Critics say wood-energy plan is barking up the wrong tree

Scottish government calls for return to timber-powered energy

By Peter John Meiklem

IT MAY sound like a throwback to the smog-filled Victorian era, but the Scottish government wants wood-powered energy to provide heating for around a quarter of a million homes and businesses by 2020.

According to targets in the Scottish Government's forthcoming renewable energy framework document, boilers powered by pellets made from compressed wood should provide around 10% of all Scotland's heating needs in a little over a decade.

But critics have pointed out that biomass fuels - the technical name for using wood-burning to generate energy - have environmental drawbacks, such as smog and deforestation, as well as a sting in the tail for the consumer who will have to find thousands of pounds to fit out their homes with the equipment needed to turn wood energy into heat.

There are also questions over whether or not the biomass industry has the ability to fulfill the government's ambitious plans. The industry in Scotland is tiny and experts claim rapid growth could be hamstrung by installation costs, wood supply, and the effect widespread use of the boilers will have on air quality in urban areas.

Experts estimate the annual turnover of the entire biomass industry in Scotland today is well under £3 million per year. Industry body Scottish Renewables has 260 members, only 15 of whom are directly active in the biomass sector.

The Scottish government has commissioned research into the effect the boilers will have on air quality.

There are also serious concerns around cost. A domestic biomass boiler costs between £4000 and £10,000 to install with a industrial boiler costing much more. A Westminster Government consultation on the best way to support people who want to install boilers closed last week.

There are further worries about the forestry industry's readiness to supply enough fuel to meet the government's biomass targets. In January, a wood fuel task force estimated the industry would need one million green tonnes - timber freshly felled - per year by 2020. That is a seventh of all the wood produced in Scotland last year.

The report concluded there would soon be "increasing competition" for the wood or timber waste material that goes into making biomass boiler fuel.

Jason Ormiston, chief executive of the Scottish Renewables Forum, said the new targets would mean a sharp increase in the current rate of boiler installation from around 1500 per year to 25,000 per year by 2020.

Ormiston, who predicted the industry could have a turnover of £275 million by 2020, said: "It's a massive jump and the real question is whether Scotland will be able to deliver that in time. We have to be confident about it. Other countries make far better use of renewables."

However, Ormiston also said there were considerable challenges facing the SNP government in pulling off the project. He pointed to pollution from wood-burning, the pressure on forestry, the cost to consumers and the huge growth needed to meet the demands.

John MacLennan, manager of the Nevis centre in Aviemore, said the community centre and sports building was about to install a biomass boiler that would cost £180,000 and is expected to save about £20,000 a year.

Alistair McGlynn, a manger for biomass fuel manufacturers Balcas, called for better incentives for customers and boiler installation companies.

Balcas is building a wood pellet production factory in Invergordon. The plant will produce 100,000 tons of pellets a year when it opens next year.

He said he had no concerns about finding enough wood to fuel his factory and "the new targets are a fantastic opportunity for the whole industry".

The Scottish government said the report would be published shortly.

http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.2453801.0.critics_say_woodenergy_plan_is_barking_up_the_wrong_tree.php

Plug-in cars sparking a power shift

Studies show how drivers — and power grids — adjust to electric vehicles

City of Seattle Seattle City Light's plug-in hybrid electric Prius is part of a pilot project to study how such vehicles will affect electrical usage in the future.

By Alan Boyle

Science editor

MSNBC

updated 9:03 p.m. ET, Tues., Sept. 23, 2008

SEATTLE - Traffic was piling up going from West Seattle to Interstate 5 — and that meant Rich Feldman had to drive a few feet and stop, over and over, all the way up the access ramp.

As they looked out at the line of cars ahead of their plug-in Toyota Prius, Feldman and the business executive sitting beside him, John Clark, couldn't have been happier.

"This is the perfect kind of traffic. We lovetraffic like this," Clark enthused. A couple of minutes later, Clark peeked at his laptop computer and gave Feldman the good news: "You're at 159 on this trip," he said. That's 159miles per gallon.

Feldman, a senior policy adviser in the Seattle mayor's office, and Clark, the president and chief executive officer of Seattle-based V2Green, were giving an on-the-road demonstration of how plug-in electric vehicles will change the way people think about driving — and about using electricity.

The converted Toyota Prius that Feldman was driving is the first of 14 vehicles that will be used by Seattle's municipal utility and other regional agencies to gather data on plug-in driving patterns, as part of a yearlong experiment monitored by the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory.

