Darker Nights as Some Cities Turn Off the Lights

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

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

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

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

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.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/coned-could-be-raising-rates-even-higher-as-citys-electric-vehicle-fleet-grows-2011-12#ixzz1fic01qEp

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

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

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

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

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?

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/