Tuesday, August 05, 2008

OIL SHOCK

Gas Prices Apply Brakes To Suburban Migration

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 5, 2008; Page A01

That 1958 brick rambler inside the Beltway is suddenly looking a lot better to Dawn and Jeff Schaefer, who are buying their first house in Northern Virginia.

Not too long ago, they were looking farther out -- for a newer house, a bigger yard and all the amenities. But no more. "You get less house and property for the same price, but we're willing to make that sacrifice to save on gas prices and commuting costs," Dawn Schaefer said.

Cheap oil, which helped push the American Dream away from the city center, isn't so cheap anymore. As more and more families reconsider their dreams, land-use experts are beginning to ask whether $4-a-gallon gas is enough to change the way Americans have thought for half a century about where they live.

"We've passed that tipping point," U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said.

Since the end of World War II, government policy has funded and encouraged the suburban lifestyle, subsidizing highways while starving mass transit and keeping gas taxes much lower than in some other countries.

Americans couldn't wait to trade in the cramped city apartments of the Kramdens and Ricardos for the lush lawns of the Bradys. Local land-use policies kept housing densities low, pushing development to the periphery of metropolitan regions and forcing families who wanted their dream house to accept long commutes and a lack of any real transportation choices other than getting behind the wheel.

Even the way the government pays for roads and transit is dependent on gas taxes, which is effective only if Americans keep driving.

"There is a whole confluence of government policies -- tax, spending, regulatory and administrative -- that have subsidized sprawl," said Bruce Katz, director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. A gallon of gasoline costs more than $8 in Britain, Germany, France and Belgium, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Much of the price difference is due to higher taxes.

Federal spending is about 4 to 1 in favor of highways over transit. Today, more than 99 percent of the trips taken by U.S. residents are in cars or some other non-transit vehicle, largely as a result of decades of such unbalanced spending.

The policies -- building so many highways and building so many houses near those highways -- have had a direct bearing on how and where people live and work. More Americans, 52 percent, live in the suburbs than anywhere else. The suburban growth rate exceeded 90 percent in the past decade.

But there's been a radical shift in recent months. Americans drove 9.6 billion fewer highway miles in May than a year earlier. In the Washington area and elsewhere, mass transit ridership is setting records. Last year, transit trips nationwide topped 10.3 billion, a 50-year high.

Home prices in the far suburbs, such as Prince William and Loudoun counties, have collapsed; those in the District and inner suburbs have stayed the same or increased. A recent survey of real estate agents by Coldwell Banker found an increased interest in urban living because of the high cost of commuting.

Brookings says transportation costs are now second only to housing as a percentage of the household budget, with food a distant third.

The people are leading the revolution, but land-use experts wonder whether a government policy so etched into the American fabric will follow.

"When people bought homes, they punched the numbers and said can we afford the mortgage payment and taxes," Katz said. "This new paradigm is going to have families being more deliberate about the cost of transportation spending and energy costs. That's a new phenomenon in the United States. That will be the change that will change development patterns."

Katz and others said high fuel prices will increase demand for transit-oriented development, where homes, townhouses and office buildings cluster around transit hubs that link jobs with population centers.

That is Fairfax County's policy at Tysons Corner, where the Board of Supervisors has approved high-rise office buildings, condominiums, a hotel, restaurants and stores -- on the condition that the area receive four Metro stops as part of the proposed rail extension to Dulles International Airport. The idea is that residents of Tysons would never have to leave and those wishing to shop, eat or work there could leave their cars at home and take the train.

On a much smaller scale, the county, for years derided for pro-sprawl policies, has approved or is considering similar proposals near the Dunn Loring, Springfield and Vienna Metro stops. Although the policy changes were in the works before fuel costs skyrocketed, the guiding philosophy was getting people out of their cars.

"We need to change the patterns of development," said Gerald E. Connolly (D), chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. "We have to move to a new transit-oriented development paradigm and concentrate development and avoid the sprawl that we've allowed in the past and undo some of the environmental damage."

He pointed to nearby Arlington County and its Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, alive with pedestrians and dense housing development.

"We actually know it works," Connolly said.

That is also the model that Tom Darden, chief executive of Cherokee Investment Partners, is betting on. His Raleigh-based firm snaps up urban land, often used industrial sites, near transit stations and transforms it into housing.

He said the days of building giant houses on former soybean fields on the outer fringes of metropolitan areas are over.

"What were pluses of that lifestyle are now liabilities: a big SUV, a big home to heat, the energy needed to mow the lawn," he said.

He said his urban properties in Charlotte, Raleigh, N.C., Montreal and Denver are doing well, while exurbs like those in California's Central Valley are "turning into ghost towns."

"And we're only at the shallow end of the pool," Darden said.

In Montreal, Cherokee bought a former General Motors plant in 2004 and is creating a mixed-use development that will include 1,200 residential units on a transit line stop. In Denver, Darden's company is doing something similar with an abandoned rubber plant.

"Longer term, rising fuel prices produces a positive effect: people living closer-in and in smaller homes and close to transit," Darden said.

David Ellis, a researcher with the Texas Transportation Institute, said the desire for such development is driven by demographics and public demand, not government fiat.

"Government can facilitate only when there is a demand," Ellis said. "If government does something against the market, it is going to fail."

But density remains a tough sell to those who want a house with some land and who don't live or work where the trains go.