V2Green — which was acquired just this week by another clean-energy company, Virginia-based GridPoint — is providing hardware and software enhancements that will let researchers monitor every move the cars make. V2Green's system sends telemetry from the car continuously via a cellular phone link to a remote computer. The readings are analyzed on a remote computer, and then posted on a password-protected Web site.

The read-outs on the car's speed, mileage, fuel economy and location are far more detailed than the numbers displayed on the Prius' dashboard display. What's more, they can be checked remotely on a wireless laptop (like Clark's) or back at the Idaho Falls lab, usually in real time. The experiment serves as a minute-by-minute reality check for the current hype over plug-in hybrids.

"It's looking at the vehicles first, and asking if this is a feasible way, economically and technologically, to move people," said Jim Francfort, the project's lead researcher.

The hot new thing
Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, or PHEVs, are the hot new thing in automotive technology: Some cars, such as Seattle City Light's motor-pool Prius, are already being converted into PHEVs. Toyota as well as GM, Chrysler and other automakers are talking about rolling out showroom-ready PHEVs in the 2010 time frame.

At current energy rates, the per-mile cost of running an electric vehicle is about a quarter the equivalent cost for gasoline. That doesn't consider the higher up-front cost of electric vehicles or the back-end cost of battery replacement. There may be other factors that affect PHEV performance as well, and that's the whole point of the pilot projects being conducted in Seattle and elsewhere.

The Energy Department is working with utilities across the country to measure the actual performance of present-day PHEVs, and figure out how their rise could affect electrical usage patterns in the years ahead. The studies could lead to "smart charging" technologies, with incentives for consumers who charge up their cars during off-peak hours.

Previous studies have found that no additional power plants would be required to power the millions of PHEVs expected to be on U.S. roads in 2030 — that is, if off-peak smart charging is available. But if every PHEV driver decided to charge up at 5 p.m., researchers said 160 additional large plants would have to be built in the next 20 years to handle the load.

Invisible to consumers
Colorado-based Xcel Energy has been studying smart-charging techniques over the past year as part of its SmartGridCity pilot project. Consumers can plug in their specially equipped Ford Escape PHEVs anytime they want to. However, the actual charging is scheduled by the utility, based on the car's driving history. Xcel switches on the flow of power into the car's batteries via a cell-phone link.

The next phase of the experiment will test vehicle-to-grid electrical flow. The "V2G" scheme would enable a utility to borrow power from a plugged-in car's battery to cope with peak electrical loads (with the car owner's advance permission, of course). Once the peak has passed, the borrowed power would be put back in the battery. Like smart charging, V2G would provide a payoff to the consumer in the form of a rate break or a rebate for utility charges.

Sandy K. Simon, Xcel's director of utility innovation and SmartGrid strategy, said the smart-charging experiment has worked pretty much as expected so far. The system is essentially invisible to consumers.

"We haven't had any issues with the battery being drawn down when they needed it," she said.

When it comes to plug-ins, the most noticeable adjustment takes place behind the wheel rather than under the hood. "What we did see was huge behavioral changes in how people drive," Simon said.

PHEVolution at work
The behavioral changes sparked by plug-in vehicles were on full display during last week's test drive with Feldman. Every move was as gradual as possible — including his smooth acceleration to blend into freeway traffic, even when a cement truck was coming up close behind.

Studies have shown that less aggressive driving is one of the biggest factor behind better fuel economy — not only for PHEVs and other hybrids, but for traditional gasoline-powered vehicles as well. Punching on the accelerator uses up more spurts of gasoline than gently getting up to your cruising speed.

"The smoother you are, the better off you are," Feldman explained.

The big difference for hybrids — and particularly for the V2Green-equipped PHEVs — is that the miles-per-gallon readings are continuously on display. Even if you're not reading the numbers, you know that someone else is. For example, Francfort could check a GPS display on his office computer in Idaho to check on Feldman's mileage performance in Seattle, and even see which lane on I-5 he was driving in.

"How am I doing?" Feldman asked Francfort over a speaker phone. "Do I have a lead foot?"

"No," Francfort answered. "I think 106 miles per gallon is not so bad."

Feldman was getting that kind of mileage because much of the power was coming from the Hymotion lithium-ion battery that was installed in the Prius' trunk, at a conversion cost of roughly $10,000. The extra electrical boost means the car's gasoline engine comes on less frequently, at least until the batteries run down.

