United Kingdom : GE s Gas Engine CHP Systems Set to Power London 2012 Olympic Games

Power Industry News (press release)

Two new energy centers in London s Stratford City and Kings Yard areas are ready to supply 10 megawatts (MW) of efficient power, heating and cooling for the London 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games as well as East London s businesses and residential areas after the Games conclude. Three of GE s (NYSE: GE) 3.3-MW ecomagination-qualified Jenbacher J620 cogeneration units are powering the energy centers and generating electricity equivalent to the amount used by 24,000 average U.K. homes.

The energy center initiative is a cornerstone of London 2012 s plan to increase the use of alternative energy, water conservation and recycling to minimize the environmental impact of the Games. The London Olympic Delivery Authority built the facilities to help reach its target of a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions while meeting the city s power needs that are expected to surge as more than 15,000 athletes and millions of spectators arrive for the Games.

The energy centers are designed to operate in combined cooling, heat and power or trigeneration mode to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Chilled water is generated by absorption chillers using the high-temperature heat available from the exhaust of the unit. Combined heat and power (CHP) technologies are more efficient than using separate electrical and thermal power systems and thus helps to reduce emissions from power generation. By using this technology, about 13,000 tons of CO2 savings can be achieved. This amount of greenhouse gas emission savings is equivalent to the annual CO2 emissions emitted by about 6,500 European Union (EU) passenger cars.

Our energy centers powered by GE s gas engines are not only crucial to the success of the London 2012 Olympic Games but also for the goal of establishing a more sustainable business and residential environment throughout the city long after the Games have ended, said Simon Wright, director of infrastructure and utilities for the Olympic Delivery Authority. The Stratford City and Kings Yard energy centers are expected to support future commercial development in East London for at least 40 years.

The first energy center, featuring two of GE s J620 natural gas cogeneration modules, is located in the Stratford City development area and will support various Olympic Park activities as well as commercial redevelopment in East London.

The second energy center, located at Kings Yard on the western end of Olympic Park, features one J620 cogeneration system that will generate thermal power for the aquatics center s swimming pools and other venues via the Olympic Park s district heating network. The Kings Yard facility also will generate electrical and thermal power for other venues, homes and buildings in the area. Both energy centers will include boilers that use natural gas as feedstock to generate additional heat to meet peak demands.

http://www.utilityproducts.com/news/2012/07/26/united-kingdom-ge-s-gas-engine-chp-systems-set-to-power-london-2012-olympic-games.html

More French Power Flowing to Britain in Time for Games

By REUTERS

July 27, 2012

CALAIS, France (Reuters) - Paris may not have won its bid to stage the 2012 Olympics, but France is doing its bit for the London games, supplying electricity through a 70 km-long under-sea link that has been upgraded just in time for Friday's opening ceremony.

The 90 million euro ($110.70 million) upgrade to the more than 25-year old power connection between Folkestone, England and Sangatte, France, was completed last week, after two years of work on the ageing and outage-prone cable link.

"This is an investment for the next 25, 30 years, it had to be done anyway. But our objective was to be ready for the Games," said Dominique Houdard, North-East director of the French grid operator RTE, at a press trip this week.

With a capacity of 2,000 MW, enough to supply the needs of 2 million people, the IFA 2000 connection started transporting electricity between Britain and France in 1986, plugging the British Isles to the continent's power grid for the first time.

At the time, 45 kms (28 miles) of copper cables had to be laid 1.5 meter deep in the soft, limestone seabed of the Channel by a subsea robot. At each end, an inverter plant converts the regular, alternating current into more transportable direct current.

"France was in overcapacity and a big exporter of electricity in the 1980s and 1990s, so England was a welcome market, while England was gaining access to cheaper electricity without having to build plants on its soil," Bruno Baronian, project manager at RTE, told reporters.

Until 2000, the flow was almost exclusively towards Britain, but RTE and Britain's National Grid opened the capacity to competition in 2001, and flows from Britain to France now account for about a third of total volumes.

In 2006, a year after London was awarded the Olympic Games, RTE and National Grid decided to upgrade the interconnector, which had about 30 incidents every year, with French turbine maker Alstom being picked for the renovation work.

RTE invested 50 million euros, and National Grid about 40 million euros, RTE's Baronian said.

Over the last two years, half of the capacity was cut during work that took place in the spring and summer of 2011 and 2012, maintaining the full 2,000 MW output in the winter, when power consumption is at its peak.

In practical terms, new converters -- sparkling new metallic structures equipped with about 2,000 valves --, cooling systems and a command control were installed in the huge, red-concrete Mandarins inverter plant near Calais.

The whole installation is now ready to supply French electricity to British homes in time for the 800-MW increase in power demand expected by Britain's National Grid on Friday night, when millions of Britons will turn on their telly to watch the opening ceremony masterminded by Oscar-winning film director Danny Boyle.

($1 = 0.8130 euros)

(Additional reporting by Karolin Schaps in London; editing by James Jukwey)

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2012/07/27/sports/olympics/27reuters-oly-power-france.html?hp

Ceremony to Cause Spike in UK Power Demand

By REUTERS

July 27, 2012

LONDON (Reuters) - British electricity demand is set to soar following London's Olympics opening ceremony on Friday, the country's energy network operator said, as millions return to their daily routine by switching on the kettle or the washing machine.

At about 2120 GMT on Friday, when director Danny Boyle's "Isles of Wonder" show will be winding down, electricity usage in Britain is expected to rise by 800 megawatts (MW), enough to boil 320,000 kettles or power the cities of Bristol and Plymouth combined.

"Before 10.00 p.m. demand will be down because people won't be doing anything but watching the television," said a spokesman for National Grid, the company that manages the country's electricity and gas networks.

France is doing its bit for the event, supplying electricity through a 70 km-long under-sea link that has been upgraded just in time for Friday's ceremony.

The 90 million euro ($110 million) upgrade to the more than 25-year old connection, between Folkestone in England and Sangatte in France, was completed last week, after two years of work on the outage-prone cable that at times restricted power flows.

