Paris adopts 'climate plan' to slash emissions in city
PARIS (AFP) — Paris on Monday adopted a plan aimed at slashing the city's greenhouse-gas emissions and energy use, as France gears up for a high-profile conference on the environment. Under the plan adopted by the mayors of Paris's 20 districts, both left- and right-wing, city authorities pledge to cut the emissions and energy consumption of public buildings and services by 30 percent by 2020. The city hopes to able to slash overall transport emissions by a quarter.
The Socialist mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoe -- who championed green projects including new tramway lines, cycle paths and a cheap mass bike-rental scheme -- said the climate plans were a "choice of civilisation."
"The environmental emergency is the greatest challenge of this century," he said ahead of the plan's adoption.
Paris city authorities have already taken steps to reduce their environmental impact, using "clean" vehicles and recycled paper, and ensuring that all new public housing answers to high environmental standards, he said.
Future plans include the creation of eco-neighbourhoods and the signature of an environmental partnership with the foundation of former US president Bill Clinton. Delanoe's right-wing rival for municipal elections next year, Francoise de Panafieu, said she backed the plan given the "historic stakes" involved, but criticised it as too little, too late.
French big business, trade unions, government and environmental groups are to come together later this month for a high-profile summit chaired by President Nicolas Sarkozy, billed as the start of a "green revolution." Last week participants unveiled a raft of measures to be put to a public debate this month and finalised at the summit.
They include green taxes on gas-guzzling cars, lower speed limits, eco-labels on supermarket food, a cutback in pesticide use and new rules on energy efficiency in the construction industry.
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5igtjcWR463yWoPT8raWlnzx-2N2g
Sunday, October 07, 2007
A congestion pricing plan can refuel this city's future
BY PETER HENDY
Thursday, October 4th 2007
Be Our Guest: The commission created to decide whether congestion pricing will work in New York has finished its first meeting, and it must not ignore the success seen in London."
Be Our Guest
This week, Mayor Bloomberg checked out London's road-pricing plan. Back in New York, he must persuade the City Council and the state Legislature to support his plan, which calls for charging drivers to enter Manhattan south of 86th St. on weekdays between 6 a.m. and 6p.m. The commission created to decide whether congestion pricing will work in New York has finished its first meeting, and it must not ignore the success seen in London.
Four years into London's congestion pricing plan, officials are continuing to improve on the idea. In seeking to address climate-change concerns, London Mayor Ken Livingstone has asked Transport for London to go further in reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the congestion-pricing zone. Planners are currently consulting Londoners on the idea of introducing emissions-related charging to encourage those who continue to drive to use lower CO2-emitting vehicles. Those people with vehicles that produce the least CO2 would get a discount on the $16-a-day charge, while those people who drive so-called gas guzzlers would pay $50 a day. If introduced, this would encourage Londoners to really think about the car they drive and the impact it has on the environment.
It's an idea that may serve New York well, too.
In 2003, London introduced congestion pricing to the central, most clogged-up part of the city. London, like New York, was experiencing gridlock, which was damaging the economy and making London a less desirable place to live and work. So, something had to be done to reduce the number of vehicles on the roads. In a brave policy decision, Livingstone instructed the Transport for London to develop a congestion price for central London. Doubters said the public transportation system would not cope, the computer system could not support it, the economy would suffer and traffic would divert onto roads bordering the zone.
More than four years later, the critics have been proven wrong.
Traffic in the congestion-pricing zone has been reduced by more than 20% - resulting in more reliable and safer journeys for businesses, bus passengers, cyclists and pedestrians. It also means, according to many businesses, a more pleasant working environment and benefits for employees using public transportation. The number of bicycle trips within the central zone has grown by 43% since February 2003. Carbon dioxide emissions in the zone have fallen by 16%. Road safety is improving, with 70 fewer serious personal injuries a year in the central zone. The $250 million raised annually through the Congestion Charge has been invested back into public transportation, walking and cycling to further improve traveling within London.
Despite opponents claiming the Congestion Charge would have a negative impact on retail business, last year central London outperformed the rest of the U.K. in retail sales. The number of bus passengers entering the zone rose by 38% between 2002 and 2003, bus reliability improved and customer satisfaction with buses is consistently high.
Despite this success, congestion problems remained, in particular in west London. This past February, Transport for London extended the congestion pricing zone to the west, a move that almost doubled the size of the zone. Again, the naysayers said the expansion plan would be a failure. Again they were wrong.
Over the first three months of the operation, traffic in the extended zone was typically down by about 15% compared with the same period in 2006. The first comprehensive survey of congestion in the extension area shows that gridlock has been reduced by some 20% against the same time frame in 2005 and 2006.
Most of those who doubted the charge in London now support it - not surprising given its huge success. As we've seen in London, introducing congestion pricing is a bold and difficult decision. There may be doubters, and there will be criticism. But it can be done. And it can work.
Hendy is London's transportation commissioner.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2007/10/04/2007-10-04_a_congestion_pricing_plan_can_refuel_thi-2.html
BY PETER HENDY
Thursday, October 4th 2007
Be Our Guest: The commission created to decide whether congestion pricing will work in New York has finished its first meeting, and it must not ignore the success seen in London."
Be Our Guest
This week, Mayor Bloomberg checked out London's road-pricing plan. Back in New York, he must persuade the City Council and the state Legislature to support his plan, which calls for charging drivers to enter Manhattan south of 86th St. on weekdays between 6 a.m. and 6p.m. The commission created to decide whether congestion pricing will work in New York has finished its first meeting, and it must not ignore the success seen in London.
Four years into London's congestion pricing plan, officials are continuing to improve on the idea. In seeking to address climate-change concerns, London Mayor Ken Livingstone has asked Transport for London to go further in reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the congestion-pricing zone. Planners are currently consulting Londoners on the idea of introducing emissions-related charging to encourage those who continue to drive to use lower CO2-emitting vehicles. Those people with vehicles that produce the least CO2 would get a discount on the $16-a-day charge, while those people who drive so-called gas guzzlers would pay $50 a day. If introduced, this would encourage Londoners to really think about the car they drive and the impact it has on the environment.
It's an idea that may serve New York well, too.
In 2003, London introduced congestion pricing to the central, most clogged-up part of the city. London, like New York, was experiencing gridlock, which was damaging the economy and making London a less desirable place to live and work. So, something had to be done to reduce the number of vehicles on the roads. In a brave policy decision, Livingstone instructed the Transport for London to develop a congestion price for central London. Doubters said the public transportation system would not cope, the computer system could not support it, the economy would suffer and traffic would divert onto roads bordering the zone.
More than four years later, the critics have been proven wrong.
Traffic in the congestion-pricing zone has been reduced by more than 20% - resulting in more reliable and safer journeys for businesses, bus passengers, cyclists and pedestrians. It also means, according to many businesses, a more pleasant working environment and benefits for employees using public transportation. The number of bicycle trips within the central zone has grown by 43% since February 2003. Carbon dioxide emissions in the zone have fallen by 16%. Road safety is improving, with 70 fewer serious personal injuries a year in the central zone. The $250 million raised annually through the Congestion Charge has been invested back into public transportation, walking and cycling to further improve traveling within London.
Despite opponents claiming the Congestion Charge would have a negative impact on retail business, last year central London outperformed the rest of the U.K. in retail sales. The number of bus passengers entering the zone rose by 38% between 2002 and 2003, bus reliability improved and customer satisfaction with buses is consistently high.
Despite this success, congestion problems remained, in particular in west London. This past February, Transport for London extended the congestion pricing zone to the west, a move that almost doubled the size of the zone. Again, the naysayers said the expansion plan would be a failure. Again they were wrong.
Over the first three months of the operation, traffic in the extended zone was typically down by about 15% compared with the same period in 2006. The first comprehensive survey of congestion in the extension area shows that gridlock has been reduced by some 20% against the same time frame in 2005 and 2006.
Most of those who doubted the charge in London now support it - not surprising given its huge success. As we've seen in London, introducing congestion pricing is a bold and difficult decision. There may be doubters, and there will be criticism. But it can be done. And it can work.
Hendy is London's transportation commissioner.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2007/10/04/2007-10-04_a_congestion_pricing_plan_can_refuel_thi-2.html
Austin's green ambitions
By Howard Witt
Chicago Tribune
AUSTIN, Texas — This environmentally conscious city is already home to the headquarters of the Whole Foods organic grocery-store chain, a new city hall built mostly with recycled materials and a municipal electric utility that features solar cells on the roof of its parking lot. The Texas capital also pays residents rebates if they install extra attic insulation or high-efficiency clothes washers. There are steep discounts on rainwater collection barrels. Low-flow toilets are practically free.
But those are just eco-baby steps compared with Austin's latest, and most ambitious, environmental quest: to lead the nation in slashing emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. All around the inexorably warming world, nations are groping for ways to slow what most scientists predict will become catastrophic climate changes. Some solutions are being mandated by governments, others are being innovated by private industry.
Austin represents a third way: a distinctively American, grass-roots global-warming initiative that has mushroomed in the shadow of the Bush administration's long-held skepticism about the issue and its refusal to join most of the rest of the world in signing the Kyoto accords limiting greenhouse-gas emissions. Within five years, this fast-growing city of 680,000 intends to power 100 percent of its municipal facilities with renewable energy, such as solar or wind-driven power. Within eight years, every new home built in Austin will be required to be so energy efficient that, if an optional solar system is added to its roof, it will consume no more energy than it produces over the course of a year.
And by 2020, fully 30 percent of the city's total residential, commercial and industrial energy consumption is to be weaned from carbon dioxide-producing fossil fuels and shifted to clean, renewable sources — a fivefold increase from current levels. Those carbon-reduction targets rank as the nation's most aggressive, environmental leaders say, outpacing efforts in Portland, Chicago and other cities that have established "green" agendas in recent years.
What's more, Austin has emerged as a leader on the international stage as the search for solutions to the overheating of the planet grows universal. The International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives now lists Austin among the top 15 greenest cities in the world. "Austin is important because it shows that a government body can take steps within its own realm of control — that this is a problem that can be managed and that there are models that can work," said David Hawkins, director of the climate center at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C. "If Austin's actions cause other cities to ask, 'Why aren't we doing something like that?' then this can have a much bigger effect."
So far, half the states in the U.S. have passed laws requiring utilities to gradually shift some of their electricity production to renewable sources. And in early August, the Democratic majority in the U.S. House pushed through a new energy bill that would require all the nation's utilities to generate 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020, although the bill faces uncertain prospects in the Senate and strong opposition from the utility industry and the White House.
Austin's activist mayor hopes his city can set the pace for even faster national change. "Why should Austin be in the climate-protection business?" asked Will Wynn, who drafted the Austin Climate Protection Plan earlier this year and ushered it through the City Council. "Well, I am the mayor of the capital city of the most polluting state in the most polluting country on the planet, from a carbon-emissions standpoint. We have the unified scientific community warning us about global warming and telling us if we don't take action, we face catastrophe. So, I'm listening."
Reducing what is known as the city's "carbon footprint" will come at a price. Wind power is currently cheaper than electricity generated by natural-gas plants, but because it is inherently intermittent, it can supply only a fraction of a city's energy needs. Meanwhile, "clean" solar power that doesn't produce greenhouse gases costs four times more than "dirty" coal power, which does. And building the kind of completely energy-efficient house Austin intends to require by 2015 could raise its sale price more than 10 percent.
"The Austin building community has been cutting-edge on green building for many years now, so we support and commend the mayor in this effort," said Harry Savio, executive vice president of the Home Builders Association of Greater Austin. "But the real answer is that we don't know if these goals are achievable. There has to be payback on all these energy-efficient upgrades, because ultimately we have to be able to sell these houses."
Austin officials agree that some costs are unknown. But they see no alternative. "It is in fact going to be more expensive to reduce our carbon emissions," acknowledged Roger Duncan, deputy general manager of Austin Energy, the city's electric utility. "But even if we were not trying to be green and reduce climate change, energy and electricity production and oil and gasoline are all going to get more expensive anyway, because the days of easily accessible oil are over.
"Plus, it's hard for me to imagine a more severe impact on the economy than the fiscal impacts of climate change, like droughts and rising sea levels. So the economy is going to be impacted whether we do something or don't do something." By comparison with many cities, it's easier for Austin to go green, not least because it's so blue. On electoral maps, the city always shows up as a stubbornly blue Democratic island in a bright-red Republican state — and Democrats, led by former Vice President Al Gore, have adopted global warming as a signature campaign issue.
Home to the flagship campus of the University of Texas and the headquarters of numerous high-technology companies, Austin is the kind of liberal, eco-friendly town where thousands of locals journey downtown every evening to spread out picnic blankets and watch 1.5 million bats, comprising North America's largest urban bat colony, take flight from beneath a bridge where they roost.
But Wynn says the city's global-warming initiative transcends partisan politics. "Our citizens expect us to do something like this," the mayor said. "Sure, there's 15 percent out to the right that still thinks global warming isn't happening, and there's 15 percent to my extreme left who think we're not doing enough. But there is a recognized 70 percent consensus in this community, including conservatives and business people, who see the wisdom in this." Other cities have struggled to fulfill promises to switch some of their energy consumption to renewable sources and reduce their carbon-dioxide emissions.
Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, for example, earned international praise from environmentalists when he pledged in 2001 that within five years the city would buy 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources and curb emissions of greenhouse gases by 4 percent. In reality, the Chicago Tribune found, by the end of last year Chicago's greenhouse-gas emissions had actually increased 10 percent from a baseline average from 1998 to 2001. And the city had not purchased any green energy since 2004.
But Austin officials are confident they can meet their pioneering goal of powering nearly a third of the city's energy from renewable sources by 2020, even though the city's current electricity mix — 35 percent coal, 30 percent natural gas, 29 percent nuclear and 6 percent wind — scarcely inspires green envy. Partly that's because Austin owns its municipal electric utility — an increasingly rare arrangement in an era of utility privatization — which allows city leaders to drive energy policies. That's why Duncan, the city's chief authority on renewable energy, was able to order the installation of a bank of solar panels atop the parking lot beneath his office window as a demonstration project.
And it's why Austin Energy subsidizes more than half the cost when homeowners agree to install $20,000 solar systems. City leaders figure such a subsidy makes sense because reduced electricity demand means they will not have to build more coal, gas or nuclear-power plants. Wind power is even more promising, city officials say. Texas already leads the nation in new wind farms, and Austin is driving demand for even more. Last year, when the city offered a fresh batch of wind-driven power contracts to consumers — at a lower cost than electricity generated from natural gas — the offering was so popular that a televised lottery was held to pick the winners.
Ultimately it's those kinds of bottom-line economic benefits, rather than feel-good politics, that will drive more consumers into the green camp, Austin officials maintain. In the hot central Texas climate where water is scarce and electricity is expensive, Wynn is certain that more energy-efficient houses that promise sharply lower utility bills will be in increasing demand, even if they cost more upfront to build or retrofit.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003926617_greenaustin05.html
By Howard Witt
Chicago Tribune
AUSTIN, Texas — This environmentally conscious city is already home to the headquarters of the Whole Foods organic grocery-store chain, a new city hall built mostly with recycled materials and a municipal electric utility that features solar cells on the roof of its parking lot. The Texas capital also pays residents rebates if they install extra attic insulation or high-efficiency clothes washers. There are steep discounts on rainwater collection barrels. Low-flow toilets are practically free.
But those are just eco-baby steps compared with Austin's latest, and most ambitious, environmental quest: to lead the nation in slashing emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. All around the inexorably warming world, nations are groping for ways to slow what most scientists predict will become catastrophic climate changes. Some solutions are being mandated by governments, others are being innovated by private industry.
Austin represents a third way: a distinctively American, grass-roots global-warming initiative that has mushroomed in the shadow of the Bush administration's long-held skepticism about the issue and its refusal to join most of the rest of the world in signing the Kyoto accords limiting greenhouse-gas emissions. Within five years, this fast-growing city of 680,000 intends to power 100 percent of its municipal facilities with renewable energy, such as solar or wind-driven power. Within eight years, every new home built in Austin will be required to be so energy efficient that, if an optional solar system is added to its roof, it will consume no more energy than it produces over the course of a year.
