A Competitor Emerges for Solar Panels

By KATE GALBRAITH

NY Times

Published: April 4, 2012

AUSTIN, TEXAS — Of all the types of energy embraced by the green community, “combined heat and power” probably has the clunkiest name. But proponents hope that C.H.P. systems, which can be installed in homes, will one day compete with better-known technologies like solar panels.

The idea is to capture two forms of energy at once, namely heat and electrical power (which is why the technology is sometimes called cogeneration). Large systems exist on college campuses like the University of Warwick in England and also at hospitals, chemical factories and even airports. These systems use the heat left over from generating electricity to produce either hot water, which circulates through pipes to nearby buildings to provide heat, or steam, which can be used for industrial purposes.

Because the process of making electricity wastes a lot of energy, combining heat and power generation leads to greater efficiencies, said Jürgen Weiss, head of the climate practice at the Brattle Group, a consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“The idea of C.H.P. is to make electricity and not waste the heat that gets generated in the process, but rather to use it for something useful,” Mr. Weiss said. That means lower utility bills and fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

In recent years, engineers have started designing more residential-scale systems. These may be about the size of a refrigerator and can fit into a basement. In Britain, a system run by a Stirling engine may cost more than £6,000, or $9,500, including installation, and in Germany — where heating systems are generally more expensive — a C.H.P. system may run from €15,000 to €20,000, or $19,800 to $26,400, according to Delta Energy & Environment, a research company based in Edinburgh. Delta said it would often take homeowners 10 years to make back the cost, in the form of lower utility bills. Getting prices down will be critical, experts say.

The small systems work best in cold climates, where homes need plenty of heat. They are often fueled by natural gas and make a bit of noise, but the extra electricity they produce can be sold into the power grid. Big-name automakers like Honda Motor and Volkswagen have applied their technology to help develop small-scale systems, sometimes known as micro C.H.P.

Small systems are gaining traction in Japan after the nuclear disaster last year, which led officials to order that nearly all of the country’s reactors be taken offline. Orders have “increased dramatically” since that event and are likely to rise even more sharply in the future, according to a recent report by Pike Research, a research and consulting group in Boulder, Colorado. Honda has sold micro-C.H.P. systems in Japan since 2003 and said last year that about 108,000 households were using its units, called the Ecowill.

The home systems in Japan tend to be much smaller than those in Germany or the United States, according to Kerry-Ann Adamson, a research director for smart energy who is based in London for Pike.

Elsewhere in the world, the picture is mixed. In the United States, a basic obstacle is lack of knowledge, said Daniel Bullock, director of the Gulf Coast Clean Energy Application Center, a U.S. Department of Energy group based in a Houston suburb that promotes C.H.P. and related sources of energy.

“Most people don’t even know about C.H.P.,” Mr. Bullock said. As a result, he added, “People are willing to pay a lot more money for solar panels than what a C.H.P. system would cost.”

The low price of natural gas in the United States — a result of the plentiful supplies created by the hydraulic fracturing boom — may make the systems more appealing, Mr. Bullock said, though homeowners, lacking the negotiating power of large industrial users, may not reap the full benefit of the lower gas prices.

In Europe, Delta Energy & Environment forecasts that 40,000 to 70,000 units a year will be sold by 2015, but “an outcome with substantially lower sales is possible,” said Jon Slowe, a director for the company, adding that Britain and Germany are using incentives to push the hardest for micro-C.H.P. technology.

Germany has a target of getting 25 percent of its power from C.H.P. systems of all sizes by 2020. A draft proposal now under consideration would increase incentives for the systems, although Ulrich Fikar, a spokesman for the industry group Cogen Europe, said it was “not ambitious enough for micro-C.H.P.”

The Netherlands used to be a promising market, but the new government sharply cut spending and incentives, according to Mr. Slowe. Belgium, too, is cutting spending.

“It’s a really tough time in Europe, with governments trying to tighten their belts,” Mr. Slowe said.

The United States has even fewer incentives for micro-C.H.P., as it does for most alternative energy sources.

“Look at the difference between the U.S. and, say, Germany,” Mr. Bullock said. In Germany, “you’ve got feed-in tariffs, a much more active regulatory environment, you have programs that support financing and implementation.”

At least one U.S. company has struggled to introduce the technology. Freewatt, a micro-C.H.P. unit developed by ECR International in Utica, New York, was installed by some U.S. customers. But “it’s unavailable commercially right now,” said Maggie Reed, a representative for the company.

Nonetheless, some analysts view the United States, with its large number of buildings and potential for energy-efficiency gains, as a sleeper market.

“The Japanese market is a given,” said Ms. Adamson, the researcher for Pike. “What will change the face of the residential C.H.P. market is if the U.S. wakes up to this.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/05/business/global/a-competitor-emerges-for-solar-panels.html?_r=1&src=rechp

LIPA prepares to heat up solar incentives

by Claude Solnik

Long Island Business News

Published: March 6, 2012

Just days after the reducing existing incentives for companies installing solar power, the Long Island Power Authority is gearing up to launch a new, far-reaching incentive program in which it will pay customers based on the solar power they produce.

LIPA Chief Operating Officer Michael Hervey described the program, which could be in place as early as this summer, during his speech at the Hauppauge Industrial Association’s annual energy update on Tuesday.

The authority hopes to formally announce a feed-in solar tariff rate in April, paying customers based on solar energy they generate, although the program wouldn’t launch immediately. Feed-in tariffs have been used in states such as California and Florida, where solar energy has caught on rapidly.

Although the tariff would apply to both residential and commercial customers, Hervey said it could make bigger installations, in particular, more economical.

