To Encourage Biking, Cities Lose the Helmets

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

New York Times

Published: September 29, 2012

ONE spectacular Sunday in Paris last month, I decided to skip museums and shopping to partake of something even more captivating for an environment reporter: Vélib, arguably the most successful bike-sharing program in the world. In their short lives, Europe’s bike-sharing systems have delivered myriad benefits, notably reducing traffic and its carbon emissions. A number of American cities — including New York, where a bike-sharing program is to open next year — want to replicate that success.

So I bought a day pass online for about $2, entered my login information at one of the hundreds of docking stations that are scattered every few blocks around the city and selected one of Vélib’s nearly 20,000 stodgy gray bikes, with their basic gears, upright handlebars and practical baskets.

Then I did something extraordinary, something I’ve not done in a quarter-century of regular bike riding in the United States: I rode off without a helmet.

I rode all day at a modest clip, on both sides of the Seine, in the Latin Quarter, past the Louvre and along the Champs-Élysées, feeling exhilarated, not fearful. And I had tons of bareheaded bicycling company amid the Parisian traffic. One common denominator of successful bike programs around the world — from Paris to Barcelona to Guangzhou — is that almost no one wears a helmet, and there is no pressure to do so.

In the United States the notion that bike helmets promote health and safety by preventing head injuries is taken as pretty near God’s truth. Un-helmeted cyclists are regarded as irresponsible, like people who smoke. Cities are aggressive in helmet promotion.

But many European health experts have taken a very different view: Yes, there are studies that show that if you fall off a bicycle at a certain speed and hit your head, a helmet can reduce your risk of serious head injury. But such falls off bikes are rare — exceedingly so in mature urban cycling systems.

On the other hand, many researchers say, if you force or pressure people to wear helmets, you discourage them from riding bicycles. That means more obesity, heart disease and diabetes. And — Catch-22 — a result is fewer ordinary cyclists on the road, which makes it harder to develop a safe bicycling network. The safest biking cities are places like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, where middle-aged commuters are mainstay riders and the fraction of adults in helmets is minuscule.

“Pushing helmets really kills cycling and bike-sharing in particular because it promotes a sense of danger that just isn’t justified — in fact, cycling has many health benefits,” says Piet de Jong, a professor in the department of applied finance and actuarial studies at Macquarie University in Sydney. He studied the issue with mathematical modeling, and concludes that the benefits may outweigh the risks by 20 to 1.

He adds: “Statistically, if we wear helmets for cycling, maybe we should wear helmets when we climb ladders or get into a bath, because there are lots more injuries during those activities.” The European Cyclists’ Federation says that bicyclists in its domain have the same risk of serious injury as pedestrians per mile traveled.

Yet the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recommends that “all cyclists wear helmets, no matter where they ride,” said Dr. Jeffrey Michael, an agency official.

Recent experience suggests that if a city wants bike-sharing to really take off, it may have to allow and accept helmet-free riding. A two-year-old bike-sharing program in Melbourne, Australia — where helmet use in mandatory — has only about 150 rides a day, despite the fact that Melbourne is flat, with broad roads and a temperate climate. On the other hand, helmet-lax Dublin — cold, cobbled and hilly — has more than 5,000 daily rides in its young bike-sharing scheme. Mexico City recently repealed a mandatory helmet law to get a bike-sharing scheme off the ground. But here in the United States, the politics are tricky.

SHAUN MURPHY, the bicycling coordinator of Minneapolis-St. Paul — which inaugurated its “Nice Ride” bike-sharing program this year — has been pilloried for riding about without a helmet. “I just want it to be seen as something that a normal person can do,” Mr. Murphy explained to the local press this past summer. “You don’t need special gear. You just get on a bike and you just go.”

In New York, where there were 21 cyclist fatalities last year, the transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, is always photographed on a bike and wearing a helmet. The administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has nonetheless rejected calls by Comptroller John C. Liu for a mandatory helmet law when New York’s 10,000-cycle bike-share program rolls out next year, for fear it would keep people from riding. Still, the mayor says helmets are a “good idea,” and the city promotes helmet use through education and with giveaway programs.

In the United States, cities are struggling to overcome the significant practical problems of melding helmet use with bike-sharing programs — such as providing sanitized helmet dispensers at bike docking stations, says Susan Shaheen, director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

But bicycling advocates say that the problem with pushing helmets isn’t practicality but that helmets make a basically safe activity seem really dangerous.

“The real benefits of bike-sharing in terms of health, transport and emissions derive from getting ordinary people to use it,” said Ceri Woolsgrove, safety officer at the European Cyclists’ Federation. “And if you say this is wonderful, but you have to wear armor, they won’t. These are normal human beings, not urban warriors.”

In fact, many European researchers say the test of a mature bike-sharing program is when women outnumber men. In the Netherlands, 52 percent of riders are women. Instead of promoting helmet use, European cycling advocates say, cities should be setting up safer bike lanes to slow traffic or divert it entirely from downtown areas. “Riding in New York or Australia is like running with the bulls — it’s all young males,” says Julian Ferguson, a spokesman for the European Cyclists’ Federation. And that’s in part what makes it dangerous. (Many European countries do require helmet use for children.)

In London, where use of a new bike-share program is exceeding all expectations, the number of riders in suits and dresses is growing, Mr. Woolsgrove says. And more Londoners seem to be leaving helmets at home.

We may follow a similar pattern. In her study of nascent bike-sharing programs in North America — including Montreal, Washington and Minneapolis — Dr. Shaheen found that the accident rate was “really low.” A large majority of participants strongly agreed that they got more exercise since the program started. And helmet use in bike programs tended to be far lower than among the general public.

Another study this summer found that only 30 percent of local riders using Washington’s Capital Bikeshare program wore helmets, compared with 70 percent of people on their own bikes, said John Kraemer of Georgetown University, the study’s author, who supports helmet use.