And by 2020, fully 30 percent of the city's total residential, commercial and industrial energy consumption is to be weaned from carbon dioxide-producing fossil fuels and shifted to clean, renewable sources — a fivefold increase from current levels. Those carbon-reduction targets rank as the nation's most aggressive, environmental leaders say, outpacing efforts in Portland, Chicago and other cities that have established "green" agendas in recent years.
What's more, Austin has emerged as a leader on the international stage as the search for solutions to the overheating of the planet grows universal. The International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives now lists Austin among the top 15 greenest cities in the world. "Austin is important because it shows that a government body can take steps within its own realm of control — that this is a problem that can be managed and that there are models that can work," said David Hawkins, director of the climate center at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C. "If Austin's actions cause other cities to ask, 'Why aren't we doing something like that?' then this can have a much bigger effect."
So far, half the states in the U.S. have passed laws requiring utilities to gradually shift some of their electricity production to renewable sources. And in early August, the Democratic majority in the U.S. House pushed through a new energy bill that would require all the nation's utilities to generate 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020, although the bill faces uncertain prospects in the Senate and strong opposition from the utility industry and the White House.
Austin's activist mayor hopes his city can set the pace for even faster national change. "Why should Austin be in the climate-protection business?" asked Will Wynn, who drafted the Austin Climate Protection Plan earlier this year and ushered it through the City Council. "Well, I am the mayor of the capital city of the most polluting state in the most polluting country on the planet, from a carbon-emissions standpoint. We have the unified scientific community warning us about global warming and telling us if we don't take action, we face catastrophe. So, I'm listening."
Reducing what is known as the city's "carbon footprint" will come at a price. Wind power is currently cheaper than electricity generated by natural-gas plants, but because it is inherently intermittent, it can supply only a fraction of a city's energy needs. Meanwhile, "clean" solar power that doesn't produce greenhouse gases costs four times more than "dirty" coal power, which does. And building the kind of completely energy-efficient house Austin intends to require by 2015 could raise its sale price more than 10 percent.
"The Austin building community has been cutting-edge on green building for many years now, so we support and commend the mayor in this effort," said Harry Savio, executive vice president of the Home Builders Association of Greater Austin. "But the real answer is that we don't know if these goals are achievable. There has to be payback on all these energy-efficient upgrades, because ultimately we have to be able to sell these houses."
Austin officials agree that some costs are unknown. But they see no alternative. "It is in fact going to be more expensive to reduce our carbon emissions," acknowledged Roger Duncan, deputy general manager of Austin Energy, the city's electric utility. "But even if we were not trying to be green and reduce climate change, energy and electricity production and oil and gasoline are all going to get more expensive anyway, because the days of easily accessible oil are over.
"Plus, it's hard for me to imagine a more severe impact on the economy than the fiscal impacts of climate change, like droughts and rising sea levels. So the economy is going to be impacted whether we do something or don't do something." By comparison with many cities, it's easier for Austin to go green, not least because it's so blue. On electoral maps, the city always shows up as a stubbornly blue Democratic island in a bright-red Republican state — and Democrats, led by former Vice President Al Gore, have adopted global warming as a signature campaign issue.
Home to the flagship campus of the University of Texas and the headquarters of numerous high-technology companies, Austin is the kind of liberal, eco-friendly town where thousands of locals journey downtown every evening to spread out picnic blankets and watch 1.5 million bats, comprising North America's largest urban bat colony, take flight from beneath a bridge where they roost.
But Wynn says the city's global-warming initiative transcends partisan politics. "Our citizens expect us to do something like this," the mayor said. "Sure, there's 15 percent out to the right that still thinks global warming isn't happening, and there's 15 percent to my extreme left who think we're not doing enough. But there is a recognized 70 percent consensus in this community, including conservatives and business people, who see the wisdom in this." Other cities have struggled to fulfill promises to switch some of their energy consumption to renewable sources and reduce their carbon-dioxide emissions.
Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, for example, earned international praise from environmentalists when he pledged in 2001 that within five years the city would buy 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources and curb emissions of greenhouse gases by 4 percent. In reality, the Chicago Tribune found, by the end of last year Chicago's greenhouse-gas emissions had actually increased 10 percent from a baseline average from 1998 to 2001. And the city had not purchased any green energy since 2004.
But Austin officials are confident they can meet their pioneering goal of powering nearly a third of the city's energy from renewable sources by 2020, even though the city's current electricity mix — 35 percent coal, 30 percent natural gas, 29 percent nuclear and 6 percent wind — scarcely inspires green envy. Partly that's because Austin owns its municipal electric utility — an increasingly rare arrangement in an era of utility privatization — which allows city leaders to drive energy policies. That's why Duncan, the city's chief authority on renewable energy, was able to order the installation of a bank of solar panels atop the parking lot beneath his office window as a demonstration project.
And it's why Austin Energy subsidizes more than half the cost when homeowners agree to install $20,000 solar systems. City leaders figure such a subsidy makes sense because reduced electricity demand means they will not have to build more coal, gas or nuclear-power plants. Wind power is even more promising, city officials say. Texas already leads the nation in new wind farms, and Austin is driving demand for even more. Last year, when the city offered a fresh batch of wind-driven power contracts to consumers — at a lower cost than electricity generated from natural gas — the offering was so popular that a televised lottery was held to pick the winners.
Ultimately it's those kinds of bottom-line economic benefits, rather than feel-good politics, that will drive more consumers into the green camp, Austin officials maintain. In the hot central Texas climate where water is scarce and electricity is expensive, Wynn is certain that more energy-efficient houses that promise sharply lower utility bills will be in increasing demand, even if they cost more upfront to build or retrofit.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003926617_greenaustin05.html
San Jose mayor unveils green vision
KEY QUESTION: HOW ARE WE GOING TO PAY FOR IT?
By Matt Nauman
Mercury News
10/05/2007
Mayor Chuck Reed will unveil his bold forecast for a green San Jose, circa 2022, today. His 10-point "green vision" calls for 25,000 new clean-tech jobs, mostly from the solar industry, the planting of 100,000 new trees and 60 miles of new trails. But Reed goes much further, suggesting that to meet his goals residents drastically cut energy use and that the city rely on new technologies that have yet to be tested.
The mayor says all San Joseans, not just the city, its workers and facilities, should cut energy use by 50 percent over the next 15 years. He says all waste should be diverted from landfills and converted to energy. And he wants 100 percent of San Jose's wastewater - that's 100 million gallons a day - to be recycled or otherwise used beneficially. As Reed himself says, "It won't be an easy task."
Many of the goals reflect huge leaps forward, at least by today's measurements. None of the waste from San Jose's landfills is being converted to energy right now and only about 10 percent of its wastewater is being recycled. Just 300 of the 2,700 vehicles in the city's fleet are emission-free. Reed wants all of them included in 15 years. "It's pretty ambitious, but how is he going to pay for it?" asked James Elsen, president and chief executive of Sustain Lane of San Francisco, an online media company that ranks cities on their level of sustainability. Last year, San Jose ranked No. 23 among the top 50 cities. "On first blush it seems pretty far-reaching."
But the mayors of other major American cities, such as Portland, Ore., and Denver, have been going green and Elsen noted that Reed has an advantage they don't: "The fastest-growing segment in the VC industry is clean tech, and that's in his back yard."
Further complicating Reed's dream are projections from the Association of Bay Area Governments that San Jose's population will grow from 993,000 in 2005 to 1.2 million by 2020. Reed doesn't address how much his plan will cost or how to pay for it, other than alluding to the savings from energy efficiency and the need for fiscal responsibility. "San Jose will show the world that environmental responsibility makes financial sense," Reed says.
It's not clear who would be responsible for ensuring San Jose meets Reed's targets if they are adopted by the city council. If the mayor seeks re-election and wins, he would leave office in 2014 - seven years before the deadline he lays out. His plan emphasizes vision over specifics. Partially, it hinges on future technology improvements, partnerships with local companies and institutions to help defray costs, money from the state and federal governments, and a consensus that these are high-priority goals for America's 10th-largest city.
Creating 25,000 clean-technology jobs in San Jose sounds realistic to Julie Blunden, a vice president at SunPower, which makes solar panels. "San Jose is putting its efforts concretely on being friendly for economic development and as a customer for clean tech," she said. Reed cites a solar installation on buildings owned by the San Jose Unified School District as the kind of thing he has in mind. Announced this year and due to be completed in 2008, the project was financed by the Bank of America and will be built and maintained by Chevron Energy Solutions. The schools are "not writing a check, and they're saving a million dollars a year. That's a message mayors understand," Reed said.
He envisions San Jose serving as a demonstration site for new technologies created by local companies. These might be tested on city buildings or city-owned land. Once proven, he said, the technologies will be sold to other cities seeking to go green. "We need to do the R&D for every city in the world to show them how we can do clean and green," Reed said. "Part of that R&D is to demonstrate that you can do it and still be fiscally responsible."
The plan started with a conversation between Reed and U.S. Rep. Mike Honda, D-Campbell, who said, "You guys should do something bold." That led to a one-page idea that San Jose could get 100 percent of its power from renewables, and months of discussions with city staff, area leaders and energy experts. The plan is now in its ninth draft and is 13 pages long. "It's at a time when Silicon Valley is abuzz with the opportunities in clean technology," Reed said.
The plan's 15-year timetable was driven by estimates of how long it would take San Jose to get 100 percent of its power from renewable sources such as the sun and wind. "It looks like 15 years is doable," Reed said. "Difficult, but not impossible or unrealistic, but doable. So that's the key goal."
Frank Wolak, a Stanford University economics professor who studies energy issues, noted that Reed's call for San Jose to get 100 percent of its power from renewable sources is far more ambitious than California's push to get 20 percent from renewables by 2010. "We're nowhere near that and most likely won't achieve that by 2010," he said.
San Jose's task also becomes increasingly difficult, Wolak said, as more and more entities - the state itself, big utilities, other cities and businesses - seek renewable power. "If a significant part of the state went for it, it would be impossible to achieve," he said. "Anything that has 100 percent on it is very hard to achieve. Getting a little is pretty cheap. Getting more is expensive, and it becomes increasingly expensive as you try to get that percentage up higher and higher."
Reaction from others familiar with Reed's plan was positive. "For anyone who wondered if our mayor lacked vision, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group is selling crow for them to eat," said Carl Guardino, the group's president and chief executive. "The plan is as ambitious and visionary as this valley, and it needs to be." Reed will unveil the plan this afternoon at Integrated Design Associates (IDeAs), a converted bank branch on Old Almaden Road that'll be a so-called Z-squared or zero-squared facility that uses less electricity than it generates and doesn't emit any carbon. It will be presented to the city council Oct. 30.
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_7091552?nclick_check=1
KEY QUESTION: HOW ARE WE GOING TO PAY FOR IT?
By Matt Nauman
Mercury News
10/05/2007
Mayor Chuck Reed will unveil his bold forecast for a green San Jose, circa 2022, today. His 10-point "green vision" calls for 25,000 new clean-tech jobs, mostly from the solar industry, the planting of 100,000 new trees and 60 miles of new trails. But Reed goes much further, suggesting that to meet his goals residents drastically cut energy use and that the city rely on new technologies that have yet to be tested.
The mayor says all San Joseans, not just the city, its workers and facilities, should cut energy use by 50 percent over the next 15 years. He says all waste should be diverted from landfills and converted to energy. And he wants 100 percent of San Jose's wastewater - that's 100 million gallons a day - to be recycled or otherwise used beneficially. As Reed himself says, "It won't be an easy task."
Many of the goals reflect huge leaps forward, at least by today's measurements. None of the waste from San Jose's landfills is being converted to energy right now and only about 10 percent of its wastewater is being recycled. Just 300 of the 2,700 vehicles in the city's fleet are emission-free. Reed wants all of them included in 15 years. "It's pretty ambitious, but how is he going to pay for it?" asked James Elsen, president and chief executive of Sustain Lane of San Francisco, an online media company that ranks cities on their level of sustainability. Last year, San Jose ranked No. 23 among the top 50 cities. "On first blush it seems pretty far-reaching."
But the mayors of other major American cities, such as Portland, Ore., and Denver, have been going green and Elsen noted that Reed has an advantage they don't: "The fastest-growing segment in the VC industry is clean tech, and that's in his back yard."
Further complicating Reed's dream are projections from the Association of Bay Area Governments that San Jose's population will grow from 993,000 in 2005 to 1.2 million by 2020. Reed doesn't address how much his plan will cost or how to pay for it, other than alluding to the savings from energy efficiency and the need for fiscal responsibility. "San Jose will show the world that environmental responsibility makes financial sense," Reed says.
It's not clear who would be responsible for ensuring San Jose meets Reed's targets if they are adopted by the city council. If the mayor seeks re-election and wins, he would leave office in 2014 - seven years before the deadline he lays out. His plan emphasizes vision over specifics. Partially, it hinges on future technology improvements, partnerships with local companies and institutions to help defray costs, money from the state and federal governments, and a consensus that these are high-priority goals for America's 10th-largest city.
Creating 25,000 clean-technology jobs in San Jose sounds realistic to Julie Blunden, a vice president at SunPower, which makes solar panels. "San Jose is putting its efforts concretely on being friendly for economic development and as a customer for clean tech," she said. Reed cites a solar installation on buildings owned by the San Jose Unified School District as the kind of thing he has in mind. Announced this year and due to be completed in 2008, the project was financed by the Bank of America and will be built and maintained by Chevron Energy Solutions. The schools are "not writing a check, and they're saving a million dollars a year. That's a message mayors understand," Reed said.
He envisions San Jose serving as a demonstration site for new technologies created by local companies. These might be tested on city buildings or city-owned land. Once proven, he said, the technologies will be sold to other cities seeking to go green. "We need to do the R&D for every city in the world to show them how we can do clean and green," Reed said. "Part of that R&D is to demonstrate that you can do it and still be fiscally responsible."
The plan started with a conversation between Reed and U.S. Rep. Mike Honda, D-Campbell, who said, "You guys should do something bold." That led to a one-page idea that San Jose could get 100 percent of its power from renewables, and months of discussions with city staff, area leaders and energy experts. The plan is now in its ninth draft and is 13 pages long. "It's at a time when Silicon Valley is abuzz with the opportunities in clean technology," Reed said.
The plan's 15-year timetable was driven by estimates of how long it would take San Jose to get 100 percent of its power from renewable sources such as the sun and wind. "It looks like 15 years is doable," Reed said. "Difficult, but not impossible or unrealistic, but doable. So that's the key goal."
Frank Wolak, a Stanford University economics professor who studies energy issues, noted that Reed's call for San Jose to get 100 percent of its power from renewable sources is far more ambitious than California's push to get 20 percent from renewables by 2010. "We're nowhere near that and most likely won't achieve that by 2010," he said.
San Jose's task also becomes increasingly difficult, Wolak said, as more and more entities - the state itself, big utilities, other cities and businesses - seek renewable power. "If a significant part of the state went for it, it would be impossible to achieve," he said. "Anything that has 100 percent on it is very hard to achieve. Getting a little is pretty cheap. Getting more is expensive, and it becomes increasingly expensive as you try to get that percentage up higher and higher."
Reaction from others familiar with Reed's plan was positive. "For anyone who wondered if our mayor lacked vision, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group is selling crow for them to eat," said Carl Guardino, the group's president and chief executive. "The plan is as ambitious and visionary as this valley, and it needs to be." Reed will unveil the plan this afternoon at Integrated Design Associates (IDeAs), a converted bank branch on Old Almaden Road that'll be a so-called Z-squared or zero-squared facility that uses less electricity than it generates and doesn't emit any carbon. It will be presented to the city council Oct. 30.
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_7091552?nclick_check=1
Friday, September 28, 2007
A break for budgets: PSE slashes natural-gas rates
By Ángel González
Seattle Times
If you heat your home with natural gas, here's some news to warm up to: The price will go down for the first time in five years, as Puget Sound Energy cuts its rate by 13 percent starting Monday. The cut, approved Wednesday by the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission (WUTC), comes as the region prepares for the cold and dreary nights of winter. The average natural-gas bill for a residential customer will drop by $11.27 to $82.12 a month, according to the WUTC.