“It’s more of an incentive for medium-to-larger solar installations,” Hervey said. “It allows medium-to-larger solar installations to feed directly into the grid and get paid a fixed price for selling into the electric grid.”

Hervey announced the broad outlines of the program, but not the rates or details, days after the authority cut its commercial solar rebate from $1.75 per kilowatt to $1.50, matching the rest of the state.

“It was so successful that just last week we had to drop the rebate amount,” he said. “We had a very high subscription rate for the commercial program in December and January. We’re well on our way to using our whole year quota for commercial solar.”

LIPA hopes the feed-in tariff could generate a new burst of interest in larger projects, further fueling solar power on Long Island. Hervey said the tariff would supplement existing programs, such as solar installation rebates that are driving a shift to solar.

“It’s all about policy,” said Neal Lewis, executive director of the Sustainability Institute at Molloy Collegeand a LIPA board member. “You can train people to install solar panels. But if you don’t have the right policy, they won’t get a job. We’re expanding.”

Solar contractors said small solar installations already caught on in this region, but a feed-in tariff could prompt a new generation of projects.

“The market is very driven by regional policies, such as LIPA’s program,” said Gentry Rouse, director of business development for Clermont, NY-based Premier Power. “In New York, we’ve seen a market for smaller systems. This feed-in tariff opens up the opportunity for larger systems.”

Supporters of feed-in tariffs point out that systems are reimbursed based not on cost, but generation, so efficient systems are rewarded at a higher rate.

“When you look at large commercial systems, you can get the price per installed solar down,” Rouse said. “The paybacks are there really for larger systems.”

A National Renewable Energy Laboratory study of feed-in tariffs described various types, including some that are constant, while others vary based on energy cost.

Utilities in Florida, Hawaii and Vermont have adopted feed-in tariff policies based on the cost of generation, while Maine adopted a cost-based tariff with a cap. California, on the other hand, adopted a feed-in tariff based on “avoided cost” related to market prices.

LIPA also is developing a remote net metering tariff in which companies that install solar power away from their facilities will be able to reap benefits of solar programs.

“That opens up some real possibilities, being able to use property in less dense areas to net meter usage against a building in a higher density area,” Hervey said.

Hervey said the authority hopes the feed-in tariff as well as streamlined and standardized permitting will lead to a new crop of solar projects as more medium-sized businesses get on board. “It certainly opens up another market,” Hervey added of the tariff. “We’ll have to see what it brings. It’s meant to be a whole new market.”

The feed-in tariff is part of several changes in the works for solar programs, for which LIPA has about $25 million set aside for incentive programs. There are currently about 70 megawatts of solar power on Long Island.

LIPA, meanwhile, has led a push for towns to sign on for a uniform solar code, in which standard regulations and costs govern installation.

http://libn.com/2012/03/06/lipa-prepares-to-heat-up-solar-incentives/

Projects to Add Wind Power for City Gain Momentum

By MIREYA NAVARRO

New York Times

February 28, 2012

Despite Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s long-expressed dream of putting wind turbines on skyscrapers and bridges, the constraints of an urban landscape have so far proved too challenging for reliable wind power in the city, energy experts said. As a result, New York City has been largely inactive — and behind the national curve — in embracing wind power.

But that is about to change. This spring, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection will solicit plans for the first major wind project, the installation of turbines atop the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island. And city planners are working on zoning changes, now under review by the City Planning Commission, to allow turbines up to 55 feet high on the rooftops of buildings taller than 100 feet, and even taller turbines on commercial and industrial sites along the waterfront.

But the biggest potential for supplying wind power to the city lies offshore, where the Bloomberg administration is supporting an application filed last September by a coalition led by the New York Power Authority to lease a swath of the ocean floor for a wind farm 13 miles off the coast of the Rockaways in Queens.

City officials say they are ready to take advantage of their coastal proximity to seek bigger renewable-energy projects and quicken the pace toward cleaner air and the jobs and economic benefits that would accompany those projects. A study commissioned by the city last year said wind farms could play a major role in replacing power now generated by the Indian Point nuclear power plant in Westchester County. The plant supplies up to 25 percent of consumption in Consolidated Edison’s service area, including New York City.

“When you’re talking about huge wind, offshore is really a unique opportunity,” said Farrell Sklerov, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection.

The proposal for the offshore wind farm, which is scheduled for a public hearing before the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management next month, is considered a game changer in that it would start at 350 megawatts but have the potential to double its capacity — eventually generating enough electricity to power a half-million homes in New York City and Long Island.

The plans are in the initial stages, but they are part of a push by states along the Eastern Seaboard to make wind power a significant staple of their energy mix. The region lags behind the West and Midwest, where flat, open spaces are plentiful and wind turbines already supply up to 20 percent of electric power in some states.

“We certainly have an ocean in our backyard that can host these turbines,” said Katherine Kennedy, clean-energy counsel at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “If we can develop wind and solar, all of a sudden we look like a European city.”

Through most of the last decade, turbines have been springing up all over the country, including in dairy farms in upstate New York. As a result, New York State, which has set a goal of deriving 30 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2015, now ranks 12th among the states in wind power installations, with 1,400 megawatts, or enough to meet 2 percent of the state’s electricity demand, says the American Wind Energy Association, a trade group.

Some states got a lift this month when federal officials from the Department of the Interior cleared the way for companies to seek federal leases in wind-energy areas off New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, speeding the process to approve wind projects.

Environmental groups say New York has been less focused on tapping into wind than some of these neighboring states but this year the New York Department of State is expected to identify the most viable locations for offshore wind farms with an eye toward protecting shipping, commercial fishing and ocean habitats — an approach that experts say should save time and red tape and help attract developers looking to begin such a project.