Before you hit the comment button and tell me that you know someone whose life was probably saved by a bike helmet, I know someone, too. I also know someone who believes his life was saved by getting a blood test for prostate specific antigen, detecting prostate cancer. But is that sense of salvation actually justified, for the individual or society? Back in New York I strapped on my helmet for a weekend bike ride in Central Park. But I’m not sure I’ll do the same two years from now if I’m commuting to work on a mature Citi Bike system.

Mr. De Jong, who grew up in the Netherlands, observes of Amsterdam: “Nobody wears helmets, and bicycling is regarded as a completely normal, safe activity. You never hear that ‘helmet saved my life’ thing.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/sunday-review/to-encourage-biking-cities-forget-about-helmets.html?hp

Board to decide fate of city’s long-debated clean-energy program

Joshua Sabatini | 09/12/12 
SF Examiner 

Read more at the San Francisco Examiner: http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/2012/09/board-decide-fate-city-s-long-debated-clean-energy-program#ixzz26M6BMn7B

The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday is expected to decide the fate of San Francisco’s long-debated public-power program, but whether the program can overcome the mayor’s concerns and PG&E’s opposition is far from clear.

For the past eight years, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission has worked on a program to compete with PG&E by offering customers 100 percent renewable energy for an extra fee.

Under a 2002 state law, municipalities can form such programs to purchase electricity. Only Marin County has done so, and now San Francisco wants to follow suit. So supervisors are set to vote on the $19.5 million CleanPowerSF program, which includes $13 million that would be placed in reserve.

It is the latest political battle at City Hall in which progressives are backing a program opposed or questioned by moderates. It would take six votes to approve and eight votes to override a veto from Mayor Ed Lee.

 “The mayor continues to have concerns about the risks, costs and benefits of entering into a contract with Shell, and he hopes the discussions at the board address his concerns,” Lee spokeswoman Christine Falvey said Wednesday.

But SFPUC head Ed Harrington, who has postponed his retirement to see the vote through the board, framed the proposal in a positive light during Wednesday’s meeting of the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee.

“This is the single biggest program that is even on the horizon within the city and county of San Francisco to make any difference toward any of the goals that you have set as board members in terms of having a change in greenhouse gas emissions and climate change,” Harrington said. “This program can make a dramatic change.”

The committee voted 2-1 to send the proposal to the full board with a recommendation for its approval.

Supervisors John Avalos and Jane Kim backed it, while Supervisor Carmen Chu opposed it.  Chu said she opposed it because it automatically enrolls city residents as participants unless they opt out and because it does not put the onus on ratepayers to pay back the program’s reserve funds.

Under state law, such programs automatically sign up customers who then must opt out to stay with their current utility provider.

The City would enter into a five-year contract with Shell Energy, which would provide the program’s
energy. The hope is to use the program’s revenue stream to ultimately fund the construction of renewable energy projects such as wind or solar.

The initial phase is expected to roll out to 90,000 customers. For the average energy user expected to remain with the program, their bills are expected to increase by about $9 a month.

 http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/2012/09/board-decide-fate-city-s-long-debated-clean-energy-program#ixzz26M60lSh2

Taxes Show One Way to Save Fuel

September 11, 2012

By EDUARDO PORTER

NY Times

Just the other day, President Obama unveiled another example of how our hostility to anything that even remotely looks like a tax is leading us down the wrong path, ultimately making us worse off.

The president proudly announced energy-efficiency standards negotiated with the nation’s carmakers, which will have to nearly double the average fuel economy of cars and light trucks sold, hitting 54.5 miles a gallon in 2025.

“It’ll strengthen our nation’s energy security, it’s good for middle class families and it will help create an economy built to last,” he said in an official statement.

The rules are a significant step in the battle against global warming. The Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which developed the standards, said they will reduce our energy use by 12 billion barrels of oil and cut carbon emissions spewed by our cars, pickups and sport utility vehicles in half by 2025. They should also cut down on other forms of pollution, helping with problems like asthma and acid rain.

What the government didn’t mention is that these improvements come at a high cost for drivers, automakers and society in general. They could be achieved much more cheaply by raising taxes on gasoline to a level comparable to that of pretty much every other industrialized nation.

The new mileage rules are so expensive, in fact, that even if one factors in all the expected gains from the policy — like less damage from climate change and fewer deaths from respiratory disease — many economists think that the costs actually outweigh the benefits.

The reason is fairly straightforward. Fuel-efficiency standards do not really change drivers’ behavior in a helpful way. Gas taxes do.

Consider how a gas tax would work. Because it would make gas more expensive at the pump, we would drive less. When time came to replace the old family S.U.V., we would be more likely to consider a more fuel-efficient option. As more Americans sought gas-sipping hybrids, carmakers would develop more efficient vehicles.

This is not theory. We’ve seen it happen. In 2008, when the price of gas shot abruptly past $4 a gallon, Americans cut back sharply on their driving. Total miles driven on American highways declined for the first time since 1980 and gas use fell more than 4 percent. General Motors ditched the Hummer, and gas-guzzling pickups were briefly dislodged from the perch they had occupied since 1992 as the nation’s most popular light vehicle.

Driving levels started creeping back up as soon as gas prices started receding, but a gas tax would be permanent and would lead to even bigger changes in habits. And the cost is lower than it seems. Economists point out that the energy savings would not change if the government returned all the revenue raised by a gas tax to Americans — perhaps through rebates for low-income people who spend a bigger share of their money on gas.

The weakness with the fuel-economy rules is that they don’t affect people’s behavior the way higher gas prices do. They apply only to new vehicles — not the ones on the road now — so it takes quite a long time to alter our overall gas use. And they carry perverse incentives: because new vehicles go farther on a gallon of gas, they give us a reason to drive more, leading to more congestion, accidents, pollution and gas consumption.