"It is fatuous to believe that because fuel costs $4 a gallon today that we will all decide to live in apartment houses," said Alan E. Pisarski, author of Commuting in America and a leading national expert on driving habits and trends.

"The economic reality is that people get forced to the edge of metropolitan areas," Pisarski said, adding that the decades-long outward march made economic sense in the days of lower home prices and cheaper commuting costs.

Even at these high gasoline prices, he doesn't foresee a major shift in those trends.

"The only answer over time is that the jobs come to them," he said, referring to employers moving out to be closer to their exurban workers. That phenomenon is in play in the Washington area, with high-tech jobs along the Dulles corridor and Interstate 270 in Maryland and all the government contracting work near Tysons Corner.

Pisarski and others say technological advances, telecommuting, flexible scheduling, carpooling and stringing errands together can reduce vehicle use. After all, most vehicle trips and miles are compiled not on commutes to work but on other trips. The eventual turnover of the nation's vehicle fleet, with the shift to more fuel-efficient vehicles, will also ease the pain.

Guy Saffel is thinking along those lines. Saffel, who works in the District but lives in South Riding, a fast-growing exurb near Dulles, is trying to sell his family's GMC Yukon Denali. He said he is sick of buying gas for a vehicle that gets 12 miles a gallon.

The Saffels recently upgraded to a 6,000-square-foot house that doubled their mortgage payment. Saffel, his wife and his son are living what many in the country's far-out suburbs describe as "The American Dream" of a big house, a big lawn and a big vehicle in the driveway.

"We kind of fell into the trap of our neighbors," he said.

But even though he'll trade in the Denali, he's not leaving the big house. "My son is happy with schools and friends," Saffel said. "But I'll be honest, if I was single guy -- if we didn't have a kid and my wife was for it -- I would probably move out of the area."

The debate over density is not just limited to the East and West coasts.

Mayor Randy Pye, mayor of Centennial, Colo., a suburb of Denver, has been called a socialist by fellow Republicans for his pro-density and pro-transit views. He was a supporter of the Denver area's new light-rail system, a system built largely without federal funds.

Pye said he doesn't see a way out of high gas prices and our collective national traffic jam that doesn't involve higher-density development and mass transit.

"We hate density; we hate sprawl," he said. "But we can't continue doing what we're doing."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/04/AR2008080402415.html?hpid=topnews

www.detnews.com.gif

Monday, July 7, 2008

Wyandotte emerges as leader in energy

Once known for its dirty industry, Downriver town forms fresh identity with alternative power projects.

Tanveer Ali / The Detroit News

WYANDOTTE -- While high fuel costs have manufacturers and communities scrambling to beef up their environmental credentials, officials in this small Downriver community believe they're ahead of the curve.

From discarded tires to solar and wind power, Wyandotte, once considered an industrial city, has now become synonymous with the alternative energy movement, and environmental experts have taken notice.

"They're among the first movers in this area," said David Gard, energy policy specialist for the Michigan Environmental Council, referring to Wyandotte's role in taking measures to curb fossil fuel dependence. "They can move forward quickly when they have good ideas."

Wyandotte, home to one of the state's 44 municipally owned electric utilities, is the first Michigan community to propose an urban wind energy project. It has received $2 million in federal grants toward building five 1.8-megawatt wind turbines that would power 500 to 700 homes each.

Melanie McCoy, general manager of the city's utility company, said while coal will continue to provide energy in the city for years to come, Wyandotte hopes to reduce that dependence in anticipation of a state law requiring 10 percent of all energy to come from renewable sources by 2015.

Since 2000, the city's power plant has been burning used shredded tires, a cheaper, more efficient fuel than coal. Though it's not considered renewable energy by the state, it provides 16 percent of the power in the 70-megawatt plant. A few other plants in the state, including two in Grayling and Hillman, use the energy that in some cases might have lower emissions than at all-fossil fuel plants.

This spring, the Wyandotte school district installed solar panels at Wilson Middle School. Though the panels provide only 2 percent of the school's energy needs, it serves as a model for the other energy conservation projects undertaken throughout Downriver by Wyandotte-based Kulick Enterprises. The company will also install solar panels for the music stage at next month's Wyandotte's Street Art Fair.

McCoy views the big and the small energy efforts in Wyandotte as a communitywide effort, with individuals playing just as vital a role as the utilities firm.

"Because we are smaller and more nimble, we're able to investigate these," she said. "The community as a whole has been able to look at all those alternatives."

The city has been notorious for being near the steel plants on Zug Island and home to Wyandotte Chemical, which was acquired by BASF in 1967. Residents claim that at one time chemical odors pervaded the air. Now, McCoy said, BASF is a model environmental neighbor. One of the wind turbines is expected to be planted on its property.

Longtime resident Sylvia Jagielski said the city has come a long way environmentally from the days when she would wake up and find her swimming pool with a film of black soot from the nearby factories.

Today, like many others in her hometown, Jagielski has taken to the little things to reduce her carbon footprint: install energy efficient lighting, conserve water and recycle everything.

"People are very conscious of this, more so in this area, perhaps because of being industrial," said Jagielski, 64. "When you have to live somewhere, you want it to be good. You want it to be pure."

The Rev. Charles Morris, founder of the nonprofit Michigan Interfaith Power and Light, has been a motivator for much of the change. An environmental adviser to the city since a "conversion experience" nearly two decades ago when he was challenged by a parish member, he has served on the commission of the city utility company, overseeing many of the changes it has made.