Big events such as important football games or the Armistice Day's 2-minute silence usually affect electricity demand as a large number of users start or stop consuming energy at the same moment.

The biggest sudden swing in electricity demand Britain has ever seen was after England's defeat to West Germany in the 1990 football World Cup, when consumption shot up by 2,800 MW.

Remembrance Day's 2-minute silence typically reduces electricity demand by 2,000 MW and a big football match will shave off 1,200 MW of power demand. (Reporting by Karolin Schaps; Additional reporting by Michel Rose in Paris; Editing by Anthony Barker)

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2012/07/27/sports/olympics/27reuters-oly-ceremony-power-day0.html?_r=1&hp

Weather Extremes Leave Parts of U.S. Grid Buckling

By MATTHEW L. WALD and JOHN SCHWARTZ

July 25, 2012
New York Times

WASHINGTON — From highways in Texas to nuclear power plants in Illinois, the concrete, steel and sophisticated engineering that undergird the nation’s infrastructure are being taxed to worrisome degrees by heat, drought and vicious storms.

On a single day this month here, a US Airways regional jet became stuck in asphalt that had softened in 100-degree temperatures, and a subway train derailed after the heat stretched the track so far that it kinked — inserting a sharp angle into a stretch that was supposed to be straight. In East Texas, heat and drought have had a startling effect on the clay-rich soils under highways, which “just shrink like crazy,” leading to “horrendous cracking,” said Tom Scullion, senior research engineer with the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University. In Northeastern and Midwestern states, he said, unusually high heat is causing highway sections to expand beyond their design limits, press against each other and “pop up,” creating jarring and even hazardous speed bumps.

Excessive warmth and dryness are threatening other parts of the grid as well. In the Chicago area, a twin-unit nuclear plant had to get special permission to keep operating this month because the pond it uses for cooling water rose to 102 degrees; its license to operate allows it to go only to 100. According to the Midwest Independent System Operator, the grid operator for the region, a different power plant had had to shut because the body of water from which it draws its cooling water had dropped so low that the intake pipe became high and dry; another had to cut back generation because cooling water was too warm.

The frequency of extreme weather is up over the past few years, and people who deal with infrastructure expect that to continue. Leading climate models suggest that weather-sensitive parts of the infrastructure will be seeing many more extreme episodes, along with shifts in weather patterns and rising maximum (and minimum) temperatures.

“We’ve got the ‘storm of the century’ every year now,” said Bill Gausman, a senior vice president and a 38-year veteran at the Potomac Electric Power Company, which took eight days to recover from the June 29 “derecho” storm that raced from the Midwest to the Eastern Seaboard and knocked out power for 4.3 million people in 10 states and the District of Columbia.

In general, nobody in charge of anything made of steel and concrete can plan based on past trends, said Vicki Arroyo, who heads the Georgetown Climate Center at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, a clearinghouse on climate-change adaptation strategies.

Highways, Mr. Scullion noted, are designed for the local climate, taking into account things like temperature and rainfall. “When you get outside of those things, man, all bets are off.” As weather patterns shift, he said, “we could have some very dramatic failures of highway systems.”

Adaptation efforts are taking place nationwide. Some are as huge as the multibillion-dollar effort to increase the height of levees and flood walls in New Orleans because of projections of rising sea levels and stronger storms to come; others as mundane as resizing drainage culverts in Vermont, where Hurricane Irene damaged about 2,000 culverts. “They just got blown out,” said Sue Minter, the Irene recovery officer for the state.

In Washington, the subway system, which opened in 1976, has revised its operating procedures. Authorities will now watch the rail temperature and order trains to slow down if it gets too hot. When railroads install tracks in cold weather, they heat the metal to a “neutral” temperature so it reaches a moderate length, and will withstand the shrinkage and growth typical for that climate. But if the heat historically seen in the South becomes normal farther north, the rails will be too long for that weather, and will have an increased tendency to kink. So railroad officials say they will begin to undertake much more frequent inspection.

Some utilities are re-examining long-held views on the economics of protecting against the weather. Pepco, the utility serving the area around Washington, has repeatedly studied the idea of burying more power lines, and the company and its regulators have always decided that the cost outweighed the benefit. But the company has had five storms in the last two and a half years for which recovery took at least five days, and after the derecho last month, the consensus has changed. Both the District of Columbia and Montgomery County, Md., have held hearings to discuss the option — though in the District alone, the cost would be $1.1 billion to $5.8 billion, depending on how many of the power lines were put underground.

Even without storms, heat waves are changing the pattern of electricity use, raising peak demand higher than ever. That implies the need for new investment in generating stations, transmission lines and local distribution lines that will be used at full capacity for only a few hundred hours a year. “We build the system for the 10 percent of the time we need it,” said Mark Gabriel, a senior vice president of Black & Veatch, an engineering firm. And that 10 percent is “getting more extreme.”

Even as the effects of weather extremes become more evident, precisely how to react is still largely an open question, said David Behar, the climate program director for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. “We’re living in an era of assessment, not yet in an area of adaptation,” he said.

He says that violent storms and forest fires can be expected to affect water quality and water use: runoff from major storms and falling ash could temporarily shut down reservoirs. Deciding how to address such issues is the work of groups like the Water Utility Climate Alliance, of which he is a member. “In some ways, the science is still catching up with the need of water managers for high-quality projection,” he said.

Some needs are already known. San Francisco will spend as much as $40 million to modify discharge pipes for treated wastewater to prevent bay water from flowing back into the system.

Even when state and local officials know what they want to do, they say they do not always get the cooperation they would like from the federal government. Many agencies have officially expressed a commitment to plan for climate change, but sometimes the results on the ground can be frustrating, said Ms. Minter of Vermont. For instance, she said, Vermont officials want to replace the old culverts with bigger ones. “We think it’s an opportunity to build back in a more robust way,” she said. But the Federal Emergency Management Agency wants to reuse the old culverts that washed out, or replace them with similar ones, she said.