The incentives to carmakers can also be weird. The original standards for fuel economy in the 1970s exempted light trucks, which were a small share of the market. That decision was critical to the explosive growth of the S.U.V. In 1973, light trucks amounted to 3 percent of new vehicle sales. Today they account for half.

Who knows what distortions the new rules will bring? The standards vary according to the footprint of the car — the length between the axles multiplied by the width. So maybe cars will be boxier in the future.

Automakers will make the most efficient cars they can that customers will buy. A gas tax that goads drivers to choose gas-sippers takes advantage of this fact. A mileage standard does not.

Christopher Knittel, an energy economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, estimated that if carmakers had devoted all their technological progress since 1980 to improving fuel efficiency, gas mileage would have improved 60 percent by 2006. Instead, they put most of their effort into more power and weight, and fuel economy gained less than 12 percent.

All this makes mileage standards an expensive way to restrain our energy use.

According to the government’s analysis, the additional production and maintenance costs made necessary by the mileage rules will rise gradually to about $31.7 billion in 2025 — which will add about $1,900 to the average price of cars and light trucks. There are other costs, too. Some Americans will not be able to afford a new car. Profits of some automakers and dealers are likely to decline. Greater congestion will impose an added burden on health.

According to economists crunching the numbers, this makes mileage standards somewhere between 2.4 and 13 times more expensive than a gasoline tax as a tool to reduce our use of fuel. Indeed, by some calculations, raising fuel-economy standards is more costly than climate change itself.

The government has to predict how much climate change will cost us in the future — through lost agricultural productivity, poorer health, bigger hurricanes and the like — to figure out how much we should spend today. It does so through a measure called the “social cost of carbon,” which captures the added damage that will be caused by adding one more ton of CO2 into the air.

The government’s estimate of the cost to our society covers a wide range of $5 to $68 a ton and increases over time. Several economists have concluded that cutting carbon emissions via fuel-efficiency standards may be even more expensive. Adding in benefits not related to global warming — like less pollution, less reliance on foreign oil, and less time spent filling up — the mileage standards may still cost more than their benefits.

The Obama administration will say that mileage standards are the best we can do to limit our gas usage. The president’s proposal to create carbon allowances, which would act like a tax to limit companies’ carbon emissions, withered in Congress two years ago despite the plan to use the money to provide tax credits to low-income families. A tax on gasoline doesn’t stand a chance.

And doing nothing about global warming might seem crazy considering how little we really know about the potentially devastating consequences of climate change.

Still, we could do much better if taxes were on the table.

The United States has the lowest gas taxes by far among the industrialized nations. This includes countries with mandatory fuel-efficiency standards and countries without them. It includes big countries and little ones. Among them, guess who uses the most transportation fuel of all?

Hint: in Britain, where gas and diesel are taxed at $3.95 a gallon, the American automaker Ford sells a compact Fiesta model that will go nearly 86 miles on a gallon. In the United States, where gas taxes average 49 cents, Ford’s Fiestas will carry you only 33 miles on a gallon of gas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/business/fuel-efficiency-standards-have-costs-of-their-own.html?src=rechp

SF clean-energy program may profit Shell

Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross

San Francisco Chronicle 

September 11, 2012

In an ironic twist, San Francisco's effort to go green with its own clean-energy program could wind up adding tens of millions of dollars to the coffers of one of the biggest oil companies in the world - Shell.

Under the terms of the CleanPowerSF program now before the Board of Supervisors, the city would contract with Shell Energy North America - a subsidiary of Shell Oil - to provide households and businesses with 100 percent renewable electricity.

The original idea was simple enough: Buy five years of clean energy on the open market and resell it to locals who want to go green.

The politics were equally attractive: Break the stranglehold that Pacific Gas and Electric Co. has long had on consumers, while encouraging the growth of local green alternatives like wind and solar power.

But the final product isn't what everyone expected.

For starters, Shell Energy - whose parent company just started drilling for Arctic oil off the coast of Alaska - wound up winning the contract.

"Unfortunately, as much as we've tried, Shell was the only company that was responsive to the city's bid process," said Supervisor David Campos, who has taken up the green energy cause at the board.

Having Shell as the city's green alternative is just one of the potential troubles the five-year, $19.5 million deal is encountering.

The initial sales pitch also included the idea that the program could beat PG&E prices. Instead, both the city controller and budget analyst have concluded that it could actually cost the average household nearly 23 percent extra.

What's more, PG&E has just filed papers with the state Public Utilities Commission announcing its intention to start offering its own 100 percent green energy program in competition with Shell, and probably at a cheaper rate.

If San Francisco's program can't compete or goes sideways, the city would be on the hook for Shell's losses, which could total $15 million or more, says the budget analyst.

According to city fiscal experts, about 90,000 ratepayers - or about a quarter of the city's residential customers - will need to sign up for the green program to break even.

Mayor Ed Lee has begun to express concerns over the risks and costs, including a provision that would automatically enroll San Francisco ratepayers - meaning that anyone who didn't want to participate would have to request to opt out within 60 days.

"He looks forward to a robust discussion at the board on this," said Christine Falvey, the mayor's press secretary.

Proponents counter that it is worth the gamble. They say going green may not be easy out of the gate, but that in the long run it will pay off.

"The hope is once we bring in enough revenue through the program, we can build it out to generate our own wind and solar energy and we don't have to do business" with companies such as Shell, Campos said.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/SF-clean-energy-program-may-profit-Shell-3857981.php#ixzz26GRqkBpc

PG&E union mounts attack on Clean Power SF

09.11.12 - 9:25 pm | Tim Redmond

San Francisco Bay Guardian

The union that represents PG&E workers -- and has opposed every single public-power initiative in modern San Francisco history -- just launched an attack on Clean Power SF. And the union's business representative is having a hard time explaining exactly why he's working with PG&E to try to undermine this modest step toward public power.