The impact will be widely felt. Some 44 percent of homes in the Seattle-Bellevue-Everett metro area burn natural gas for heat, and Puget Sound Energy (PSE) is their sole provider. Residents who heat with fuel oil won't be so lucky. Oil prices are expected to rise about 7 percent on the West Coast, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Given the volatility of energy markets, nothing guarantees natural-gas prices won't rebound when PSE revises its costs again next year.
"I only wish I could guarantee that these wholesale prices will stay low in the future," WUTC Commissioner Pat Oshie said in a statement. The recent lower wholesale prices are a result of several factors:
--Relatively mild summer temperatures meant low air-conditioning loads for utilities, which used less natural gas to generate electricity.
-- No major supply disruptions like those hurricanes Rita and Katrina caused in 2005.
-- Record imports of liquefied natural gas, and more production in the Gulf of Mexico and the Rockies. The EIA expects natural-gas production in the United States to increase 0.7 percent in 2007 and 1.3 percent next year.
PSE, Washington state's largest energy utility, is required to pass these savings on to customers.
The company, like other state-regulated utilities, adjusts its rates once a year to balance its costs with the prices it charges. Should there be a major increase in natural-gas prices — due to extreme cold this winter, or a killer hurricane late in the season — consumers won't see the effect until next year.
Electricity
For area residents who heat their homes electrically — 45.6 percent of the total — rates will go up or down depending on whether they live in Seattle or its suburbs. Seattle City Light cut its 2007 and 2008 rates for residential customers by about 8 percent Jan. 1, said spokesman Peter Clarke. The drop is due to its reliance on abundant hydropower and the improvement of the company's finances, which were badly hurt after an energy crisis at the start of the decade.
PSE, which supplies electricity outside the city of Seattle to people in 11 Washington counties, raised its rates 3.7 percent Sept. 1, bringing the average monthly bill up to $91.31. The boost was approved to help the utility recover money spent on higher power-supply costs, such as the purchase of a gas-Klickitat County gas-turbine plant.
Customers of PSE and other private electricity providers have also had another change in their bill: In June, the companies stopped applying a federal power-system credit to bills. That change increased the average bill by $10.28 a month for Puget Sound Energy customers, according to the WUTC. Private utilities seek to restore the payment of the benefit, which was suspended in May by a federal court. Meanwhile, to offset the credit's end, "we're encouraging our customers to conserve and take what steps they can to use energy wisely," said Puget Sound Energy spokeswoman Martha Monfried.
Snohomish County Public Utility District has not finished its budget process but said recently it did not expect to change electricity rates.
Oil
Homes heated by fuel oil represent less than 5 percent of the regional total and should see costs rise, according to a report by the National Energy Assistance Directors' Association. The increase is driven by skyrocketing crude-oil prices reflecting global supply concerns. Residential customers are expected to pay a national average of $1,834 for heating oil-derived warmth during the 2007-08 winter, up 28 percent from the previous year, the report says.
But the price increase will be less acute west of the Rockies, where demand is the lowest. The EIA estimates that a gallon of heating oil on the West Coast in the fourth quarter of 2007 will cost around $2.75, up about 7 percent from the same period last year. Demand here is lower due to less-severe winter weather than in the Northeast, where the bulk of heating-oil users reside.
"Here in the Northwest, the winters have been tending towards mild," said Calvin Caley, owner of Pacific Heating Oil in Seattle. The area is also less vulnerable to sharp cold snaps. "A winter that's colder is not much different anymore from a winter that is milder," he said. Typical residential customers consume between 400 and 800 gallons between September and June, Caley said. The current price runs between $3.05 to $3.15 a gallon, he said.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=2003906654&zsection_id=2002119995&slug=natgas27&date=20070927
By Ángel González
Seattle Times
If you heat your home with natural gas, here's some news to warm up to: The price will go down for the first time in five years, as Puget Sound Energy cuts its rate by 13 percent starting Monday. The cut, approved Wednesday by the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission (WUTC), comes as the region prepares for the cold and dreary nights of winter. The average natural-gas bill for a residential customer will drop by $11.27 to $82.12 a month, according to the WUTC.
The impact will be widely felt. Some 44 percent of homes in the Seattle-Bellevue-Everett metro area burn natural gas for heat, and Puget Sound Energy (PSE) is their sole provider. Residents who heat with fuel oil won't be so lucky. Oil prices are expected to rise about 7 percent on the West Coast, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Given the volatility of energy markets, nothing guarantees natural-gas prices won't rebound when PSE revises its costs again next year.
"I only wish I could guarantee that these wholesale prices will stay low in the future," WUTC Commissioner Pat Oshie said in a statement. The recent lower wholesale prices are a result of several factors:
--Relatively mild summer temperatures meant low air-conditioning loads for utilities, which used less natural gas to generate electricity.
-- No major supply disruptions like those hurricanes Rita and Katrina caused in 2005.
-- Record imports of liquefied natural gas, and more production in the Gulf of Mexico and the Rockies. The EIA expects natural-gas production in the United States to increase 0.7 percent in 2007 and 1.3 percent next year.
PSE, Washington state's largest energy utility, is required to pass these savings on to customers.
The company, like other state-regulated utilities, adjusts its rates once a year to balance its costs with the prices it charges. Should there be a major increase in natural-gas prices — due to extreme cold this winter, or a killer hurricane late in the season — consumers won't see the effect until next year.
Electricity
For area residents who heat their homes electrically — 45.6 percent of the total — rates will go up or down depending on whether they live in Seattle or its suburbs. Seattle City Light cut its 2007 and 2008 rates for residential customers by about 8 percent Jan. 1, said spokesman Peter Clarke. The drop is due to its reliance on abundant hydropower and the improvement of the company's finances, which were badly hurt after an energy crisis at the start of the decade.
PSE, which supplies electricity outside the city of Seattle to people in 11 Washington counties, raised its rates 3.7 percent Sept. 1, bringing the average monthly bill up to $91.31. The boost was approved to help the utility recover money spent on higher power-supply costs, such as the purchase of a gas-Klickitat County gas-turbine plant.
Customers of PSE and other private electricity providers have also had another change in their bill: In June, the companies stopped applying a federal power-system credit to bills. That change increased the average bill by $10.28 a month for Puget Sound Energy customers, according to the WUTC. Private utilities seek to restore the payment of the benefit, which was suspended in May by a federal court. Meanwhile, to offset the credit's end, "we're encouraging our customers to conserve and take what steps they can to use energy wisely," said Puget Sound Energy spokeswoman Martha Monfried.
Snohomish County Public Utility District has not finished its budget process but said recently it did not expect to change electricity rates.
Oil
Homes heated by fuel oil represent less than 5 percent of the regional total and should see costs rise, according to a report by the National Energy Assistance Directors' Association. The increase is driven by skyrocketing crude-oil prices reflecting global supply concerns. Residential customers are expected to pay a national average of $1,834 for heating oil-derived warmth during the 2007-08 winter, up 28 percent from the previous year, the report says.
But the price increase will be less acute west of the Rockies, where demand is the lowest. The EIA estimates that a gallon of heating oil on the West Coast in the fourth quarter of 2007 will cost around $2.75, up about 7 percent from the same period last year. Demand here is lower due to less-severe winter weather than in the Northeast, where the bulk of heating-oil users reside.
"Here in the Northwest, the winters have been tending towards mild," said Calvin Caley, owner of Pacific Heating Oil in Seattle. The area is also less vulnerable to sharp cold snaps. "A winter that's colder is not much different anymore from a winter that is milder," he said. Typical residential customers consume between 400 and 800 gallons between September and June, Caley said. The current price runs between $3.05 to $3.15 a gallon, he said.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=2003906654&zsection_id=2002119995&slug=natgas27&date=20070927
It could be `lights out' for one hour to save energy
Alison Hewitt
San Bernadino Sun
A budding "lights out" movement could darken Los Angeles County for one hour in October.
The effort, which began in Australia and has gained traction in San Francisco, got a local boost from county Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke when she introduced a motion this week supporting "Lights Out Los Angeles." The idea is to turn off as many lights as is safely possible in and around government buildings, businesses, homes and public landmarks in order to reduce pollution and raise awareness of the need to save energy, Burke said.
"In one hour, you could save as much as 15 percent of the energy used on an average Saturday," Burke said. Her motion proposed synchronizing Lights Out Los Angeles with Lights Out San Francisco, where City Hall, the Golden Gate Bridge and other landmarks have already agreed to go dark from 8 to 9 p.m. on Oct. 20.
If Burke's motion is approved, county buildings would join in switching off their lights. In the city of Los Angeles, Councilwoman Wendy Greuel introduced a similar motion that would darken city structures. Landmarks such as the pillars of light at Los Angeles International Airport could also go dark, according to Burke's office. The Hollywood sign is also on the list of candidates - but the sign isn't lit up, said Betsy Isroelit of the Hollywood Sign Trust.
The movement started when San Francisco resident Nate Tyler found out about Sydney, Australia's Earth Hour. In Sydney, the one-hour event reduced pollution as much as taking 48,000 cars off the road for an hour, Burke said.
San Francisco and Los Angeles will be Tyler's trial runs for a national event on March 29 - the same day as Earth Hour. Tyler hopes it will become an annual effort. "What we're encouraging or inviting people to do is turn off all nonessential lighting to save energy, and to install one compact fluorescent lightbulb to save energy," he said. "It's a simple thing that people can do to take action in the fight against climate change."
Streetlights and stoplights and other lights needed for safety should of course stay on, Tyler said. Beyond that, it's up to people to decide for themselves whether they will simply remember to turn off the lights when they leave a room, he said.
http://www.sbsun.com/news/ci_7021458
Alison Hewitt
San Bernadino Sun
A budding "lights out" movement could darken Los Angeles County for one hour in October.
The effort, which began in Australia and has gained traction in San Francisco, got a local boost from county Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke when she introduced a motion this week supporting "Lights Out Los Angeles." The idea is to turn off as many lights as is safely possible in and around government buildings, businesses, homes and public landmarks in order to reduce pollution and raise awareness of the need to save energy, Burke said.
"In one hour, you could save as much as 15 percent of the energy used on an average Saturday," Burke said. Her motion proposed synchronizing Lights Out Los Angeles with Lights Out San Francisco, where City Hall, the Golden Gate Bridge and other landmarks have already agreed to go dark from 8 to 9 p.m. on Oct. 20.
If Burke's motion is approved, county buildings would join in switching off their lights. In the city of Los Angeles, Councilwoman Wendy Greuel introduced a similar motion that would darken city structures. Landmarks such as the pillars of light at Los Angeles International Airport could also go dark, according to Burke's office. The Hollywood sign is also on the list of candidates - but the sign isn't lit up, said Betsy Isroelit of the Hollywood Sign Trust.
The movement started when San Francisco resident Nate Tyler found out about Sydney, Australia's Earth Hour. In Sydney, the one-hour event reduced pollution as much as taking 48,000 cars off the road for an hour, Burke said.
San Francisco and Los Angeles will be Tyler's trial runs for a national event on March 29 - the same day as Earth Hour. Tyler hopes it will become an annual effort. "What we're encouraging or inviting people to do is turn off all nonessential lighting to save energy, and to install one compact fluorescent lightbulb to save energy," he said. "It's a simple thing that people can do to take action in the fight against climate change."
Streetlights and stoplights and other lights needed for safety should of course stay on, Tyler said. Beyond that, it's up to people to decide for themselves whether they will simply remember to turn off the lights when they leave a room, he said.
http://www.sbsun.com/news/ci_7021458
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Green buildings get green light
By Wu Jiayin
2007-9-27
Shanghai Daily
ALTHOUGH still at the initial stage, "green building" has a promising future in China.Green building refers to practices that promote occupant health and comfort while minimizing negative impacts on the environment. Although construction costs are usually higher for green buildings than for traditional energy-gobblers, the buildings save money in the long run because of reduced fuel costs.
A report by People's Daily at the end of 2004 pointed out that in China, of all the buildings in use (about 40 billion square meters) at that time, 99 percent were highly energy consuming. In 2002, China's buildings accounted for over a quarter of the country's energy consumption, according to Yang Fujia, chancellor of the University of Nottingham, England, and an academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences. And that figure is expected to increase to 40 percent by 2020 with the rapid development of the construction sector.
Recognizing this problem, the Chinese government first listed the goal of promoting green buildings and energy-saving buildings in the Outline of National Plan for Medium to Long-term Scientific and Technological Development (2006-2020) in 2005. Chen Yiming, director of the science and technology department promotion center of the Ministry of Construction, explained China's "green" policies at a conference on green building organized by McGraw-Hill Construction in Shanghai on September 13.
In response to the central government's regulation, many enterprises, especially real estate enterprises, are becoming active in the green building movement. Shanghai East Harbor Development Co Ltd, for example, is developing a green office building on the North Bund. It is based on the high standards of the US Green Building Council's LEED (leadership in energy and environmental design) certification. According to Kenny H.C. Ko, president of Shanghai East Harbor Development Ltd, the building uses a geothermal heat pump system to tap the constant temperature of the earth as the main source of heating in winter and cooling in summer. Further, to save energy, the company turned down a proposal to make the building's exterior of glass. It also made a wise decision on the ratio of window space to wall space.
As to the part of exterior wall that is made of glass, the company requires energy-saving double-layer hollow glass. In addition, the building is equipped with energy-saving automatic switches, water taps and a rooftop rainwater drainage system. Zhejiang Zhongcheng Industry Co Ltd is now the owner of the largest public green building project in Zhejiang Province - the Jiaxing International China HK city. The project devotes 180,000 square meters of its 1.15 million square meters to an international marketplace for energy saving and environmental friendly building products and equipment. What's more, the site of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing will be equipped with many of General Electric's energy-saving technologies such as a solar-powered lighting power and rainwater recycling system as well as a light-emitting diode system.
Although green building materials nowadays are somewhat more expensive than ordinary building materials, they help to conserve energy in the long run.
http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article/2007/200709/20070927/article_332627.htm
By Wu Jiayin
2007-9-27
Shanghai Daily
ALTHOUGH still at the initial stage, "green building" has a promising future in China.Green building refers to practices that promote occupant health and comfort while minimizing negative impacts on the environment. Although construction costs are usually higher for green buildings than for traditional energy-gobblers, the buildings save money in the long run because of reduced fuel costs.
A report by People's Daily at the end of 2004 pointed out that in China, of all the buildings in use (about 40 billion square meters) at that time, 99 percent were highly energy consuming. In 2002, China's buildings accounted for over a quarter of the country's energy consumption, according to Yang Fujia, chancellor of the University of Nottingham, England, and an academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences. And that figure is expected to increase to 40 percent by 2020 with the rapid development of the construction sector.
Recognizing this problem, the Chinese government first listed the goal of promoting green buildings and energy-saving buildings in the Outline of National Plan for Medium to Long-term Scientific and Technological Development (2006-2020) in 2005. Chen Yiming, director of the science and technology department promotion center of the Ministry of Construction, explained China's "green" policies at a conference on green building organized by McGraw-Hill Construction in Shanghai on September 13.
In response to the central government's regulation, many enterprises, especially real estate enterprises, are becoming active in the green building movement. Shanghai East Harbor Development Co Ltd, for example, is developing a green office building on the North Bund. It is based on the high standards of the US Green Building Council's LEED (leadership in energy and environmental design) certification. According to Kenny H.C. Ko, president of Shanghai East Harbor Development Ltd, the building uses a geothermal heat pump system to tap the constant temperature of the earth as the main source of heating in winter and cooling in summer. Further, to save energy, the company turned down a proposal to make the building's exterior of glass. It also made a wise decision on the ratio of window space to wall space.
As to the part of exterior wall that is made of glass, the company requires energy-saving double-layer hollow glass. In addition, the building is equipped with energy-saving automatic switches, water taps and a rooftop rainwater drainage system. Zhejiang Zhongcheng Industry Co Ltd is now the owner of the largest public green building project in Zhejiang Province - the Jiaxing International China HK city. The project devotes 180,000 square meters of its 1.15 million square meters to an international marketplace for energy saving and environmental friendly building products and equipment. What's more, the site of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing will be equipped with many of General Electric's energy-saving technologies such as a solar-powered lighting power and rainwater recycling system as well as a light-emitting diode system.
