Some PG&E customers want choice on SmartMeters

David R. Baker, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, August 16, 2010

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Joshua Hart does not want a SmartMeter.

But unless state officials and Pacific Gas and Electric Co. relent, he's going to get one anyway.

Hart, 34, considers the radiation from wireless devices - such as cell phones, laptops and the new SmartMeters - a health hazard. He covered the existing electricity meter at his home in Scotts Valley (Santa Cruz County) with a sign proclaiming the premises a "SmartMeter-free zone." On several occasions, he has followed meter installers around town with a video camera, filming as residents tell the installers to leave their homes alone.

Hart, a freelance writer and transportation planner, even interrupted a speech last week by PG&E Chief Executive Officer Peter Darbee and tried to hand the executive a box labeled "dumb meter."

But in the end, Hart probably won't have a choice. When the California Public Utilities Commission approved the SmartMeter program, the regulators didn't give PG&E customers the ability to opt out. Sooner or later, all PG&E customers will get SmartMeters for their electricity and gas service, whether they want the meters or not.

"It just rubbed us the wrong way that we can choose not to use a cell phone, we can choose not to have Wi-Fi, we can choose to make our home relatively free of (electromagnetic fields), but then here comes PG&E, and suddenly you have no choice," Hart said. "People need to feel they're in control of their own homes."

The same lack of control angers people who distrust SmartMeters for different reasons.

accuracy concern

Many PG&E customers have questioned the meters' accuracy, a criticism that PG&E considers overblown. Other customers complain that the devices, which measure electricity use hour by hour, invade homeowners' privacy by revealing when people wake up, go to work and leave on vacation.

The lack of choice is a common thread linking all of those issues. Regardless of whether they're concerned about accuracy, privacy or health, no PG&E customers can reject the meters - at least not for long. Meter installers will leave a home if confronted, but eventually they'll return.

"We don't necessarily say we'll be back in this amount of time," said PG&E spokesman Denny Boyles. "What we do is try to reach out to the customer, talk to them about the program, talk to them about the benefits of the program. ... Eventually, we will install the meter."

Under rules approved by the utilities commission, PG&E has the right to enter private properties for any reason connected to providing electricity service. That includes installing a new meter.

PG&E executives and California officials view advanced meters as essential to many of the state's long-range energy plans.

In time, the meters will enable utilities to start charging different prices for electricity use at different times of day, encouraging Californians to use power in the mornings and the evenings instead of the afternoons, when demand hits its peak. Lowering peak demand, in turn, could cut the number of power plants that need to be built, helping to fight global warming. Other California utilities are installing their own versions of advanced meters.
"If you have people opting out of that, you've put a chink in the program," said utilities commission President Michael Peevey. "It's vital to have universality of service."

The commission has ordered a study of the SmartMeter's accuracy, the results of which could be available late this month or in early September. But so far, the commission has resisted calls for a SmartMeter moratorium, saying that delaying the program could add to its already considerable $2.2 billion expense. Scotts Valley, San Francisco and other cities have asked for a moratorium across all of PG&E's service territory, and the town of Fairfax recently adopted its own temporary ban on the devices.

Helen Burt, PG&E senior vice president and chief customer officer, said other utilities that are installing advanced meters around the world are also making the meters mandatory for their customers.

"We didn't think of making it voluntary, and I don't think any utility in the U.S. or anywhere else has made it voluntary," she said. "I wish there were a way to make the grid work without everyone participating, but we haven't figured that out yet."

There has been some resistance. Last year, lawmakers in the Netherlands backed off a bill to make advanced meters compulsory after consumer advocates raised the same privacy concerns that PG&E has faced.

To individual homeowners who for various reasons don't want a SmartMeter, the lack of choice can be maddening.

Health troubles

Sudi Scull says she experiences intense migraines in the presence of electromagnetic fields. Cell phones and computers can set off blinding headaches, she says. The condition, often referred to as electromagnetic hypersensitivity or electrosensitivity, remains highly controversial, dismissed by much of the medical establishment, and Scull says she knows many people have a hard time accepting it.

"It's hard to believe, if you don't have it and don't feel it," said Scull, 61, a marriage and family therapist.

But she and an increasingly vocal group of PG&E customers say the SmartMeters make them sick. A SmartMeter was installed on Scull's San Francisco home in January, although she didn't know it at the time. She quickly became ill with symptoms that included anxiety, heart palpitations, depression and vomiting. She found the SmartMeter only after a neighbor asked her if she had one.

Scull persuaded a PG&E manager to have the device removed. But she fears she may have to move when the utility wants to install it again. PG&E insists the devices are safe, emitting less radiation than federal guidelines allow.

"I have a house that I love, I've lived here 20 years and I don't want to move," Scull said. "We have absolutely no freedom on this."

E-mail David R. Baker at dbaker@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/08/16/BUPK1EUELD.DTL

This article appeared on page D - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Wall Street Journal

16 August 2010

Empire State Building Goes Green, One Window at a Time

Maya Pope-Chappell for The Wall Street Journal

A fifth floor space inside the Empire State Building has been transformed into a cramped window-making workshop.