Hunter Stern, with IBEW Local 1245, sent a press release out Sept. 11 announcing the start of a campaign to convince the supervisors not to approve the Clean Power SF plan. The line of attack: Shell Energy, which got the contract to supply sustainable energy to customers in the city, in competition with PG&E. The pitch:

San Francisco city government is considering a proposal to partner with Shell Energy of North America to inaugurate SF’s so-called “clean power” program. If the Board of Supervisors approves the proposal, San Francisco would pay millions to Shell, one of the most notorious environmental violators in businesstoday.

Shell's a pretty bad company. So is PG&E. So is just about everyone in the energy business. Not justifying Shell's behavior, just noting: If you want a contractor to deliver electricty to San Francisco, you aren't going to get a cool independent small business. You aren't even going to get Google. These folks are evil, all of them.

Oh, and by the way: Shell Energy also sells power to PG&E (pdf). Stern's boss has a contract similar to what the city is going to get. So the PG&E power we all pay for today is in part Shell power. And as Sup. David Campos points out, it wasn't as if the city chose Shell over some better competitors: There was no other company out there anywhere in the world that responded to the city's bid process and offered to work with Clean Power SF.

The key point here is that Clean Power SF is going to use Shell as a bridge -- the private outfit will deliver power generated at renewable facililities to the city's power operation, which will resell it to customers ... for a while. The goal is to use the revenue stream from the sales of power to back bonds that will allow the city to build its own renewable energy system. Five, maybe ten years down the road, San Francisco will have solar generators on city property (including large swaths of Public Utilities Commission property in the East Bay), wind generators, maybe at some point tidal generators, and will be able to sell cheap, clean, local power to customers. Shell will be gone.

Let's face it: this is a step on the path to creating a city-owned and city-run power system -- that is, a step to eliminating PG&E as a player in San Francisco's energy future. Public power will be cheaper and cleaner -- and it's going to take a while to get there. Which is why we need to start now.

PG&E knows this, too, and is fighting to block Clean Power SF, which comes before the board's Budget and Finance Committee Sept. 12. Now IBEW is allied, as usual, with the giant company.

The Stern press release talks about how Clean Power SF will be expensive:

The average home can expect to see a rate increase of 77% over their current PG&E electricity generation rates. That comes out to an increase of over $200 per year.  The higher cost of power would eat up more and more of the City budget, forcing service reductions and costing San Francisco vitally needed jobs. Our local economy would take a multi-million dollar hit.

Actually, not true: The only people who will pay for Clean Power SF are the ones who want it. The idea is that a significant number of San Franciscans will be willing to pay a little more -- maybe $10 a month -- to help save the planet. The ones who want to stick with PG&E wil have every opportunity to do so. The city budget isn't taking a hit -- municipal services already use the city's Hetch Hetchy hydropower. This doesn't cost the city money or jobs.

It will, of course, hurt PG&E.

I called Hunter Stern to talk about all of this, and we had a long conversation. He was polite and answered all of my questions. Sort of.

He insisted that IBEW isn't against community choice aggregation, that he's only worried about the city budget and the impacts on ratepayers. And Shell. So we started going around in circles, like this:

Me: So you don't oppose Clean Power SF?

Stern: We are not opposed to community choice aggregation. Just to this contract with Shell.

Me: I'm told Shell is the only contractor willing to fulfill this role.

Stern: That's what I'm told, too.

Me: So if you support CCA, what should the city do?

Stern: Find somebody else.

Me: The city has made it clear there IS nobody else.

Stern: We should put this on hold and wait around until there is.

Me: Why is IBEW unhappy with Shell?

Stern: This is contracting out.

Me: Is Shell Energy a nonunion company?

Stern: They don't generate power, they just buy and sell, so they don't really have any employees who could be in IBEW.

Me: So what if they city can use this revenue to build its own renewables, with union labor?

Stern: We aren't opposed to the city building its own renewables.

Me: But the idea here is to use the revenue stream from Clean Power SF to raise money for local renewables.

Stern: You don't need revenue to build local renewables. Just creativity.

Me: But the city has a huge budget problem now. There's no money to build local generation unless you have a revenue stream to bond against.

Stern: There are creative ways to do it.

Me: So you support CCA. You support building local renewables.Clean Power SF is a CCA program to build local renewables. Shell is the only company that answered the city's call for bids for this project. You don't have any labor issues with Shell. I don't understand where you're coming from.

Stern: I don't disagree with your checklist.

Me: So why are you against this project?

Stern: We don't think this is good for the city or for the ratepayers.

Me: But the ratepayers don't have to be a part of it if they don't want to.

Stern: I think the way the city is approaching that is a good strategy.

Round and round and round. It was making my head hurt. I wish I'd put it on tape so you could all listen.

I passed the press release along to Tyrone Jue at the SFPUC. He had a pretty clear response:

This attack is not surprising. IBEW is one of the largest unions at PG&E. They historically side with PG&E on all their issues. The fact is CleanPowerSF will not cost IBEW workers jobs. Ironically, the local renewable build out phase will be creating even more green union jobs. This happens while we weaning ourselves off dirty fossil fuel sources.San Franciscans want the choice to embrace a clean energy future. While PG&E shareholders stand to lose with CleanPowerSF, the consumer and environment stand to win.

He added:

Our ‘little creativity’ involves reinvesting revenue into aggressive energy efficiency and local renewable generation projects.  We’re simply not motivated to maximize profit at the expense of our customers or the environment.   Our common sense goal is to reinvest revenue into real projects that will reduce San Francisco’s carbon footprint, create local jobs, and build a sustainable energy future that is better for the environment and our customers.

Ugh. This is going to be a battle royal. I hope there are six votes on the board for Clean Power SF, which is imperfect but important. And then Mayor Lee will have to decide whether to side with his highly respected SFPUC general manager, Ed Harrington, who wants to make this happen, and PG&E, which doesn't.