Although green building materials nowadays are somewhat more expensive than ordinary building materials, they help to conserve energy in the long run.
http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article/2007/200709/20070927/article_332627.htm
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Yemen: Agreement signed to build $15 billion nuclear power plant
25-09-2007
A delegation of American and Canadian investors in the field of nuclear energy left Yemen on Tuesday after signing an initial agreement with the Yemeni government to fund a nuclear power plant at an estimated cost $15 billion.
The firms would carry out feasibility studies for building the plant with a total production capacity of 5,000 MW, Saba news agency has indicated. The agreement with the US and Canadian firms envisages the construction of five nuclear reactors over 10 years to produce nuclear energy.
Yemen is looking to build nuclear plant to generate electricity and to desalinate sea water in order to meet the needs of its growing urban population of electrification and water and boost the country's industrial development. It also hopes to diversify and expand its energy resources due to declining oil production.
Speaking to AFP, Yemen's Energy and Electricity Minister Mustafa Bahran said the contract was inked with the Houston-based Powered Corp. "The overall cost of the project is estimated at 15 billion dollars. It features the construction of five nuclear reactors over 10 years," Bahran said. "Powered Corporation will oversee efforts to secure the financing of the project," he said.
http://www.albawaba.com/en/countries/Yemen/217221
25-09-2007
A delegation of American and Canadian investors in the field of nuclear energy left Yemen on Tuesday after signing an initial agreement with the Yemeni government to fund a nuclear power plant at an estimated cost $15 billion.
The firms would carry out feasibility studies for building the plant with a total production capacity of 5,000 MW, Saba news agency has indicated. The agreement with the US and Canadian firms envisages the construction of five nuclear reactors over 10 years to produce nuclear energy.
Yemen is looking to build nuclear plant to generate electricity and to desalinate sea water in order to meet the needs of its growing urban population of electrification and water and boost the country's industrial development. It also hopes to diversify and expand its energy resources due to declining oil production.
Speaking to AFP, Yemen's Energy and Electricity Minister Mustafa Bahran said the contract was inked with the Houston-based Powered Corp. "The overall cost of the project is estimated at 15 billion dollars. It features the construction of five nuclear reactors over 10 years," Bahran said. "Powered Corporation will oversee efforts to secure the financing of the project," he said.
http://www.albawaba.com/en/countries/Yemen/217221
MAYOR BLOOMBERG ANNOUNCES APPOINTMENT OF MARGARITA LOPEZ AS ENVIRONMENTAL COORDINATOR AT NEW YORK CITY HOUSING AUTHORITY
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) Chairman Tino Hernandez today appointed NYCHA Board Member Margarita Lopez to spearhead environmental initiatives at the Authority. In her expanded role, Commissioner Lopez will guide NYCHA in setting aggressive goals to improve sustainability and ensure that those goals are met through new operational and administrative programs.
(Media-Newswire.com) - Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and New York City Housing Authority ( NYCHA ) Chairman Tino Hernandez today appointed NYCHA Board Member Margarita Lopez to spearhead environmental initiatives at the Authority. In her expanded role, Commissioner Lopez will guide NYCHA in setting aggressive goals to improve sustainability and ensure that those goals are met through new operational and administrative programs. The new initiatives will further advance PlaNYC, the City's strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and make New York City the world's first great sustainable city of the 21st century.
"With 2,653 residential buildings across the City, the Housing Authority can play a vital role in achieving our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," said Mayor Bloomberg. "With her dedication and intelligence, I can think of no better person than Margarita to lead NYCHA in this important effort."
Commissioner Lopez will lead a NCYHA team that will develop and implement a series of environmental programs aimed at making NYCHA a leader in green initiatives for public housing agencies across the country. Its strategies to enhance sustainability include the purchase and installation of energy efficient systems, as well as programs to educate and engage residents in adopting energy efficient practices in their homes. NYCHA, with 343 developments located throughout the City, is the nation's second largest landlord behind the U.S. Army with nearly 180,000 apartments providing housing to over 408,000 New Yorkers.
"Margarita Lopez is clearly an excellent choice for the Housing Authority," said Chairman Hernandez. "Her understanding of these complex issues and championing of green initiatives at NYCHA has been evident since she joined the Board. I welcome her leadership in helping not only NYCHA, but the entire City, in achieving our environmental goals."
"I am honored that Mayor Bloomberg has chosen me to head this important initiative," said Commissioner Lopez. "NYCHA's size and location throughout the City make it an important resource in achieving the goals set by the Mayor. NYCHA is going to be an integral part of PlaNYC and the global effort to help ensure a healthy and environmentally-sound future for everyone."
http://media-newswire.com/release_1054863.html
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) Chairman Tino Hernandez today appointed NYCHA Board Member Margarita Lopez to spearhead environmental initiatives at the Authority. In her expanded role, Commissioner Lopez will guide NYCHA in setting aggressive goals to improve sustainability and ensure that those goals are met through new operational and administrative programs.
(Media-Newswire.com) - Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and New York City Housing Authority ( NYCHA ) Chairman Tino Hernandez today appointed NYCHA Board Member Margarita Lopez to spearhead environmental initiatives at the Authority. In her expanded role, Commissioner Lopez will guide NYCHA in setting aggressive goals to improve sustainability and ensure that those goals are met through new operational and administrative programs. The new initiatives will further advance PlaNYC, the City's strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and make New York City the world's first great sustainable city of the 21st century.
"With 2,653 residential buildings across the City, the Housing Authority can play a vital role in achieving our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," said Mayor Bloomberg. "With her dedication and intelligence, I can think of no better person than Margarita to lead NYCHA in this important effort."
Commissioner Lopez will lead a NCYHA team that will develop and implement a series of environmental programs aimed at making NYCHA a leader in green initiatives for public housing agencies across the country. Its strategies to enhance sustainability include the purchase and installation of energy efficient systems, as well as programs to educate and engage residents in adopting energy efficient practices in their homes. NYCHA, with 343 developments located throughout the City, is the nation's second largest landlord behind the U.S. Army with nearly 180,000 apartments providing housing to over 408,000 New Yorkers.
"Margarita Lopez is clearly an excellent choice for the Housing Authority," said Chairman Hernandez. "Her understanding of these complex issues and championing of green initiatives at NYCHA has been evident since she joined the Board. I welcome her leadership in helping not only NYCHA, but the entire City, in achieving our environmental goals."
"I am honored that Mayor Bloomberg has chosen me to head this important initiative," said Commissioner Lopez. "NYCHA's size and location throughout the City make it an important resource in achieving the goals set by the Mayor. NYCHA is going to be an integral part of PlaNYC and the global effort to help ensure a healthy and environmentally-sound future for everyone."
http://media-newswire.com/release_1054863.html
New study shows Mayor's energy policies are 'highly successful'
25-9-2007
Greater London Authority press release
The Mayor of London Ken Livingstone's energy policies will help to save over 135,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions each year according to a new report published today.
The Mayor of London Ken Livingstone’s energy policies will help to save over 135,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions each year according to a new report published today. The independent study by London South Bank University for the Greater London Authority looked at reductions in energy use and carbon savings resulting from the application of London Plan energy policies to developments referred to the Mayor and concluded that “In general, the Mayor’s policies have been highly successful in reducing expected energy consumption and CO2 emissions in new developments representing around a 26% saving of CO2.”
The study shows that more than three quarters of carbon savings come from energy efficiency measures, and that the target for ten percent of further CO2 savings from on-site renewables was met on average by late 2005. The authors note that carbon savings have increased over time, and that both developers and the Greater London Authority planning team have climbed a steep learning curve and are now more aware of how to address energy issues through the planning process.
The report coincides with the publication of the Mayor’s draft Housing Strategy last week, which sets out the Mayor’s plans to deliver 30,500 homes a year and 50,000 affordable homes over the next three years. Accordingly, as the number of homes built increases, the strategy contains specific policies to continue tackling climate change with a firm Mayoral commitment that the £1 billion regional housing budget for London will only be invested in new homes that meet high standards of environmental performance.
The Mayor said:
‘This study shows that the development industry in London has made a dramatic change in its approach to energy and climate change over the last four years. It also shows the value of setting tough policy to drive innovation and the adoption of energy efficient building design, efficient energy supply and renewable energy technologies. As the evidence of accelerating climate change continues to build, I look forward to working with London's construction and development communities to meet my targets for building new low carbon homes.’
Douglas Parr, Policy Director Greenpeace said: ‘London has shown that strong local policies can make developers and builders actually change the way they work to reduce carbon emissions. They need to be made standard across the country whilst progressive authorities and the Greater London Authority can continue to drive standards towards zero-carbon building.’
To download a copy of the report visit http://www.london.gov.uk/gla/publications/planning.jsp
25-9-2007
Greater London Authority press release
The Mayor of London Ken Livingstone's energy policies will help to save over 135,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions each year according to a new report published today.
The Mayor of London Ken Livingstone’s energy policies will help to save over 135,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions each year according to a new report published today. The independent study by London South Bank University for the Greater London Authority looked at reductions in energy use and carbon savings resulting from the application of London Plan energy policies to developments referred to the Mayor and concluded that “In general, the Mayor’s policies have been highly successful in reducing expected energy consumption and CO2 emissions in new developments representing around a 26% saving of CO2.”
The study shows that more than three quarters of carbon savings come from energy efficiency measures, and that the target for ten percent of further CO2 savings from on-site renewables was met on average by late 2005. The authors note that carbon savings have increased over time, and that both developers and the Greater London Authority planning team have climbed a steep learning curve and are now more aware of how to address energy issues through the planning process.
The report coincides with the publication of the Mayor’s draft Housing Strategy last week, which sets out the Mayor’s plans to deliver 30,500 homes a year and 50,000 affordable homes over the next three years. Accordingly, as the number of homes built increases, the strategy contains specific policies to continue tackling climate change with a firm Mayoral commitment that the £1 billion regional housing budget for London will only be invested in new homes that meet high standards of environmental performance.
The Mayor said:
‘This study shows that the development industry in London has made a dramatic change in its approach to energy and climate change over the last four years. It also shows the value of setting tough policy to drive innovation and the adoption of energy efficient building design, efficient energy supply and renewable energy technologies. As the evidence of accelerating climate change continues to build, I look forward to working with London's construction and development communities to meet my targets for building new low carbon homes.’
Douglas Parr, Policy Director Greenpeace said: ‘London has shown that strong local policies can make developers and builders actually change the way they work to reduce carbon emissions. They need to be made standard across the country whilst progressive authorities and the Greater London Authority can continue to drive standards towards zero-carbon building.’
To download a copy of the report visit http://www.london.gov.uk/gla/publications/planning.jsp
New York behind on renewable energy
By VALERIE BAUMAN
Business Week
ALBANY, N.Y.
The complex web of New York's local governments and regulations, along with a lack of resources and strong competition from other states, has limited the state's ability to develop renewable energy technologies, according to findings released Tuesday. The state's Renewable Energy Task Force identified a series of problems New York faces in achieving its goal of generating 25 percent renewable energy by 2013.
Lt. Gov. David Paterson is chairman of the task force. Gov. Eliot Spitzer has called for reducing the state's electricity consumption 15 percent below forecast levels by 2015.
One major obstacle to alternative energy use in New York comes from the complex and numerous local governments that have varying laws and restrictions that apply to installing new energy systems.
"Renewable energy installers and potential owners face a patchwork of widely differing local government requirements and home owner association restrictions, creating hurdles to the efficient and widespread installation of renewable energy systems," the task force said.
New York also faces a competitive disadvantage, because other states provide substantially more funding for incentives to attract clean industries. "New York has lacked the vision to ask ourselves the hard questions of why renewable industries are locating in surrounding states, and how do we utilize and maximize New York's resources, and craft polices that are environmentally balanced and economically sustainable for our state," the task force said in its executive summary. A full report is expected later this year.
"There are a number of other places that do see this (energy efficiency) as an opportunity for their area to stand out and try to put themselves first in line to attract this next generation of green technologies," said Carol Werner, executive director of the District of Columbia-based Environmental and Energy Study Institute. California, and Sacramento in particular, have been leaders in providing incentives, requests for proposals, direct funding and competitive grants to attract green companies, Werner said.
Ann Arbor, Mich.; Portland, Ore.; Austin, Texas; Seattle and Chicago have also led the way in developing major projects to develop more efficient energy technology and attract new businesses, she said.
Paterson identified California, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania as New York's competition for businesses attracted to alternative energy sources. He said New York hasn't prioritized renewable energy in the budget.
"California has a plan to invest billions into renewable energy," Paterson said. "In this respect they're ahead of us and corporate America has followed the less costly plan." The task force said the state needs more funding to achieve its goals.
The $41.3 million funding the Renewable Portfolio Standard program is not sufficient to change New York's energy use, the task force said. The RPS program was created to improve energy security, help diversify the state's electricity options and increase economic development opportunities in the renewables industry.
The task force is to identify and recommend potential markets for investment invest that would increase the state's use of renewable energy and alternative fuels.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8RSPAHO0.htm
By VALERIE BAUMAN
Business Week
ALBANY, N.Y.
The complex web of New York's local governments and regulations, along with a lack of resources and strong competition from other states, has limited the state's ability to develop renewable energy technologies, according to findings released Tuesday. The state's Renewable Energy Task Force identified a series of problems New York faces in achieving its goal of generating 25 percent renewable energy by 2013.
Lt. Gov. David Paterson is chairman of the task force. Gov. Eliot Spitzer has called for reducing the state's electricity consumption 15 percent below forecast levels by 2015.
One major obstacle to alternative energy use in New York comes from the complex and numerous local governments that have varying laws and restrictions that apply to installing new energy systems.
"Renewable energy installers and potential owners face a patchwork of widely differing local government requirements and home owner association restrictions, creating hurdles to the efficient and widespread installation of renewable energy systems," the task force said.
New York also faces a competitive disadvantage, because other states provide substantially more funding for incentives to attract clean industries. "New York has lacked the vision to ask ourselves the hard questions of why renewable industries are locating in surrounding states, and how do we utilize and maximize New York's resources, and craft polices that are environmentally balanced and economically sustainable for our state," the task force said in its executive summary. A full report is expected later this year.
"There are a number of other places that do see this (energy efficiency) as an opportunity for their area to stand out and try to put themselves first in line to attract this next generation of green technologies," said Carol Werner, executive director of the District of Columbia-based Environmental and Energy Study Institute. California, and Sacramento in particular, have been leaders in providing incentives, requests for proposals, direct funding and competitive grants to attract green companies, Werner said.
Ann Arbor, Mich.; Portland, Ore.; Austin, Texas; Seattle and Chicago have also led the way in developing major projects to develop more efficient energy technology and attract new businesses, she said.
Paterson identified California, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania as New York's competition for businesses attracted to alternative energy sources. He said New York hasn't prioritized renewable energy in the budget.
"California has a plan to invest billions into renewable energy," Paterson said. "In this respect they're ahead of us and corporate America has followed the less costly plan." The task force said the state needs more funding to achieve its goals.
The $41.3 million funding the Renewable Portfolio Standard program is not sufficient to change New York's energy use, the task force said. The RPS program was created to improve energy security, help diversify the state's electricity options and increase economic development opportunities in the renewables industry.
The task force is to identify and recommend potential markets for investment invest that would increase the state's use of renewable energy and alternative fuels.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8RSPAHO0.htm
Green power
How California's PG&E is transforming itself into the very model of a modern utility company.
By Katherine Ellison
Business 2.0 Magazine
September 26 2007
(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- A 22-foot-long, neon-green banner hangs from the high-ceilinged lobby of the San Francisco headquarters of Pacific Gas & Electric, California's largest utility. "GREEN IS resisting the urge to drive to yoga," it declares. "GREEN IS saying no thanks to the daily disposable coffee cup." Never mind that right beneath the banner a woman is selling coffee in plastic-foam cups. There's richer irony here. Why in the world, you might well ask, is a giant utility telling people not to use products that consume energy?