By David Roth

How does a Depression-era skyscraper go green? For the Empire State Building, which is in the middle of $550 million renovation that includes about $100 million in energy-efficient upgrades, all 6,514 windows must be replaced. And that’s no easy task.

As The Journal’s Anton Troianovski reports, the greening of the iconic 79-year-old tower has become a platform for Anthony Malkin, the real-estate scion who runs the building, to criticize as insufficient popular programs for assessing the environmental sustainability of buildings. If the world follows the U.S. lead on energy use, he told the audience at a real-estate panel earlier this summer, “We’re all going to die and we’ll go to war along the way.”

For the Empire State Building’s windows, Malkin brought in Serious Materials to handle a pane-by-pane upgrade. The Silicon Valley-based building materials company is transforming the old, inefficient windows into “super-insulating” units, a sort of glass sandwich that combines the existing panes with a mixture of inert gases and film. The finished product is a window anywhere from 250% to 400% more efficient than the windows they replace, according to the company.

“Dirty little secret: double-pane windows aren’t all that efficient,” says Serious Materials CEO Kevin Surace.

The replacement windows, which use what Surace calls a “suspended film system,” break up the convection current between the inside and outside of a building. That means less heat sneaks in through the windows on hot days when the air-conditioning is running, and warm air from inside has a harder time leaking out when it’s cold outside.

The team of workers tasked with the window upgrade spend their days removing, cleaning and re-fabricating the building’s 12-year-old double-pane windows. The process, which began in March and is expected to run until October, is projected to reduce solar heat gain by more than half and save $400,000 each year in energy costs.

The window work is being done on site, in an office-turned-workshop on the Empire State Building’s fifth floor. Malkin estimates that keeping the process in-house saves $2,300 per window. The Serious Materials workspace buzzes between 7 a.m. and 2 a.m., processing 75 windows per day in a space roughly the size of a Manhattan apartment. The room is so snug that engineers for the project had to shrink some of their equipment to fit in the space.

Keeping the workshop on site ensures the windows are out of their frames for just about 20 hours before the upgraded window is ready. The process is designed to keep waste at a minimum: just 4% of the building’s existing windows are being discarded, and only the gasket surrounding the original windows winds up in the trash.

Workers remove the windows from office spaces at night and bring them downstairs to the workshop. Once there, the windows are removed from their frames and peeled apart like Oreo cookies before being cleaned. The first cleaning is manual, using razor blades and pumices, followed by a wash with a chemical solution and finally water.

The deconstructed windows are then fitted with new steel spacers, treated with a metallized film and baked flat in an oven at 205 degrees. The windows are then sealed with a mixture of Kyrpton and Argon gas. Finally, the upgraded windows are put back — with the help of careful but firm malleting — into their original aluminum frames.

The on-site re-use and refabrication of the Empire State Building’s windows is unprecedented on a project of this size. But Paul Rode, the project executive from Johnson Controls Inc. who is overseeing the retrofit, believes it could become a popular model in the industry. “I’m never waiting for product. If a problem ever comes up, we don’t have to call someplace that’s 500 miles away,” he says. “Logistically, that’s just what you want in the construction business.”

New York Times

August 9, 2010

Portugal Gives Itself a Clean-Energy Makeover

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

LISBON — Five years ago, the leaders of this sun-scorched, wind-swept nation made a bet: To reduce Portugal’s dependence on imported fossil fuels, they embarked on an array of ambitious renewable energy projects — primarily harnessing the country’s wind and hydropower, but also its sunlight and ocean waves.

Today, Lisbon’s trendy bars, Porto’s factories and the Algarve’s glamorous resorts are powered substantially by clean energy. Nearly 45 percent of the electricity in Portugal’s grid will come from renewable sources this year, up from 17 percent just five years ago.

Land-based wind power — this year deemed “potentially competitive” with fossil fuels by the International Energy Agency in Paris — has expanded sevenfold in that time. And Portugal expects in 2011 to become the first country to inaugurate a national network of charging stations for electric cars.

“I’ve seen all the smiles — you know: It’s a good dream. It can’t compete. It’s too expensive,” said Prime Minister José Sócrates, recalling the way Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, mockingly offered to build him an electric Ferrari. Mr. Sócrates added, “The experience of Portugal shows that it is possible to make these changes in a very short time.”

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has renewed questions about the risks and unpredictable costs of America’s unremitting dependence on fossil fuels. President Obama has seized on the opportunity to promote his goal of having 20 to 25 percent of America’s electricity produced from renewable sources by 2025.

While Portugal’s experience shows that rapid progress is achievable, it also highlights the price of such a transition. Portuguese households have long paid about twice what Americans pay for electricity, and prices have risen 15 percent in the last five years, probably partly because of the renewable energy program, the International Energy Agency says.

Although a 2009 report by the agency called Portugal’s renewable energy transition a “remarkable success,” it added, “It is not fully clear that their costs, both financial and economic, as well as their impact on final consumer energy prices, are well understood and appreciated.”