His St. Elizabeth's Church on Goddell and Second sports eight solar panels and wind turbines. Though those power sources cost $20,000 to install, combined with a new boiler and other improvements, the church saves more than $25,000 in energy costs per year.

"Morris gave me the inspiration to say, wow, this is a good idea," McCoy said.

Still, Wyandotte hasn't had a spotless record. In 2006, the city received a notice from the Environmental Protection Agency alleging its plants violated the Clean Air Act by releasing excessive amounts of nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide over a two-year period.

While the city initially argued that there were some reporting inconsistencies, McCoy now says the city may have released excessive emissions and expects to receive additional guidelines from the agency. The EPA would not comment on the "ongoing enforcement action."

Municipally owned utilities and smaller communities have been among the first to make a move with alternative energy. Traverse City Light & Power installed a turbine in 1996, while private investors helped put up turbines in Mackinac City and the Thumb.

Other Downriver communities have been slower to adapt alternative energy policies, with several communities and developers voicing reluctance to putting up overhead costs. But with rising fuel costs and government funding for energy projects, the state's specialist Gard expects more projects in the future.

Nearby Taylor is one of the cities looking to jump on the eco-friendly trend. Mayor Cameron G. Priebe said a yearlong study expected to end in October looks promising and may result in the purchase of two $1.5 million wind turbines that would power 1,500 homes. The city also received $116,000 in grants to power a building with solar energy in Heritage Park.

Lifelong Downriver resident Frank Mangiapane owns Wyandotte-based Silver Lining Recycling, which provides shredded tires to the power plant. Like other natives, he says he's noticed a change in the quality of life with its new environmental focus.

"We've come to the point that we could eat the fish without concern to health and well-being," Mangiapane said.

McCoy said Wyandotte may be experimenting with more ideas.

McCoy's next idea? River current energy.

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080707/METRO01/807070372

Solar & Alternative Energy

Solar-energy collecting potential in urban Honolulu

Stephen Meder and Olivier Pennetier

A novel method to assess the intensity of solar radiation on existing rooftops uses a combination of aerial images and geographic information systems software.

The Helianthus solar-energy assessment (HSEA) method was developed to evaluate the solar-radiation intensity striking existing buildings in urban areas. It uses aerial images, geographic information systems (GIS) software, and field observations, as well as a robust assessment protocol and additional patented processes. The HSEA method doubles as a powerful design tool aiding the orientation and solar integration of buildings. The Mapunapuna district of Honolulu was selected for the technique's validation study. This urban area, immediately to the northeast of the Honolulu international airport, comprises a mix of industrial, commercial, and residential buildings, thus offering a representative cross-section of building types (see Figure 1). The assessment guidelines were tested for feasibility and accuracy, refined, and adjusted to facilitate an efficient and reasonably accurate evaluation. At present, the research protocols include nine steps, identified below, and a verification procedure.

First, aerial photographs at a scale of 1:48,000 (1in=4000ft) were used. Although not offering the same level of accuracy as larger scales, they allow simultaneous analysis and assessment of insolation of large areas. Since most aerial images must subsequently be scaled and georeferenced to a GIS layer (step 2), the use of a single small-scale photograph speeds up the assessment process. GIS layers also provide helpful information about the area of study, such as land use and zoning, Hawaii-specific tax-map key numbers, and property areas. In addition, a 3D digital elevation model (DEM) of the island of Oahu was acquired, containing elevation information for any point on the map.

Next, we scaled and georeferenced the aerial photographs to the GIS layers. Georeferencing is the spatial alignment of the photograph to known geographical features. Scaling within the GIS program is necessary to identify and calculate surface areas corresponding to actual dimensions.

Figure 1. The Mapunapuna district of Honolulu. The yellow shading corresponds to our study area.

We identified building rooftop areas from six specific, homogeneous neighborhoods in the study district (step 4). These sectors were defined by their land use and zoning characteristics, as well as their roof-surface distinctiveness, identified from field surveys and aerial photographs.

The orientation of single building rooftops can be determined through georeferencing to GIS layers (step 5). However, roof-slope angle (or pitch) could not be identified using aerial photography combined with image-recognition software. Field surveys in the study area (step 6) were an important part of the protocol. A pitch factor was tagged to the total surface area for each sector of the study district (step 7).

Global insolation on a horizontal surface (or flat) includes both direct and diffuse solar-radiation values.¹ While this important information is readily available for numerous cities,² it does not account for mesoclimatic factors such as orographic overshadowing, which is particularly prominent within the deep valleys surrounding Honolulu.³ We acquired a GIS extension, Solar Analyst, which enables the identification of solar radiation incident on any terrain⁴ (step 8). It also accounts for the shadow effect caused by its topography⁵ (see Figure 2). This allowed us to assess the insolation on existing building rooftops (step 9).

Figure 2. Insolation map of the Mapunapuna district, with orange and blue representing high and low incident radiation, respectively.

Four input variables affect the overall radiation incident on a surface. The first two relate to the clearness index, which quantifies how much cloud cover should be implemented into the model.⁵ The third input parameter is linked to the shading coefficient. Shading might be produced by rooftop mechanical equipment, adjacent buildings, parapets, or other obstructions. The final variable is driven by the albedo factor, which can potentially increase the insolation received by a given surface.¹

We conclude that the roofs in our study area could potentially supply enough electrical power for 250–300 nearby homes per year. While the main purpose of the solar-radiation modeling program is to estimate incident insolation, we can also produce design guidelines pertaining to surface tilt and orientation to optimize solar collection on future structures. This includes considerations of terrain features and shading, and is extendable to locations worldwide if DEMs (and other relevant information) are available.