Oh, by the way: PG&E pays Willie Brown about $250,000 a year as a "legal retainer." And I hear the mayor takes his phone calls.

http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2012/09/11/pge-union-mounts-attack-clean-power-sf

In Quest for River’s Power, an Underwater Test Spin

September 11, 2012

By PATRICK McGEEHAN

NY Times

Could cars in New York City someday run on electricity generated at the bottom of the East River?

Trey Taylor thinks so, but first he and his associates have to build a better turbine — specifically, one that can withstand the river’s strong and shifting currents. On Tuesday afternoon they moved one step closer to their goal, as a crane hoisted what looked like a giant, hand-held electric fan from the riverbed east of Roosevelt Island.

The turbine — its three white blades were still turning as they broke the surface — had been bolted for 10 days to a piling drilled into the bedrock beneath the river. Mr. Taylor’s company, Verdant Power, had positioned it there in the latest test of its long-running plan to turn the tides into a source of electricity.

“This is the perfect testing ground,” said Dean Corren, the company’s director of technology, as he watched two divers descend from a barge on a ladder and attach a sling to the turbine. The current, which runs as fast as 2 meters per second, keeps the blades spinning slowly, except during the lulls when the tide reverses its flow from north to south, or back again.

The turbine, a commercial prototype with a diameter of more than 16 feet, did not generate any electricity during its brief period of submersion. A previous set of turbines in the river powered a Gristede’s supermarket and an adjacent parking garage on the island, Mr. Taylor said.

The problem with those machines was that they kept breaking, he said. So, the company commissioned the manufacture of stronger blades, made of layered fiberglass and plastic, and tested them first in a lab in Golden, Colo.

After 10 days in the river, the blades gleamed in the September sunlight, showing no obvious signs of wear or damage. The turbine’s pristine appearance brought smiles to the faces of Mr. Corren and his colleagues. Dean Whatmoor, a logistics manager, who had been monitoring the test from a converted cargo container filled with computer screens and gauges, admitted that he was a little sad to see the test end.

The next step will be to start building more turbines and installing them in the river in sets of three, Mr. Taylor said. The rotors are made in Holland, Mich., but the other parts will be made in New York State and assembled in Bayonne, N.J., he said.

In about five years, the company hopes to have 30 turbines arrayed in the river, each capable of producing 35 kilowatts of electricity. All told, the project would produce about as much power as one wind turbine, enough to power a few hundred homes.

Mr. Taylor said he has had discussions with the corporation that operates Roosevelt Island and officials from Cornell University, which plans to build a school of applied sciences on the island, about how the power from the turbines might be used. One idea he has broached, he said, is installing charging stations for electric cars on the island.

“New York City could be the first city with tidal-powered cars,” he said.

But Verdant Power, which has raised about $33 million from investors, has a potentially more lucrative plan: to sell its technology for use in rivers and even oceans around the world. “The holy grail is to harness the ocean tides,” Mr. Corren said.

Simply turning the East River into a viable source of electricity would be a vindication for Mr. Corren, who began researching the idea as a student at New York University in the early 1980s, and wrote his thesis on global warming. The university later eliminated its applied sciences department and gave up on the tidal turbine technology developed there, Mr. Corren said.

On Tuesday, he grinned at the prospect that his work at N.Y.U. three decades ago might yield a renewable source of power for the campus that Cornell is building, which city officials hope will be an engine of New York’s economic future. (In April, N.Y.U. announced plans to develop its own applied science campus, in Downtown Brooklyn.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/nyregion/in-quest-for-east-rivers-power-a-search-for-stouter-arms.html?_r=1

Crowdfunding helps community power become reality

By John Farrell

Grist guest contributor

Back in April, President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act(the JOBS Act), and one of the most heralded elements was so-called crowdfunding. The law sought to solve a major problem: It’s hard to finance small-scale business ventures. Wall Street only cares about multi-million-dollar plays, and securities regulations make small-dollar projects rather difficult (and costly) to jointly fund.

The act could have big implications for community-based renewable energy projects.

Right now, there are two kinds of community-based renewable energy projects, the charitable or the persistent. Solar Mosaic, for example, was founded and funded on the concept that many environmentally motivated people would help finance local solar projects with zero-percent-interest loans. They succeeded in building several projects, but the model is constrained by the limited universe of people who have money at hand and are willing to let it be used for no reward.

The other kind of renewable energy project allows participants to get some kind of financial reward through sheer persistence, overcoming enormous regulatory and legal barriers to success (some of which I covered in this 2007 report). It means finding a complex legal structure to capture federal tax credits despite needing investors with “passive tax liability” or sacrificing federal incentives for simple ownership structures like cooperatives or municipal utilities. It means having “accredited” (rich) investors or only soliciting investors through personal relationships. This community wind project is an illustration, as are several solar projects in this report.

The JOBS Act may finally allow thousands of regular folks to make a modest return (5 to 10 percent) by investing in local renewable energy projects. The act allows for crowdfunding under the following circumstances:

• The project raises less than $1 million.
• The project owner discloses certain financial information, such as income tax returns, financial statements reviewed by an accountant, or fully audited financial statements.

The $1 million limit is the approximate cost of a 200-kilowatt solar project, so crowdfunding could mean a significant boost for community-based solar arrays, especially in states with virtual net metering (allowing those potential investors to share the electricity output).

Crowdfunding won’t mean much for wind projects, where a single turbine costs well over the dollar limit, but the JOBS Act also opened the door for more community-based wind with changes to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) exemption Regulation A. (For more on this, read my 2007 report on wind energy ownership and then this article on the changes to Regulation A).

It’s not all roses and unicorns. There are still several potential hangups for the crowdfunding model:

• The SEC still has to implement the new regulation (likely in early 2013).
• Websites that host crowdfunding opportunities (e.g. Kickstarter) will have to comply with new regulations.
• The information disclosure requirements for potential project owners mentioned in the act are not insignificant.
• Up-front costs such as legal fees, even for a modest crowdfunding venture, could still be $10,000 to $15,000.
• It’s not clear how crowdfunding solves the problem of capturing federal tax incentives.