Indeed, complaints about rising electricity rates are a mainstay of pensioners’ gossip here. Mr. Sócrates, who after a landslide victory in 2005 pushed through the major elements of the energy makeover over the objections of the country’s fossil fuel industry, survived last year’s election only as the leader of a weak coalition.

“You cannot imagine the pressure we suffered that first year,” said Manuel Pinho, Portugal’s minister of economy and innovation from 2005 until last year, who largely masterminded the transition, adding, “Politicians must take tough decisions.”

Still, aggressive national policies to accelerate renewable energy use are succeeding in Portugal and some other countries, according to a recent report by IHS Emerging Energy Research of Cambridge, Mass., a leading energy consulting firm. By 2025, the report projected, Ireland, Denmark and Britain will also get 40 percent or more of their electricity from renewable sources; if power from large-scale hydroelectric dams, an older type of renewable energy, is included, countries like Canada and Brazil join the list.

The United States, which last year generated less than 5 percent of its power from newer forms of renewable energy, will lag behind at 16 percent (or just over 20 percent, including hydroelectric power), according to IHS.

To force Portugal’s energy transition, Mr. Sócrates’s government restructured and privatized former state energy utilities to create a grid better suited to renewable power sources. To lure private companies into Portugal’s new market, the government gave them contracts locking in a stable price for 15 years — a subsidy that varied by technology and was initially high but decreased with each new contract round.

Compared with the United States, European countries have powerful incentives to pursue renewable energy. Many, like Portugal, have little fossil fuel of their own, and the European Union’s emissions trading system discourages fossil fuel use by requiring industry to essentially pay for excessive carbon dioxide emissions.

Portugal was well poised to be a guinea pig because it has large untapped resources of wind and river power, the two most cost-effective renewable sources. Government officials say the energy transformation required no increase in taxes or public debt, precisely because the new sources of electricity, which require no fuel and produce no emissions, replaced electricity previously produced by buying and burning imported natural gas, coal and oil. By 2014 the renewable energy program will allow Portugal to fully close at least two conventional power plants and reduce the operation of others.

“So far the program has placed no stress on the national budget” and has not created government debt, said Shinji Fujino, head of the International Energy Agency’s country study division.

If the United States is to catch up to countries like Portugal, energy experts say, it must overcome obstacles like a fragmented, outdated energy grid poorly suited to renewable energy; a historic reliance on plentiful and cheap supplies of fossil fuels, especially coal; powerful oil and coal industries that often oppose incentives for renewable development; and energy policy that is heavily influenced by individual states.

The relative costs of an energy transition would inevitably be higher in the United States than in Portugal. But as the expense of renewable power drops, an increasing number of countries see such a shift as worthwhile, said Alex Klein, research director, clean and renewable power generation, at IHS.

“The cost gap will close in the next decade, but what you get right away is an energy supply that is domestically controlled and safer,” Mr. Klein said.

Necessity Drives Change

Portugal’s venture was driven by necessity. With a rising standard of living and no fossil fuel of its own, the cost of energy imports — principally oil and gas — doubled in the last decade, accounting for 50 percent of the country’s trade deficit, and was highly volatile. The oil went to fuel cars, the gas mainly to electricity. Unlike the United States, Portugal never depended heavily on coal for electricity generation because close and reliable sources of natural gas were available in North Africa, and Europe’s carbon trading system could make coal costly.

Portugal is now on track to reach its goal of using domestically produced renewable energy, including large-scale hydropower, for 60 percent of its electricity and 31 percent of its total energy needs by 2020. (Total energy needs include purposes other than generating electricity, like heating homes and powering cars.)

In making the shift, Portugal has overcome longstanding concerns about reliability and high cost. The lights go on in Lisbon even when the wind dies down at the vast two-year-old Alto Minho wind farm. The country’s electricity production costs and consumer electricity rates — including the premium prices paid for power from renewable sources — are about average for Europe, but still higher than those in China or the United States, countries that rely on cheap coal.

Portugal says it has kept costs down by focusing heavily on the cheapest forms of renewable energy — wind and hydropower — and ratcheting down the premium prices it pays to lure companies to build new plants.

While the government estimates that the total investment in revamping Portugal’s energy structure will be about 16.3 billion euros, or $22 billion, that cost is borne by the private companies that operate the grid and the renewable plants and is reflected in consumers’ electricity rates. The companies’ payback comes from the 15 years of guaranteed wholesale electricity rates promised by the government. Once the new infrastructure is completed, Mr. Pinho said, the system will cost about 1.7 billion euros ($2.3 billion) a year less to run than it formerly did, primarily by avoiding natural gas imports.

A smaller savings will come from carbon credits Portugal can sell under the European Union’s carbon trading system: countries and industries that produce fewer emissions than allotted can sell permits to those that exceed their limits.

Mr. Fujino of the International Energy Agency said Portugal’s calculations might be optimistic. But he noted that the country’s transition had also created a valuable new industry: Last year, for the first time, it became a net power exporter, sending a small amount of electricity to Spain. Tens of thousands of Portuguese work in the field. Energias de Portugal, the country’s largest energy company, owns wind farms in Iowa and Texas, through its American subsidiary, Horizon Wind Energy.