The answer: This energy company has risen from bankruptcy to become one of the planet's most prestigious - and profitable - brokers in green power. Wrapped in the mantle of environmentalism and touting the virtues of saving kilowatts, planting trees, and driving electric cars, the 155-year-old, $12.5 billion behemoth these days is acting less like a robber baron than a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. It's exploring, even incubating, cutting-edge technologies - from solar power to wave energy to biogas produced from cow manure. Along the way, it's giving other big energy firms a lesson in how to adapt to a carbon-constrained world, without - at least so far - getting burned.
In short, PG&E is turning itself into a role model for 21st-century utilities. That means making money by transmitting renewable energy wherever it may be generated - from the water flowing under the Golden Gate Bridge to the batteries of hybrid electric cars - all while managing an interactive power grid. Peter Darbee, CEO and chairman of PG&E Corp., the company that owns Pacific Gas & Electric, describes the sophisticated network that will hold it all together as the energy equivalent of the Internet.
While PG&E isn't the only American power firm that's going green, it is way ahead of the pack of investor-owned utilities in some important ways, including its connections in Silicon Valley and its willingness to use its political muscle to support environmental initiatives, such as limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. "It's certainly a viable strategy, out West in particular," notes Morningstar analyst Travis Miller. "The regulators have given PG&E a blank checkbook to go ahead and build everything they need to expand that renewable portfolio, and that's going to give them a lot of growth."
These are nervous times for America's electric power industry. More than two dozen states have followed California's lead and now require utilities to obtain a portion of their electricity from renewable sources. (The Golden State's target is 20 percent by 2010.) In Washington, D.C., meanwhile, there's a new push to curb national greenhouse-gas emissions, about 40 percent of which come from electric utilities. Rather than trying to hold back the tide, PG&E is surfing the green wave, throwing its weight behind Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's environmental initiatives and the state's landmark global-warming law as well as some congressional greenhouse-gas-cutting efforts. It's not exactly a popular position among PG&E's peers in the $387 billion segment of the industry composed of publicly traded companies, especially those in the coal-burning business. But as Darbee sees it, it's better to be at the table than on the menu. (Better still, in Darbee's case, to be splashed across the glossy pages of Vanity Fair, whose May issue hailed him as an "eco-warrior.")
"This is a defining moment for utilities," says Darbee, a golden-haired former high school wrestling champ, from his 24th-floor office with stunning views of San Francisco Bay. "Are we going to be central players in shaping the new energy economy that is now emerging, or are we going to leave these challenges to others?" Change won't be easy for the giant utility, and PG&E is taking a big risk. It's betting heavily on technologies with little or no track record. It must also counter a growing movement among California cities and counties to abandon the investor-owned utilities and buy their own power, a trend that could leave PG&E stranded with costly new investments in technologies nobody wants.
The city furthest along on this path is PG&E's hometown of San Francisco. In June, the city's board of supervisors gave staff the go-ahead to put together a plan that advocates say could provide San Francisco with 50 percent renewable energy by 2017.
On a national level too, the stakes are high. Many observers anticipate that the United States will impose some sort of cap on greenhouse gases within the next few years. Utilities that fail to cut their emissions could end up paying heavy penalties in carbon taxes. PG&E is preparing for greenhouse-gas caps by investing in a more efficient grid and fostering innovation in renewable energy. Says Des McGinnes, business development manager at Ocean Power Delivery, a nine-year-old Scottish wave-energy firm that's in discussions with PG&E about building a wave farm off the Northern California coast, "PG&E is walking the talk."
PG&E's origins stretch back to the Gold Rush, with the company's founding in 1852 as the San Francisco Gas Co. A series of mergers produced the Pacific Gas & Electric Co. in 1905; the company survived the great earthquake one year later to grow into a powerful regulated monopoly. But a century of growth and prosperity came to an abrupt end on April 6, 2001, when PG&E filed for bankruptcy. California's three-year experiment in energy deregulation had produced not lower prices but rolling blackouts and a $7 billion utility bill.
Darbee, then CFO, had joined PG&E during the first year of deregulation after a career in telecommunications and finance, including stints at Goldman Sachs (Charts, Fortune 500) and Salomon Bros. He vowed to turn things around, and he got his chance in January 2005 when he took over as CEO. Darbee was then 51, and certainly no eco-warrior; he wasn't even convinced that climate change was real. But as it turned out, those hard times helped free PG&E and other California utilities to adapt to the climate-change era. Forced to sell off most of its power plants during deregulation, PG&E was now a buyer of energy and could choose what kind of energy it wanted to purchase. This coincided with the greening of the Governator, who in 2006 signed a landmark law to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 25 percent by 2020.
Watching all this transpire, Darbee asked his staff whether PG&E had a strategy to deal with climate change. To his surprise, it didn't. So, early in 2006, Darbee invited a group of experts to conduct a crash course in global warming for the company's top managers. One scientist, Stanford University climatologist Stephen Schneider, gave the executives some blunt advice: "Sooner or later, there's going to be another [Hurricane] Katrina, and you could get an irrationally high carbon tax stuffed down your throat," he said. "So why don't you stop trying to derail the train and try to drive it?"
Darbee took Schneider's pragmatism to heart. PG&E began to lobby for more -not less - regulation of its industry. It was also the only big California utility to actively back the state's global-warming bill. Without that key support, the legislation might not have passed, says former Schwarzenegger adviser Terry Tamminen. In return, he says, PG&E was able to negotiate "a lot of changes" that made the bill more flexible.
Among utilities, PG&E is particularly well suited for thriving in a carbon-constrained world. With just 2 percent of its in-state electricity generated by coal, it was already greener than most of the nation's big utilities. It also benefits from the way California regulates its utilities. Their sales are separated, or "decoupled," from revenue, so they neither earn more by selling more energy nor lose money by promoting efficiency measures that reduce those sales.
Instead, California's utilities make a guaranteed profit on all their investments - $2.8 billion this year for PG&E. The regulators have also approved big budgets for energy efficiency, something that has helped PG&E's top business clients save money, while boosting PG&E's bottom line. The $300 million PG&E set aside for energy efficiency in 2007 includes a lot of "customer education," which often doubles as public relations for the company. "This is not a normal business, like the bubble-gum business, where you can make money by selling more gum. If a regulator will let you, you can make money by selling less of the product," notes David Victor, director of Stanford's Program on Energy and Sustainable Development. "The single most important relationship is with the regulators."
Yet as concern about global warming increases, PG&E's fortunes also will depend on its relationships with the entrepreneurs the utility hopes will supply enough green energy to meet the targets set by the state's energy bureaucrats. And that's giving green startups a chance to score some very big deals.
At 'Summer Davos,' hard talk about soft power
On another unseasonably warm early-spring morning in downtown San Francisco, about three dozen entrepreneurs sit in a darkened PG&E auditorium as a company executive tells them the utility is "open to any and all offers" to provide as much as 800 megawatts of clean power. Among those in the audience is John Pimentel, a business-suited former state bureaucrat who has a plan to make biofuel and energy from nonrecyclable trash. This is PG&E's fourth annual request for proposals as it seeks to meet the state's renewable-energy target of 20 percent by 2010. It's still short; only 12 percent of the utility's delivered energy currently meets that standard - though it has signed contracts for 18 percent. "We have a lot more renewable megawords than renewable megawatts," scoffs renewable-energy lobbyist V. John White, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies. In fact, Southern California Edison, with a much less vividly green public profile, has surged ahead of PG&E, with 17 percent of its mix from renewable energy.
So the heat is on PG&E - and it's getting hotter. State officials recently approved a new target of 33 percent renewables by 2020. And earlier this year, regulators banned utilities from signing long-term contracts with out-of-state coal-fired power plants - the source of 20 percent of California's electricity.
That's why PG&E is turning for help to Silicon Valley, where there's a boom in new clean-energy technology fueled by venture capital. To be sure, it's a brave entrepreneur who will chase this holy grail and risk failure at the hands of a lumbering corporate bureaucracy and the numerous government agencies that regulate the industry. "They're opening the door," Pimentel says, "but there's still a thick forest to walk through." Darbee maintains that only a few current technologies offer the hope of a fast scale-up at a price reasonably competitive with that of fossil fuel. One of these is wind power, which PG&E is pursuing. PG&E is also betting that solar power - or, more specifically, massive-megawatt "Big Solar" power plants operating in the deserts of California and the Southwest - will help it meet its targets.
Cash in on the rebuilding boom
The utility is working on three major solar projects expected to start delivering power between 2009 and 2011. Each is in the 200-to 500-megawatt range, enough to light as many as 700,000 homes at prices competitive with those for natural gas. The first deal was a 500-megawatt agreement with Bright-Source Energy, an Oakland, Calif., startup funded by Silicon Valley VCs and run by veteran solar entrepreneur Arnold Goldman. Goldman says he's convinced that PG&E is committed to his technology. "It's a funny-strange feeling, going in there and finding a group within a utility that's actually trying to see how we can make these things happen," he says.
Then in July, PG&E announced the world's largest solar deal to date: an agreement to buy 553 megawatts of electricity from a plant to be built in the Mojave Desert by Israeli firm Solel. Silicon Valley VC Vinod Khosla, a leading green-tech investor, is working on the third potential PG&E deal with a solar power company called Ausra, which recently relocated to Palo Alto from Australia. He shares Goldman's enthusiasm about the utility. "They're not really acting like a big company," says Khosla, who appreciates the utility's nimble grasp of what he calls the "massive opportunities" to profit by adapting to climate change. "I mentioned I needed to do some due diligence, and within three or four days, they'd sent a team to Australia," he recalls.
PG&E is making progress on other fronts as well. It's leading the herd, for instance, in the emerging industry of "cow power." That's the polite name for extracting methane - a potent greenhouse gas - from cow manure and turning it into biogas that can be piped to power plants. During the past year, PG&E has signed long-term contracts with two biogas startups: Microgy, based in Golden, Colo., and BioEnergy Solutions in Bakersfield, Calif. Each aims to produce enough gas in the next two years to power 50,000 homes. "PG&E has been way out in front on this," says Microgy senior vice president Jeffrey Dasovich, who adds that the utility has devoted considerable time and resources to engineering the system to connect Microgy's machinery to its pipes.
Further out on the horizon are PG&E's plans to produce electricity from ocean currents off the Northern California coast. The utility's WaveConnect project will test wave-energy technologies with the aim of getting two 40-megawatt power plants up and running within a few years. That could provide a big boost to other wave-energy startups. McGinnes at Ocean Power Delivery, which makes a semisubmerged 459-foot cylindrical wave-energy converter called the Pelamis, says PG&E is the first U.S. utility to include wave power as part of its green-energy mix. "We see this technology as ultimately being competitive with other renewables," he says. PG&E is also seeking federal permits to test tidal power under the Golden Gate Bridge.
Perhaps just as important as where PG&E gets its power - where the wind blows, where the waves crash, where the sun shines, where the cows poop - is how it plans to share it. Instead of generating electricity in colossal centralized power plants and pushing electrons into homes and businesses, energy distribution in the future may be more a matter of give and take, of energy managed over a web that draws electricity from wherever it's abundant and sends it wherever it's needed.
We got a peek at that future one morning in May when Kyle Aarons, a 20-something PG&E employee whose title is project manager for clean air transportation, took a plug attached to a mutant Toyota Prius hybrid and stuck it in a wall socket in the utility's underground garage in San Francisco. A meter moved clockwise, showing that the nearly 9-kilowatt lithiumion battery pack installed in the back of the Prius was charging like a cell phone. Then Aarons flipped a switch, and the meter moved in the opposite direction, demonstrating how the car can also send electricity back into the grid.
Call it user-generated power. In June, PG&E and Google (Charts, Fortune 500) took the concept one step further by unveiling a solar-panel-covered carport at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., where employees will be able to plug in a fleet of hybrid vehicles that the search giant is creating for an electric-car-sharing program.
Much work remains to be done, but the plug-in technology is revolutionary on several counts. It could help ramp up wind power, which is now nearly cost-competitive with natural gas but has the drawback of being intermittent. Vehicle-to-grid technology could change all that if plug-in hybrids become common. A driver could charge a car in the evening, tapping renewable energy when the winds blow most strongly but demand is low. When electricity demand peaks during the afternoon, hybrids plugged in at office parking lots could send power back into the grid (while owners rack up microcredits on their utility bills). If automakers embrace vehicle-to-grid, utilities could end up with valuable credits to sell to companies that exceed their greenhouse-gas-emission limits.
Of course, this will work only if the grid knows where your car is, what time you're plugged in, and what rate to charge or to credit you with. The grid, in other words, needs to be intelligent. That's where PG&E's SmartMeter comes in. This electronic device monitors a home's energy consumption in real time, allowing the utility to charge different rates as electricity demand rises and falls during the day. The meters move PG&E's model closer to Darbee's vision of "the smart energy web."
"In the future," says Roland Risser, the utility's efficiency czar, "we might send you a message and say, Do you realize your pool pump is coming on at 3 p.m.? Or that the compressor on your air conditioner is about to go out?" Such a system would create new opportunities for companies that make devices smart enough to communicate with the grid- everything from your Toyota to your toaster.
Even as PG&E goes green, it continues to make investments in less benign technologies, like liquefied gas and gas-fired power plants. Executives characterize that spending as a "bridging strategy." Darbee has also been putting out the word that more nuclear power could be a good thing for a warming world, California's 30-year-old moratorium on new nuclear plants notwithstanding.
Positions like these have alienated San Francisco's liberal board of supervisors, who think they can move faster on fighting climate change than a profit-motivated utility can. Mayor Gavin Newsom has quietly supported efforts to seek independent sources of green energy, and now several other California cities and counties are preparing similar plans. That, however, doesn't seem to have hurt PG&E's bottom line. Its financial prospects, in fact, would make any respectable utility manager green - with envy. PG&E Corp.'s stock price jumped 27.5 percent last year and hit an all-time high closing price of $52.11 in April. Counting dividends, PG&E shareholders earned a 31.6 percent return for 2006.
Darbee is confident that his company is now more prepared than just about any U.S. utility to weather a predicted new storm of climate-change legislation. "There's going to be mandatory carbon regulation within the next two to three years," Darbee says, "and the probability reaches 100 percent in four years. We're going to be ready for it. There's a saying I learned during my days on Wall Street: You don't fight the tape."
http://money.cnn.com/2007/09/25/technology/green_power.biz2/index.htm
How California's PG&E is transforming itself into the very model of a modern utility company.
By Katherine Ellison
Business 2.0 Magazine
September 26 2007
(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- A 22-foot-long, neon-green banner hangs from the high-ceilinged lobby of the San Francisco headquarters of Pacific Gas & Electric, California's largest utility. "GREEN IS resisting the urge to drive to yoga," it declares. "GREEN IS saying no thanks to the daily disposable coffee cup." Never mind that right beneath the banner a woman is selling coffee in plastic-foam cups. There's richer irony here. Why in the world, you might well ask, is a giant utility telling people not to use products that consume energy?
The answer: This energy company has risen from bankruptcy to become one of the planet's most prestigious - and profitable - brokers in green power. Wrapped in the mantle of environmentalism and touting the virtues of saving kilowatts, planting trees, and driving electric cars, the 155-year-old, $12.5 billion behemoth these days is acting less like a robber baron than a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. It's exploring, even incubating, cutting-edge technologies - from solar power to wave energy to biogas produced from cow manure. Along the way, it's giving other big energy firms a lesson in how to adapt to a carbon-constrained world, without - at least so far - getting burned.
In short, PG&E is turning itself into a role model for 21st-century utilities. That means making money by transmitting renewable energy wherever it may be generated - from the water flowing under the Golden Gate Bridge to the batteries of hybrid electric cars - all while managing an interactive power grid. Peter Darbee, CEO and chairman of PG&E Corp., the company that owns Pacific Gas & Electric, describes the sophisticated network that will hold it all together as the energy equivalent of the Internet.
While PG&E isn't the only American power firm that's going green, it is way ahead of the pack of investor-owned utilities in some important ways, including its connections in Silicon Valley and its willingness to use its political muscle to support environmental initiatives, such as limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. "It's certainly a viable strategy, out West in particular," notes Morningstar analyst Travis Miller. "The regulators have given PG&E a blank checkbook to go ahead and build everything they need to expand that renewable portfolio, and that's going to give them a lot of growth."