Ms. Arroyo of Georgetown said the federal government must do more. “They are not acknowledging that the future will look different from the past,” she said, “and so we keep putting people and infrastructure in harm’s way.”

Matthew L. Wald reported from Washington, and John Schwartz from New York.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/26/us/rise-in-weather-extremes-threatens-infrastructure.html?_r=1&hp

Save Kilowatts, Win a Prize

By DIANE CARDWELL

NY Times

July 24, 2012

With temperatures hovering near a sweaty 100 degrees in recent weeks, the nation’s electric utilities have been taking to Facebook and Twitter, urging customers to conserve energy in the hopes of avoiding blackouts and other strains on the system.

At Duke Energy, the country’s largest utility after its merger with Progress Energy, the effort has included something beyond the usual messages to turn down the air-conditioner. The company is promoting a series of Web videos featuring a fictitious girl named Shannon who appears with her family, the Powers, to dispense energy-saving advice.

“This summer, why not use a clothesline to dry your clothes instead of a dryer?” Shannon, also known as Bossy Pants, suggests while pinning up the family wash in a clip promoted recently on Youtility, Duke’s Facebook page for energy efficiency. “You’ll save a lot on your energy bill and your clothes will come out nice and fresh.”

The series, started last summer, is just one way that Duke and other electric companies across the country are trying to use social media, competitive games and Big Brotherish data analysis to push customers to buy less of the electricity they sell.

While it seems counterintuitive for utilities to discourage use of their product, it actually makes financial sense as they face government mandates to encourage more energy conservation and deal with the rising cost and difficulty of building power plants and distribution systems.

So in Chicago, a household that uses a lot of electricity might receive a mailing showing that more energy-efficient neighbors wash their clothes in cold water, along with a coupon for Tide Coldwater detergent. In Texas, customers can compete to be named the Biggest Energy Saver and get a shot at winning new appliances, home improvement gift cards or $5,000 to put toward a wind turbine. And outside Boston, customers earn points for saving energy that they can redeem for meals at local restaurants or a $10 discount at Whole Foods.

Motivating people to save energy isn’t really about the money, behavior experts say. Successful programs foster a sense of achievement and identity. And competing to beat your friends and neighbors at the savings game doesn’t hurt.

Many of these programs are still in their infancy, and it remains to be seen whether a significant number of customers want to work with their utility companies over energy savings; most customers become interested in their electricity only when it doesn’t work, executives and experts say. The Duke Youtility page, for instance, has fewer than 3,300 “likes,” and most of the recent comments complain about power failures, rate increases and the company’s troubled merger with Progress Energy.

But utilities hope to tap into the same dynamic that works for video games and applications like Foursquare, where users compete against one another to earn bragging rights, like becoming “mayor” of a favorite restaurant.

Opower, a leading home energy management company, has shown promising results with its keeping-up-with-the-Joneses approach, sending people reports on how their electricity use compares with households in their neighborhoods — complete with a smiley face, or two, depending on how they stack up. The company has created an app with Facebook and the Natural Resources Defense Council that can load a user’s energy data and allow people to compete with their friends and family.

Soon, said Daniel Yates, a co-founder of Opower, customers of the roughly 75 utilities he works with will be able to earn electronic badges saying things like “Congratulations: You are an energy saver” for cutting their bills.

While it might sound hokey, the strategy works. Tom Lyons, a customer of Pacific Gas and Electric in San Jose, Calif., said Opower’s feedback was reinforcing. “You’re getting some nourishment or some reward from the energy report and the smiley faces,” he said.

When his conservation efforts slip, he said, it makes him dig for the reason: extra company that month, working more from home or his daughter having a couple of sleepovers “where they were yakking, watching TV with all the lights on in the room until 3 a.m.”

States and utilities have run conservation programs for decades, with some success. Many households have compact fluorescent bulbs, Energy Star-rated appliances and even programmable thermostats.

But the current efforts are aimed at helping customers to change their habits as well.

“I think we’ve transcended the equipment and the shell of the house, and now we’re talking about the how,” said Tom Baron, senior program manager for residential energy efficiency at National Grid, an electric and gas utility in the Northeast. “Not, ‘What in my house uses energy?’ but, ‘How do I use it?’ ”

The need to find ways to encourage long-term conservation is ever more critical, utility executives and efficiency experts say. At least 25 states have set specific goals for reductions in energy use that in many cases will continue to increase even as electrical demands and the grid’s complexity keep growing.

In 2010, the total budget for utility customer energy efficiency programs was $4.6 billion, up more than four times from the $1.1 billion spent on such programs a decade earlier, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. The vast potential of the energy efficiency market has spurred interest in home energy management from major companies like Verizon and Comcast as well as a fleet of start-ups.

But getting people to care about their electricity and work with their utilities is a battle. Electricity is “boring and it’s cheap,” said Alex Laskey, an Opower co-founder. Many efforts have already foundered: Microsoft, Google and Cisco Systems have pulled back from their ventures, and Tendril, a start-up that works with utilities including Southern California Edison and Con Ed, lost two executives and cut its staff in May, as it raised money to finance its operations.

Part of the challenge is that while most people see saving money as a good thing, it is not enough by itself to change habits in the long term. The average household spends about 2 percent of its income on electricity, so a 10 percent reduction in power use doesn’t add up to much, Mr. Laskey said.

Instead, people can be motivated by more emotional factors, like the sense of achievement that comes from setting and reaching goals or one-upping a neighbor, or the sense of belonging that comes from mimicking friends or participating in a communitywide challenge.

Nonetheless, a little financial reward, coupled with a clear display of energy savings, can be just the nudge customers need.

One program managed by C3, a company that contracts with utilities to run loyalty programs, awards participants two points for every kilowatt-hour less in electricity they use each month compared with the year before they joined. Customers can redeem the points for gift cards or discounts at places like Staples and Amazon.com, or local restaurants and shops. The company uses demographic and behavioral information to present specific offers to customers — discounts on school supplies in the fall to households with children, for instance, said Tom Scaramellino, senior vice president and general manager of C3.

