived from 100 percent renewable sources instead of from PG&E, which gathers about 16 percent of its energy from renewable sources.

For the average residential customer, monthly bills will increase by $7 to $15. Those customers would automatically be enrolled in CleanPowerSF and they would have to opt out to go back to PG&E. Originally, the program was going to meet or beat PG&E rates.

“Based on market research, we think there’s a significant number of folks in The City that really want to put their money where their mouth is and are willing to pay a little bit more for more renewable energy,” said Michael Campbell, director of CleanPowerSF.

The program launch would cost The City $19.5 million, which includes a $15 million payout to Shell if the program is terminated before the 4½-year contract expires. And $4 million would sit in a reserve account to “mitigate potential
program risks.”

The launch is set for July 2012, if the program is approved.

Past versions of the proposal faced criticism over consumer costs and financial risks to The City.

“We have put together what we believe are the best terms possible right now,” said Campos.

A board committee is expected to hold its first hearing on the term sheet in early November.

jsabatini@sfexaminer.com

Idle in Manhattan by Herbert London - City Journal

2011-09-27T19:17:00.000-07:00

Idle in Manhattan by Herbert London - City Journal

Idle in Manhattan

Mayor Bloomberg’s attempts to control traffic have only made things worse.

27 September 2011

“What’s the easiest way to get across town?” a New York City traffic commissioner was asked in the 1950s. “Be born there,” he replied. That flippant retort has even more relevance today. In fact, not only is it difficult to travel across town in Manhattan; it is also virtually impossible to travel north-south without having to change your route to avoid obstacles. Seeking to improve traffic congestion in the city, the Bloomberg administration has declared war on the automobile.

....

Tax Plan to Turn Old Buildings ‘Green’ Finds Favor

2011-09-21T09:58:00.000-07:00

By JUSTIN GILLIS

New York TImes

September 19, 2011

A business consortium that includes Lockheed Martin and Barclays bank plans to invest as much as $650 million over the next few years to slash the energy consumption of buildings in the Miami and Sacramento areas. It is the most ambitious effort yet to jump-start a national market for energy upgrades that many people believe could eventually be worth billions.

Focusing mainly on commercial property at first, the group plans to exploit a new tax arrangement that allows property owners to upgrade their buildings at no upfront cost, typically cutting their energy use and their utility bills by a third. The building owners would pay for the upgrades over five to 20 years through surcharges on their property-tax bills, but that would be less than the savings.

The consortium is led by a company called Ygrene Energy Fund of Santa Rosa, Calif., which has already won an exclusive contract to manage a retrofit program for a half-dozen communities in the Miami area, with the city expected to join in a few weeks. It is in the late stages of completing a contract with Sacramento, and is seeking deals in other cities.

State and city officials are optimistic they may have found a way to tackle one of the nation’s biggest energy problems — waste in older buildings — without new money from Washington. If enough building owners sign on, private capital would be put to work paying for retrofit projects that promise to save local businesses money while creating thousands of new construction jobs.

“We are so used to reaching our hand out and saying, ‘Washington, we need this,’ and ‘Tallahassee, give us that,’ ” said Edward MacDougall, the mayor of Cutler Bay, Fla., a Miami suburb that took the lead in setting up the deal in that region. “This is really a home-grown mechanism where we don’t need to do that.”

The consortium was put together by the Carbon War Room, a nonprofit environmental group based in Washington set up by Richard Branson, the British entrepreneur and billionaire, to tackle the world’s climate and energy problems in cost-saving ways. With the United States government nearly paralyzed on climate policy, he said, his group is seeking a way forward.

“We see this as the first of hopefully many, many, many projects, and a big step in the right direction,” Mr. Branson said in an interview last weekend in New York.

In the past three years, half the states have passed legislation permitting energy retrofits financed by property-tax surcharges, and hundreds of cities and counties are considering such programs. While the situation poses some risks, and programs aimed specifically at homeowners have run into a snag, many jurisdictions are moving forward with plans to focus on commercial properties.

Environmental groups have lauded the trend as one of the most exciting developments in years regarding climate change. They point out that wide use of such programs could cut emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from power plants by reducing electricity demand.

“It’s a big deal,” said James D. Marston, head of energy programs for the Environmental Defense Fund, a group that has worked with Carbon War Room in developing the approach. Over the long haul, he said, “we’re talking about tens of billions of dollars in investments, and energy savings that are 10 times that amount. If you do this correctly, you would be able to shut down a third of the coal plants in the country.”

While that may take a while, there seems to be little question that the new approach could draw substantial private capital into the market for energy upgrades, which have historically been difficult for many midsize and smaller businesses to finance.