Redesigning the System

A nationwide supply of renewable power requires a grid that can move electricity from windy, sunny places to the cities.

But a decade ago in Portugal, as in many places in the United States today, power companies owned not only power generating plants, but also transmission lines. Those companies have little incentive to welcome new sources of renewable energy, which compete with their investment in fossil fuels. So in 2000, Portugal’s first step was to separate making electricity from transporting it, through a mandatory purchase by the government of all transmission lines for electricity and gas at what were deemed fair market prices.

Those lines were then used to create the skeleton of what since 2007 has been a regulated and publicly traded company that operates the national electricity and natural gas networks.

Next, the government auctioned off contracts to private companies to build and operate wind and hydropower plants. Bidders were granted rights based on the government-guaranteed price they would accept for the energy they produced, as well as on their willingness to invest in Portugal’s renewable economy, including jobs and other venture capital funds. Some of the winners were foreign companies. In the latest round of bidding, the price guaranteed for wind energy was in the range of the price paid for electricity generated by natural gas.

Such a drastic reorganization might be extremely difficult in the United States, where power companies have strong political sway and states decide whether to promote renewable energy. Colorado recently legislated that 30 percent of its energy must come from renewable sources by 2020, but neighboring Utah has only weak voluntary goals. Coal states, like Kentucky and West Virginia, have relatively few policies to encourage alternative energies.

In Portugal, said Mr. Pinho, the former economy minister, who will join Columbia University’s faculty, “the prime minister had an absolute majority.”

“He was very strong, and everyone knew we would not step back,” Mr. Pinho said.

A Flexible Network

Running a country using electricity derived from nature’s highly unpredictable forces requires new technology and the juggling skills of a plate spinner. A wind farm that produces 200 megawatts one hour may produce only 5 megawatts a few hours later; the sun shines intermittently in many places; hydropower is plentiful in the rainy winter, but may be limited in summer.

Portugal’s national energy transmission company, Redes Energéticas Nacionais or R.E.N., uses sophisticated modeling to predict weather, especially wind patterns, and computer programs to calculate energy from the various renewable-energy plants. Since the country’s energy transition, the network has doubled the number of dispatchers who route energy to where it is needed.

“You need a lot of new skills. It’s a real-time operation, and there are far more decisions to be made — every hour, every second,” said Victor Baptista, director general of R.E.N. “The objective is to keep the system alive and avoid blackouts.”

Like some American states, Portugal has for decades generated electricity from hydropower plants on its raging rivers. But new programs combine wind and water: Wind-driven turbines pump water uphill at night, the most blustery period; then the water flows downhill by day, generating electricity, when consumer demand is highest.

Denmark, another country that relies heavily on wind power, frequently imports electricity from its energy-rich neighbor Norway when the wind dies down; by comparison, Portugal’s grid is relatively isolated, although R.E.N. has greatly increased its connection with Spain to allow for energy sharing.

Portugal’s distribution system is also now a two-way street. Instead of just delivering electricity, it draws electricity from even the smallest generators, like rooftop solar panels. The government aggressively encourages such contributions by setting a premium price for those who buy rooftop-generated solar electricity. “To make this kind of system work, you have to make a lot of different kinds of deals at the same time,” said Carlos Zorrinho, the secretary of state for energy and innovation.

To ensure a stable power base when the forces of nature shut down, the system needs to maintain a base of fossil fuel that can be fired up at will. Although Portugal’s traditional power plants now operate many fewer hours than before, the country is also building some highly efficient natural gas plants.

To accommodate all this, Portugal needed new transmission lines from remote windy regions to urban centers. Portugal began modernizing its grid a decade ago. Accommodating a greater share of renewable power cost an additional 480 million euros, or about $637 million, an expense folded into electricity rates, according to R.E.N.

Last year, President Obama offered billions of dollars in grants to modernize the grid in the United States, but it is not clear that such a piecemeal effort will be adequate for renewable power. Widely diverse permitting procedures in different states and the fact that many private companies control local fragments of the grid make it hard to move power over long distances, for example, from windy Iowa to users in Atlanta. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the United States’ grid a “D+,” commenting that it is “in urgent need of modernization.”

“A real smart national grid would radically change our technology profile,” said John Juech, vice president for policy analysis at Garten Rothkopf, a Washington consulting firm that focuses on energy. “But it will be very costly, and the political will may not be there.”

A 2009 report commissioned by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change estimated that the United States would have to spend $3 billion to $4 billion a year for the next two decades to create a grid that could accommodate deriving 20 percent of electricity from wind power by 2030 — a 40 percent to 50 percent increase over current spending.

The Drawbacks

Energy experts consider Portugal’s experiment a success. But there have been losers. Many environmentalists object to the government plans to double the amount of wind energy, saying lights and noise from turbines will interfere with birds’ behavior. Conservation groups worry that new dams will destroy Portugal’s cork-oak habitats.

Local companies complain that the government allowed large multinationals to displace them.