Mark Lattanzi, who has been in the program for about a year through the Western Massachusetts Electric Company, said he had shaved about a third off his bill, through replacing his old electric water heater and a range of small behavior changes like turning off the lights and using the clothesline. It helps, he said, to receive an automatic monthly e-mail that shows how his electricity use compares with the same month in his baseline year.

And the rewards points are an incentive, too. Mr. Lattanzi has already earned a $10 gift card for Whole Foods and is waiting to use the rest at restaurants that are joining the program.

“Restaurants that I already go to are giving me discounts and gift cards because I saved a little money on my electric bill?” he said. “That’s a win-win.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/business/in-energy-conservation-utilities-focus-on-bragging-rights.html?pagewanted=all

New Research Finds Urban Form Plays Little Role in Sustainability

Nate Berg

The Atlantic 

One need not look far to find a passionate argument that the compact city is the green city. Having more people in a smaller area results in less energy use for transportation purposes, lower greenhouse gas emissions, and greater efficiencies in the use of various resources. Cramming more people into a smaller space makes our cities more sustainable. Or does it? New research published in the spring issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association finds that – unlike today's dominant narrative of the green city – urban form may actually have very little impact on energy use and other measures of sustainability.

Researchers from the universities of Cambridge, Newcastle, and Leeds looked at three English metropolitan areas of various sizes and ran them through computer models that imposed three different urban forms over the course of 30 years. Each area was modeled as a hyper-dense city with tight restrictions on land use, an urban growth boundary and prioritized transit development, a sprawling, market-driven urban form that had few restrictions on land use, and a middle ground based on English new towns, or those planned suburban-style developments on the outskirts of larger cities. Each urban form – compaction, dispersal, expansion – was modeled on the three areas between the years 2001 and 2031 and evaluated on the basis on 26 different measures of sustainability – from pollution levels to degradation of water systems to the energy consumption of buildings and people. The models showed only very slight differences between the three urban forms.

"To our surprise, if you compare the compact form versus the current trend, the difference in reduced transport by automobile is very minor. And if you allow the city to expand, the increase in the use of the car is only marginal," says Marcial Echenique, a professor at the University of Cambridge Department of Architecture and one of the authors of the report. "If you make the city more compact, it doesn't mean that people will abandon their car. Only 5 percent of people abandon the use of the car. Ninety-five percent carries on using the car, which means there are more cars on the same streets, therefore there is much more congestion and therefore there is much more pollution and no great increase in the reduction of energy."

Echenique says he and his team have been working on this research for about 4 or 5 years, and continued modeling and analysis has only backed up their findings.

"We are not very convinced of the idea that compacting cities will make very much difference in terms of environmental quality. But it will have severe consequences in terms of economics and social issues," Echenique says.

Of particular concern for these researchers is that restricting development to only high-density, urban locations could greatly increase the cost of land and housing, causing both the cost of living and the cost of doing businesses to skyrocket. Echenique worries this will cause cities to become less competitive over the long term.

In terms of reducing the environmental impacts of human development and lifestyle, Echenique says his numbers indicate that we might be better off focusing our effort on improving technology and energy efficiency. He says we'll have a much better chance of reducing the negative impacts of modern living by focusing on automobile technology and reduced energy usage in buildings. He and his team are currently working on research on the effectiveness of focusing on the technology side. Results are expected to publish later this year.

Echenique argues and his research indicates that greater gains can be achieved by making more efficient cars or better insulation for buildings than by trying to reshape the urban landscape."We believe that we can reduce by 50 percent or more the use of energy in a fairly short time, within the next 20 years or so," he says. "It's much more effective than compacting or dispersing cities, because there's only a five percent difference either way."

"Technology offers a much better future than trying to constrain behavior of the market," he says.

The result of this work will likely be somewhat frustrating for urban boosters arguing for an increased emphasis on density and city living. Echenique recognizes that urbanization is underway, especially in developing countries, and that density will likely be the development paradigm in many of these places. But he also observes that urbanization is happening on a metropolitan scale, and that means development is occurring at a variety of densities within a region. Valuing one over the others as the sustainable model is unwise, he argues. He says this research shows that creating sustainable places has little to do with what they look like and far more to do with their energy use.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/design/2012/07/new-research-finds-urban-form-plays-little-role-sustainability/2680/

Commuters Pedal to Work on Their Very Own Superhighway

By SALLY McGRANE

New York Times

COPENHAGEN — Picture 11 miles of smoothly paved bike path meandering through the countryside. Largely uninterrupted by roads or intersections, it passes fields, backyards, chirping birds, a lake, some ducks and, at every mile, an air pump.

For some Danes, this is the morning commute.

Susan Nielsen, a 59-year-old schoolteacher, was one of a handful of people taking advantage of Denmark’s first “superhighway” for bicycles on a recent morning, about halfway between Copenhagen and Albertslund, a suburb, which is the highway’s endpoint. “I’m very glad because of the better pavement,” said Ms. Nielsen, who wore a rain jacket and carried a pair of pants in a backpack to put on after her 40-minute commute.

The cycle superhighway, which opened in April, is the first of 26 routes scheduled to be built to encourage more people to commute to and from Copenhagen by bicycle. More bike path than the Interstate its name suggests, it is the brainchild of city planners who were looking for ways to increase bicycle use in a place where half of the residents already bike to work or to school every day.

“We are very good, but we want to be better,” said Brian Hansen, the head of Copenhagen’s traffic planning section.

He and his team saw potential in suburban commuters, most of whom use cars or public transportation to reach the city. “A typical cyclist uses the bicycle within five kilometers,” or about three miles, said Mr. Hansen, whose office keeps a coat rack of ponchos that bicycling employees can borrow in case of rain. “We thought: How do we get people to take longer bicycle rides?”

They decided to make cycle paths look more like automobile freeways. While there is a good existing network of bicycle pathways around Copenhagen, standards across municipalities can be inconsistent, with some stretches having inadequate pavement, lighting or winter maintenance, as well as unsafe intersections and gaps.