As envisioned for Miami and Sacramento, the plans will work like this:

Ygrene and its partners will gain exclusive rights for five years to offer this type of energy upgrade to businesses in a particular community. They will market the plan aggressively, helping property owners figure out what kinds of upgrades make sense for them. Lockheed Martin is expected to do the engineering work on many larger projects.

The retrofits might include new windows and doors, insulation, and more efficient lights and mechanical systems. In some cases, solar panels or other renewable power might be included. For factories, the retrofits might include new motors or other gear.

Short-term loans provided by Barclays Capital will be used to pay for the upgrades. Contractors will offer a warranty that the utility savings they have promised will actually materialize, and an insurance underwriter, Energi, of Peabody, Mass., will back up that warranty. Those insurance contracts, in turn, will be backed by Hannover Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies.

As projects are completed, the upgrade loans, typically carrying interest rates of 7 percent, will be bundled into long-term bonds resembling those routinely issued by governmental taxing districts. Barclays will market the bonds. Retirement funds have expressed interest in buying these bonds, which will be repaid by tax surcharges on each property that undergoes a retrofit.

Perhaps the most serious risk is that fly-by-night contractors will be drawn to the new pot of money, pushing energy retrofits that are too costly or work poorly.

“Contractors are cowboys,” said Dennis Hunter, chairman of Ygrene. He promised close scrutiny of the ones selected for the Miami and Sacramento programs.

Ygrene is one of about a dozen start-up companies around the country pursuing such deals. The company appears to have substantial momentum, but some of its competitors have already stumbled, telling property owners they qualified for retrofits but then failing to deliver the necessary short-term financing. Still, many people are optimistic this approach will get off the ground.

“This is a game-changer,” said John D. Kinney, whose company, Clean Fund of San Rafael, Calif., has raised $250 million to invest in such projects. The company just used the technique to help finance a large solar installation at a development called Sonoma Mountain Village in Rohnert Park, Calif.

Experts point out that, with modern techniques and equipment, a retrofit can typically cut a building’s energy use so much that the project pays for itself in as little as five years. The most famous recent example was the refurbishment of the Empire State Building, which cut energy use by nearly 40 percent, turning it into one of New York’s greenest buildings.

The new financing approach is called Property Assessed Clean Energy, or PACE.

For decades, cities and counties have created special taxing districts to finance improvements that benefit private property, such as street lights or sewers. Bonds are issued to pay for the projects, then repaid with surcharges on tax bills. If an owner sells, the surcharge stays with the property.

Several years ago, the city of Berkeley, Calif., hit on the idea of using that approach to finance energy upgrades on private homes. The idea took off, and 25 states and the District of Columbia soon passed PACE legislation. One of the most successful programs to date has been in Sonoma County, Calif., where retrofit projects exceeding $50 million have been financed.

While the initial focus was on homeowners, those programs slowed last year when an arm of the federal government that oversees the mortgage market took a hostile stance toward such projects on residential property, on the grounds that they add risk to mortgages. In most states, a lien associated with a retrofit project would have to be paid ahead of the mortgage if the property went into foreclosure.

A legal and political battle is under way to try to force the Federal Housing Finance Agency to reverse its stand. So far, it appears that PACE programs for commercial properties pose fewer legal complications.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/business/energy-environment/tax-plan-to-turn-old-buildings-green-finds-favor.html?src=recg&pagewanted=print

Congestion pricing looks to hitch ride again with plan that could earn $1 billion for city

2011-09-18T14:19:00.000-07:00

BY KENNETH LOVETT
DAILY NEWS ALBANY BUREAU CHIEF

Sunday, September 18th 2011

ALBANY - A coalition of influential interest groups is quietly shopping a new plan to revive the idea of congestion pricing for some Manhattan travel.

A draft of the plan says it would generate more than $1 billion in new revenue that would be dedicated for MTA service improvements, and targeted fare and toll reductions.

Among the transit, environmental, labor and business groups developing the plan is the labor-backed Working Families Party.

Under the "MOVE NY draft sustainable mobility plan," drivers entering New York City's central business district, from 60th St. down to the Battery, would pay a toll at 22 entry points.

The tolls would vary based on the time of day. Peak hours - between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. - would be in the same range as the Port Authority's bridge and tunnel tolls, and the cost would be lower overnight and on weekends.

Yellow cabs would not be subject to the tolls, but they would be slapped with a $1-per-trip increase to generate $180 million a year, with $20 million going toward the hacks' health care. Livery cabs would get a 50% discount, and commercial vehicles would not pay more than once a day.