I’ll be interested to see how it develops.

John Farrell is an Institute for Local Self-Reliance senior researcher specializing in energy policy developments that best expand the benefits of local ownership and dispersed generation of renewable energy. His seminal work, Energy Self-Reliant States, gave a vision of states meeting their energy needs with in-state sun and wind and spawned a rapidly expanding distributed generation resource.

http://grist.org/climate-energy/crowdfunding-for-community-power/

Does Delhi Need a Cap on Car Ownership?

By MALAVIKA VYAWAHARE

NY Times

September 10, 2012

Is it time for India to take lessons from China about pollution and congestion?

The municipal government of Guangzhou, one of China’s biggest auto manufacturing centers, plans to halve the number of new cars on the streets, The New York Times reported, by introducing “license plate auctions and lotteries.”

The move comes as the city struggles to address traffic congestion issues and curb pollution – issues that also bedevil India’s biggest cities, particularly its capital. Despite the current slowdown, India is still one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, and, according to a World Economic Forum study released this year, also has the world’s worst air pollution.

The problem is particularly acute in Delhi, where an average of 1,335 vehicles were added to Delhi’s roads every day during 2010 and 2011. Infrastructure improvements have not kept pace with the influx of vehicles, mostly cars and motorcycles, and the city faces a capacity crisis in less than a decade, an expert says.

“The capacity of roads in Delhi will be exceeded by 2021 on most major roads and junctions,” Geetam Tiwari, a professor of transport planning at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi who is also associated with the city’s contentious Bus Rapid Transport pilot project, told India Ink.

So far, the Delhi government has been mulling measures to discourage private vehicle use and promote other methods of transportation, like B.R.T., rather than direct limits on ownership.

“Increasing vehicular population is a major challenge facing the city, and we will have to take tough decisions to deal with it,” a senior Delhi official said in an interview with The Jagran Post last week.

The “tough decisions” so far include making parking more expensive, levying congestion charges on certain routes during peak hours and upgrading the public transportation system, all of which are being gradually implemented in Delhi. The government is also considering a proposal to levy parking charges in residential areas, unlikely to be a popular idea among car owners, who are the city’s wealthiest and most influential people. The B.R.T. project, for example, has spawned vociferous opposition, especially among the car-owning population. A recent court order, in response to their complaints, allows other vehicles to use the bus-only corridor, negating its benefit for those not using private cars.

Some cities in India, however, are already experimenting with rules to check car ownership.

Aizawl, the capital of the northeastern state of Mizoram, has linked the granting of licenses to parking availability. Vehicle owners have to show that they own garages before their vehicles can be registered. But as a consequence, “a number of vehicles have been left unregistered due to the inspectors’ inability to verify that the garages exist,” the local news media reported.

In Jaipur in the western state of Rajasthan, the state government was directed by the high court to register only those vehicles whose owners submit an affidavit that they have a parking space for the vehicle. The order came into force on May 1 and local transport officials have not encountered the same difficulties as their peers in Aizawl, for a simple reason. “We were asked to get the affidavits from the vehicle owners. The high court did not direct us to crosscheck the affidavit,” officials told the The Daily Bhaskar.

Vehicle ownership levels remain fairly low in Delhi at 85 vehicles per 1,000 inhabitants, compared with a developed country like Britain, which has 760 vehicles per 1,000 people. But owning one remains a goal for many. “Rising appetites for personal mobility are buttressed by the association of car ownership with high social status,” a report on changes in bus transportation pointed out.

Growth in car sales remains a strong point in India’s economy. In a mid-term review of the Automotive Mission Plan 2006-2016, the government outlines plans to make India a “destination of choice in the design and manufacture of automobiles.” According to the review, vehicle production in the country increased from 9.7 million units in 2006 to 20 million in 2011.

India’s courts have occasionally addressed questions about the addition of more cars to India’s roads. Dismissing the Municipal Corporation of Delhi’s plea this year to limit the cycle rickshaws on Delhi roads, a Supreme Court judge said the government was not prepared to put limits on cars. “In your so-called vision, you must have thought that by scrapping rickshaws there will be enough space for cars and other vehicles on the roads,” The Hindu quoted him as saying.

Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director of the Center for Science and Environment and head of the transport planning program, said the government should focus on influencing commuting choices and encouraging people to use cars less and public transportation more.

“A quota system should be a last resort,” Ms. Roychowdhury said. “But that is something Delhi would have to consider if the current government policies do not solve the transport problems soon.”

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/does-delhi-need-a-cap-on-car-ownership/?src=rechp

A Dictator Is Gone, but Egypt’s Traffic and Congestion Seem Immovable

September 10, 2012

By SCOTT SAYARE

NY Times

CAIRO — It seems a measure of how little has changed since Egypt’s revolution that Nasr Mohammed Ghaleb still peddles tamarind juice here beneath an overpass, 15 cents a glass, amid the smog and piercing horns of the line of traffic he is blocking.

“The people in the cars coming this way are all hot, and so they want something to drink,” Mr. Ghaleb, 43, said the other day from behind his stand in Ramses Square. The people are hot, in part, because of the traffic, and the traffic is bad, in part, because of Mr. Ghaleb.

“I’m off to the side,” he insisted, smiling and looking a bit embarrassed.

So it was before the revolution, so it is now. Police officers come, sometimes, to clear out the street vendors — there are thought to be thousands, if not tens of thousands, in this massive city’s vast informal economy — and to ease the flow of traffic. The street vendors return, with nowhere else to go, and so does the congestion.