These are nervous times for America's electric power industry. More than two dozen states have followed California's lead and now require utilities to obtain a portion of their electricity from renewable sources. (The Golden State's target is 20 percent by 2010.) In Washington, D.C., meanwhile, there's a new push to curb national greenhouse-gas emissions, about 40 percent of which come from electric utilities. Rather than trying to hold back the tide, PG&E is surfing the green wave, throwing its weight behind Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's environmental initiatives and the state's landmark global-warming law as well as some congressional greenhouse-gas-cutting efforts. It's not exactly a popular position among PG&E's peers in the $387 billion segment of the industry composed of publicly traded companies, especially those in the coal-burning business. But as Darbee sees it, it's better to be at the table than on the menu. (Better still, in Darbee's case, to be splashed across the glossy pages of Vanity Fair, whose May issue hailed him as an "eco-warrior.")
"This is a defining moment for utilities," says Darbee, a golden-haired former high school wrestling champ, from his 24th-floor office with stunning views of San Francisco Bay. "Are we going to be central players in shaping the new energy economy that is now emerging, or are we going to leave these challenges to others?" Change won't be easy for the giant utility, and PG&E is taking a big risk. It's betting heavily on technologies with little or no track record. It must also counter a growing movement among California cities and counties to abandon the investor-owned utilities and buy their own power, a trend that could leave PG&E stranded with costly new investments in technologies nobody wants.
The city furthest along on this path is PG&E's hometown of San Francisco. In June, the city's board of supervisors gave staff the go-ahead to put together a plan that advocates say could provide San Francisco with 50 percent renewable energy by 2017.
On a national level too, the stakes are high. Many observers anticipate that the United States will impose some sort of cap on greenhouse gases within the next few years. Utilities that fail to cut their emissions could end up paying heavy penalties in carbon taxes. PG&E is preparing for greenhouse-gas caps by investing in a more efficient grid and fostering innovation in renewable energy. Says Des McGinnes, business development manager at Ocean Power Delivery, a nine-year-old Scottish wave-energy firm that's in discussions with PG&E about building a wave farm off the Northern California coast, "PG&E is walking the talk."
PG&E's origins stretch back to the Gold Rush, with the company's founding in 1852 as the San Francisco Gas Co. A series of mergers produced the Pacific Gas & Electric Co. in 1905; the company survived the great earthquake one year later to grow into a powerful regulated monopoly. But a century of growth and prosperity came to an abrupt end on April 6, 2001, when PG&E filed for bankruptcy. California's three-year experiment in energy deregulation had produced not lower prices but rolling blackouts and a $7 billion utility bill.
Darbee, then CFO, had joined PG&E during the first year of deregulation after a career in telecommunications and finance, including stints at Goldman Sachs (Charts, Fortune 500) and Salomon Bros. He vowed to turn things around, and he got his chance in January 2005 when he took over as CEO. Darbee was then 51, and certainly no eco-warrior; he wasn't even convinced that climate change was real. But as it turned out, those hard times helped free PG&E and other California utilities to adapt to the climate-change era. Forced to sell off most of its power plants during deregulation, PG&E was now a buyer of energy and could choose what kind of energy it wanted to purchase. This coincided with the greening of the Governator, who in 2006 signed a landmark law to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 25 percent by 2020.
Watching all this transpire, Darbee asked his staff whether PG&E had a strategy to deal with climate change. To his surprise, it didn't. So, early in 2006, Darbee invited a group of experts to conduct a crash course in global warming for the company's top managers. One scientist, Stanford University climatologist Stephen Schneider, gave the executives some blunt advice: "Sooner or later, there's going to be another [Hurricane] Katrina, and you could get an irrationally high carbon tax stuffed down your throat," he said. "So why don't you stop trying to derail the train and try to drive it?"
Darbee took Schneider's pragmatism to heart. PG&E began to lobby for more -not less - regulation of its industry. It was also the only big California utility to actively back the state's global-warming bill. Without that key support, the legislation might not have passed, says former Schwarzenegger adviser Terry Tamminen. In return, he says, PG&E was able to negotiate "a lot of changes" that made the bill more flexible.
Among utilities, PG&E is particularly well suited for thriving in a carbon-constrained world. With just 2 percent of its in-state electricity generated by coal, it was already greener than most of the nation's big utilities. It also benefits from the way California regulates its utilities. Their sales are separated, or "decoupled," from revenue, so they neither earn more by selling more energy nor lose money by promoting efficiency measures that reduce those sales.
Instead, California's utilities make a guaranteed profit on all their investments - $2.8 billion this year for PG&E. The regulators have also approved big budgets for energy efficiency, something that has helped PG&E's top business clients save money, while boosting PG&E's bottom line. The $300 million PG&E set aside for energy efficiency in 2007 includes a lot of "customer education," which often doubles as public relations for the company. "This is not a normal business, like the bubble-gum business, where you can make money by selling more gum. If a regulator will let you, you can make money by selling less of the product," notes David Victor, director of Stanford's Program on Energy and Sustainable Development. "The single most important relationship is with the regulators."
Yet as concern about global warming increases, PG&E's fortunes also will depend on its relationships with the entrepreneurs the utility hopes will supply enough green energy to meet the targets set by the state's energy bureaucrats. And that's giving green startups a chance to score some very big deals.
At 'Summer Davos,' hard talk about soft power
On another unseasonably warm early-spring morning in downtown San Francisco, about three dozen entrepreneurs sit in a darkened PG&E auditorium as a company executive tells them the utility is "open to any and all offers" to provide as much as 800 megawatts of clean power. Among those in the audience is John Pimentel, a business-suited former state bureaucrat who has a plan to make biofuel and energy from nonrecyclable trash. This is PG&E's fourth annual request for proposals as it seeks to meet the state's renewable-energy target of 20 percent by 2010. It's still short; only 12 percent of the utility's delivered energy currently meets that standard - though it has signed contracts for 18 percent. "We have a lot more renewable megawords than renewable megawatts," scoffs renewable-energy lobbyist V. John White, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies. In fact, Southern California Edison, with a much less vividly green public profile, has surged ahead of PG&E, with 17 percent of its mix from renewable energy.
So the heat is on PG&E - and it's getting hotter. State officials recently approved a new target of 33 percent renewables by 2020. And earlier this year, regulators banned utilities from signing long-term contracts with out-of-state coal-fired power plants - the source of 20 percent of California's electricity.
That's why PG&E is turning for help to Silicon Valley, where there's a boom in new clean-energy technology fueled by venture capital. To be sure, it's a brave entrepreneur who will chase this holy grail and risk failure at the hands of a lumbering corporate bureaucracy and the numerous government agencies that regulate the industry. "They're opening the door," Pimentel says, "but there's still a thick forest to walk through." Darbee maintains that only a few current technologies offer the hope of a fast scale-up at a price reasonably competitive with that of fossil fuel. One of these is wind power, which PG&E is pursuing. PG&E is also betting that solar power - or, more specifically, massive-megawatt "Big Solar" power plants operating in the deserts of California and the Southwest - will help it meet its targets.
Cash in on the rebuilding boom
The utility is working on three major solar projects expected to start delivering power between 2009 and 2011. Each is in the 200-to 500-megawatt range, enough to light as many as 700,000 homes at prices competitive with those for natural gas. The first deal was a 500-megawatt agreement with Bright-Source Energy, an Oakland, Calif., startup funded by Silicon Valley VCs and run by veteran solar entrepreneur Arnold Goldman. Goldman says he's convinced that PG&E is committed to his technology. "It's a funny-strange feeling, going in there and finding a group within a utility that's actually trying to see how we can make these things happen," he says.
Then in July, PG&E announced the world's largest solar deal to date: an agreement to buy 553 megawatts of electricity from a plant to be built in the Mojave Desert by Israeli firm Solel. Silicon Valley VC Vinod Khosla, a leading green-tech investor, is working on the third potential PG&E deal with a solar power company called Ausra, which recently relocated to Palo Alto from Australia. He shares Goldman's enthusiasm about the utility. "They're not really acting like a big company," says Khosla, who appreciates the utility's nimble grasp of what he calls the "massive opportunities" to profit by adapting to climate change. "I mentioned I needed to do some due diligence, and within three or four days, they'd sent a team to Australia," he recalls.
PG&E is making progress on other fronts as well. It's leading the herd, for instance, in the emerging industry of "cow power." That's the polite name for extracting methane - a potent greenhouse gas - from cow manure and turning it into biogas that can be piped to power plants. During the past year, PG&E has signed long-term contracts with two biogas startups: Microgy, based in Golden, Colo., and BioEnergy Solutions in Bakersfield, Calif. Each aims to produce enough gas in the next two years to power 50,000 homes. "PG&E has been way out in front on this," says Microgy senior vice president Jeffrey Dasovich, who adds that the utility has devoted considerable time and resources to engineering the system to connect Microgy's machinery to its pipes.
Further out on the horizon are PG&E's plans to produce electricity from ocean currents off the Northern California coast. The utility's WaveConnect project will test wave-energy technologies with the aim of getting two 40-megawatt power plants up and running within a few years. That could provide a big boost to other wave-energy startups. McGinnes at Ocean Power Delivery, which makes a semisubmerged 459-foot cylindrical wave-energy converter called the Pelamis, says PG&E is the first U.S. utility to include wave power as part of its green-energy mix. "We see this technology as ultimately being competitive with other renewables," he says. PG&E is also seeking federal permits to test tidal power under the Golden Gate Bridge.
Perhaps just as important as where PG&E gets its power - where the wind blows, where the waves crash, where the sun shines, where the cows poop - is how it plans to share it. Instead of generating electricity in colossal centralized power plants and pushing electrons into homes and businesses, energy distribution in the future may be more a matter of give and take, of energy managed over a web that draws electricity from wherever it's abundant and sends it wherever it's needed.
We got a peek at that future one morning in May when Kyle Aarons, a 20-something PG&E employee whose title is project manager for clean air transportation, took a plug attached to a mutant Toyota Prius hybrid and stuck it in a wall socket in the utility's underground garage in San Francisco. A meter moved clockwise, showing that the nearly 9-kilowatt lithiumion battery pack installed in the back of the Prius was charging like a cell phone. Then Aarons flipped a switch, and the meter moved in the opposite direction, demonstrating how the car can also send electricity back into the grid.
Call it user-generated power. In June, PG&E and Google (Charts, Fortune 500) took the concept one step further by unveiling a solar-panel-covered carport at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., where employees will be able to plug in a fleet of hybrid vehicles that the search giant is creating for an electric-car-sharing program.
Much work remains to be done, but the plug-in technology is revolutionary on several counts. It could help ramp up wind power, which is now nearly cost-competitive with natural gas but has the drawback of being intermittent. Vehicle-to-grid technology could change all that if plug-in hybrids become common. A driver could charge a car in the evening, tapping renewable energy when the winds blow most strongly but demand is low. When electricity demand peaks during the afternoon, hybrids plugged in at office parking lots could send power back into the grid (while owners rack up microcredits on their utility bills). If automakers embrace vehicle-to-grid, utilities could end up with valuable credits to sell to companies that exceed their greenhouse-gas-emission limits.
Of course, this will work only if the grid knows where your car is, what time you're plugged in, and what rate to charge or to credit you with. The grid, in other words, needs to be intelligent. That's where PG&E's SmartMeter comes in. This electronic device monitors a home's energy consumption in real time, allowing the utility to charge different rates as electricity demand rises and falls during the day. The meters move PG&E's model closer to Darbee's vision of "the smart energy web."
"In the future," says Roland Risser, the utility's efficiency czar, "we might send you a message and say, Do you realize your pool pump is coming on at 3 p.m.? Or that the compressor on your air conditioner is about to go out?" Such a system would create new opportunities for companies that make devices smart enough to communicate with the grid- everything from your Toyota to your toaster.
Even as PG&E goes green, it continues to make investments in less benign technologies, like liquefied gas and gas-fired power plants. Executives characterize that spending as a "bridging strategy." Darbee has also been putting out the word that more nuclear power could be a good thing for a warming world, California's 30-year-old moratorium on new nuclear plants notwithstanding.
Positions like these have alienated San Francisco's liberal board of supervisors, who think they can move faster on fighting climate change than a profit-motivated utility can. Mayor Gavin Newsom has quietly supported efforts to seek independent sources of green energy, and now several other California cities and counties are preparing similar plans. That, however, doesn't seem to have hurt PG&E's bottom line. Its financial prospects, in fact, would make any respectable utility manager green - with envy. PG&E Corp.'s stock price jumped 27.5 percent last year and hit an all-time high closing price of $52.11 in April. Counting dividends, PG&E shareholders earned a 31.6 percent return for 2006.
Darbee is confident that his company is now more prepared than just about any U.S. utility to weather a predicted new storm of climate-change legislation. "There's going to be mandatory carbon regulation within the next two to three years," Darbee says, "and the probability reaches 100 percent in four years. We're going to be ready for it. There's a saying I learned during my days on Wall Street: You don't fight the tape."
http://money.cnn.com/2007/09/25/technology/green_power.biz2/index.htm
California panel OKs controversial Calpine plant
Wed Sep 26, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 26 (Reuters) - California energy regulators on Wednesday approved construction of a controversial power plant by Calpine Corpin the city of Hayward across the bay from San Francisco. The 600-megawatt natural gas-fired plant drew opposition from local residents and environmentalists and raised concerns about aviation safety because of its location near the Hayward Executive Airport.
The staff of the California Energy Commission in July said it could not recommend the project because hot air rising from the proposed plant's exhaust stacks could be a hazard for aircraft taking off and landing at the airport. The plant was initially certified by the commission in 2002 but was not built for various reasons. The Federal Aviation Administration early in September questioned the safety issue and asked for more time to study the project.
David Butterfield, an FAA official, told the commission on Wednesday that pilots of fixed wing planes and helicopters should avoid flying through the exhaust plume when they are below 1,000 feet. Butterfield said he expects pilots will fly through a plume but did not see that as a significant safety hazard, adding it is an "acceptable risk."
The plant also was opposed by the Sierra Club's San Francisco Bay chapter which said the commission should reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants by pushing for more energy efficiency and building up supplies of renewable energy.
Calpine said clean-energy technologies will make the plant 40 percent more fuel efficient and allow for more than a 90 percent reduction of emissions compared to an average fossil-fueled power plant. Construction of the $600 million plant, called the Russell City Energy Center, is expected to begin in the second quarter of 2008 with commercial operation to begin by the summer of 2010. General Electric'sEnergy Financial Services unit has a 35 percent stake in the project.
It will sell the electricity to Pacific Gas & Electric Co.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articleinvesting.aspx?type=bondsNews&storyID=2007-09-26T200832Z_01_N26297593_RTRIDST_0_CALPINE-PLANT.XML
Wed Sep 26, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 26 (Reuters) - California energy regulators on Wednesday approved construction of a controversial power plant by Calpine Corp
The staff of the California Energy Commission in July said it could not recommend the project because hot air rising from the proposed plant's exhaust stacks could be a hazard for aircraft taking off and landing at the airport. The plant was initially certified by the commission in 2002 but was not built for various reasons. The Federal Aviation Administration early in September questioned the safety issue and asked for more time to study the project.
David Butterfield, an FAA official, told the commission on Wednesday that pilots of fixed wing planes and helicopters should avoid flying through the exhaust plume when they are below 1,000 feet. Butterfield said he expects pilots will fly through a plume but did not see that as a significant safety hazard, adding it is an "acceptable risk."
The plant also was opposed by the Sierra Club's San Francisco Bay chapter which said the commission should reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants by pushing for more energy efficiency and building up supplies of renewable energy.