Until it became the site of the largest wind farm south of Lisbon, Barão de São João was a sleepy village on the blustery Alentejo Coast, home to farmers who tilled its roller coaster hills and holiday homeowners drawn to cheap land and idyllic views. Renewable energy has brought conflict.

“I know it’s good for the country because it’s clean energy and it’s good for the landowners who got money, but it hasn’t brought me any good,” said José Cristino, 48, a burly farmer harvesting grain with a wind turbine’s thrap-thrap-thrap in the background. “I look at these things day and night.” He said 90 percent of the town’s population had been opposed.

In Portugal, as in the United States, politicians have sold green energy programs to communities with promises of job creation. Locally, the effect has often proved limited. For example, more than five years ago, the isolated city of Moura became the site of Portugal’s largest solar plant because it “gets the most sun of anywhere in Europe and has lots of useless space,” said José Maria Prazeres Pós-de-Mina, the mayor.

But while 400 people built the Moura plant, only 20 to 25 work there now, since gathering sunlight requires little human labor. Unemployment remains at 15 percent, the mayor said — though researchers, engineers and foreign delegations frequently visit the town’s new solar research center.

Indeed, Portugal’s engineers and companies are now global players. Portugal’s EDP Renováveis, first listed on stock exchanges in 2008, is the third largest company in the world in wind-generated electricity output. This year, its Portuguese chief executive, Ana Maria Fernandes, signed contracts to sell electricity from its wind farm in Iowa to the Tennessee Valley Authority.

“Broadly, Europe has had great success in this area,” said Mr. Juech, the analyst at Garten Rothkopf. “But that is the result of huge government support and intervention, and that raises questions about what happens when you have an economic crisis or political change; will these technologies still be sustainable?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/science/earth/10portugal.html?scp=3&sq=energy&st=cse

New York Times

August 9, 2010

In Crackdown on Energy Use, China to Shut 2,000 Factories

By KEITH BRADSHER

HONG KONG — Earlier this summer, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China promised to use an “iron hand” to improve his country’s energy efficiency, and a growing number of businesses are now discovering that it feels like a fist.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology quietly published a list late Sunday of 2,087 steel mills, cement works and other energy-intensive factories required to close by Sept. 30.

Energy analysts described it as a significant step toward the country’s energy-efficiency goals, but not enough by itself to achieve them.

Over the years, provincial and municipal officials have sometimes tried to block Beijing’s attempts to close aging factories in their jurisdictions.

These officials have particularly sought to protect older steel mills and other heavy industrial operations that frequently have thousands of employees and have sometimes provided workers with housing, athletic facilities and other benefits since the 1950s or 1960s.

To prevent such local obstruction this time, the ministry said in a statement on its Web site that the factories on its list would be barred from obtaining bank loans, export credits, business licenses and land. The ministry even warned that their electricity would be shut off, if necessary.

The goal of the factory closings is “to enhance the structure of production, heighten the standard of technical capability and international competitiveness and realize a transformation of industry from being big to being strong,” the ministry said.

The announcement was the latest in a series of Chinese moves to increase energy efficiency. The National Development and Reform Commission, which is the government’s most powerful economic planning agency, announced last Friday that it had forced 22 provinces to halt their practice of providing electricity at discounted prices to energy-hungry industries like aluminum production.

The current Chinese five-year plan calls for using 20 percent less energy this year for each unit of economic output than in 2005. But surging production by heavy industry since last winter has put in question China’s ability to meet the target.

The success or failure of China’s energy-efficiency campaign is being watched closely not just by economists, who cite the campaign as one reason that growth of the Chinese economy has slowed down a little this summer, but also by climate scientists.

China’s energy consumption rose so sharply last winter that it produced the biggest surge ever of greenhouse gases by a single country. Power plants burned more coal to generate enough electricity to meet demand.

As China has become increasingly dependent on imported oil and coal, its national security establishment has become more visibly involved in energy policy and energy security, including efforts to improve energy efficiency.

Efficiency improved 14.4 percent in the first four years of the current plan, only to deteriorate by 3.6 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to official statistics. Mr. Wen responded by convening a special meeting of the cabinet in May to address the situation.

Energy efficiency was only 0.09 percent worse in the first half of this year than in the same period in 2009, according to statistics released last week.

Energy analysts said those statistics indicated improvement in efficiency in the second quarter that nearly offset the deterioration in the first quarter, although the government has not released separate figures for the second quarter.

Zhou Xizhou, an associate director for IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates in Beijing, said that the ministry’s new list of factory closings was a strong measure to improve efficiency. But he added that China’s goal of achieving a 20 percent improvement by the end of this year compared with 2005 was “still a tall order for the rest of the year.”

The ministry said in its statement that the factories to be closed would include 762 that make cement, 279 that produce paper, 175 that manufacture steel and 84 that process leather.

The factories were chosen after discussions with provincial and municipal officials to identify industrial operations with outdated, inefficient technology, the ministry said.

The ministry did not provide figures for the percentage of capacity to be closed in each industrial sector. The ministry also did not say how many employees would be affected.

Closing factories is more palatable now than in the past because a labor shortage in many cities has made it easier for workers, particularly young ones, to find other jobs.