Sweet spot for electric power
Feldman, who drives a standard-issue Prius when he's off-duty, said he can notice a difference between his own car and the city-owned PHEV when he drives up an incline. The PHEV could take an uphill access ramp without a single gasoline-fired boost. "In my car, I cannot do this," Feldman said.

PHEVs don't give you much of a fuel economy advantage for a trip around the block, because the gasoline engine has to be fired up at first to warm up the catalytic converter. And the all-electric advantage fades away on an extended trip when the batteries run out. But for a medium-length trip, a PHEV is just right.

For example, on the 18.3-mile trip out from West Seattle across Lake Washington to Redmond, Feldman hit a fuel economy mark of 108 miles per gallon by using just 0.17 gallon of gas. By that time, however, the batteries were drained to 11 percent of capacity. The 13.3-mile trip back to downtown Seattle used up 0.22 gallons of gas, resulting in a 60-mpg performance.

When V2Green's software added up all of that day's trips, the distance driven came to a little more than 40 miles. That used up half a gallon of gas, which translates to 81 miles per gallon. Total cost, including the price tag for 3.98 kilowatts of electricity: $2.91.

That's the kind of real-world data that the Idaho National Laboratory hopes to pile up over the next year or so. As a result, carmakers may find it worth their while to build additional intelligence into future electric vehicles. Utilities just might enlist smart-charging technology and incentive programs to accommodate a new wave of drivers. And drivers could be using new gizmos to save money at the gas pump — and on their electric bill.

It might even be fun.

"This is the next level up," Feldman said, pointing to Clark's laptop. "People are really going to get into computer-game mode in terms of seeing what they can do."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26843591/

September 28, 2008

It isn’t easy to be green

The landmark buildings that are failing to live up to their environmental ambitions

Jonathan Leake

It began with such good intentions. When work started on Portcullis House, the landmark Thameside project designed to provide modern offices for MPs, it promised to be one of the greenest buildings in London.

The £247m building would use a third of the energy required by a similar-sized prestige office block, Ove Arup and Partners, the project engineer, told the National Audit Office in 2002.

That works out at an annual total energy consumption of about 90 kilowatt-hours per square metre. The current best practice for an air-condi-tioned office block is about 250 kilowatt-hours per square metre per year, not a long way from what you might expect from a modern home.

But it took a parliamentary question earlier this year from Peter Ainsworth, the Conservative environment spokesman, to winkle out the fact that Portcullis House is consuming about 400 kilowatt hours per square metre - more than four times what was envisaged.

The answer went on to add that: “A number of measures are under consideration which could lead to a significant reduction in consumption.” However, it was fairly clear that Portcullis House will never be the low-carbon building taxpayers were promised.

Ainsworth was angry: “It was supposed to be an example the rest of the country could follow and instead it’s an embarrassment.”

A spokesman from Ove Arup told The Sunday Times: “Portcullis House is not a standard office building. It is used for longer and by more people than envisaged or standard . . . Arup is continuing to advise the Parliamentary Works Directorate on the reduction of the building’s carbon footprint.” Portcullis House is just one of many commercial buildings, sold as low-carbon, where the actual performance turns out to be less impressive. City Hall, which houses the Mayor of London’s office, was designed to be one of the most energy efficient and sustainable structures in the capital. It included special cladding, thermal glass and an air conditioning system that uses artesian well water. But staff have complained that working there is like being in a greenhouse - and solar panels recently installed at a cost of £730,000 have proved capable of producing only 1.5% of the building’s power.

It’s not always fair to blame the building designers. Occupants often install far more equipment and staff than their properties were designed for and then fail to run their energy management systems efficiently. The Swiss Re building in the City of London, better known as the Gherkin, was designed by Norman Foster with advanced energy-saving systems including shafts between floors providing natural ventilation and windows that opened. It recently emerged, however, that such systems have been compromised by tenants erecting partitions that block or alter the natural airflow.

A statement from Evans Randall, the investment bank that bought the Gherkin with German property firm IVG in February 2007, confirmed that partitions had been added “to provide the privacy and security needed for subletting”, but said it was too early to comment on energy use. “The building is only now reaching the point where year-on-year comparisons of energy consumption are possible,” Evans Randall said.

Housing developments have similar problems. One of Britain’s best-known attempts at low-carbon housing is BedZed, the Beddington Zero Energy Development, near Croydon, south London. It was meant to get much of its energy from an onsite combined heat and power plant fuelled by woodchips but the system failed, forcing the developers to resort to the national grid.