Long processes to win approvals and the higher cost of wind compared with less sustainable sources of electricity are not the only obstacles to developing wind installations. The projects must also withstand public scrutiny. Despite support from environmental groups, the only federally approved offshore wind project to date, Cape Wind in Nantucket Sound off the coast of Cape Cod, has been stalled, in part by opposition over aesthetics and the impact on American Indian artifacts and burial grounds, among other issues.

Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, opposed a proposed wind farm three-and-a-half to five miles off Jones Beach in Long Island over concerns about the potential harm to fish. The project was ultimately derailed in 2007 by high costs. Ms. Brady said the proposal off the Rockaways, while farther offshore, was still worrisome. It calls for at least 70 wind turbines that could each soar 430 feet above the water.

“The biggest problem we have is that there’s really no science to either support or negate wind power as something that wouldn’t affect the fish negatively,” she said. “If there’s a problem, once you’ve done the damage, who’s responsible?”

While more expensive to produce than wind power, solar energy is more suited to cities, energy experts said, because it can be harnessed more discreetly from thousands of rooftops. New York City has so far grown its solar production to seven megawatts, a modest amount but well over its practically nonexistent wind production. This runs counter to what is occurring in the rest of the state and the country, where wind installed capacity, 46,000 megawatts, vastly outpaces the 3,800 megawatts of solar.

Some New York buildings are already experimenting with private wind production, like the Eltona apartments in the Melrose section of the Bronx. But they have found that they do not get enough wind to make turbines a reliable source of power. City planners are revising zoning regulations to allow more private turbines, but still concede that wind turbines may not thrive here unless they are on or near the shore.

City officials say the former environmental wasteland known as Fresh Kills is an ideal location. The Department of Environmental Protection will, in the next two months, ask for wind and solar proposals to develop 75 acres of the landfill, with the goal of adding 15 megawatts of energy, enough to power 3,300 homes. Officials said at least a third of the production would be wind power.

The Fresh Kills plan could double the city’s solar output, but it is the wind turbines that excite the Staten Island borough president, James P. Molinaro, who has lobbied for a wind farm for years, and persuaded the state to finance a study that showed the site could support seven 400-foot turbines.

City officials say it has taken them this long to evaluate the challenges of installing wind turbines on the landfill’s unique subsurface.

Fresh Kills closed as a landfill handling the city’s residential garbage more than a decade ago and is now undergoing a transformation into a 2,200-acre park.

“It’d change the biggest tragedy that ever happened to Staten Island and convert it to something wonderful,” Mr. Molinaro said. “Windmills that would give us clean energy in a beautiful park. It’d be a model for the rest of the world to look at.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/nyregion/new-york-to-renew-push-for-wind-power.html?pagewanted=print

CHICAGO NEWS COOPERATIVE

Power Station’s Closing Could Create Problems

Jose More Photography/Chicago News Cooperative

In March, Dominion Resources is closing the coal-fired State Line Power Station in Hammond.

By KARI LYDERSEN

Published: February 11, 2012

For years, environmental and health organizations have called for the closing of the 83-year-old coal-fired State Line Power Station, one of the Chicago area’s top polluters.

Now the plant, which is in Hammond, just across the Indiana border on Lake Michigan and adjacent to Calumet Park, is burning through its last stores of coal. It will stop generating electricity by March 31. Federal air quality regulations that take effect in coming years and — more immediately — competition from inexpensive natural gas make it uneconomical to run the plant, according to Dominion Resources, the Richmond, Va., company that bought it in 2002.

While many environmentalists are cheering the closing, it raises new environmental and land-use challenges. It will also be an economic blow to Hammond, and to about 100 employees, most of them members of the United Steelworkers union and many who have worked there for decades.

“It’s not a good thing for the city economically, but at the same time the air we breathe will be a little cleaner — what’s that worth financially?” said Mayor Thomas M. McDermott Jr. of Hammond.

Similar situations are playing out nationwide as aging coal plants close, including a Dominion plant in Salem, Mass.; six Midwestern and Eastern coal plants owned by FirstEnergy Corp.; and, potentially, the Fisk and Crawford plants in Chicago in coming years.

Lower natural gas prices from the increase in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of shale gas deposits have made it much less profitable to produce electricity from coal. This is especially true for facilities like State Line and the Chicago coal plants, which sell electricity on a highly competitive short-term wholesale market rather than through long-term contracts.

“These companies bought coal plants based on certain assumptions about the price of natural gas,” said William Boyd, a professor of energy law at the University of Colorado. “Shale gas turned their world upside down, and retrofitting old coal plants to meet new environmental regulations doesn’t make sense anymore.”

Some coal plants elsewhere in the country have been retrofitted to burn natural gas. But Dominion and Midwest Generation, which owns the Chicago plants, said converting would be too expensive.

Doug McFarlan, a spokesman for Midwest Generation, said, “We will continue to evaluate numerous factors — including the capital expenditures required to comply with environmental regulations and market conditions that impact our ability to recover costs — in making decisions about future investments in any of our power generating units.”

Dominion had planned to close State Line in 2014, but last summer the company said the plant would be shut down by March.

Environmental advocates have long said the sooner the better, since medical studies link emissions from coal plants to higher rates of asthma attacks, cardiac disease and premature death among surrounding residents.

Old coal plants like State Line — the current boilers date to 1955 and 1963 — have not had to meet the same environmental regulations as new plants. Environmentalists have portrayed State Line as a justice issue because three-quarters of nearby residents are minorities and almost one-fifth live below the poverty line.