This research was funded by the Hawaiian Electric Company Inc. and the Electric Power Research Institute.

Stephen Meder

School of Architecture and

Center for Smart Building and Community Design

University of Hawaii at Manoa

Honolulu, HI

Stephen Meder holds a joint appointment at the School of Architecture and the Sea Grant College Program at the University of Hawaii (UH). He is the director of the Center for Smart Building and Community Design. He serves on the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, the Chancellor's Commission for Climate Change, and the UH Council for Sustainability.

Olivier Pennetier

School of Architecture

University of Hawaii at Manoa

Honolulu, HI

References:

1. S. A. Klein, An algorithm for calculating monthly-average radiation on inclined surfaces, Trans. ASME, J. Solar Energy Eng. 103, pp. 29-33, 1981.

2. T. Yoshihara, P. C. Ekern, Solar Radiation Measurements in Hawaii, pp. 104, Hawaii Nat. Energy Inst., University of Hawaii, HI, 1977.

3. W. Falicoff, G. Koide, P. Takahashi, Solar/Wind Handbook for Hawaii, US Department of Energy, 1979.

4. P. Fu, P. M. Rich, The Solar Analyst 1.0 User Manual, Helios Environmental Modeling Institute, 2000.

5. P. M. Rich, Design and implementation of the solar analyst: an ArcView extension for modeling solar radiation at landscape scales, Proc. 19th Ann. ESRI User Conf., 1999, 2000. Paper 867

DOI: 10.1117/2.1200807.1103

Give landlords cash to cut carbon, government told

18.07.08

By Mark Jansen

Select committee of MPs, LandSecs’ Salway and Sir David King recommend incentive scheme

The government should introduce cash incentives to improve the energy efficiency of Britain’s commercial buildings, a committee of MPs has concluded.

The committee also called for the Building Regulations to be progressively tightened to raise energy-efficiency standards and for the wider introduction of display energy certificates.

The report of the All Party Urban Development Group was launched on Wednesday by Francis Salway, president of the British Property Federation and chief executive of Land Securities, together with Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the government.

The report, Greening UK Cities’ Buildings, said the cost of refitting properties to make them greener is often prohibitive. Landlords have little incentive to make the investment when rents and values are unlikely to rise as a result, while energy costs are still too low in relation to tenants’ overall occupation costs to induce them to cut consumption.

The report makes eight recommendations:

• It calls on the government to create a ‘one-stop shop’ to deliver energy-efficiency policies and information coherently

• Owners and occupiers should be given clear advice on how to make easy energy savings

• The government must lead by example. A study by the National Audit Office, published in April last year, found that only 9% of the governments’ new buildings and refurbishments met its own sustainability targets

• There should be a single standard for measuring a building’s energy performance

• A national database should be compiled to compare the energy performance of buildings in use with their initial design assumptions.

• Display energy certificates, which show a building’s energy usage and will be compulsory for large public sector sites from October, should also apply to commercial buildings. Energy performance certificates, which were introduced for commercial buildings in April, only show what the design is capable of

• Building regulations on energy efficiency should be tightened to force changes in behaviour

• Trading standards officers given clear guidance to ensure that the regulations are enforce.

The report concludes that ‘there is scope to consider … a range of fiscal incentives and grants to retrofit buildings and help owners deal with upfront costs’.

The committee of MPs based its report on oral and written evidence given by a range of property industry sources. A spokesman for the All Party Urban Development Group said: ‘The readiness of the private sector to give evidence for this report shows that it is willing to work with the government, but we need a clear vision on how to go forward.’

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Gas Prices May Revive Cities

Urban planners finally see a way to curb sprawl

By Bret Schulte

Posted July 17, 2008

Andres Duany is thrilled by the prices he's seeing at the gas pump. The urban planner and high priest of the New Urbanism movement sees today's (and likely tomorrow's) gas prices accomplishing what he and others in his field have long sought: a wholesale re-creation of the American lifestyle. "The urbanism of the United States has been premised on two things," Duany says. "One is inexpensive land. And the other is inexpensive fuel. Both have led to sprawl."

Sprawl—that scourge of urban designers who prize a tightly packaged city, walkable neighborhoods, and mixed-use development that brings together homes with businesses and shops—may have finally met its match. At least, that's the hope of the enclave of people who study settlement and land use, and who now sheepishly admit they're rooting for high energy prices. "Urban planners have been beating their heads against the wall for decades trying to get Americans to settle in a more compact pattern on the landscape for the very reasons we're starting to see now," says Thomas Campanella, an associate professor of city and regional planning at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill. "To be honest, I feel that rising gas prices...are going to do more for good, sustainable urban planning than the entire urban planning profession."

Sure, they feel guilty admitting it, but high energy prices—gasoline as well as heating oil and natural gas—could prove to be the force that brings the dreams of urban planners to fruition: a greener, more sustainable society that is also a throwback to the preautomobile age, when it wasn't realistic to have tracts of homes miles away from business centers, which were, in turn, miles away from shopping centers. "There are vast swaths of the landscape that are inaccessible to anything but the automobile," Campanella says. "Obviously, we're going to see real changes if oil is going to skyrocket, and I think we can all assume it's not going to return to levels of the past."