Although it is easy to look for faults in such innovative developments, it is through their pioneering work that we can learn what succeeds and what fails. David Strong, formerly managing director of the Building Research Establishment’s environment division and now chief executive of Inbuilt, a sustainable building consultancy, believes overcomplexity is one of the emerging themes.

“The more complicated you make these systems for saving energy and cutting emissions, the more likely they are to break down,” he says. “Even if they don’t break, they fail because the occupants and managers of the building simply forget how to run things properly. Bad practices creep in so that all the potentially excellent design features become pointless. Ideally, low-carbon buildings should have passive systems that manage themselves.”

Bill Bordass, of William Bordass Associates, a buildings performance consultancy, says it is wrong to assume that new or refurbished buildings automatically will have lower-energy consumption and emissions. “Businesses tend to put more kit and more people into modern buildings and there is little pressure to make them efficient. Most of the benchmarking systems date back to the 1980s and there has been little pressure to change because, until recently, energy was a relatively small cost for most businesses.”

How much does this matter? A lot, according to the Carbon Trust, the organisation set up by the government to try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from business. “Nondomestic buildings generate nearly a fifth of Britain’s CO2 emissions,” says Mark Williamson, the trust’s director of innovations. “Reducing those emissions will be an essential part of meeting Britain’s commitment to cut CO2 emissions by at least 60% by 2050.”

Owners and occupiers are coming under increasing pressure to cut emissions from buildings. Since April this year, energy performance certificates have been required as part of the construction, sale or lease of large nondomestic buildings and the same rules will apply to most other commercial buildings from the beginning of next month. And public buildings with a floor space of more than 1,000 square metres will have to display information on energy efficiency to visitors – a naming and shaming tactic that will apply to some of Britain’s most famous buildings, from art galleries to town halls.

Hitting the 2050 target presents a problem for landlords and owners. About 60% of the commercial buildings that will be operating then have already been built – and 40% will predate 1985. How can they be brought up to scratch? “The average commercial building gets a complete refurbishment every 20-30 years,” says Williamson. “By 2050 almost all the buildings now standing will have had the chance to be upgraded and made energy efficient. It is a huge opportunity.”

There is, however, also a big risk. Studies show that most companies carry out refurbishments for reasons such as improving their brand image, expanding office space or achieving higher rental values. Cutting carbon emissions is seldom high on the agenda, so most refurbishments actually lead to higher carbon emissions.

Tom Delay, the Carbon Trust’s chief executive, says: “Low-carbon refurbishment is not constrained by the availability of appropriate technologies. The key issue is commitment.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/career_and_jobs/careers_in/careers_in_energy/article4836746.ece

Nickels: No change in '09 electricity rates

While the City Council considers steep increases for water and garbage rates, Seattle customers will not see a change to their electric...

By Sharon Pian Chan
Seattle Times staff reporter
While the City Council considers steep increases for water and garbage rates, Seattle customers will not see a change to their electric rates in 2009.

Mayor Greg Nickels announced Friday that rates at Seattle City Light, about 6 cents per kilowatt hour for residential customers, will stay the same next year due to rainfall, wholesale energy prices and inflation.  "Any number of financial factors come into play," said Scott Thomsen, spokesman for the public utility. "We've enjoyed pretty good water this year."

The average monthly bill for a single-family home is currently $47.58. The council reduced rates in 2007 and 2008 by an average of 8.4 percent. During the 2000 and 2001 energy crisis, rates soared 58 percent.

Councilmember Bruce Harrell called the mayor's announcement, which does not require council approval, the right step.  "We're doing a good job, I think, in terms of keeping our costs lower" and prioritizing conservation, said Harrell, who chairs the committee that oversees City Light.

The announcement comes as council members question increases proposed for Seattle Public Utilities' water and garbage-collection customers.  The utility recommended a 29 percent increase for garbage collection to $29.65 for a single-family home with a 32-gallon garbage can and 96-gallon yard-waste bin. The garbage rates are a result of new collection contracts the council approved earlier this year, which will add weekly food-waste collection and replace trucks with natural-gas-burning vehicles.