Even so, the closing will have serious economic consequences for the already struggling area. State Line is the biggest property tax payer in Hammond, at about $4.5 million a year.

At Pucci’s Restaurant and Pizzeria, which for decades has delivered food to overtime workers and served beer and pizza to men dropping by after their shifts, the prospect of cleaner air does not count for much.

“It’s almost a tragedy,” said Frank Pucci, an owner of the restaurant. “Some of my best customers are losing their jobs. I’ve been in the area all my life, and nobody ever talked about the so-called pollution from State Line.”

Moving up the closing date is a major frustration for about 30 workers who turn 55 between now and 2014. Employees who are 55 and older when laid off can continue to purchase moderately priced health insurance through Dominion, but younger workers cannot.

“With our exposure to coal dust, mercury, welding gases — I don’t know what my medical future will be,” said Jeff Kuzma, 52, a welder who has worked at the plant for 33 years.

Dan Genest, a spokesman for Dominion, said other employers had called wanting to hire their workers, and the company is hosting a job fair on Thursday. But workers are skeptical.

“We all know age discrimination is against the law, but realistically these companies are going to want someone who can put in a lot more years,” said David Weaver, president of Steelworkers Local 12502, who started as a janitor at State Line 30 years ago and worked his way up to control room operator.

As the shutdown nears, urban planners, environmental leaders and elected officials are envisioning new uses for the property, including transforming it into a park that would connect existing Chicago and Indiana bike trails or making it the site of a wind or solar farm. There have also been calls to preserve the plant’s Renaissance revival architecture, with its intricate brickwork.

Environmentalists, however, fear the site may be contaminated with toxins and heavy metals, which could potentially run into the lake during rains or leach into the groundwater.

Jim Norvelle, another Dominion spokesman, said the company currently had no plans to test the site for contamination, or to sell or develop it for recreational, commercial or alternative-energy uses.

Officials at the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management said they had no information indicating that the site was releasing hazardous waste. Unless new information comes to light, there are no government mandates for testing or cleanup.

Howard A. Learner, the executive director of the Environmental Law & Policy Center, a Midwest environmental advocacy organization, has called for an independent evaluation of the site.

According to Environmental Protection Agency records, chemicals released into the air by the plant in 2010 included nearly 30,000 pounds of sulfuric acid, 1,180 tons of hydrochloric acid and 143 pounds of mercury. It released a total of about 44,000 pounds of copper, barium, zinc and lead into Lake Michigan, the federal records said.

“We don’t know what’s there, but there are some red flags,” Mr. Learner said. “This is the tip of the iceberg of a broader problem as more old coal plants shut down.”

klydersen@chicagonewscoop.org

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/us/closing-of-state-line-power-station-on-illinois-indiana-border-is-expected-to-leave-problems-behind.html?_r=1&src=rechp&pagewanted=all

Vision for Affordable Energy Even if Indian Point Nuclear Plant Is Shut Down

January 12, 2012

By JIM DWYER

New York Times

If anyone, or any business, can get a good deal on electricity, it ought to be Consolidated Edison, which buys loads of it every year and then sells it to three million customers in New York City and the suburbs. Like most traditional utility companies, it has gotten out of the power generation business in recent years and is now a distribution company. It buys the electricity that it delivers from generators run by independent companies.

So when Con Ed goes shopping, where does it find the best prices?

The question came up Thursday at a legislative hearing in the city on the future of the Indian Point nuclear power plant, which Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo wants to close. Whether he succeeds or not, the action will be a pivot in the history of New York City. The state has plenty of relatively cheap and clean electricity from hydropower and wind farms, but it is trapped in the northern reaches of the state by a distribution system that hits a traffic jam of electrons before it gets near the city.

Indian Point, however, is in Westchester County, south of that congestion, and its electricity flows without obstacles into the city, just about 30 miles away. That very geography is also driving the effort by the governor and others to close the plant, which is getting old.

There is little confidence that people would be able to evacuate the region, much less the most densely populated big city in the country, in the event of a serious accident. (A leak of radioactive water in a cooling pump forced the plant to shut down one of its two generators this week.)

If the plant closes in the next few years, the 2,000 megawatts of electricity that it produces will have to come from somewhere else — that is, somewhere either in or near the city. Business and union officials spoke Thursday, as they have before, in support of the continued operation of Indian Point, arguing that the economy would be hobbled by the loss of so much cheap electricity.

Interestingly, the current electricity prices are kept secret by the generating companies and the utilities.

But by poring through Con Edison’s annual reports, James F. Brennan, a Democratic member of the Assembly from Brooklyn who also represents the Working Families Party, managed to figure out the prices it paid in 2010 to four of its leading suppliers.

Here are the numbers Mr. Brennan found for each kilowatt hour:

¶ 12.8 cents, from a wholesale market based in Albany.

¶ 8.2 cents from a gas-fired power plant in Astoria, Queens.

¶ 7.7 cents from the Indian Point nuclear generators.

¶ 6.8 cents from a gas-powered co-generation plant operated in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Mr. Brennan thinks that New York can get by without the electricity generated by Indian Point and that the city will not be putting itself at a financial disadvantage. Other cities actually make their own electricity, and do so at lower costs than some commercial suppliers, he noted at the hearing. Asked by a city official if he thought that the city should get into that business, Mr. Brennan paused for a minute. “Yes,” he said.

Certainly, the cost of making electricity has declined drastically in the last few years, in large part because the price of natural gas has been dropping. The decrease in price has made electricity from natural gas competitive with nuclear power. In 2008, the price of natural gas was $12 or $13 for a quantity known as a decatherm.