Calpine said clean-energy technologies will make the plant 40 percent more fuel efficient and allow for more than a 90 percent reduction of emissions compared to an average fossil-fueled power plant. Construction of the $600 million plant, called the Russell City Energy Center, is expected to begin in the second quarter of 2008 with commercial operation to begin by the summer of 2010. General Electric's
It will sell the electricity to Pacific Gas & Electric Co
http://today.reuters.com/news/articleinvesting.aspx?type=bondsNews&storyID=2007-09-26T200832Z_01_N26297593_RTRIDST_0_CALPINE-PLANT.XML
A Mighty Wind
Rooftop wind turbines are an increasingly popular way to generate electricity in cities
By Susan Cosier
The wind turbines that engineer Bil Becker installed on top of a Chicago apartment building last year probably don’t resemble the structures that pop into your head when you think “windmill.” Instead of propellers mounted on soaring poles, these turbines are made primarily with curved, galvanized steel shaped like the double helix of DNA. This special design means that they can generate renewable electricity in the densely-built urban environment, unlike their counterparts found twirling in the boonies.
Becker’s Chicago company, Aerotecture International, is just one of a growing number that is developing rooftop wind turbine technology. Unlike the towering, free-standing commercial variety, these vertical-axis wind turbines extend from buildings, capturing winds blowing from any direction. Some can generate electricity in conditions running the gamut from 8-mile-per-hour breezes to 100-mile-per-hour gusts—a range nearly three times that of conventional, horizontal-axis turbines. New rooftop wind turbines don’t have the same problems as their predecessors: They’re safer for wildlife, quieter, and don’t vibrate violently in howling winds. And, at as little as $3,000, they’re increasingly affordable. Obstacles to widespread implementation remain, but the number of buildings crowned with spinning turbines climbs every year.
“People love the way they seem to dance,” says Becker, a professor emeritus of engineering at the University of Illinois, Chicago who founded Aerotecture International two years ago. The structures aren’t just aesthetically appealing, he adds. “We learned to make them safe, lightweight, and quiet.”
Rooftop systems aren’t entirely new. In 1976, owners of a co-op in New York City installed the first urban rooftop windmill that contributed energy to the northeastern power grid. The turbine generated 200 kilowatt-hours of electricity each month, meeting 110 percent of their common-use energy needs, such as lighting hallways and heating water.
Despite this successful example, rooftop wind turbines were slow to catch on. Over time, however, the materials and designs improved, and people became increasingly aware of the environmental benefits of renewable energy. As a result, there has been as much as a 25 percent growth in small wind energy projects over the last 15 years, according to the American Wind Energy Association. This demand is helping the industry expand.
“We want competition,” Becker says. “There are 3.5 billion urban customers out there and there’s no way we can meet the needs for all of them.”
Other companies vying for urban clients include the British company Quiet Revolution, Cleanfield Energy in Ontario, and PacWind in California. “We can’t make the turbines fast enough,” says Philippa Rogers, spokesperson for Quiet Revolution. PacWind just allied with a company to help manufacture turbines on a large scale. Right now many of them are sprinkled throughout the U.S., but company president Phil Watkins estimates that more than 40,000 turbines will be distributed by this time next year.
Each design comes at a different price depending on its size and energy-generating capacity. PacWind offers a turbine for residential homes for about $3,000 (without installation) that can produce 2,160 kilowatt-hours of electricity. At the other end of the cost spectrum, one of Quiet Revolution’s turbines designed for commercial buildings sells for about $50,000 without installation and generates up to 9,600 kilowatt-hours of electricity a year—about ten percent of the energy needed to power a 6,500-square-foot office building. (The cost of installation varies, but typically increases the total price tag by about 35 percent.)
Still, not everyone is convinced that rooftop wind turbines are the best way to generate renewable energy. “Small windmills on rooftops are an unfortunate distraction from the real work of building a renewable energy society,” says Paul Gipe, who has written numerous books and studied wind energy for 30 years. Instead, Gipe says, we should focus on promoting solar panels and wind farms made up of large turbines and owned by cooperatives and municipal utility companies.
Aside from the fact that rooftop systems can still be expensive to build and install—mainly because there aren’t many companies supplying materials yet—there is also no certification process in place for small wind turbines that would verify their safety and performance. The American Wind Energy Association is currently working to develop standards that will allow “turbines to be compared apples to apples,” says Ron Stimmel, an association spokesperson.
Though the certification process won’t be finalized for at least another year, wind energy advocates say that the industry will continue to grow in the meantime. That, in part, is because the benefits of creating renewable energy in cities outweigh the drawbacks, according to Watkins of PacWind. “We get the power here where we need it instead of spending huge amounts of money building grid systems and infrastructure,” he says.
Becker says he’d like to see city buildings become mini power plants. His company is one of those working on ways to further improve urban wind technology by designing buildings that accelerate wind through a turbine to generate more electricity. Becker predicts that “the most prevalent renewable energy form in the next 50 years will be wind-capturing devices.”
http://www.plentymag.com/features/2007/09/a_mighty_wind.php?page=1
Rooftop wind turbines are an increasingly popular way to generate electricity in cities
By Susan Cosier
The wind turbines that engineer Bil Becker installed on top of a Chicago apartment building last year probably don’t resemble the structures that pop into your head when you think “windmill.” Instead of propellers mounted on soaring poles, these turbines are made primarily with curved, galvanized steel shaped like the double helix of DNA. This special design means that they can generate renewable electricity in the densely-built urban environment, unlike their counterparts found twirling in the boonies.
Becker’s Chicago company, Aerotecture International, is just one of a growing number that is developing rooftop wind turbine technology. Unlike the towering, free-standing commercial variety, these vertical-axis wind turbines extend from buildings, capturing winds blowing from any direction. Some can generate electricity in conditions running the gamut from 8-mile-per-hour breezes to 100-mile-per-hour gusts—a range nearly three times that of conventional, horizontal-axis turbines. New rooftop wind turbines don’t have the same problems as their predecessors: They’re safer for wildlife, quieter, and don’t vibrate violently in howling winds. And, at as little as $3,000, they’re increasingly affordable. Obstacles to widespread implementation remain, but the number of buildings crowned with spinning turbines climbs every year.
“People love the way they seem to dance,” says Becker, a professor emeritus of engineering at the University of Illinois, Chicago who founded Aerotecture International two years ago. The structures aren’t just aesthetically appealing, he adds. “We learned to make them safe, lightweight, and quiet.”
Rooftop systems aren’t entirely new. In 1976, owners of a co-op in New York City installed the first urban rooftop windmill that contributed energy to the northeastern power grid. The turbine generated 200 kilowatt-hours of electricity each month, meeting 110 percent of their common-use energy needs, such as lighting hallways and heating water.
Despite this successful example, rooftop wind turbines were slow to catch on. Over time, however, the materials and designs improved, and people became increasingly aware of the environmental benefits of renewable energy. As a result, there has been as much as a 25 percent growth in small wind energy projects over the last 15 years, according to the American Wind Energy Association. This demand is helping the industry expand.
“We want competition,” Becker says. “There are 3.5 billion urban customers out there and there’s no way we can meet the needs for all of them.”
Other companies vying for urban clients include the British company Quiet Revolution, Cleanfield Energy in Ontario, and PacWind in California. “We can’t make the turbines fast enough,” says Philippa Rogers, spokesperson for Quiet Revolution. PacWind just allied with a company to help manufacture turbines on a large scale. Right now many of them are sprinkled throughout the U.S., but company president Phil Watkins estimates that more than 40,000 turbines will be distributed by this time next year.
Each design comes at a different price depending on its size and energy-generating capacity. PacWind offers a turbine for residential homes for about $3,000 (without installation) that can produce 2,160 kilowatt-hours of electricity. At the other end of the cost spectrum, one of Quiet Revolution’s turbines designed for commercial buildings sells for about $50,000 without installation and generates up to 9,600 kilowatt-hours of electricity a year—about ten percent of the energy needed to power a 6,500-square-foot office building. (The cost of installation varies, but typically increases the total price tag by about 35 percent.)
Still, not everyone is convinced that rooftop wind turbines are the best way to generate renewable energy. “Small windmills on rooftops are an unfortunate distraction from the real work of building a renewable energy society,” says Paul Gipe, who has written numerous books and studied wind energy for 30 years. Instead, Gipe says, we should focus on promoting solar panels and wind farms made up of large turbines and owned by cooperatives and municipal utility companies.
Aside from the fact that rooftop systems can still be expensive to build and install—mainly because there aren’t many companies supplying materials yet—there is also no certification process in place for small wind turbines that would verify their safety and performance. The American Wind Energy Association is currently working to develop standards that will allow “turbines to be compared apples to apples,” says Ron Stimmel, an association spokesperson.
Though the certification process won’t be finalized for at least another year, wind energy advocates say that the industry will continue to grow in the meantime. That, in part, is because the benefits of creating renewable energy in cities outweigh the drawbacks, according to Watkins of PacWind. “We get the power here where we need it instead of spending huge amounts of money building grid systems and infrastructure,” he says.
Becker says he’d like to see city buildings become mini power plants. His company is one of those working on ways to further improve urban wind technology by designing buildings that accelerate wind through a turbine to generate more electricity. Becker predicts that “the most prevalent renewable energy form in the next 50 years will be wind-capturing devices.”
http://www.plentymag.com/features/2007/09/a_mighty_wind.php?page=1
Green Paper 'Towards a new culture for urban mobility”
Mario Sina
26/9/2007
The European Commission adopted a Green Paper with the title 'Towards a new culture for urban mobility”, which is going to open a debate on the key issues of urban mobility: free-flowing and greener towns and cities, smarter urban mobility and an urban transport which is accessible, safe and secure for all European citizens.
The Green Paper presents a set of policy issues for urban mobility and includes twenty-five open questions addressing these options. The questions address, for example, how the quality of collective transport can be improved, how the use of clean and energy efficient technologies can be increased, how walking and cycling can be promoted and how the rights of collective transport passengers can be protected. Other questions look at the idea of a 'labelling'' scheme for pioneering cities, the development of guidance for Green Zones with restrictive measures, and the promotion of the use of urban road user charging. Furthermore, it sets a European agenda for urban mobility, while respecting the responsibilities of local, regional and national authorities in this field.
On the other hand, the Commission wants to launch a discussion on how it can best enable the development of a new culture for urban mobility in Europe. Therefore, this Green Paper marks the start of a new consultation phase and will be discussed by the European institutions. Citizens and stakeholders are invited to share their views with the Commission until 15 March 2008, while an Action Plan on urban mobility will follow in the early autumn of 2008.
For more information on the Green Paper and the consultation: http://ec.europa.eu/transport/clean/green_paper_urban_transport/index_en.htm
http://www.businessupdated.com/shownews.asp?news_id=2623&cat=Green+Paper+'Towards+a+new+culture+for+urban+mobility%E2%80%9D
Mario Sina
26/9/2007
The European Commission adopted a Green Paper with the title 'Towards a new culture for urban mobility”, which is going to open a debate on the key issues of urban mobility: free-flowing and greener towns and cities, smarter urban mobility and an urban transport which is accessible, safe and secure for all European citizens.
The Green Paper presents a set of policy issues for urban mobility and includes twenty-five open questions addressing these options. The questions address, for example, how the quality of collective transport can be improved, how the use of clean and energy efficient technologies can be increased, how walking and cycling can be promoted and how the rights of collective transport passengers can be protected. Other questions look at the idea of a 'labelling'' scheme for pioneering cities, the development of guidance for Green Zones with restrictive measures, and the promotion of the use of urban road user charging. Furthermore, it sets a European agenda for urban mobility, while respecting the responsibilities of local, regional and national authorities in this field.
On the other hand, the Commission wants to launch a discussion on how it can best enable the development of a new culture for urban mobility in Europe. Therefore, this Green Paper marks the start of a new consultation phase and will be discussed by the European institutions. Citizens and stakeholders are invited to share their views with the Commission until 15 March 2008, while an Action Plan on urban mobility will follow in the early autumn of 2008.
For more information on the Green Paper and the consultation: http://ec.europa.eu/transport/clean/green_paper_urban_transport/index_en.htm
http://www.businessupdated.com/shownews.asp?news_id=2623&cat=Green+Paper+'Towards+a+new+culture+for+urban+mobility%E2%80%9D
Congestion Pricing’s Effects On Upper Manhattan Debated
By Daniel Amzallag
Columbia Spectator
SEPTEMBER 26, 2007
Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s hotly debated congestion pricing plan is aimed primarily at reducing traffic in the area of Manhattan below 86th Street. Yet while the focal point of the plan is downtown, its effects would ripple across the city, and local politicians and environmental activists differ dramatically on its ramifications for northern Manhattan.
Hoping to alleviate traffic as well as to reduce pollution and improve mass transit, Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled his congestion pricing proposal on Earth Day 2007. Under the proposal, drivers would be charged to enter Manhattan below 86th Street. Such a plan would require the approval of the New York State Legislature. After a round of summer sparring between Bloomberg and legislative leaders, the Legislature has created a commission to develop a new plan to alleviate Manhattan traffic congestion, considering in part Bloomberg’s proposal.
Many elected officials from Morningside Heights and West Harlem have denounced the plan, saying that it will divert traffic into their neighborhoods. “The mayor tried to jam this down our throats without details,” said New York State Senator Bill Perkins, D-West Harlem and Morningside Heights. “It wasn’t simply the aggressive, self-righteous process that the mayor employed; it was the substance as well.” Bloomberg’s press office did not return calls for comment.
Bloomberg’s original congestion pricing plan called for a three-year pilot program in which passenger vehicles would pay $8 each day to enter or leave Manhattan below 86th Street, with the exception of the FDR Drive, the West Side Highway, and West Street, according to the PlaNYC Report on Transportation. Vehicles that travelled through tolled bridges and tunnels would not pay this fee, as round-trip tolls are already $8.
Justin Meyers, district director to City Council member Inez Dickens, D-Morningside Heights and Harlem, stated that Dickens is “opposed to it because essentially if cars are not allowed to enter below 86th Street, a lot will enter the upper part of Manhattan, and parking is already a huge problem in Harlem.”
“The so-called solution could turn out to be contributing to the problem, because as it was designed, there was no way to avoid the area above 86th Street from becoming a parking lot and having even more congestion,” Perkins said. But Wiley Norvell, communications director for Transportation Alternatives, a citizen-based New York City group aimed at “sensible transportation,” believes congestion pricing would have “huge benefits for northern Manhattan” because “upper Manhattan neighborhoods act as funnels coming into the central business district, so if you reduce overall traffic volumes, you’ll see traffic reduction in those areas as well.” Norvell cited a 2006 study conducted by the Partnership for New York City that he said shows that neighborhoods just adjacent to the pricing zone would see a 14 percent reduction in traffic coming through Harlem.
To address concerns about drivers parking their cars in northern Manhattan, Bloomberg proposed the idea of residential parking permits, wherein only residents of northern Manhattan would be allowed to park in those areas after purchasing a city permit. Jeanine Johnson, General Counsel to State Assemblyman Keith Wright, D-West Harlem, said the Assemblyman does not support this idea, saying it would create “private streets” and that “there should be access for everyone.”
Norvell said that congestion pricing would not exacerbate the parking problem in Northern Manhattan. He gave the example of a commuter driving into central Manhattan from Westchester, NY, who, he said, would not “drive half an hour into Manhattan, spend another half an hour looking for a parking space in Harlem, and then take mass transit to work. People don’t make their transit sources that way—they take the same kind of transit the entire way.” The impact on air quality that congestion pricing could have in northern Manhattan is also a major concern, especially given record high asthma rates in Harlem. “We believe air emissions will decrease because there will be less idling, and the traffic flow will be a more consistent one,” said Peggy Shepard, executive director of the West Harlem Environmental Action group. “We are at such a critical crisis in terms of public health and air quality that we need to try this.”
But Meyers, speaking for Councilwoman Dickens, expressed fears that the plan would have the opposite effect, saying that “increased traffic uptown could lead to higher asthma rates.” New York State Assemblyman Danny O’Donnell of the 69th Assembly District, which includes parts of Morningside Heights, agreed, saying congestion pricing “will reduce them [asthma rates] inside [the congestion zone] but increase them in the places outside.” Shepard countered these claims, saying, “One thing that you have to remember when you look at air pollution is that it is dynamic and moving. If you understand the nature of air and air quality, you will realize that decreasing pollution in midtown will clean up the air in [northern] Manhattan certainly, and in other locales.”