The plan would also chop tolls by 15% for the Whitestone, Throgs Neck, Cross Bay and Verrazano bridges, and defer by a year a 2013 MTA fare and toll hike.

The document stresses that "this is a draft plan that continues to evolve as we solicit feedback from stakeholders and elected officials from around the region."

The latest meeting with a handful of lawmakers and other parties is scheduled for tomorrow evening in Manhattan. Supporters say times have changed since 2008, when the Legislature nixed Mayor Bloomberg's congestion-pricing plan.

Those in the coalition say they learned from that failure by working the past nine months to include all major parties in developing the plan.

"Everyone we've spoken to across the region agrees that we need to find new funding for our transportation system and appreciates the effort we've made to test different ideas and solicit feedback," said Alex Matthiessen, an environmental consultant and MOVE NY campaign director.

But congestion pricing still faces an uphill battle in the Legislature.

"I think there is zero appetite," one state lawmaker said. "They can dress this up all they want, but people just don't trust the MTA."

How to Build a Greener City

2011-09-15T06:13:00.000-07:00

Bike lanes, micro wind turbines, pneumatic garbage collection—and other ways to make urban areas more environmentally friendly

Wall Street Journal

By MICHAEL TOTTY

Can cities be part of the environmental solution instead of part of the problem?

The question isn't an idle one. Urban populations around the world are expected to soar in the next 20 years, to five billion from more than three billion today. If the current rate of urbanization holds steady, cities will account for nearly three-quarters of the world's energy demand by 2030. Most of the increase will come in rapidly developing countries like China and India; China's cities alone will have to deliver water, housing, transportation and other services to 400 million additional urban dwellers by 2030.

"There's going to have to be new forms of energy, new ways of delivering energy and new forms of infrastructure," says Warren Karlenzig, president of Common Current, a consulting firm on sustainable cities based in San Anselmo, Calif. "All this will be necessary to allow cities to operate the way they do now."

So, cities aren't going to have be made a little greener; they're going to have to be rethought from the ground up. The goal: compact living environments that require less resources and that get the most out of the land, water and energy they do use.

It wasn't long ago that the idea of using "green" and "city" in the same sentence seemed absurd. Cities were considered a blight on the environment: energy-hogging, pollution-spewing, garbage-producing environmental hellholes. But in recent years, they've begun to be seen as models of green virtue. City dwellers tend to walk more and drive less than their suburban counterparts, and dense urban development encourages transit use. Apartment living generally means lower per-household energy use.

Building on these strengths, planners and developers are devising innovative solutions to meet urbanites' energy, water, transportation and sanitation needs well into the future.

Some improvements are fairly easy, such as switching to energy-efficient LED lighting in buildings and streetlights, or setting aside bike lanes and widening sidewalks to encourage alternatives to driving (although such moves aren't without political hazards, as a recent battle over bike lanes in New York shows). Others are more ambitious, requiring new construction or even an extensive rebuilding of city infrastructure—consider what is needed to add a second set of pipes for a water-reuse system.

Some of the most ambitious projects—and the greatest source of innovative ideas—are the dozens of "eco-city" developments in the works or on drawing boards around the world. Projects like the Songdo International Business District near Incheon, South Korea, are testing grounds for the latest in green technologies.

But green initiatives aren't just found on blueprints for new cities. Chicago, for example, has about 350 green-roof projects covering more than 4.5 million square feet.

Of course, many of these initiatives can be expensive, with high up-front costs. Urban planners say savings from lower energy bills and other operational efficiencies can more than cover the added expenses, but the break-even point can be years out. Still, cities—unlike the average homeowner considering rooftop solar panels—can take a long view and make investments with a decades-long payback.

So, how can cities—old or new—take green to a new level? Here's a look at some of the ways.

District Heating In a typical office building, heating and cooling account for nearly two-thirds of total energy use. So an alternative to traditional electricity or natural-gas HVAC systems can go a long way toward making cities greener. One solution: tapping the excess heat produced by nearby utilities or industry. A network of pipes distributes the heat, which can be used for hot water, space heating and in absorption chillers to provide air conditioning in the summer. These district heating systems are considerably more efficient—capturing up to 90% of the available energy—than in-building boilers. And they can tap any number of heat sources, including high-efficiency natural-gas turbines, large-scale solar thermal systems, biomass incinerators or furnaces in a steel mill. Common in Europe, high-efficiency district heating systems are being used in South Korea's Songdo IBD and are in the plans for other eco-city developments.