The list of steel mills to be closed appeared to emphasize smaller, older mills producing fairly low-end grades of steel.

Edward Meng, the chief financial officer of China Gerui Advanced Materials, a steel-processing company in central China’s Henan Province, said that the closing of such mills was consistent with the government’s broader goals of consolidating the steel sector and pushing steel makers into the production of more sophisticated kinds of steel.

The International Energy Agency in Paris announced last month that China surpassed the United States last year as the world’s largest consumer of energy.

China passed the United States as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases in 2006. That milestone came earlier because of China’s heavy reliance on coal, an especially dirty fossil fuel in terms of emission of gases contributing to global climate change.

In addition to the energy-efficiency objective in the current five-year plan, a plan announced by President Hu Jintao late last year called for China to reduce its carbon emissions per unit of economic output by 40 to 45 percent by 2020, compared with 2005 levels. Carbon emissions are a measurement of a country’s man-made emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.

Even if China meets its energy-efficiency goal this year and its carbon goal by 2020, its total carbon emissions are still on track to rise steeply in the next decade, according to forecasts by the International Energy Agency.

That is because of factors including rapid growth in the Chinese economy, growing car ownership and rising ownership of household appliances.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/business/energy-environment/10yuan.html?scp=5&sq=energy&st=cse

New York Times

August 16, 2010

Wind Turbines Are Coming to New York, and Not Just Offshore

By PATRICK McGEEHAN

For years, New York officials have envisioned powering the region from a set of huge wind turbines in the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island. But well before an offshore wind farm would be up and running, giant turbines may soon be spinning much closer to the city.

Within three years, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey hopes to have five wind towers, each more than 280 feet tall, operating on the west side of New York Harbor. Nearby, the City of Bayonne, N.J., plans to install an equally large turbine to power a sewage-pumping station. Meanwhile, the Department of Veterans Affairs is considering placing wind turbines on or near its hospitals in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

New York, it turns out, is a windy city, well suited for turning stiff breezes into electricity. If open space were not so rare, the city might be a prime spot for harnessing the wind, said Bill Baroni, deputy executive director of the Port Authority.

“Anybody who’s ever stood out at the dock in Weehawken waiting for a ferry just knows it’s a very windy area,” Mr. Baroni said. “Apparently, it’s a pretty good place to put windmills.”

In 2008, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced his plan to use wind power to help reduce the city’s dependence on power plants that run on fossil fuels. So far, there are no large-scale efforts to harness the wind in the city, only token projects like the small turbines on the roof of an apartment building in the Bronx and a wind-powered electronic billboard for Coca-Cola in Times Square.

The city’s Economic Development Corporation has been studying the feasibility of putting turbines atop buildings, including a warehouse at the Hunts Point Cooperative Market in the Bronx. But the high hopes rest on a partnership, with utility companies and the New York Power Authority, that has designs on building a wind farm on about 65,000 acres of the Atlantic floor. The New York consortium said at the end of June that it would apply for a 25-year lease on the site, with hopes of generating as much as 700 megawatts of power there by 2016.

While city officials navigate the logistical and political shoals of that ambitious plan, other agencies are pressing ahead on more solid ground.

The Port Authority’s proposed project at Port Jersey on the border of Bayonne and Jersey City would be similar, in appearance and purpose, to a wind farm that was built at a sewage-treatment plant in Atlantic City five years ago. The authority is seeking suggestions from companies that might be interested in managing the project on how to set up the turbines. Mr. Baroni said it could be operating by 2013.

When the winds are high, the five turbines would produce as much as 7.5 megawatts — enough to run at least 2,000 homes, he said. The authority plans to use the power generated to operate the container port there, then to feed the surplus energy into the local power grid, offsetting some of the authority’s consumption elsewhere.

“This is a commitment the Port Authority is making to reduce our carbon footprint and be better neighbors,” Mr. Baroni said. “It will allow us to both save money and also be good for the environment. Somebody’s got to go first, and it’s going to be us.”

But the City of Bayonne may tap the wind quicker. Construction of a 262-foot-tall turbine has already begun at a plant operated by the city’s Municipal Utilities Authority. That $5.6 million tower, which would be the biggest wind turbine in New Jersey outside of Atlantic City, is expected to start producing more than enough energy to power the plant by September. The city plans to sell the excess power, saving at least $150,000 a year, said Stephen J. Gallo, executive director of the utilities authority.

“It will be iconic,” Mr. Gallo said. “It will be the first windmill in New York Harbor. You’ll be able to see it from anywhere on the water.”

Both projects in Bayonne would help New Jersey achieve its stated goal of developing 200 megawatts of wind energy onshore by 2020. The state’s energy master plan also calls for producing 3,000 megawatts of wind energy offshore within 10 years.

In late 2008, the state’s Board of Public Utilities provided $12 million in rebates to three companies that are racing to build the first wind farm 12 miles or more off the coast of New Jersey. At the end of last month, the State Legislature approved a bill that would provide $100 million in tax credits to the developers of offshore wind farms.