“Right now, it is $3 for a decatherm,” said Joseph P. Oates, a vice president at Con Edison.

Newer gas-generating plants are far more efficient than the ones they are replacing, and the city has helped developers build new ones in Queens. Con Edison, which used to own Indian Point, does not have a position on the continued operation of its old plant, but Mr. Oates said: “If you close it, it has to be replaced with something. The question is, what is that something?”

Natural gas plants have low emissions, but Norris McDonald, the president of the African American Environmentalist Association, said during a break in the hearing that Indian Point had virtually no emissions. “Where it is now, it is an environmental asset,” he said. “If you shut it down, whatever you’re going to replace it with is going to increase emissions in communities like Harlem.”

Other environmentalists argue that much of the slack can be made up with a combination of greater efficiency and more renewable energy, like solar, wind and tidal power. But when?

A wise colleague once gave me a warning on another dense topic: If you think you understand the problem, he said, then it hasn’t been properly explained to you.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/nyregion/vision-for-cheap-power-even-if-indian-point-nuclear-plant-is-closed.html?pagewanted=print

Darker Nights as Some Cities Turn Off the Lights

By MONICA DAVEY

New York Times

Published: December 29, 2011

HIGHLAND PARK, Mich. — When the sun sets in this small city, its neighborhoods seem to vanish.

In a deal to save money, two-thirds of the streetlights were yanked from the ground and hauled away this year, and the resulting darkness is a look that is familiar in the wide open cornfields of Iowa but not here, in a struggling community surrounded on nearly all sides by Detroit.

Parents say they now worry more about allowing their children to walk to school early in the morning. Motorists complain that they often cannot see pedestrians until headlights — and cars — are right upon them. Some residents say they are reshaping their lives to fit the hours of daylight, as the members of the Rev. D. Alexander Bullock’s church did recently when they urged him to move up Saturday Bible study to 4 p.m. from the usual 7 p.m.

“It’s just too dark,” said Mr. Bullock, of Greater St. Matthew Baptist Church. “I come out of the church, and I can’t see what’s in front of me. What happened to our streetlights is what happens when politicians lose hope. All kinds of crazy decisions get made, and citizens lose faith in the process.”

Cities around the nation, grappling with what is expected to be a fifth consecutive year of declining revenues and having exhausted the predictable budget trims, are increasingly considering something that would once have been untouchable: the lights.

Highland Park’s circumstances are extreme; with financial woes so deep and long term, it has extinguished all but 500 streetlights in a city accustomed to 1,600, utility company officials say. But similar efforts have played out in dozens of towns and cities, like Myrtle Creek, Ore., Clintonville, Wis., Brainerd, Minn., Santa Rosa, Calif., and Rockford, Ill.

What distinguishes these latest austerity measures is how noticeable they are to ordinary residents. If health care cuts, pay cuts, layoffs and furloughs — and even limits on enforcing building codes or maintaining parks — are most apparent to the people inside city halls, everyone notices when his streetlights go dark (and some cities, like Colorado Springs, where the issue boiled over, have already resumed some lighting when revenues allowed).

Turning off the lights has drawn grumpy crowds to city council meetings, stirred jealousy among neighborhoods and neighbors, and set off conversations about crime.

“I go around town, and even I think some areas seem a little darker than they should be,” said Tim Hanson, the public works director in Rockford, where officials turned off 2,300 of the city’s 14,000 lights. “It was not anything that I wanted to do, and it was nothing that the mayor or aldermen wanted to do, but it’s like your own budget at home — we can’t afford this anymore.”

Here in Highland Park, that had been true for a while. Over a matter of years, the city accumulated a debt of about $4 million to DTE Energy, the utility company. The city was paying less than half of its $60,000 monthly bill for an antiquated lighting system that was costly to maintain. So the company and city struck a deal. The company could turn off and take away 1,300 of the city’s lights, add 200 lights in strategic locations, and the debt would be forgiven, said Scott Simons, a spokesman for DTE.

The result in this 2.9-square-mile city feels like this: Lights are still abundant along Woodward Avenue, the crowded commercial strip. But a block away, along the quieter, residential streets, lights now remain mostly at intersections. Long stretches of blocks are dark, silhouettes of people are barely visible and potholes appear suddenly beneath tires.

Some people here say they learned of the plans this fall only when a truck pulled up outside their homes and workers began pulling the poles from the ground. (Though the added step of removing the lights — not just turning them off — seemed an affront to residents, company officials said it had to be done for liability reasons and to avoid continuing reports of power failure and the risk of metal theft.)

“The people were basically left in the dark,” said DeAndre Windom, who was elected mayor in November. He said the disappearing streetlights were the top concern of residents as he campaigned door to door.

“When you come through at night, it’s scary; you have to wonder if anyone is lurking around waiting to catch you off your guard,” said Juanita Kennedy, 65, who said she had installed a home security system and undergone training to carry a handgun in the weeks since workmen carried away the streetlight in front of her house. “I don’t go out to get gas at night. I don’t run to any stores. I try to do everything in the daytime and to be back before night falls.”

Highland Park, home of Henry Ford’s first moving assembly line, was once a well-off enclave of 50,000 residents. Ford left long ago, and Chrysler’s corporate headquarters moved away in the 1990s. Now it has fewer than 12,000 residents — half the size it was just 20 years ago.

So for this city, a shrunken tax base and financial crisis have been long in the making, and the recent national downturn has only made matters worse. More than 42 percent of Highland Park’s residents live in poverty, unemployment is high and the median income here is nearly $30,000 below that of the state.