On one hand, the story of the car, and the far-flung communities of huge homes and cul-de-sacs they enabled, is a testament to America's enormous economic success. But it has also meant more obesity, pollution, and, say urban planners, social isolation. They argue that in some ways, the quality of life was higher when Americans had less money to purchase things like cars. "The great cities that people love," Duany says, "were the result of a substantially less wealthy nation that had to be far more intelligent about its assets." He notes cities such as New York, Boston, and San Francisco, which were built for people to live close to their daily needs. A fringe benefit: more opportunities for interaction with and reliance on neighbors.

High energy prices could mean more U.S. cities joining those ranks, growing thicker with residents, shops, and employers—as they were decades ago. Together with the foreclosure crisis, gas prices "will really take the sheen off the distant suburbs," says Bob Dunphy, a senior fellow for transportation and infrastructure at the Urban Land Institute. Experts are predicting that city homes, often smaller than their suburban counterparts, could gain value for being less costly to heat and cool, as well as for their proximity to mass transit, shops, and employers. "It's what I call a return to reason," Duany says.

The obstacles to such a retro future, of course, are staggering. Thriving cities are expensive and cramped and hardly family friendly. Shrinking cities, like many in the Rust Belt, are dilapidated, crime-ridden—and hardly family friendly. Few offer a quality public school system. But the biggest changes would have to take place in the suburbs. New Urbanists such as Duany, who champion mixed-use environments, say suburbs must adapt to high gas prices by becoming more like villages. Central shopping should replace big box stores (and their aprons of parking) on the town edge. And entire swaths of city blocks with nothing but houses and cul-de-sacs must be retrofitted to fully functioning neighborhoods, with corner stores and businesses in walking distance. "Communities will have to look at diversifying their land use," says Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "You'll see more people buying into the idea of a more dense suburb." Public transit would have to not only link to the metropolitan core but to other suburbs, which often have their own employer bases.

That's a tall order that would require billions in public infrastructure investment and a massive shift in taxpayer subsidies from highways to other infrastructure. That's not likely to happen—at least, not yet. At $4 per gallon for gas, Americans are paying an average of about $500 more to fill up a car this year over last year. That may dent the family budget, but it's hardly enough to trigger a wholesale reimagining of the American Dream. Not to mention that new automobile technology that features plug-in hybrids, electric cars, and hydrogen-powered cars may blunt the impact of gas prices and allow plenty of Americans to enjoy life as they've known it for decades.

Nevertheless, changes in settlement patterns are already occurring, albeit incrementally. And if the price of energy continues to snowball, so will the changes in people's behavior. "American zoning has largely separated land uses," says Tom Murphy, a former mayor of Pittsburgh and a senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute. But across the country, officials are already rethinking that notion. California's new effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is requiring some developers to assess how far residents will have to drive to reach schools, work, and shopping by automobile. "That can be reduced by putting a shopping center in the middle of a development instead of the edge," Murphy says. The once prototypical car-centered western metropolis of Salt Lake City is aggressively adding light rail commuter lines. So is Denver. With the help of Campanella and his students, modest Hillsborough, N.C., recently lobbied for commuter rail service to the state's bustling research triangle in Raleigh. Chicago, Minneapolis, and other Midwestern cities are joining their East Coast counterparts in growing dense with condominiums. "That was a trend beginning anyhow," Murphy says. "There's every reason to believe that's going to accelerate significantly."

Lawrence Yun, an economist for the National Realtors Association, is already seeing the evidence. Yun was amazed at the 3,000 responses he received from a recent survey of the nation's realtors. "People are now saying affirmatively they want to live closer to town centers and have a shorter commute," Yun says. "And smaller homes mean less energy consumption." Homes in the exurbs are "being hammered on two fronts, gas and heating and cooling costs." Realtors are reporting that they are having a difficult time even getting people to show up at open houses in some distant suburbs. Homes in cities and close-in suburbs are not only selling faster than homes in far-flung suburbs, they are appreciating more rapidly. That's especially noteworthy. While homes inside thriving cities, such as New York or Washington, have always been more expensive than in the suburbs, they tended to appreciate at the same clip. Not any more. Houses closer to the urban core are now outpacing their peers on the fringes. "Areas in the suburbs requiring long commutes are very weak," he says.

Some cities are better poised to take advantage of this trend than others. Namely, those that are already have strong urban cores and public transit lines. Meanwhile, developers are buying up abandoned rail lines, anticipating their revival as people ditch their cars. Duany says he's betting on oil-rich Texas, the very home of suburban sprawl and the derisively dubbed McMansion. "Dallas has more retrofitted downtown suburbs than any place," Duany says. "I'm always betting on Texas. It's such a can-do place." Duany's calling on American city planners to look at Europe's many thriving cities, where gasoline has always been expensive. But, he says, "we can also learn from our own cities of the past"—back when the automobile was the future.

28 ConConserve

Green Path North is a proposed power corridor of 500-kilovolt transmission lines that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power wants to carve through pristine desert and desert communities.