Under Bloomberg’s plan, “the money collected through congestion pricing would raise about $400 million every year” and would be used for mass transit expansion and improvements, according to a fact sheet on congestion pricing released by the mayor’s office. “We have a real crisis in mass transit, and we need to improve it to unload this burden. Hopefully, this [congestion pricing] will generate the resources towards that end,” Perkins said.
Many have expressed concerns that congestion pricing would overload already crowded transit systems, especially in Harlem, and agree on the need for expansion. “The idea that you can discourage one form of transportation without having an impact on the others is simply wrong,” O’Donnell said. “All of the solutions mean creating alternatives, which means you have to increase capacity.”
“A lot of additional capacity would be added, such as more trains more frequently, which is currently not near capacity,” Norvell said. He argued that while congestion pricing would discourage approximately 100,000 people from driving into Manhattan, this number makes up only two percent of transit ridership.
“The huge benefactors of congestion pricing are bus riders,” Norvell added. “We can add more buses, but they’ll be stuck in traffic otherwise. We need a strong traffic reduction strategy to make buses more reliable and fast.” Bus service, he said, can inexpensively make up for the increase in transit ridership brought about by congestion pricing.
“The communities that are suffering are suffering because of traffic,” Perkins said. “So when you talk about congestion pricing, you need to talk about it beginning with what’s healthy for the community. And what’s healthy for the community will translate into what’s healthy for the economy. A healthy economy begins with a healthy community.”
http://www.columbiaspectator.com/?q=node/26970
By Daniel Amzallag
Columbia Spectator
SEPTEMBER 26, 2007
Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s hotly debated congestion pricing plan is aimed primarily at reducing traffic in the area of Manhattan below 86th Street. Yet while the focal point of the plan is downtown, its effects would ripple across the city, and local politicians and environmental activists differ dramatically on its ramifications for northern Manhattan.
Hoping to alleviate traffic as well as to reduce pollution and improve mass transit, Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled his congestion pricing proposal on Earth Day 2007. Under the proposal, drivers would be charged to enter Manhattan below 86th Street. Such a plan would require the approval of the New York State Legislature. After a round of summer sparring between Bloomberg and legislative leaders, the Legislature has created a commission to develop a new plan to alleviate Manhattan traffic congestion, considering in part Bloomberg’s proposal.
Many elected officials from Morningside Heights and West Harlem have denounced the plan, saying that it will divert traffic into their neighborhoods. “The mayor tried to jam this down our throats without details,” said New York State Senator Bill Perkins, D-West Harlem and Morningside Heights. “It wasn’t simply the aggressive, self-righteous process that the mayor employed; it was the substance as well.” Bloomberg’s press office did not return calls for comment.
Bloomberg’s original congestion pricing plan called for a three-year pilot program in which passenger vehicles would pay $8 each day to enter or leave Manhattan below 86th Street, with the exception of the FDR Drive, the West Side Highway, and West Street, according to the PlaNYC Report on Transportation. Vehicles that travelled through tolled bridges and tunnels would not pay this fee, as round-trip tolls are already $8.
Justin Meyers, district director to City Council member Inez Dickens, D-Morningside Heights and Harlem, stated that Dickens is “opposed to it because essentially if cars are not allowed to enter below 86th Street, a lot will enter the upper part of Manhattan, and parking is already a huge problem in Harlem.”
“The so-called solution could turn out to be contributing to the problem, because as it was designed, there was no way to avoid the area above 86th Street from becoming a parking lot and having even more congestion,” Perkins said. But Wiley Norvell, communications director for Transportation Alternatives, a citizen-based New York City group aimed at “sensible transportation,” believes congestion pricing would have “huge benefits for northern Manhattan” because “upper Manhattan neighborhoods act as funnels coming into the central business district, so if you reduce overall traffic volumes, you’ll see traffic reduction in those areas as well.” Norvell cited a 2006 study conducted by the Partnership for New York City that he said shows that neighborhoods just adjacent to the pricing zone would see a 14 percent reduction in traffic coming through Harlem.
To address concerns about drivers parking their cars in northern Manhattan, Bloomberg proposed the idea of residential parking permits, wherein only residents of northern Manhattan would be allowed to park in those areas after purchasing a city permit. Jeanine Johnson, General Counsel to State Assemblyman Keith Wright, D-West Harlem, said the Assemblyman does not support this idea, saying it would create “private streets” and that “there should be access for everyone.”
Norvell said that congestion pricing would not exacerbate the parking problem in Northern Manhattan. He gave the example of a commuter driving into central Manhattan from Westchester, NY, who, he said, would not “drive half an hour into Manhattan, spend another half an hour looking for a parking space in Harlem, and then take mass transit to work. People don’t make their transit sources that way—they take the same kind of transit the entire way.” The impact on air quality that congestion pricing could have in northern Manhattan is also a major concern, especially given record high asthma rates in Harlem. “We believe air emissions will decrease because there will be less idling, and the traffic flow will be a more consistent one,” said Peggy Shepard, executive director of the West Harlem Environmental Action group. “We are at such a critical crisis in terms of public health and air quality that we need to try this.”
But Meyers, speaking for Councilwoman Dickens, expressed fears that the plan would have the opposite effect, saying that “increased traffic uptown could lead to higher asthma rates.” New York State Assemblyman Danny O’Donnell of the 69th Assembly District, which includes parts of Morningside Heights, agreed, saying congestion pricing “will reduce them [asthma rates] inside [the congestion zone] but increase them in the places outside.” Shepard countered these claims, saying, “One thing that you have to remember when you look at air pollution is that it is dynamic and moving. If you understand the nature of air and air quality, you will realize that decreasing pollution in midtown will clean up the air in [northern] Manhattan certainly, and in other locales.”
Under Bloomberg’s plan, “the money collected through congestion pricing would raise about $400 million every year” and would be used for mass transit expansion and improvements, according to a fact sheet on congestion pricing released by the mayor’s office. “We have a real crisis in mass transit, and we need to improve it to unload this burden. Hopefully, this [congestion pricing] will generate the resources towards that end,” Perkins said.
Many have expressed concerns that congestion pricing would overload already crowded transit systems, especially in Harlem, and agree on the need for expansion. “The idea that you can discourage one form of transportation without having an impact on the others is simply wrong,” O’Donnell said. “All of the solutions mean creating alternatives, which means you have to increase capacity.”
“A lot of additional capacity would be added, such as more trains more frequently, which is currently not near capacity,” Norvell said. He argued that while congestion pricing would discourage approximately 100,000 people from driving into Manhattan, this number makes up only two percent of transit ridership.
“The huge benefactors of congestion pricing are bus riders,” Norvell added. “We can add more buses, but they’ll be stuck in traffic otherwise. We need a strong traffic reduction strategy to make buses more reliable and fast.” Bus service, he said, can inexpensively make up for the increase in transit ridership brought about by congestion pricing.
“The communities that are suffering are suffering because of traffic,” Perkins said. “So when you talk about congestion pricing, you need to talk about it beginning with what’s healthy for the community. And what’s healthy for the community will translate into what’s healthy for the economy. A healthy economy begins with a healthy community.”
http://www.columbiaspectator.com/?q=node/26970
Green City: Reaching critical mass
Fifteen years of free-wheelin'
By Ryn Stepanski
news@sfbg.com
GREEN CITY
Fifteen years ago this month, San Franciscans mobilized for the first Critical Mass, an unpermitted monthly bicycle parade and social protest that has subsequently been exported to cities around the world. The movement formed in the streets as the Commute Club, just a handful of bicyclists seizing their stretch of pavement together. Among them rode former bike messenger Jim Swanson, whom many credit with coining the name Critical Mass, a reference to the traffic-controlling power achieved when enough bicycles join a ride.
Two months into the project, Swanson watched Ted White's short film The Return of the Scorcher. The surreal footage of bicyclists in China fording intersections inspired Swanson: "When there was enough of them, they crossed and took over the road." Thus, in September 1992, the autonomous and leaderless collective known as Critical Mass was born, picking up momentum — while enduring an often rocky relationship with the city and its motorists — ever since.
On Sept. 28, around 6 p.m., thousands of bicyclists are expected to convene around Justin Hermann Plaza for the 15th anniversary ride, just as they do on the last Friday of every month. Each rider brings a unique cause and perspective to the ride. Swanson wheels out his 1965 blue Schwinn Tandem each month and makes it a regular date with his sweetheart and friends. Longtime rider Joel Pomerantz focuses on the political undertones of the event. "For me, the ride is about community. It's an opportunity for people to take over public space that is usually destructive to the community," he told the Guardian.
During Critical Mass, riders change the use of street space and establish bicycles as the dominant form of transportation, taking control of every intersection they encounter, at least for the 10 or 15 minutes it takes the mass to pass. Bicyclists in San Francisco have also attained critical mass in other ways, with more and more residents realizing the environmental, health, safety, and monetary benefits of trading the gas pedal for a pair of pedals. The 35-year-old San Francisco Bicycle Coalition now boasts a peak membership of 7,500, and the city has the highest per capita membership in the Thunderhead Alliance, a national conglomeration of cycling and walking advocates.
According to the Urban Transportation Caucus's 2007 report card, automobiles and trucks account for 50 percent of San Francisco's carbon emissions, a major cause of climate change and respiratory ailments. "Simply reducing the number of driving vehicles will be the biggest thing in reducing carbon emissions and improving people's health. Bicycling comes up as the most cost-effective way to reduce private vehicle trips," SFBC director Leah Shahum said. Some groups want to take big steps toward furthering that trend. For example, San Francisco Tomorrow is pushing a plan to ban private automobiles on Market Street. But for now the city is prevented by a court injunction from undertaking bike-friendly projects after a judge found procedural flaws in how the current Bicycle Plan was approved (see "Stationary Biking," 5/16/07).
Carla Laser, founder of the San Francisco Bicycle Ballet, said getting the plan back on track is also essential to minimizing bike-car conflicts: "The striping of bike lanes is an example of how the Bike Plan educates the public on how to share the streets. Drivers can clearly see that the city actually supports bikes on streets and is willing to give them a nod of space with the stripes. Every street is a bike street." That's especially true for Critical Mass, a situation that can cause tensions between motorists and cyclists and fuel a backlash toward bike riders seen as overreaching into the realm of automobiles. Yet Critical Mass remains more popular than ever, and it only seemed to grow larger a few months ago, when the San Francisco Chronicle publicized some motorist-cyclist clashes (see "Did Critical Mass Really Go Crazy?," SFBG Politics blog, www.sfbg.com, 4/4/07).
Yet as the event becomes a popular rolling party, some longtime massers have started openly wondering what's next for those looking to send a serious message about minimizing dependence on cars. As transportation activist and former SFBC executive director Dave Snyder told us, "I'm looking forward to the next public phenomenon in San Francisco that inspires a humane use of public space, as Critical Mass was to so many people."
http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_id=4592&catid=&volume_id=254&issue_id=316&volume_num=41&issue_num=52
Fifteen years of free-wheelin'
By Ryn Stepanski
news@sfbg.com
GREEN CITY
Fifteen years ago this month, San Franciscans mobilized for the first Critical Mass, an unpermitted monthly bicycle parade and social protest that has subsequently been exported to cities around the world. The movement formed in the streets as the Commute Club, just a handful of bicyclists seizing their stretch of pavement together. Among them rode former bike messenger Jim Swanson, whom many credit with coining the name Critical Mass, a reference to the traffic-controlling power achieved when enough bicycles join a ride.
Two months into the project, Swanson watched Ted White's short film The Return of the Scorcher. The surreal footage of bicyclists in China fording intersections inspired Swanson: "When there was enough of them, they crossed and took over the road." Thus, in September 1992, the autonomous and leaderless collective known as Critical Mass was born, picking up momentum — while enduring an often rocky relationship with the city and its motorists — ever since.
On Sept. 28, around 6 p.m., thousands of bicyclists are expected to convene around Justin Hermann Plaza for the 15th anniversary ride, just as they do on the last Friday of every month. Each rider brings a unique cause and perspective to the ride. Swanson wheels out his 1965 blue Schwinn Tandem each month and makes it a regular date with his sweetheart and friends. Longtime rider Joel Pomerantz focuses on the political undertones of the event. "For me, the ride is about community. It's an opportunity for people to take over public space that is usually destructive to the community," he told the Guardian.
During Critical Mass, riders change the use of street space and establish bicycles as the dominant form of transportation, taking control of every intersection they encounter, at least for the 10 or 15 minutes it takes the mass to pass. Bicyclists in San Francisco have also attained critical mass in other ways, with more and more residents realizing the environmental, health, safety, and monetary benefits of trading the gas pedal for a pair of pedals. The 35-year-old San Francisco Bicycle Coalition now boasts a peak membership of 7,500, and the city has the highest per capita membership in the Thunderhead Alliance, a national conglomeration of cycling and walking advocates.
According to the Urban Transportation Caucus's 2007 report card, automobiles and trucks account for 50 percent of San Francisco's carbon emissions, a major cause of climate change and respiratory ailments. "Simply reducing the number of driving vehicles will be the biggest thing in reducing carbon emissions and improving people's health. Bicycling comes up as the most cost-effective way to reduce private vehicle trips," SFBC director Leah Shahum said. Some groups want to take big steps toward furthering that trend. For example, San Francisco Tomorrow is pushing a plan to ban private automobiles on Market Street. But for now the city is prevented by a court injunction from undertaking bike-friendly projects after a judge found procedural flaws in how the current Bicycle Plan was approved (see "Stationary Biking," 5/16/07).
Carla Laser, founder of the San Francisco Bicycle Ballet, said getting the plan back on track is also essential to minimizing bike-car conflicts: "The striping of bike lanes is an example of how the Bike Plan educates the public on how to share the streets. Drivers can clearly see that the city actually supports bikes on streets and is willing to give them a nod of space with the stripes. Every street is a bike street." That's especially true for Critical Mass, a situation that can cause tensions between motorists and cyclists and fuel a backlash toward bike riders seen as overreaching into the realm of automobiles. Yet Critical Mass remains more popular than ever, and it only seemed to grow larger a few months ago, when the San Francisco Chronicle publicized some motorist-cyclist clashes (see "Did Critical Mass Really Go Crazy?," SFBG Politics blog, www.sfbg.com, 4/4/07).
Yet as the event becomes a popular rolling party, some longtime massers have started openly wondering what's next for those looking to send a serious message about minimizing dependence on cars. As transportation activist and former SFBC executive director Dave Snyder told us, "I'm looking forward to the next public phenomenon in San Francisco that inspires a humane use of public space, as Critical Mass was to so many people."
http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_id=4592&catid=&volume_id=254&issue_id=316&volume_num=41&issue_num=52
SMUD Purchases Wood Biomass Energy
Sacramento, California [RenewableEnergyAccess.com]
The Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) Board of Directors approved the extension of an 18-month contract with Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI) for the purchase of renewable energy from a new wood biomass plant in Burlington, WA. The agreement will allow SMUD to buy 15 to 23 megawatts (MW) of round-the-clock baseload power at a competitive cost relative to other renewable energy projects through July 31, 2017.
The SMUD Board also approved a 10-year extension of a related transmission and exchange agreement with Seattle City Light. This agreement brings SMUD closer to its goal of getting 20 percent of its power supply from renewable energy sources by 2011. In 2006, SMUD's power mix was made up of over 13 percent qualifying renewable sources.
In addition to renewable power purchases SMUD owns approximately 39 MW of wind generation (with an additional 63 MW on-line by year's end) and 10.4 MW of solar power.
http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=50073
Sacramento, California [RenewableEnergyAccess.com]
The Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) Board of Directors approved the extension of an 18-month contract with Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI) for the purchase of renewable energy from a new wood biomass plant in Burlington, WA. The agreement will allow SMUD to buy 15 to 23 megawatts (MW) of round-the-clock baseload power at a competitive cost relative to other renewable energy projects through July 31, 2017.
The SMUD Board also approved a 10-year extension of a related transmission and exchange agreement with Seattle City Light. This agreement brings SMUD closer to its goal of getting 20 percent of its power supply from renewable energy sources by 2011. In 2006, SMUD's power mix was made up of over 13 percent qualifying renewable sources.
In addition to renewable power purchases SMUD owns approximately 39 MW of wind generation (with an additional 63 MW on-line by year's end) and 10.4 MW of solar power.
http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=50073
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