“It doesn’t work if you have a good route, then a section in the middle is covered in snow,” said Lise Borgstrom Henriksen, spokeswoman for the cycle superhighway secretariat. “People won’t ride to work then.”

For the superhighway project, Copenhagen and 21 local governments teamed up to ensure that there were contiguous, standardized bike routes into the capital across distances of up to 14 miles. “We want people to perceive these routes as a serious alternative,” Mr. Hansen said, “like taking the bus, car or train.”

The plan has received widespread support in a country whose left- and right-leaning lawmakers both regularly bike to work (albeit on slightly different models of bicycle).

Riding on the first superhighway, which grew more crowded as it neared the city, Marianne Bagge-Petersen said she was heading to a support group for job seekers. “I think it’s very cool,” she said, noting that the path allowed her to avoid roads with more car traffic. “Taking the bike makes me feel good about myself. I’m looking for a job, and if I don’t get out, it’s going to be a very long day.”

The Capital Region of Denmark, a political body responsible for public hospitals as well as regional development, has provided $1.6 million for the superhighway project.

“When we look at public hospitals, we look very much at how to reduce cost,” said a regional councilor, Lars Gaardhoj, who had just picked up his three small children in a cargo bike decorated with elephants. “It’s a common saying among doctors that the best patient is the patient you never see. Anything we can do to get less pollution and less traffic is going to mean healthier, maybe happier, people.”

In Denmark, thanks to measures like the superhighway, commuters choose bicycles because they are the fastest and most convenient transportation option. “It’s not because the Danes are more environmentally friendly,” said Gil Penalosa, executive director of 8-80 Cities, a Canadian organization that works to make cities healthier. “It’s not because they eat something different at breakfast.”

Lars Gemzo, a partner at Gehl Architects, said that within Copenhagen, biking was already the best option for many kinds of trips. “If you want to drive a car for a medium distance, you know you are a fool,” he said. “You are going to waste time.”

Danish statistics show that every 6 miles biked instead of driven saves 3 1/2 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions and 9 cents in health care costs. But many cite happiness among the chief benefits of bicycle commuting.

“When you have been biking for 30 minutes, you have a really good feeling about yourself,” said Henrik Dam Kristensen, the minister for transport, who supports the superhighways. “You really enjoy a glass of wine because you’ve earned it.”

Frits Bredal, the head of communications at the Danish Cyclists’ Federation, cautioned that the superhighways were not perfect. “Ideally, there would be no red lights, there would be a perfect pavement, no holes, no obstacles, a real highway,” Mr. Bredal said.

Several biking innovations are being tested in Copenhagen. Some, like footrests and “green wave” technology, which times traffic lights at rush hour to suit bikers, have already been put into place on the superhighway. Others, like garbage cans tilted at an angle for easy access and “conversation” lanes, where two people can ride side by side and talk, might show up on long-distance routes in the future.

Superhighway users can also look forward to some variation on the “karma campaign,” now under way in Copenhagen, in which city employees take to the streets with boxes of chocolate to reward cyclists who adhere to the five rules of cycling: be nice, signal, stay to the right, overtake carefully and, rather than let bicycle bells irritate you, do your best to appreciate them.

The next superhighway will link Copenhagen with the municipality of Fureso, to the northwest. There, the existing bike path takes riders through a beautiful forest that is, unfortunately, very dark at night.

Last winter, to comply with superhighway standards, Fureso tested solar-powered lighting. “People were so happy about it,” said Lene Hartmann, Fureso’s climate project leader. “One rider said, ‘We feel like the trolls are taking care of us.’ ”

Several years ago, a Fureso resident, Karsten Bruun Hansen, started a “bike bus,” in which cyclists meet and commute together, taking turns blocking the wind. (Inspired by Mr. Hansen’s idea, the municipality also created a bike bus for children to ride to school together.)

Mr. Hansen, who estimates that he personally saves a ton of carbon dioxide every year, hopes that the superhighway will encourage more people to ride their bikes. “It’s unavoidable to commute to work,” Mr. Hansen said. “This way, you are using the time doing something fun.”

Ole Bondo Christensen, Fureso’s mayor, is also looking forward to the improvements that the superhighway will bring. Mr. Christensen, who does not own a car, bikes nearly four miles to work every day. “It’s my way to clear my brain,” he said. “Sometimes I get new ideas.”

This summer, after the rest of the solar-powered lights are installed, Fureso’s section of the road will be superhighway-ready.

“Now, the wind should always be at your back,” Mr. Christensen said with a smile. “We are working on that.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/18/world/europe/in-denmark-pedaling-to-work-on-a-superhighway.html?_r=1&hp

The Power Grid: From Rickety to Resilient

By Bryan Walsh

Time Magazine

July 17, 2012

August 14, 2003 was a brutally hot day in much of the northeastern U.S. The high temperatures prompted people in cities like Pittsburgh and New York to crank up the fans and the air conditioning. The electricity those appliances consumed put unusually high demands on the transmission grid, forcing power plants to work overtime. The summer heat also caused local power lines in northern Ohio to expand and physically sag, which brought them into contact with nearby trees. Sparks ensued, and the resulting short circuit shut down power locally.

An alarm should have gone off at a local utility, leading the operator to reroute the flow of power around the affected area until a repair crew could be dispatched to fix the downed wires. But that didn't happen. The alarm never sounded, and utilities across the regional grid kept sending power through the weakened area, stressing the transmission lines further. Within two hours of the short circuit, all of the power lines in Ohio cut out, triggering a chain reaction that led other regional grids to fail before operators could do anything to respond. The resulting blackout — the biggest in American history — affected 55 million people in the northeastern U.S. and Canada. Darkness fell across Times Square because the aging snarl of wires and transformers that is the U.S. electrical grid couldn't handle a hot day and a few overgrown trees.