Mohamed Morsi, the Islamist leader who is Egypt’s first democratically elected president, has inherited far larger problems: an economy devastated by unrest, a broken system of food and fuel subsidies and plunging foreign currency reserves. He has turned to the International Monetary Fund for assistance in the form of a $4.8 billion loan, to Saudi Arabia and Qatar for aid and investment, to the United States for debt relief. His country is desperate to attract tourists and investors.

Mr. Morsi has also pledged to remove the street vendors and improve traffic, though, echoing the promises of decades of other officials who have sought to tame Cairo’s infamous crush of jalopies and buses and taxis and motorbikes. Mr. Morsi has called traffic a high priority for his first 100 days in office, not least because of its tremendous cost to the economy: as much as $8 billion in lost productivity, delays and excess fuel consumption, according to the World Bank. That amounts to about 3 percent of gross domestic product, putting Cairo’s rate several times higher than that of comparable cities. It is one of several basic but intractable problems still troubling Egypt, one that belies the revolutionary fervor of early 2011 and speaks to the longstanding challenges this country still faces.

Everything has changed, many Egyptians say, and nothing has changed.

“Chaos is the master of the situation,” said Saad Hagras, a columnist and the managing editor at a business newspaper, Al Alam Al Youm, describing traffic in Cairo but also life in Egypt, more generally. “Politics has been brought back to life,” to be sure, Mr. Hagras said, but the revolution has solved little else. Crime and violence are up, he noted, with fewer police officers on the streets since the uprising that deposed President Hosni Mubarak. Poverty remains extensive — more than 40 percent of the population is thought to live on less than $2 per day — and unemployment is high and rising.

“The citizen’s life is worse now than it was before the Jan. 25 revolution,” Mr. Hagras said.

Mohammed Ahmed, 31, who sells pirated software and videos in the street in Ramses Square, echoed that sentiment. “It’s no different now than under Mubarak,” Mr. Ahmed said at his stand in central Cairo, outside the city’s principal railway station. Commuters flow out into the shaded road here, between the cars and battered microbuses that crawl around the pilings of the bridge overhead. The police come most weeks to chase him off the street, Mr. Ahmed said. “We’re causing a problem, yes,” he said, referring to the traffic, “but we’re not the main reason for it.”

Designated parking spaces are difficult to come by in Cairo, so drivers park in the street. The traffic police often appear wildly unpreoccupied by traffic. Gas is subsidized and inexpensive, and stoplights are rare, the World Bank notes in a report, and the city’s transportation infrastructure was simply never meant to handle so many vehicles or human beings. While accommodations have been made — bridges, a ring road, a subway system, a bus network — they have not kept pace with the city’s growth.

About 2.2 million vehicles now ply Cairo’s streets, a number that has risen an average of 4 percent each year since the 1970s, said Safwan Khedr, an engineering professor and transportation expert at the American University in Cairo. Egypt’s population has grown by about 13 million in the past decade, a rise of nearly 20 percent; greater Cairo has absorbed much of that growth, to reach 18 million residents.

Road accidents kill about 1,000 people — half are pedestrians — in greater Cairo each year, and injure 4,000 more, according to the World Bank. Ambulances here are equipped with loudspeakers; emergency workers plead with drivers to find room for them to pass.

Local driving habits are famously problematic, too. Cairenes often shrug off stoplights and traffic rules and what more timid souls might call prudence, Dr. Khedr noted, and the revolution has done nothing to change this. Many Egyptians learn to drive from friends or family, he said, not in classes, and licenses are generally awarded without a road test.

“If a person is doing something wrong, he should know he is doing something wrong,” said Dr. Khedr, a bit exasperated.

Police checkpoints, to check drivers’ licenses, often cause traffic problems as well.

“To check drivers’ licenses, would you make the whole country stop moving?” asked Mohammed Hedi, 49. He stopped his white taxicab in the middle of the road along the Sixth of October bridge to point to several rows of halted midday traffic below.

There are the street vendors, too. Mr. Morsi’s government has suggested placing the vendors at designated markets once a week; the vendors complain that they would never be able to feed their families with just one day’s work. There are vague plans to build new market areas, off the pavement, but the appropriate land has yet to be identified or prepared. Nor is it altogether clear where, in central Cairo, such land might be found.

“Where do they want us to go?” asked Mr. Ahmed, the salesman of pirated software. “Do they want us to stay home?”

Business has fallen sharply since last year, he said, with customers concerned about the country’s stability. He now sells no more than about $50 of goods a day, he said, and takes home just a fraction of that to support his wife and twin boys.

But he has yet to pass judgment on Mr. Morsi, who took office in late June, despite his pledge to clear out the street vendors; two months is too little time, Mr. Ahmed said. “We’ll give him a chance,” he said. “We hope God is on his side.”

Still, Mr. Ahmed has every intention of keeping his stand here amid the traffic, where it has been for nearly eight years, though he does not much like the work or the noise.

“Every day, I wake up and say, ‘I hope God will let me stop coming here,’ ” he said, laughing. “But I keep coming.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/world/middleeast/for-egyptians-no-relief-from-cairos-infamous-traffic.html?pagewanted=all

Plasma Gasification Raises Hopes of Clean Energy From Garbage

By RANDY LEONARD

NY Times

September 11, 2012

David Robau tours the country promoting a system that sounds too good to be true: It devours municipal garbage, recycles metals, blasts toxic contaminants and produces electricity and usable byproducts — all with drastic reductions in emissions.

Mr. Robau, an environmental scientist for the Air Force, has been promoting a method that was developed with the Air Force to dispose of garbage with neither the harmful byproducts of conventional incineration nor the environmental impact of transporting and burying waste. It is one of several innovative techniques that the United States military has been researching to provide alternatives to the open-pit burns that some veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars say have made them ill.

Already some waste companies and cities like New York have shown an interest in technology similar to what Mr. Robau has been promoting, known as plasma arc gasification. Proponents say the process can break chemical bonds and destroy medical waste, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), asbestos and hydrocarbons, some of which can be hazardous if disposed of in landfills or traditional mass-burn incinerators.