“To understand our street lighting situation is to understand the wealth that Highland Park once had; it was a situation where we had the best of almost everything and an abundance of lights,” said Rodney Patrick, whose father insisted on moving his family to Highland Park in the early 1950s because of its advantages — its status, in his words, as the shining city on the hill. “But we don’t have the residents to have the luxuries we had when we were a city of 50,000.”

If the outcome seems imperfect to many residents, not everyone views it as dire. “The lights are not out in Highland Park,” said Mr. Patrick, who serves on the City Council. “We’ve had a reduction, a responsible reduction.”

It is too soon to judge whether the lights have affected safety here. Officials from other communities and studies on the question of streetlights and crime draw mixed conclusions.

In Highland Park, yard lights and even strings of Christmas lights are helping to illuminate some streets, and some leaders have urged residents to add their own lighting if they are worried about security — leading to complaints that the city is trying to shift items it cannot afford to residents who cannot afford them either.

In cities around the nation, similar ideas have emerged: streetlight user fees, private security lights, even optional “adopt-a-light” programs comparable to road sponsorships.

In Oregon, officials in Myrtle Creek turned off 78 of the city’s 297 streetlights in 2010, to save $11,000. A streetlight sponsorship program suggests that nerves have calmed. Last year, people paid to keep six of the lights on. Now, only two of the lights remain adopted and lighted. “Nobody’s talking about it anymore,” said Aaron K. Cubic, city administrator in the rural community, 90 minutes south of Eugene.

Not so in Highland Park, where the measure is newer and the darkness more pronounced. There is hope for new lights, though no money for them. The mayor-elect, Mr. Windom, said that he was in conversations with groups that might consider Highland Park as a pilot project for some more energy-efficient, environmentally conscious, experimental lighting system.

“We can’t go back,” said Mr. Windom, who has, for now, urged residents to turn on their porch lights.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/us/cities-cost-cuttings-leave-residents-in-the-dark.html?_r=1&src=rechp&pagewanted=all

Yale Environment 360: Map Projects When U.S. Cities Will Achieve Grid Parity for Solar

Yale Environment 360: Map Projects When U.S. Cities Will Achieve Grid Parity for Solar

If energy cost trends remain consistent — with the price of retail electricity rising and solar power falling — solar energy could become cheaper than power from the grid in most major U.S. metropolitan areas

Click to enlarge

Energy Self-Reliant States

Grid parity in U.S. states

by 2027, according to a recent projection. In a new map published on the Energy Self-Reliant States website, energy policy analyst John Farrell has predicted which U.S. cities will achieve so-called “grid parity” first — and the order in which other cities will follow through 2027. Farrell, a researcher with the group, Local Self-Reliance, based his projections on recent regional retail rates for electricity, which have seen the cost of solar energy decline by an average of 7 percent per year and the cost of retail electricity increase by 2 percent annually. If that trend holds, Farrell predicts that San Diego will become the first city to achieve grid parity, in 2013, followed by New York City in 2015. By 2020, 17 metropolitan areas nationwide will have reached grid parity; the number will jump to more than 40 by 2027, Farrell projects. According to a recent study, the wholesale price of solar panels dropped 70 percent from late-2009 to mid-2011.

http://e360.yale.edu/digest/map_projects_when_us_cities_will_achieve_grid_parity_for_solar/3265/

Ship’s Espresso-Fueled Mission: Laying Cables Beneath the Hudson

By PATRICK McGEEHAN

New York Times

Published: December 26, 2011

For several minutes on Thursday, Al Figueroa was up to his neck in mud nearly 70 feet below the swift-moving surface of the Hudson River.

Mr. Figueroa, who has been diving in and around New York Harbor for 24 years, was well acquainted with the river’s shifting currents. Not so for the sailors and engineers on the hulking ship floating above him: almost all of them had traveled from Italy in the fall to stretch several miles of power cables beneath the river between Midtown Manhattan and New Jersey.

The cables, coiled in huge steel baskets on the deck of the ship, were custom-made in a factory near Naples to survive for decades in the muck and clay beneath the Hudson. The ship, the Giulio Verne, is one of only two in the world capable of laying so much heavy cable across ocean floors and deep riverbeds.

“The ship is filled like an egg,” said Sebastiano Aleo, an executive who oversees installation projects for its owner, Prysmian Powerlink. “There is no more room on it.”

The Giulio Verne left Naples in late October and, after 25 days on the Atlantic Ocean, arrived in New York, where a crew of 70 began preparing for a project that had been years in the planning. By Monday, it was halfway to its destination of Edgewater, N.J.

The cables on the ship were designed to carry as much as 660 megawatts of electricity — about 5 percent of the power consumed in New York City on the hottest summer days — to Midtown Manhattan from the main power grid west of the Hudson. The power could replace some of the supply that would be lost if Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo succeeds in his quest to shut down the Indian Point nuclear plant, 35 miles north of Midtown.

The New York Power Authority, which buys electricity for many city and state agencies, strongly supported the cross-Hudson cable plan. But the $850 million project is a privately financed venture, managed by PowerBridge, the same company that ran a cable from New Jersey to Long Island in 2007.

PowerBridge has sold most of the capacity on the cable to the power authority. But it can sell additional capacity to Consolidated Edison or other power providers. The laying of the cable accounts for about $175 million of the total cost, said Edward M. Stern, the chief executive of PowerBridge.

The electricity that is to run through the cables, three of them bundled together with two thinner fiber-optic wires, is from the grid that serves New Jersey and several other states. It is usually significantly less expensive than electricity made in the city.