Water rates would increase 18 percent to $29.05 per month for the average single-family home to pay for capital improvements to the system.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008208260_electric27m.html

Mitchell Joachim: Redesign Cities From Scratch

By Tom Vanderbilt  09.22.08

Photo: Bruce Gilden

Dressed in architect black and sporting dreadlocks,Mitchell Joachim isn't your average Whole Foods envirogeek. For one thing, he speaks in an intense staccato punctuated with words like peristaltic and epiphetic. And don't get him started on sustainability. "I don't like the term," he says. "It's not evocative enough. You don't want your marriage to be sustainable. You want to be evolving, nurturing, learning." Efficiency doesn't cut it, either: "It just means less bad." Even zero emissions falls short. "This table does zero damage," he says, thumping the one in his office. "No VOCs, no carbons. Whatever. It doesn't do anything positive."

Joachim spent a decade working with architect Michael Sorkin, followed by a short spell with Frank Gehry. He now teaches at Columbia University and is a partner at Terreform 1, a nonprofit focused on ecological design. A kind of Frederick Law Olmsted for the 21st century, he spends most of his time thinking about how to reduce the ecological footprint of cities. It's not a short-term project. "It took 15 to 20 years to get a hybrid car," he says. "To change the basic paradigm for how we make buildings, 40 to 50 years. To change a city? That's 100 to 150 years." If the next president is smart, he'll want to get started sooner rather than later.

At the top of the agenda, Joachim says, is mobility and its inefficiencies. Citing US Department of Energy statistics, he says that while 29 percent of the nation's energy expenditure--what he calls "the suck"--now goes toward getting around, "in 50 years that will double." Among the biggest sources of waste, he argues, is the automobile--not only in energy but in the space it occupies (cars, he notes, spend more than 90 percent of the day parked). For nearly a century, Joachim says, "cities have been designed around cars. Why not design a car around a city?" So he did just that. One of his concept vehicles, the City Car , was named to Time magazine's Inventions of the Year list in 2007.

His various cars would be less machine than Facebook on wheels. Instead of rpm gauges, there'd be social networking software telling drivers where their friends are and how to get there. Made from neoprene and other soft materials, cars would no longer suffer traffic-fouling fender benders, merely what he calls "gentle congestion"--picture a flock of urban sheep grazing against one other. Like Zipcar vehicles, the cars would be shared. They would "read" potholes and send warnings to nearby drivers and city repair crews. Urban parking would be eased by intelligent real-time supply and demand management, with people bidding remotely for available spots. Of course, there'd also be more spaces to begin with, since his cars could be folded and stacked like shopping carts. The average New York City block could handle 880 of the vehicles, he says.

In this vision of downtown Atlanta (based on Joachim's renderings), the city is transformed by wind power and flooded parking lots. 
Illustration by Christoph Nieman

For Joachim, reinventing the city doesn't stop at the curb; he's been reimagining just about every part of the modern urban landscape. To help cool Atlanta, Joachim suggests flooding an area of the city now filled with parking lots to create a "munificent pool"--a large pond filled with fish, plants, and algae, surrounded by trees. It would counteract the urban "heat island" effect and process gray water and sewage. The waterworks would be powered by wind turbines.

Some of Joachim's ideas are more conceptual than practical: His vision for the future of New York City includes airborne public transit. He imagines low-hung blimps tethered to buildings, moving through the city 24/7. They would function like a ski lift, and commuters could hop on and off with relative ease. "We put the funk in functionalism," he says.

Architecture needs radical reengineering, too, and Joachim envisions a retro-futurist alternative for home building: "Let's grow it onsite." That's the concept behind his Fab Tree Hab, currently on view at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Rather than cutting down a tree and transporting it from forest to mill to lumber-yard to building site, the house is the tree. It's the ancient art of "pleaching"--training and joining plants to create structures--with a 21st-century twist, using milling software to achieve precise geometries. "You can pregrow a village with no consequence on the land," he says. "In fact, with a positive carbon contribution."

Or why not build cities out of garbage? Joachim notes that if you could somehow convert waste into construction material, you could make another Empire State Building out of what New Yorkers throw away in two weeks. There's enough trash in the city's , he says, to "remake Manhattan island seven times at full scale." That this sounds a bit like a recent Pixar release in which a robot builds towers of unrecycled trash isn't lost on Joachim, who recently gave a talk at Disney on making its theme parks greener. Wall-E destroyed a lot of my visions," he says. "They really did it so well." Not to worry: There's always room for another visionary in Tomorrowland.

http://www.wired.com/politics/law/magazine/16-10/sl_joachim