Still, some environmentalists are leery. They say the ability to fully dispose of waste will discourage recycling and the development of renewable products, and the gasification will still result in toxic substances like dioxins.

Mr. Robau maintains that the process is earth-friendly. “This is not incineration,” he said. “This is gasification, so it’s a lot cleaner, a lot better for the environment.”

Mr. Robau, who also heads a nonprofit organization based in Gulf Breeze, Fla., has overseen testing of the small-scale plasma arc gasification system, which cracks complex molecules into simple elements using energy as intense as the sun’s surface, making fuel for about 350 kilowatts of electricity from about 10 tons of garbage each day, enough to run the system.

The system has been hard at work in a 6,400-square-foot building at Hurlburt Field Air Force base in Florida’s panhandle. A mechanical shredder cuts household garbage into pieces no bigger than two inches. An airtight auger feeds the waste into an oxygen-poor gasification chamber, where temperatures reach more than 9,000 degrees.

In an instant, wood disintegrates, plastics turn to gas. Bits of metal and glass fall into a molten pool.

From two graphite electrodes, an arc of electricity leaps about a foot to the molten slag, producing a cloud of ionized particles known as plasma, which heats the chamber. Most heavier metals settle to the bottom of the pool, below a layer of liquid silica and other oxides. The metals are removed, cooled and used for steel or other products.

“Effectively, 100 percent of all the metals on the base are being recycled,” Mr. Robau said.

The liquid oxides are removed and form a glassy solid when cooled. The slag traps contaminants like errant lead molecules and other heavy metals in a vitreous matrix that takes up 1 percent of the volume of the original waste, Mr. Robau said, a tenth of the volume left over after traditional incineration.

The vitrified component meets standards for disposal and may even be suitable for use as a construction aggregate, according to Mr. Robau and other industry professionals.

In the chamber, organic gases break down into hydrogen and carbon monoxide — the components of a fuel called synthesis gas, or syngas — which exits the furnace.

The gas passes through a plasma torch polisher, which breaks down remaining complex molecules and soot.

Injected water cools the syngas to less than 200 degrees. The extreme temperature of the plasma followed by quick cooling inhibits the formation of dioxins and furans (another organic compound), according to Mr. Robau and other industry experts.

The lack of dioxin creation would be a benefit over traditional incinerators and other types of gasifiers, in which lower temperatures and incomplete burning result in toxic compounds.

Emissions rules forced a 99 percent cut in dioxin and furan emissions and a 96 percent reduction in mercury from traditional incinerators between 1990 and 2005, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. However, companies have to dispose of the toxic ash filtered from mass-burn facilities.

After water quenches the gas in the Hurlburt system, stripping processes produce sodium bisulfate and hydrochloric acid, which can be sold, Mr. Robau said.

The gas passes through three types of filters to catch remaining impurities. The resulting syngas is as clean or cleaner than natural gas, and the system produces less than half the nitrogen oxides and 5 percent of the sulfur oxides and mercury of a traditional incinerator, Mr. Robau said. The Air Force uses the syngas to produce enough electricity to power the system.

Companies have used plasma arc technology in steel refining for more than a century. Some small-scale plasma gasifiers are specialized to process materials like asbestos or medical waste.

In Japan, a plasma facility originally designed to zap residue from automobile shredding now handles up to 150 tons of municipal solid waste each day in the city of Utashinai. And construction on a plant of similar size, designed to process industrial waste and wood chips, wrapped up this summer in Morcenx, in southern France.

Companies have been eying plasma gasification of municipal waste with eager hopes, but until recently financing has lagged. Plasma facilities are expensive, and the energy-hungry arcs and torches can consume half of the generated electricity. On the other hand, the systems can also handle medical and hazardous waste, which can command two to four times the fees associated with municipal waste.

“The problem has been over the years trying to find that economic sweet spot,” said Joe Vaillancourt, who evaluates newer technologies for Waste Management, a $15.4 billion company with headquarters in Texas.

In the past five years, with increased interest in energy independence and sustainability, venture capitalists and companies have financed testing of small-scale systems, including a 25-ton system built and run by InEnTec in Arlington, Ore., Mr. Vaillancourt said. Waste Management now holds an equity stake in InEnTec.

Last month the Agriculture Department announced a conditional $105 million loan guarantee for Fulcrum BioEnergy to build a much larger system outside Reno, Nev. It will use three InEnTec plasma melters to process 400 tons of garbage a day, an unprecedented scale for a plasma municipal waste facility, said Mr. Vaillancourt and others in the industry. Fulcrum plans to create ethanol from the syngas, and expects the Reno plant to be running in 2014.

New York City, too, is looking for innovative technology to deal with some of the city’s waste. In March, the Bloomberg administration requested proposals to build a facility that would use newer techniques like plasma gasification or anaerobic digestion to process as much as 900 tons of garbage a day.

“New Yorkers want their trash to be handled in an environmentally friendly way,” said Caswell F. Holloway, deputy mayor for operations. “Anything would be better than putting it in the ground.” The city is reviewing the proposals.

Still, some environmental groups, like the Sierra Club and the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, lump these techniques in with traditional incinerators, claiming that they still produce dioxin. They also oppose renewable energy credits for these facilities.

Allen Hershkowitz, a scientist with the National Resources Defense Council, said he believed there was a place for waste-to-energy operations, but only after recycling and composting programs had been maximized.

He said he still believed that communities could reach recycling rates of 60 to 70 percent. In his view it is premature for a city like New York, with a recycling rate of about 15 percent, to be considering setting up a new waste facility. “They’re not even at the point where they should be thinking about waste-to-energy,” Mr. Hershkowitz said

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/science/plasma-gasification-raises-hopes-of-clean-energy-from-garbage.html?pagewanted=all