But first, the men on the ship — they are all men and almost all Italian — must get the cables buried. That was why Mr. Figueroa was deep in the water, feeling his way around a plow that had been lowered to the river bottom.

After plunging into the 48-degree water about 700 feet from the west end of 53rd Street, Mr. Figueroa reported his observations through a microphone inside his bright yellow helmet. He had a camera too, but it was virtually useless in the murk of the Hudson.

In the “dive shack” — a steel freight container filled with hoses and gauges — on a barge tethered to the ship, two supervisors listened to Mr. Figueroa’s transmissions. Beside them stood a member of the Giulio Verne’s engineering crew, who translated the information into Italian and relayed it to the control room on the ship’s main deck.

Inside the control room, Mr. Aleo and his engineers kept up a spirited debate as they surveyed the 21 computer screens mounted on one wall. Some displayed video of the situation underwater from different angles; some showed data about the angle of the plow and the tension on the cables passing through it into the riverbed.

The discussion rarely ceased, with one notable exception: Every hour, a crew member circulated with a pot of espresso and a stack of two-inch-tall plastic cups.

If an army travels on its stomach, an Italian ship’s crew floats on a steady stream of coffee. They eat well, too. On Thursday, lunch was fettuccine alla bolognese with an antipasto spread, oranges and, of course, espresso.

The Christmas tree in the mess hall served as a reminder that the crew would miss the holidays with their families. Their work in the Hudson was not likely to wrap up until just before or after New Year’s Day.

“Unfortunately, it’s not the first Christmas we have passed on this ship,” Mr. Aleo said.

The ship has traveled the world, laying cables across seas from Sardinia to Australia, he said. Mr. Aleo said that the length and depth of those crossings presented more vexing technical challenges than the Hudson project, which will run only a few miles underwater, from West 52nd Street to Edgewater. The construction on the two sides of the river is not scheduled to be completed until mid-2013. So, on Thursday afternoon, when the brief lull between the strong tides of the Hudson passed before the crew of the Giulio Verne could get the plow moving upriver, Mr. Stern, the chief executive, remained sanguine.

“I’ve waited four years, I can wait another few hours,” he said, leaning against the ship’s rail, BlackBerry in hand.

On Friday, the plow, using jets of water to cut through the silt and clay, began threading the cables into the trench at the tortoise-like pace of about 325 feet per hour. Almost immediately, it ran into some industrial junk. But after finding a way around it, the crew resumed laying the cables.

They expected to reach New Jersey before the end of this week.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/nyregion/crew-lays-power-cable-beneath-the-hudson.html?ref=nyregion

In China, Power in Nascent Electric Car Industry

By KEITH BRADSHER

New York Times

Published: December 26, 2011

GUANGZHOU, China — Three years ago, as part of its green-energy policy, the Chinese government set an ambitious goal: by the end of 2011, the nation would be able to produce at least 500,000 hybrid or all-electric cars and buses a year.

With only about a week to go, it is clear China will fall far short of that target. Despite dozens of electric-vehicle demonstration projects around the country, analysts put China’s actual annual production capacity at only several thousand hybrid and all-electric cars and buses.

“It’s pretty trivial at this stage — they hardly sell any,” said Lin Huaibin, the manager of China vehicle sales forecasts at IHS Automotive, a global consulting firm.

Obstacles include continued technological hurdles, disputes over technology transfers by multinational automakers, and a broad wariness by the Chinese public regarding alternative-technology cars.

But it would be shortsighted to count out China’s electric car efforts just yet. Only a few months ago Prime Minister Wen Jiabao called for Beijing to create a new “road map” for energy-saving vehicles.

Unlike in other nations, where automakers are leading the push for electric vehicles, in China the effort is being led largely by one of the country’s most powerful industries — the state-run electric companies that operate the national power grid. With China expected to surpass the United States in the number of all vehicles on the road by as early as 2020, the government-run utilities see it as their job to provide an alternative to imported oil as a way to power several hundred million cars, trucks and buses.

This month in this sprawling southern industrial city, for example, the giant China Southern Power Grid company opened a sales and service center for electric cars.

The new three-story building, resembling a giant lizard egg of lime-green glass, is a showcase for technology supplied by Better Place, a start-up based in Palo Alto, Calif. Under the Better Place business model, customers do not recharge their electric cars but instead periodically stop at an electric filling station to swap their nearly depleted batteries for freshly charged ones.

And just because there are no customers kicking the tires now doesn’t mean China Southern Grid, as it is commonly known, isn’t in the electric-vehicle game for the long haul. The power company and Better Place are in talks to sell electric cars to the Guangzhou municipal government and to taxi fleets, according to Shai Agassi, Better Place’s founder and chief executive.

The demonstration project showcases imported Renault Laguna sedans and Nissan Dualis crossover utility vehicles whose gasoline-fueled power trains have been replaced with electric motors and swappable batteries. But the companies are in talks with Chinese automakers to produce battery-powered cars, for which no price has been set.

In a separate bet, meanwhile, China Southern Grid has also built recharging stations in another big southern industrial city, Shenzhen, for electric buses and cars made by a Chinese automaker, BYD, which has Warren E. Buffett among its investors.

Though automakers in other countries have supplied charging equipment to be installed at homes and parking lots, China’s power industry has already made it clear that it wants to dictate when and how plug-in gasoline-electric hybrids and all-electric cars are charged, by owning the charging equipment and setting technical standards.

“It is more and more difficult to manage the grid; we need more flexibility,” by controlling how cars are recharged, said Zhang Diansheng, the deputy general manager of China Southern Grid.