In his new book Resilience, Andrew Zolli — the director of the global innovation network PopTech — uses the electrical grid as an example of a system that lacks just that. And in an increasingly interconnected world — financially, ecologically, politically — one in which small errors in one place can cascade into broader system failures, the ability to adapt, accommodate and bounce back is only going to become more important. From climate change to overpopulation to recessions, the threats facing the world are as unpredictable as they are varied — which is why we need to craft systems that are nimble, that can bend under stress rather than break. "If we cannot control the volatile tides of change, we can learn to build better boats," writes Zolli. "We can design — and redesign — organizations, institutions, and systems to better absorb disruption, operate under a wilder variety of conditions, and shift more fluidly from one circumstance to the next."

In Resilience — co-written with the playwright and journalist Ann Marie Healy — Zolli covers everything from global finance to psychology, but the benefits of resilience are perhaps clearest in the environmental realm. Take the electrical grid again. Here we have a century-old system that is incredibly complex and also incredibly vulnerable to outside threats. Blackouts are only the most conspicuous part of the problem and thankfully do not occur often. But the battle is fought in other, smaller ways all the time. On unusually hot days in New York City this summer, the utility ConEd has had to reduce power flow to some parts of the city simply to keep the overstressed system running. In essence, they're trading blackouts for the occasional brownout, all because the system can't take the pressure being put on it — pressure that, thanks the increasingly hot summers climate change is bringing us, will only grow. Just as the grid is vulnerable to accidents, it also has few defenses against deliberate attacks by hackers or terrorists. And this vulnerability exists despite the fact that steady electrical service has become absolutely necessary for an always-on economy. If the grid crashes today, a lot more than your lights and air conditioner will go down with it.

To Zolli, the answer is to create what he calls a "swarming grid," a smart system that's operated more like the redundant infrastructure of the Internet — initially designed in part by the military, after all, to emphasize robustness and survivability. That means a grid capable of real-time monitoring and reaction that can create a holistic picture of what's happening throughout the transmission lines. During the 2003 blackout, operators were essentially working in the dark as they tried to head off the cascading failure — and that was even before the lights went out. The grid should be able not only to sense trouble, but to anticipate it. The current system assesses bits of information with a 30-second delay, which Zolli explains is "analogous to driving a car by looking at the rearview mirror." Finally, the national grid needs to be able to decouple into a series of local grids, to lock down into isolated islands, so that a problem in, say, Ohio doesn't result in Manhattan going dark.

Not all is hopeless. Almost despite itself, the grid is getting smarter and more resilient, with information technology companies like Google applying Internet smarts to the way we generate and electricity and move it around the country. The challenge will be paying for a system that, as Zolli notes, could eventually be one hundred to one thousand times larger than the U.S. domestic Internet, with trillions of nodes and sensors embedded in it. The only thing worse than building and paying for such a system is failing to do so, because we really have no other choice . In the 21st century, disruption is going to become the new normal in ways we can't even predict. All we can do is learn to bounce back better — and Zolli's excellent book is a very good start.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2119663,00.html?xid=gonewsedit&google_editors_picks=true 

Detroit adopts business model to fix troubled mass transit

Powell Energy & Solar helps New Jersey churches harness their higher power

By Diane Mastrull

Philadelphia Inquirer

July 1, 2012

Don Powell did not find his calling to bring solar power to houses of worship by reading the Book of Genesis, which contains God's command: "Let there be light." He found it staring at his roof.

It was post-recession in late 2008 and Powell, then a residential builder, was in his home office in Moorestown lamenting how much construction work had dried up. He looked out the window at the solar panels on his roof, "and thought, ‘I bet there's a market for that.'?"

That wasn't as obvious a prediction as it might seem today, with New Jersey now second in the nation in solar-energy production. At the time, Powell was the rare homeowner who had taken the solar leap — one he said was based "on faith." Not the religious kind, but trust in a mechanical engineer brother-in-law with a reputation for thorough research.

Soon after Powell Energy & Solar L.L.C. had completed its first residential job in Moorestown, "people in my church expressed interest in putting solar on the church roof," Powell recalled.

He partnered with another parishioner at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Medford to form a power purchase agreement, or PPA, to pay for the 50,000-watt system that went live in April 2010 and to sell the energy it produces to the church.

Since then, Powell's PPA has reached agreements with another seven houses of worship — with opportunities to do many more.

"There are churches all over the place crying for solar," he said, attributing that to two primary reasons: tight finances and a spiritual obligation to be better environmental stewards.

The problem for Powell is that the financial challenges now tormenting the solar market are interfering with his new business niche — where clients are cash-strapped nonprofits that need options other than paying for solar systems up-front.

"We are running out of equity to do it," Powell said recently.

When he first got into the business, solar renewable energy credits were a hot commodity. The so-called SRECS are sold by generators of solar power to utilities and other power providers under government mandate to offset their carbon production. But an overabundance of solar, fueled by government funding incentives that have since expired, has delivered a big chill to the SREC market.

For solar-system investors like Powell, it has been an unsettling ride of highs near $700 and lows near $85. The spot-market SREC price is currently around $150 in New Jersey.

"We're putting our personal cash in," Powell said of the PPA business model. "The value of the solar credits does not sustain the debt service."

He made those comments at Cherry Hill Unitarian Universalist Church, where he was showing off a recently installed 103,000-watt, roof- and ground-mounted solar system. Less than a week later, the New Jersey Assembly last Monday took a step that might improve business prospects for Powell and other solar contractors. It passed S-1925, a bill designed to increase demand for solar energy and establish a more predictable SREC pricing schedule that Gov. Christie is expected to sign. Powell said he was "elated" by the bill's passage, but concerned it didn't address enough.

"The bill failed to introduce any meaningful throttle mechanism to control the pace of solar construction if it gets overheated again," he said in an e-mail Tuesday.

The pace of solar-installation projects at religious institutions has slowed substantially from six years ago when financial incentives were plentiful and "we had 24 different houses of worship go solar in New Jersey," said Stacey Kennealy. She is sustainability director at GreenFaith, a national nonprofit based near New Brunswick that provides guidance on religious environmental work.

The situation has been less challenging for wealthier congregations, Kennealy said. There, affluent members have formed limited liability companies that fund the solar projects, making use of the sale of SRECs and tax credits that are not available to the churches themselves because of their tax-exempt status.
"Investors can make money off the project, the congregation gets the solar panels, and in some cases the investors will just give over the solar system," Kennealy said.