But those deepwater projects would cost about twice as much to build as turbines on land, wind-energy developers say. Mr. Baroni declined to say how much the Port Authority expected to spend on the wind farm it plans to build at Port Jersey, but he said New Jersey had already offered $3 million toward the project. The Atlantic City turbines cost $12 million when they were erected in 2005 by Community Energy, a company based in Radnor, Pa.

Brent Beerley, executive vice president of Community Energy, said the Mid-Atlantic Coast was an attractive location for wind farms because the wind tended to be highest when demand for electricity was at its peak. The power produced also does not have to travel far to reach the consumers who pay the most for it, Mr. Beerley said.

“It’s a windy site in general, but unlike other wind farms, the time of day and the time of year that the wind blows strongest there matches when consumers use electricity,” he said. “We have very strong summer winds and daytime winds.”

The wind power generated in Atlantic City has sold at “relatively good” prices, and the project has exceeded its revenue targets so far, Mr. Beerley said. He added that the second important benefit that wind farms generate is federal tax credits, which attract big banks to invest in the projects.

Without that incentive, it would be difficult for private developers to finance a project like the one the Port Authority is proposing. Mr. Beerley, who said his company might bid to build the project, said it appeared to be feasible and potentially beneficial to the metropolitan area.

“It’s a real amount of power and it will offset a significant amount of fossil fuel use locally,” he said.

The idea is not universally popular, though. On July 8, the Board of Freeholders of Monmouth County, N.J., decided to oppose the construction of a wind turbine at a wastewater treatment plant in the Raritan Bay shore town of Union Beach after a resident fanned dissent with a Web site, www.noturbine.com.

And what about the appearance of five fans as tall as 30-story buildings forming a swirling backdrop to the Statue of Liberty?

Mr. Baroni, a former state senator from central New Jersey, said people actually liked to gaze at the big turbines. In Atlantic City, he said, casino-hotel guests often requests rooms that offer a view of the wind farm atop the sewage plant, instead of the ocean and beach.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/nyregion/16turbines.html?ref=nyregion

New York Times

August 15, 2010

Air-Conditioners That Run When Nobody’s Home

By SAM DOLNICK

In a handsome prewar building in Greenwich Village, a tenant struggled to remember the last time she turned off her air-conditioner. Upstairs, a young couple admitted to having let the window unit run for four days while they went out of town for a funeral, thinking it would be nice, amid the July heat wave, to return to a cool apartment.

Another resident of the 160-unit building, on Seventh Avenue between 13th and 14th Streets, says he leaves the air-conditioning on when he goes to work, when he sleeps at his girlfriend’s apartment, even when he leaves the country on vacation — and only partly out of sympathy for his cat, Kitty.

“My A.C. is pretty much running 24/7,” Kitty’s owner, Michael Perlo, a 28-year-old television producer, said with more bravado than guilt. “Not having to pay for electricity makes me a little bit more reckless.”

Forget round-the-clock doormen or views of Central Park. This sweltering summer, the most coveted New York real estate amenity is two little words that in other times can go unnoticed: “utilities included.” Mr. Perlo and his neighbors live in a building where not just heat and hot water, but electricity, is part of their monthly rent — a more-common-than-you’d-think arrangement caused by old-fashioned wiring in which a building has a single “master meter” tracking power use rather than individual meters tied to each tenant. They can blast their air-conditioners all summer long without paying a dollar extra.

Con Edison counts about 250,000 apartments across the city, not including public housing projects, that do not have individual meters tracking electricity consumption, compared with roughly 1.75 million that do. One large management company, Cooper Square, estimates that these units expend at least 30 percent more electricity year-round than their counterparts.

So while lucky tenants across the city relax beneath arctic gusts, their landlords and building managers are left to worry whether these weeks of record-challenging heat will break the bank.

And regardless of who pays the electric bills, there is a considerable environmental cost: a 2009 report said that residential buildings account for 39 percent of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions, and 40 percent of the energy that buildings use is spent on heating and cooling.

“Using it when you’re not home is outright irresponsible and disrespectful of all the rest of us,” Dan Hendrick of the New York League of Conservation Voters said. “There’s no good way to look at this. The worst thing is, you’re warming our climate to cool your apartment for your own comfort.”

But as any introductory economics course might explain, tenants who blast air-conditioners on their landlord’s dime are making rational, predictable choices.

“This is Homo economicus coming out in full feather,” said Prof. Lawrence J. White of New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. “When something is free, until some point of satiation, you will take up a lot of it.”

New York State’s Energy and Research Development Authority, in part out of concern over the environmental effects of excessive air-conditioning, is planning to offer building owners financial incentives to install “submeters” that measure individual consumption, a major construction project that can require a significant upfront expense.

Under an earlier incentive program, the state helped convert 426 buildings in the city over the last decade, said Jeffrey Gordon, a department spokesman.

The new conversion project will focus on submeters, which track individual electricity use but still feed a single utility account paid by the building owner or manager. (Some landlords then charge tenants based on actual consumption.) That is simpler than individual metering and is seen as an improvement over master meters because it introduces a level of accountability, according to state energy officials. Con Edison estimates that there are 30,000 apartments in the city with submeters.