After initially seeking to leapfrog Japan and the West by moving straight from internal combustion engines to cars powered only by batteries, Chinese policy makers are now paying more attention to hybrids that combine gasoline engines with electric motors. (As battery-fire problems with the Chevrolet Volt in the United States have recently indicated, technical problems still bedevil electric automotive technology.)

Even some of the Chinese companies like BYD that have bet most heavily on all-electric cars are now investing in plug-in hybrid cars that have gasoline engines as well as batteries.

“More and more companies are certainly going to do it like this,” Wang Chuanfu, BYD’s founder and chairman, said in an interview at his company’s headquarters in Shenzhen. But he quickly added, “there is still tremendous potential in the Chinese market for electric cars.”

Some of the obstacles that have slowed deployment of all-electric cars in China also exist in other markets. The cars’ range, less than 200 miles even under ideal conditions, falls steeply in cold weather, if the air-conditioner is turned on or if the car was not fully charged overnight.

“I’m not interested in them — I worry I’d run out of electricity and get stuck,” said Mu Zhongbao, a 31-year-old businessman who paid the equivalent of $130,000 for an Audi Q7 minivan on a recent afternoon here at one of the many dealerships near the Better Place site.

Southern China Grid’s Better Place demonstration project indicates that powerful interests in China still back the development of all-electric cars.

“I see the Chinese fully committed on a path toward electric vehicles — the time frame may shift, the volume numbers may shift,” said Raymond Bierzynski, the executive director of electrification strategy at General Motors China.

Some executives say that China has fallen behind its schedule for hybrid and all-electric cars because it has put heavy pressure on multinationals to transfer technology to their Chinese partners to be eligible for generous subsidies for the sale of alternative-energy vehicles in China. Some foreign manufacturers have responded by withholding some of their latest models from the Chinese market — as Nissan has with the electric Leaf.

G.M. has put the Volt on sale in China, despite the Chinese government’s decision to make it ineligible for renewable energy subsidies of up to $19,300 per car. That is because G.M. has not transferred enough of the technology to satisfy Beijing, although G.M. did agree this autumn to share some electric technology in the coming years.

“By forcing foreign technology sources into a junior role, that’s going to significantly slow the development of the technology in China,” said Bill Russo, a former auto executive who oversaw the Chinese and Korean markets for Chrysler and is now an industry consultant in Beijing.

But the betting in China is that China Southern Grid and another big grid operator, the State Grid Corporation, and their allies among the country’s five main electricity generation companies have much more influence in Beijing than the auto industry.

The Chinese auto industry was tiny until the last decade, and very few of its executives have wound up in senior government positions. By contrast, specializing in electric power has long been a path to the top of the Chinese Communist Party for leaders like Li Peng, the former premier.

And as long as the electric companies are influential, all-battery cars may hold the political edge over hybrids.

But what is not clear is which of three experimental approaches to recharging will eventually dominate the field: the so-called fast charging of vehicle batteries at recharging centers; overnight charging options at homes and parking lots; or battery swapping à la Better Place.

Meantime, World Trade Organization rules are also influencing how China approaches electric cars, said a Chinese official close to the decision-making who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss transportation policy.

The government wants to build an electric car industry that can export vehicles all over the world. But it does not want to someday face W.T.O. trade complaints from other countries that might accuse China of violating free-trade export rules by subsidizing the industry’s development. With China having raised trade tensions with the United States earlier this month by slapping additional tariffs on a range of American imported autos, Beijing may need to tread more carefully than ever.

The most promising trade strategy for China to avoid legal pitfalls might be for the government first to subsidize the development of a network of charging stations for electric buses and other municipal vehicles, the Chinese official said. Mass transit subsidies are hard to challenge at the W.T.O. because they involve an almost purely domestic government service.

The bus recharging stations, and the lessons learned in building them, might then be used in a more extensive network of electric car recharging stations. Subsidizing the charging stations could help make electric cars more affordable, and in turn help Chinese automakers achieve economies of scale in their home market that would help them build up an export business.

Already BYD is expanding its annual capacity to manufacture all-electric buses — 1,000 this year, up from 500 last year and with a target of 5,000 next year.

Mr. Agassi of Better Place predicted China would become a large-scale maker of electric cars and then start exporting them. “This is the fork-in-the-road moment” for China, Mr. Agassi said. “You get to a trade deficit on oil imports, or you get to a trade surplus with a lot of car exports.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/business/global/chinas-push-for-electric-cars-flows-through-grid-operators.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

ConEd Could Be Raising Rates Even Higher As The Size Of The City's Electric Vehicle Fleet Explodes

Jaclyn P. Bouchard | Dec. 5, 2011, 3:23 PM
Business Insider


In order to power the largest electric vehicle (EV) fleet in the nation Manhattan is about to have as many charging stations as gas stations.

The city is home to 48 old-school filling stations while the number of charging stations is currently at 40 and growing by the month.

Under PlaNYC, a comprehensive sustainability program, the City of New York partnered with Consolidated Edison, has invested $130 million in 26,500 hybrid and EVs across all city agencies such as the fire and police departments.

Over 4,000 Smith Electric hybrid commercial trucks are already streaming across Manhattan with that number expected to increase to 140,000 over the next decade, with even the New York Taxi & Limousine Commission committing to a Nissan Leaf pilot program.

Con Edison is watching these numbers closely and has set up a section of their website outlining specific  charging plans that won't disrupt energy flow to the city. Plugging in during off peak hours after 10:00 p.m. and before 10:00 a.m. will be key.

To that end the utility company could raise its already high rates to keep drivers from plugging in any time but off peak. 

Whether New York is ready or not, change is coming, money is invested, and the plan has been set — now we know where all that tax money goes.

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