LADWP claims that these transmission lines are necessary to bring renewable energy into the urban city to “diversify their energy portfolio.” Development of renewable energy resources including geothermal, solar and wind, should be our highest priority to replace fossil fuels. However, for LADWP to destroy pristine desert and conservation lands in the process, including condemnation of private property, is not a “green” way to go about it. I further disagree that LADWP needs to own its own transmission lines, when there are existing corridors that were established through years of focus and study and could be the shared with other utilities.

Save The Canyons

As a third-generation resident of a canyon, I have been fortunate to have an intimate connection to a wild place that is integral to our family heritage. The place is in our bones and is where they will someday rest.

Pipes Canyon was established as the first preserve for The Wildlands Conservancy and protected 8,000 acres of pristine desert-mountain habitat and wetlands. After returning from college in Northern California and working as a biologist for the National Park Service, I accepted a position for conservancy as preserve manager of the Pipes Canyon Preserve.

LADWP threatens this land dear to our community with a new transmission corridor that will unnecessarily devastate us. There are other alternatives we have offered to LADWP, but so far their ears have been deaf to us.

The proposal for this new corridor lacks any detail as to how much renewable energy will come over the line, as well as how and by whom the mixture of renewable and dirty power will be monitored.

Threat Of Eminent Domain

The route through desert communities, branded with LADWP survey markers until recently, traverses 30 miles of private property. Thus, unwilling sellers like homesteaders and conservation nonprofits like the conservancy could see their hard-earned properties condemned under eminent domain.

The project threatens conservation lands creating a potential breach with the public trust. Lands set aside for protection with private or public monies would be unnecessarily impacted for this project. Current and future generations would lose the benefits of these pristine lands established for managed recreation.

More Innovative Strategies

LADWP does not need to look hard nor far to see more innovative strategies to tap into renewable energy. Forward-thinking cities, including Palm Desert, have backed programs for home owners to go solar with low-cost loans paid back through property taxes. Los Angeles can meet its renewable energy needs without over stepping its bounds and devastating conservation lands under the misleading project name of Green Path North.

April Sall is preserve manager of the Pipes Canyon and Mission Creek Preserve for The Wildlands Conservancy and chairwoman of the California Desert Coalition, a nonpartisan citizen advocacy group created to stop the current Green Path North. www.cadesertco.org

Anchorage Joins LED City Initiative to Improve Light Quality and Reduce Energy Costs

Municipality Appropriates $2.2 Million for First Phase Installation of LED Roadway Lights

Last update: 5:01 p.m. EDT July 29, 2008

DURHAM, N.C., Jul 29, 2008 (PrimeNewswire via COMTEX) -- Cree, Inc. (CREE:

18.83, +1.58, +9.1%) , a market leader in LED lighting, and the Municipality of Anchorage today announced Anchorage's participation in the LED City(r) program, an international program that promotes the deployment of energy-efficient LED lighting. Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich announced his city's participation in conjunction with an energy-related initiative calling for the retrofit of all 16,000 municipal roadway lights with high-efficiency LED fixtures.

"I am pleased to announce the appropriation of $2.2 million to enable the city to purchase LED fixtures to change out roughly one-quarter of Anchorage's streetlights," notes Mayor Begich. "We have studied new lighting technology extensively over the past several months to validate energy and maintenance cost savings. We also conducted a lighting conference and public survey in March of this year that showed our residents overwhelmingly approve of the new white LED lighting. With this feedback and quantified costs savings research in hand, we are confident in moving ahead with the broad deployment of LED lighting for our roadways."

"Lighting is absolutely critical to daily life in Anchorage. The continental U.S. has more than eight hours of daylight per day. Here in Anchorage, approximately 85 days a year see less than eight hours of daylight. It is significant that this community is at the forefront of adopting energy-efficient lighting," notes Deb Lovig, Cree LED City program manager. "Cree and the other LED Cities welcome Anchorage into the program and look forward to learning from this large-scale installation as the city pushes forward for energy and maintenance savings with LED lighting."

The LED fixtures from BetaLED are expected to use 50-percent less energy than current streetlights, which could save the city $360,000 annually at today's energy prices. The LED fixtures, based on performance-leading Cree XLamp(r) LEDs, typically last up to seven times longer than high-pressure sodium fixtures, allowing Anchorage to better utilize maintenance resources.

About LED City

The LED City is an expanding community of government and industry parties working to evaluate deploy and promote LED lighting technology across the full range of municipal infrastructure to:

 * Save energy  * Protect the environment  * Reduce maintenance costs  * Provide better light quality for improved visibility and safety.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, 22 percent of electricity used in the U.S. powers lighting. In a world with soaring energy prices based on the availability and control of fossil fuels, and with growing concern about sustainability of the environment, a revolution in lighting is long overdue.

LED City program participants include Raleigh, NC; Toronto, Ontario; Ann Arbor, MI; Austin, TX; Tianjin, China; Torraca, Italy, and now Anchorage, AK.

About Anchorage, Alaska

Anchorage (officially called the Municipality of Anchorage) is home to some 282,813 municipal residents, making it Alaska's largest city with more than two-fifths of the state's total population. Anchorage has been named All-America City four times, in 1956, 1965, 1984/85, and 2002, by the National Civic League. Diverse and extraordinary scenery and wildlife exist in urban Anchorage and the surrounding area. Approximately 250 black bears and 60 grizzly bears live in the area. Moose are a common sight and are a hazard to drivers, with over 100 moose killed by cars each year. Because of Anchorage's latitude, summer days are very long and winter daylight hours are very short. Anchorage is often cloudy during the winter, which decreases the amount of sunlight experienced by residents. For more information visit: www.muni.org.