David Kuperberg, the chief executive officer of Cooper Square, compared two co-op buildings he manages on the Upper East Side. Annually, the one with a master meter used 1.38 kilowatt hours per square foot more than the one with submeters, he said, costing an additional $52,000 a year. Over all, Cooper Square’s 45 or so master-metered buildings have energy costs 14 to 24 percent higher than their submetered counterparts, Mr. Kuperberg said.

But installing submeters almost always sets off a battle with tenants who are loath to give up what they see as a perk, even if it could lower their rent or maintenance charges.

“Many of these properties have older populations, and some people are scaring them, saying that if you do this your costs are going to go up,” Mr. Kuperberg said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Indeed, some tenants in Mr. Perlo’s building in the Village have become upset at a submeter plan in the works by the management company, Northbrook Partners.

Mr. Perlo said that Northbrook had agreed to knock $150 off his monthly rent; but some residents fear their air-conditioning habits would surpass that.

“It’s the end of an era,” lamented his neighbor, a telecommuter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering her landlord. “It was a great treat.”

Northbrook officials declined to discuss the matter.

Two years ago, a similar kerfuffle unfolded at Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, the famed middle-class enclaves overlooking the East River that had long offered “free” — at least to tenants — electricity.

Tishman Speyer Properties, which bought the complexes in 2006, announced plans to install individual meters in each unit as part of an effort to reduce energy use by 20 percent.

The news distressed some long-term residents, sparking newspaper articles and blog posts, including one that announced, “No More Free Electricity.”

Tishman Speyer abandoned the plans amid larger financial problems that ended with a default on the properties.

Danielle, a social worker who asked that her last name not be used, definitely considered free air-conditioning among the “pros” for the two-bedroom apartment in Stuyvesant Town that she moved into last month.

She and her roommate have kept their two units running almost constantly ever since, partly for her purse-size dog, who is in the house all day, but also for that moment, after trekking through the sweaty subways and steaming sidewalks of the city in summer, when they open the door and get to feel a chill.

“I don’t want to walk into a hot apartment at the end of the day,” Danielle said, simply. “It’s nice to not have to worry about it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/nyregion/16chill.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion&pagewanted=print

City of Dallas considers starting own power company

12:00 AM CDT on Saturday, August 7, 2010

By ELIZABETH SOUDER / The Dallas Morning News
esouder@dallasnews.com

Dallas could become an electricity provider.

The city is considering creating its own retail electric provider to procure power for city-owned facilities. That could lop $4 million off the city's annual budget but would require expertise to operate.

A city-owned power company could eventually serve customers outside of city government, but that's not the initial goal.

"The primary purpose is to serve their own facilities, to control their own destiny in terms of what they pay for electricity," said John Bick, managing principal for Priority Power Management, which is advising the city on creating an electric company.

Organizing the company will take a couple of years.

So the city signed a three-year contract with TXU Energy to buy electricity for "much" less than 9 cents per kilowatt-hour, said Bick, who also negotiated the deal for the city.

He declined to give an exact figure, but the deal saves taxpayers as much as $7 million a year. The city uses about 2.2 billion kilowatt-hours a year to juice up more than 800 facilities, traffic lights and water pumps.

Dallas will also buy renewable energy credits to cover 40 percent of the power.

Last year, those credits cost the city about $1 million, according to a June slide presentation posted on the city's website. Next year, the cost would be between $500,000 and $1.1 million, according to the presentation.

TXU will also pay for up to $812,000 in energy-efficiency upgrades.

TXU and Priority Power declined to give other terms of the contract. City staff members also didn't provide the information.

Even though the renewable-energy credits cost extra money, council member Ann Margolin said they're worth it.

"I had some doubts about whether it was worth the cost, but I became convinced," she said. Buying renewable-energy credits makes Dallas a more likely candidate for federal grants, she said.

Once the three-year contract ends, the city would be free to create its own electricity provider. Electricity retailers must be licensed by thePublic Utility Commission and must meet certain credit standards to operate.

Dallas, with its sterling municipal credit rating, could meet the credit standards at a lower cost than other major Texas power companies that carry junk ratings.

The city would also have to hire people or find contractors with the expertise to trade wholesale power and hedge against swings in prices. Poor operation could leave the city with losses.

"Basically, it's removing one level of middleman," Margolin said. "Ultimately it would shave about 3 percent off of our total electric bill. And our electric bill being in the 70, 80 million-per-year range, that's a significant amount of money."

Once Dallas establishes the electric company, it could begin to sell power to outside customers.

Bick with Priority Power, which is researching the issue for the city, said Dallas could use the power company to help lure big companies to town. The city could offer a major company cheap electricity for a certain amount of time, he said.

Or, the city could sell power to regular customers. Residential operations could create a revenue stream for the city.

"If they have already invested in infrastructure and technology to send bills out for water bills, then maybe it's just a natural extension to do the other," Bick said. But he emphasized selling power beyond city facilities is just an idea at this point.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/stories/DN-txudallas_07bus.ART0.State.Edition1.26c3ff7.html