Powell took it one step further by creating a company offering PPAs, which assume the up-front costs of installation and for the life of the contract, typically 15-20 years, offer discounted electric rates. St. Peter's opted for a contract that requires it to pay electric rates equal to what the utility company would charge so it can take ownership of the system faster — in eight years, Powell said.

A church committee of engineers and accountants found the PPA alternative appealing because it would not require any payment at installation and, after the church takes ownership of the system, will result in annual savings of $10,000 to $15,000 and free up resources for future ministry, said the Rev. Canon Donald Muller.

No wonder he braved heights in April 2010, allowing himself to be hoisted high in a bucket truck to sprinkle holy water on the solar panels, which were arranged to include a cross-shaped clearing. Through prayer Muller implored God to "receive this solar power system which we offer and grant that it may … benefit your church, preserve your creation, and minister grace and joy to those who benefit from its use."

At Cherry Hill Unitarian Universalist, Greg Newcomer, project manager for its solar project, said the decision to go solar was both a spiritual choice "as part of the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part," and a practical one: "We have to watch our pennies."

From its 441 panels producing power since February, the church is expecting yearly savings of $11,000, Newcomer said.

Powell said his focus on religious facilities is motivated by "a sense of doing the right thing." But reality is "we have to put food on the table and shoes on the baby."

So he is currently seeking other investors — while praying the SREC market improves.

http://www.philly.com/philly/business/20120701_Powell_Energy.html?cmpid=138890509

This Summer, Electric Cars Are Merging Into California’s Traffic

By JOSIE GARTHWAITE

New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO

IT doesn’t sound as sexy as the 1967 Summer of Love, but for Californians with a passion for plug-ins, the warm months of 2012 are turning into the season of the electric car.

Some four years after the $100,000-plus Tesla Roadster became the nation’s only new electric vehicle capable of highway speeds, a wave of more affordable plug-in cars are coming to market. And California, the state with the nation’s largest auto market, the worst air quality and the most stringent emissions rules, is the first to catch the tide.

By summer’s end, nearly a dozen plug-in cars and crossovers may be traveling the state’s highways, including five or so that are arriving before the end of August. The latest models are from upstarts like Tesla and Coda Automotive as well as from global giants like Ford and Toyota.

Aside from the state’s longtime role as a trend incubator, other factors have combined to make this a test bed for what proponents hope will be a new age in personal transportation. The state’s policy makers have set tough emissions rules mandating a rising number of zero-emission vehicles, and they’ve offered tax incentives for buyers. As a hotbed of high technology and entertainment, California has plenty of influential early adopters with ready cash. An expanded charging infrastructure is being developed and, perhaps most important, battery-powered cars grant access to the coveted car-pool lanes on congested freeways.

Among the most anticipated electric models of the summer is the Tesla Model S luxury sedan, with base prices of $58,570 to $78,570, depending on the size of the battery pack and, consequently, the driving range on a charge. While the car was under development, Tesla collected more than 10,000 reservations without so much as a test drive. Once promised for delivery in 2009, the S — Tesla’s second model — at last reached customers on June 22.

“The people who buy this car are the movers and shakers — leaders in arts, entertainment, business,” said Paul Scott, a co-founder of the advocacy group Plug In America who now sells electric Leafs at a Nissan dealership in downtown Los Angeles.

“I sold a Leaf to Danny DeVito,” Mr. Scott said. “He’s that kind of guy. But you’ve got a lot of people who just will not put themselves into a small car.” On the other hand, he said, celebrities who live large are the ones who “will drive the market” if they embrace upscale electric cars like the Tesla, influencing purchases by regular Janes and Joes.

Following the Model S’s introduction last weekend, Tesla is providing thousands of test drives for reservation holders, starting in Fremont and Los Angeles before moving on to a dozen cities across North America.

California drivers are also getting a chance to get behind the wheel of the $38,145 electric sedan from Coda, based in Los Angeles, at test-drive events through the summer in Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area. The car will initially be sold through four dealerships in the state.

What’s markedly different about the plug-in vehicle market this summer is the growing presence of some of the world’s largest carmakers. Ford began slowly delivering its $40,000 Focus Electric to dealers in May (a month in which just six units were sold) and was expecting to ship 350 cars to dealerships in California, New Jersey and New York by the end of June.

Honda plans to start leasing its Fit EV for $389 a month in California and Oregon on July 20, with a move into six East Coast markets next year.

Certainly, electric vehicles are still in their tentative early days. “There will be model launches, but each one will be a few hundred or a few thousand,” Michael Omotoso, a senior manager of LMC Automotive, a research firm, said in a telephone interview last week. "We don’t expect an E.V. to be a big seller like the Toyota Prius anytime soon. But we also don’t expect any of these cars to be a big disaster.”

LMC’s forecast for 2012 puts sales of all-electric vehicles at only one-tenth of 1 percent of the nation’s light-vehicle market, or about 12,000 vehicles. And plug-in hybrids, which have a gasoline engine as well as an electric drive system that can be charged with a cord, are projected to claim three-tenths of a percent, or about 40,000 units.

For automakers, Mr. Omotoso said, “the significance is to show that you can produce an electric vehicle at a price that maybe not the average consumer can afford, but a lot of consumers can afford.” He added, “It’s a first step toward having a significant number of electric vehicles in the next 10 to 20 years."

As for Tesla, the Model S release is but one of its milestones this summer. In addition to opening five new stores, Tesla will provide the battery pack and powertrain for the $50,000 Toyota RAV4 EV, which goes on sale late this summer in San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento and the Bay Area. This electric crossover follows the rollout, in March, of a plug-in version of the Prius hybrid. Through May, Toyota sold 3,631 Prius Plug-ins, the majority of them in California.