Micro Wind Turbines The giant windmills that dot the countryside aren't suitable for cities, where vibrations can rattle windows and the noise would be annoying. So developers are turning to microturbines. These small generators sit atop commercial or residential buildings and are designed to take advantage of the quirks of big-city wind patterns—lots of turbulence and frequent, sudden shifts in direction. The turbines are generally small, rated at one to three kilowatts each. But when installed in arrays and combined with high-efficiency solar panels, they can generate a large share of a building's energy needs, especially when the structure is equipped with a full set of energy-saving features. A handful of companies provide micro wind systems around the world, and the devices, while more expensive per kilowatt than bigger systems, have been installed at scores of locations, including PepsiCo Inc.'s Chicago office building.

Pumped Hydro Storage/Micro Hydropower Wind and solar power are notoriously fickle, producing more power than needed at some times and less than needed at others. A city that wants to rely on such intermittent sources needs to find a way to bank that power. One technique: pumped hydroelectric storage. When wind or solar power is plentiful, electricity is used to pump water to an upper reservoir; later, when power is needed, the water is allowed to flow downhill, turning turbines in the process. (The lakes have the added benefit as open-space landscaping.) Large-scale pumped-hydro systems are increasingly used for storing energy, and many isolated towns rely on small-scale micro hydro plants to generate electricity. Adding a pumped-storage capability isn't technically difficult, but it's expensive, especially on a small scale, and current technology generally requires a large "drop," or change in elevation to produce much power—though companies are working on lower-flow hydro turbines that can work in more level settings.

Walking and Biking When it comes to transportation, dense urban areas like Manhattan already have an advantage over suburbs: By packing people, jobs and services close together, they reduce the need for many car trips and provide the density to support bus and transit services. Green-city planners do even more, designing streets so that walking is safe, convenient and interesting—with wide sidewalks, landscaping and abundant crosswalks—and providing separate designated bicycle lanes. Songdo's 1,500 acres are designed so that most shops, parks and transit stops can be reached in less than a 15-minute walk, and the city also has a 15-mile network of bike lanes.

Personal Rapid Transit Not every urban trip can be made on foot, bicycle or public transit. Cities can encourage greener auto choices by providing electric-vehicle charging stations in parking garages. A futuristic solution: personal rapid transit, or PRT—pod-like, self-powered vehicles that can carry as many as six passengers. The vehicles can travel along dedicated roadways, like an automated airport transit system, or on streets equipped with buried magnets. There are no fixed schedules or routes; passengers pick their destinations, and a central computer guides the car without intermediate stops. Although still a novelty, PRTs are operating at Heathrow International Airport near London and at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Masdar City, an eco-city development in Abu Dhabi. Masdar, however, has put on hold plans to deploy the pod cars throughout the entire planned two-square-mile development.

Pneumatic Garbage Collection Even the greenest cities produce lots of garbage, which creates two problems: collecting the trash and getting rid of it. On the collection side, a centralized waste system, using an underground network of pneumatic tubes, can replace the fleets of trucks that block traffic, tear up streets and burn fossil fuels. The tubes can collect garbage from both households and outdoor trash bins and carry it to a centralized collection and sorting facility. Though some systems handle only food waste, others are set up to handle separate streams for paper and other recyclable trash. The systems are used in scores of cities world-wide; a pneumatic trash-collection system on New York's Roosevelt Island has been in operation since 1975.

Waste to Resources Getting to zero waste is as important to cities as getting to zero carbon. This doesn't mean just encouraging residents to recycle—cities also can deploy technologies to tap the energy and other valuable resources buried in the trash. Advanced anaerobic digesters process organic garbage waste and the sludge left over from treating wastewater to produce biogas, which can be burned for energy; more common in Europe, the technology is just being deployed in the U.S. for handling municipal garbage. High-temperature plasma-arc gasifiers can consume nearly the entire waste stream, making a synthetic gas that is burned to produce electricity; the leftover slag can be used in building materials. One novel approach under consideration by the PlanIT Valley project, an eco-city development planned for northern Portugal: Aluminum cans are processed with water and energy, producing aluminum oxide and hydrogen, which can then be used to power fuel cells. But because aluminum oxide requires tremendous energy to make aluminum, it may be more economically feasible just to recycle aluminum containers.

Green Roofs Rooftops, which take up a fifth of urban surface area, can be used to support solar panels or wind turbines, but they're otherwise underutilized. Covering the tops of buildings with grasses, shrubs and other plants can deliver a host of benefits. Though often more costly than traditional coverings, green roofs can provide insulation and trim a building's heating and cooling needs. They absorb rainwater, reducing the load on storm-water systems, and filter what water does run off so it can be used for many domestic needs. They also filter air pollutants.

Mr. Totty is a news editor for The Journal Report in San Francisco. He can be reached at michael.totty@wsj.com.
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