About BetaLED

BetaLED, a brand of Beta Lighting, was established to dedicate resources to the emerging use of LED technology for general illumination. Beta Lighting, a division of Ruud Lighting, Inc., provides the lighting market with high-quality, specification-grade luminaires for exterior lighting applications. For additional exterior LED luminaire information, visit www.BetaLED.com.

About Cree

Cree is leading the LED lighting revolution and setting the stage to obsolete the incandescent light bulb through the use of energy-efficient, environmentally friendly LED lighting. Cree is a market-leading innovator of lighting-class LEDs, LED lighting retrofit solutions, and semiconductor solutions for general illumination, backlighting, wireless and power applications. For additional product and company information, please refer to www.cree.com.

The Cree, Inc. logo is available athttp://www.primenewswire.com/newsroom/prs/?pkgid=3529

This press release contains forward-looking statements involving risks and uncertainties, both known and unknown, that may cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated. Actual results may differ materially due to a number of factors, including the possibility that actual energy saving may vary from expectations; the potential lack of customer acceptance of LED products; the rapid development of new technology and competing products that may impair demand or render Cree's products obsolete; and other factors discussed in Cree's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its report on Form 10-K for the year ended June 24, 2007, and subsequent filings.

Cree, XLamp and LED City are registered trademarks of Cree, Inc.

This news release was distributed by PrimeNewswire, www.primenewswire.com

SOURCE: Cree, Inc.

Cree, Inc.           Media Contact:           Deb Lovig, LED City Program Manager           (919) 287-7505           deb_lovig@cree.com

Commuting
Driving Works
Robert Bruegmann 07.29.08, 6:00 PM ET

Recently, there has been a rush by pundits, particularly those who live at the center of large, older cities, to claim that rising gasoline prices will lead inexorably to fundamental shifts in the way Americans live and work. They confidently predict a long-term decline in automobile use, a rise in mass transit ridership, a widespread move of families from the suburban periphery back to the central city and the demise of the McMansion and the SUV.

These predictions are based more on wishful thinking than on good evidence. They are, first of all, suspiciously similar to those made during the oil crisis of the 1970s. Like those of the 1970s, they are based on the notion that low-density suburbs, single-family houses and private automobiles necessarily consume significantly more energy than higher-density urban areas, apartments and public transportation.

This notion is based on an entire set of assumptions that is dubious at best. The first is that we will continue to use carbon fuels for most of our energy needs. This is unlikely. And even if we continue to use gasoline for most transportation needs, the assumption that public transportation will save a lot of energy is unfounded.

Public transportation, which in the U.S. is overwhelmingly via bus, does not use significantly less fuel per passenger mile traveled than private automobiles, because buses get such low gas mileage and carry so few people. This is particularly true once all of the bus runs, including the nearly empty runs outside peak travel times, are counted in. So even with 1.25 people per car, the average car today uses no more energy per passenger mile traveled than the average bus.

The idea that large numbers of families will move from the suburban periphery to the urban center to be closer to their jobs and avoid traffic is also problematic. The pundits tend to think that the rise in traffic in our urban areas has been caused by longer and longer commutes. In fact, the commute between home and work accounts for a surprisingly small percentage of all trips, less than 20%, and that number is falling. So merely moving closer to work would help only if it involved moving closer to everything else that a family does during a typical day.

In fact, the idea that moving people from the suburbs to the city will reduce traffic is probably wrong to start with. The major reason for the growth in traffic in U.S. cities has been that, as Americans have become affluent, more of them have been able to switch from public transportation to faster and more comfortable private transportation. And since the 1960s they have done so without any commensurate increase in the capacity of our roadway system.

For this reason, traffic is typically worst not in our most sprawling metropolises, places like Kansas City, Mo., but in places like Los Angeles, which (perhaps surprisingly) is the nation's densest urbanized area. Because of the vast growth in population and density in the L.A. region but no comparable growth in the freeway network since the 1960s, it has one of the smallest provisions of freeway lane miles per capita of any urban area in the country.

If there were any large-scale move of citizens from the edge to city centers, the rising densities would almost certainly further exacerbate travel problems, because, outside of central New York and Chicago, the percentage of people using mass transit is extremely small. The vast majority of residents would continue to drive automobiles, further choking already congested roads.

Even more basic is the proposition that moving back toward the center would decrease the length of commutes. This flies in the face of evidence that jobs have been moving outwards in urban regions for decades. Today no more than about 20% of the jobs in America's largest urban regions are located within three miles of the city center, and the growth in jobs in the suburbs has vastly outpaced that in the central city.

So much for short-term prospects. What of the future? As everyone's expectations of mobility have risen over the last decades, there has been an ever greater desire to find the most efficient way of getting directly from any given Place X to Place Y. This has given the automobile a tremendous edge over mass transit. With the rapid rise in congestion in many urban areas, the advantages of the automobile have declined slightly, but it is more likely than ever that in the future most people will use some combination of private or rental automobile, taxi or small on-demand vehicle than they will start using those old-fashioned, big-box transit modes, the bus or the train.