Smaller players are adding to the bubbling E.V. activity in California, too. An electric motorcycle company, Brammo, plans to ship its long-promised Empulse R model this summer. By early August, a start-up called Scoot Networks will offer more than 50 electric scooters to members through a scooter-sharing program in San Francisco. Also over the summer, a Bay Area nonprofit, City CarShare, plans to make a big push for members to rent plug-in models it is adding to its fleet.

All of these summer arrivals join earlier releases including the Leaf and the Chevrolet Volt, the Fisker Karma plug-in hybrid and the egg-shaped battery-powered Mitsubishi “i,” a $30,000 electric car that is to arrive at dealers this month. And while Tesla has ended sales of its first model, the Roadster sports car, many of the 2,500 sold went to Californians.

Sales of the 2013 Volt, which is said to have slightly more electric range than before, are to start in August.

The relatively high concentration of new electric offerings in a few regions of California could help raise awareness and add momentum to the nascent market. Cars from companies as varied as Ford, Honda and Tesla “will help Californians to feel like there is a real commitment across the industry,” John Gartner, an electric vehicle analyst with Pike Research, said in an interview. He noted that the state’s gas prices were among the highest in the 48 contiguous states, adding to consumer interest in alternative-power vehicles.

On the other hand, Mr. Omotoso said that if gas prices fell below $3 a gallon nationally, as some analysts expect, “we’re going to see more people buying trucks again, and fewer people being interested in hybrid and electric vehicles.”

He added that if the Republicans won the White House, “there will be less enthusiasm to keep this $7,500 tax credit,” which the federal government has provided for electric vehicle purchases since 2010. California currently offers state tax rebates of up to $2,500 for battery electric cars and up to $1,500 for plug-in hybrids.

Tesla says it expects to deliver 5,300 Model S sedans in 2012, and another 20,000 next year. But Mr. Omotoso said he expected the company to achieve less than half its 2013 sales goal. “People who like technology and like to be different will buy the Model S,” he said. “But a lot of luxury buyers are more traditionalists. They’ll stick with what they know.”

It is hardly by chance that this wave of electric vehicle activity is landing in California. “It’s kind of the birthplace of the modern electric car,” said Mr. Scott, the Leaf salesman. “This is where the powerful stuff comes from, the really coolest stuff” — the motors, controllers and battery-management systems that defy old notions of electric cars as glorified golf carts.

Mr. Omotoso cited the state’s environmental awareness, its technological savvy, the long urban commutes and the pockets of wealth in Silicon Valley and Hollywood as factors that have enhanced Californians’ affinity for plug-in vehicles.

Public policy has also contributed. The state’s 1990 Zero Emission Vehicle mandate decreed that in 1998 through 2000, zero-emission vehicles must make up at least 2 percent of sales in the state by the six largest carmakers. The state set the bar at 5 percent of new vehicles for 2001 and 2002, and at 10 percent for 2003 and beyond.

Under pressure from the auto industry, California changed the law, and automakers crushed many of the 4,000-plus battery-electric vehicles deployed from 1996 to 2003 — but not before some 1,000 charging stations were in place.

“Several thousand fairly aware, high-tech, wealthy people got these cars and said, ‘Whoa, this is good,’ ” Mr. Scott said. “We had this large group of people who were cognizant of the electric car, and we talked loudly. So that’s why California is where a lot of this stuff is happening. We know about electric cars, and we don’t shut up about it.”

The state’s latest clean car rules, passed in January by the California Air Resources Board, or CARB, establish higher quotas for more automakers in 2018-2025. The current rules apply to six automakers — the three Detroit-based companies and Honda, Nissan and Toyota. In 2012-14, about 2 percent of the cars they sell in the state are required to be zero-emission vehicles.

Also, beginning with 2018 models, BMW, Daimler, Hyundai, Kia, Mazda, Volkswagen and others who sell more than 20,000 vehicles a year in California will be required for the first time to sell models with very low, or no, tailpipe emissions.

Based on the new mandates, CARB projects there will be 1.4 million zero-emission vehicles on the road by 2025, making up 15.4 percent of overall sales in California. The target for each individual manufacturer shifts depending on its market share and annual sales.

Toyota’s low production plans for the RAV4 EV (just 2,600 over three years) and Honda’s intent to provide just 1,100 Fit EVs over two years — only under a lease with no option to buy — have prompted some plug-in proponents to deride the models as “compliance cars” offered just to meet quotas.

“For years we were just fighting to get the carmakers to build the cars,” Mr. Scott said. “Now they’re building the cars, and it’s just so slow.”

From a business perspective, however, the bare-minimum strategy makes sense. "If you’re losing money on each one you make, you want to make as few of them as possible," said Mr. Omotoso. "If we get to a point where carmakers can at least break even, or make a little bit of a profit — which may not be for 10 years or more — we can see them producing more plug-ins."

A Toyota spokeswoman, Jana Hartline, said the zero-emissions mandate was “really a moot point.” In an e-mail, she called the mandate “a fact of life for over 20 years,” and said the company was committed to meeting California’s requirements through a combination of plug-in hybrid, battery-electric and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles. .

What good is a new E.V. if you have nowhere to charge it? Wheels have been set in motion for $100 million in new charging infrastructure throughout California, under a recent settlement between a New Jersey-based power company, NRG Energy, and the California Public Utilities Commission. The deal is meant to close the book on offenses committed by Dynegy (the assets of which are now owned by NRG) during the Enron scandal and the state’s 2001 energy shortages.

“It’s a solution to the chicken-and-egg problem,” Frank Lindh, general counsel for the public utilities commission, said in a telephone interview. “People won’t buy electric vehicles unless they’re confident there’s a place to charge up. And companies don’t want to invest in charging infrastructure unless people are buying electric vehicles.”

A competing provider of charging systems, ECOtality, has filed a lawsuit over the deal, calling it an “illegal giveaway” that would give NRG a monopoly in the California E.V. charging market. But if the settlement is approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and goes through as planned, it could give places like San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles the densest E.V. charging networks in the world. Mr. Lindh said he expected the settlement to win federal approval “definitely this summer” and perhaps before July.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/automobiles/evs-are-merging-into-californias-traffic.html?hpw