Traditional transit use may well increase a little in the short run, as it did in the 1970s, but in the long run it is very unlikely to offer most Americans an effective way to get to most of the places they need to go. Mass transit currently accounts for no more than about 5% of total trips in America's urban areas. To scale this up even to 25% would require a staggering capital expenditure and a remaking of urban patterns that would almost certainly be unacceptable to most Americans.

Yes, the current rise in fuel costs may well bring major changes to American urban development patterns and commuting patterns, but these price increases will hit city and suburb alike. The world is almost certainly on the verge of enormous technological change in energy generation and transportation. It is likely that this will, indeed, fundamentally reshape the way we live, but what these changes will be is hard to say. What is not likely is that this reshaping will look anything like the simpleminded predictions of the prophets heralding the death of the SUV.

Robert Bruegmann, a historian of architecture, landscape and the built environment, is a professor of art history, architecture and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His most recent book, Sprawl: A Compact History, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2005.

August 3, 2008

EAST VILLAGE

The Wind Farmers of East 11th Street

By JOSH WEIL

FIVE years ago this month, the lights of the city that never sleeps winked out. It was the kind of situation that would have been tailor-made for a group of young architects who, in the 70s, took over a five-story tenement that didn’t rely on the city’s electrical grid. They lived at 519 East 11th Street, and they got their power from the wind.

On top of their building, one block north of Tompkins Square Park, stood the first roof-mounted urban windmill in the United States. More than just a tower and turbines, the windmill represented a first step toward urban energy self-sufficiency, toward freedom from electricity costs, and toward a loosening of the energy monopoly.

During the energy crisis in 1976, when a radical young architect named Travis Price first came to New York, this windmill was just a vision. Known as the Solar Cowboy, Mr. Price wore a straw cowboy hat and had a passion for renewable power.

“I was going to bring solar energy to the poor,” said Mr. Price, who is now a practicing architect in Washington. “And I was going to do it in an urban environment, during a recession, and that was going to be my flame.”

Instead, he found a city ravaged by another kind of fire. “A building an hour was being burned in New York,” he said. For a host of complicated reasons, among them rising energy costs, many landlords were abandoning their buildings or worse. Eventually, the city began to repossess the apartment houses and then sell them on favorable terms to neighborhood groups.

But Mr. Price, along with David Norris, a Yale architecture student who joined him in his cause, saw a problem: If the new owners simply reoccupied the abandoned buildings, the high energy costs and other factors would drive them out, too. So, along with an M.I.T. architecture student named Chip Tabor, they bought a share in a gutted tenement on East 11th Street and persuaded the neighborhood’s working-class, largely Puerto Rican community to help turn the building into a model for energy conservation. They installed extensive insulation and the first rooftop solar panels in Manhattan.

“I mean, what was the next step?” said Mr. Norris. “Put up a windmill.”

Finding and restoring an old farm turbine for the windmill was easy enough, but erecting the windmill, even after all the pieces were carried up to the roof, was another matter. “How do you lift this 30- or 40-foot tower straight up on the top of a narrow building,” Mr. Price said, “and not have it fall down and skewer someone? We had no budget for cranes, so we just got several cases of beer and went all down the street and said, ‘Let’s have a party.’ ”

Soon they had 40 people on the roof. “Everybody’s drinking,” Mr. Price said. “It’s a timing issue. You can’t get everyone up there unless there’s drink, but you can’t wait too long or they’re too drunk to work.”

With some pushing and tugging and lifting, the rooftop crowd soon set up the windmill. “It was absolutely harebrained and hair-raising,” Mr. Norris said. “It was in contravention of every known city regulation.”

But politicians soon flocked to 519 East 11th Street. “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report” filmed a show on its roof. Senator Ted Kennedy described the structure as “the little windmill that could.”

“We felt like a rock band,” Mr. Price recalled. “We were cooking.”

He would see people doing double-takes, he added. “And then they would suddenly see it spinning, and there would be this really delightful smile.”

SINCE storing energy produced by the windmill was difficult, the group wired it into the city’s power grid. Then, when the building was producing more electricity than it was using, the grid absorbed the overflow.

Wiring into the power grid was illegal by itself, but when the group demanded that the utility reimburse them for the overflow, Con Ed urged the New York State Energy Commission to force the group to disconnect from the grid.

Ramsey Clark, a former attorney general of the United States, came to the group’s aid. “There’d been practically no urban experience like it,” Mr. Clark said of the windmill hookup, adding that the utility was afraid of the precedent.

The group won the case. “The energy commission essentially said to Con Ed, ‘You’ve got to buy their power,’ ” Mr. Norris said. “That was huge.”

But the turbine never worked well enough to provide power for the entire building, which, by 1977 or so, was home to 25 or 30 people. Either wind speeds were too low to generate sufficient power or turbulence from gusts produced a deafening noise from the windmill and caused the building to shake. Moreover, during the major blackout in 1977, unable to get a charge from Con Ed, the windmill provided insufficient power.

Still, until 1985, when a blade was blown off during a hurricane, the windmill produced enough power to light communal areas and heat water. For the next two decades or so, its remnants jutted into the sky until, sometime in the last few years, the tower was dismantled.

Today, interest in urban wind is growing — plans are afoot to build a wind farm on Staten Island, for example — but if another blackout occurs this summer there will be no light glowing on East 11th Street. There will, however, probably be vendors hawking flashlights and batteries, a thought that reminds Mr. Price of the old days.

“I think of that hustle,” he said, “and think of us as the New Yorkers who hustled the wind.”

Urban Energy