California Launches Biggest Commercial Clean Energy Financing Effort in US

SustainableBusiness.com

The long-term fate of residential Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs is still uncertain, but commercial programs are still emerging and California leads the way.

In late September, a group of 14 counties and 126 cities announced the nation's largest initiative to leverage the financing model for commercial properties.

This is the first multi-jurisdictional initiative of its kind.

Participating counties under the CaliforniaFIRST include Sacramento, Yola, Solano, San Francisco, San Mateo, Alameda, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, San Benito, Monterey, Fresno, San Luis Obispo, Kern, Ventura and San Diego.

The CaliforniaFIRST program being run by the California Statewide Communities Development Authority (CSCDA) lets commercial property owners use municipal bonds to pay for energy efficiency, water efficiency and renewable energy upgrades – which the owners repay over time through a special assessment on their annual property tax bill.

The PACE structure, authorized in 27 states, allows the high initial cost of investments to be spread out to match the payback period, so the annual cost savings exceed the tax assessments that come with property improvements like these. California's new CaliforniaFIRST program will look to private investment for the upfront funding, so as not to burden local budgets, says CSCDA.

If all US businesses conducted the sorts of upgrades made possible through PACE, it would reduce their collective energy usage by 25% - saving $100 billion, says CSCDA.

"Commercial PACE gives businesses a great option for pursuing energy efficiency projects that may have previously been out of reach," says San Diego County Supervisor Dianne Jacob.  "The County's partnership with CaliforniaFIRST provides a mechanism for participants to start spending less money on energy bills and more back into the business."

The PACE financing model was pioneered in Berkeley, California, for residential properties. But it ran into headwinds in July 2010, when the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) issued a statement calling the loans risky and inadvisable.

The issue for the federal government was that PACE loans might be paid back before banks or Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac if a property went into foreclosure.

While residential programs have languished, commercial PACE programs exist in San Francisco and Los Angeles – as well as in the Washington DC.

"CaliforniaFIRST's approach has potential to promote energy efficiency retrofits of commercial properties and maintain lien security for mortgage lenders," says Wayne Seaton, managing director Wells Fargo's Sustainable Public Infrastructure group.

Besides receiving support from traditional banks like Wells Fargo, other financial institutions behind the program include Clean Fund, which has financed PACE retrofits in California and Minnesota.

"PACE financing has the potential not only to save energy and money, but to create nearly 25,000 jobs in California," says Clean Fund CEO John Kinney. 

The CaliforniaFIRST program is administered by Renewable Funding in Oakland, which was behind the first PACE program in Berkeley in 2008. The company is an advisor to the US Department of Energy on commercial PACE financing and it runs programs both in the US and in countries including Australia.

CSCDA was created in 1988 to provide California's local governments with a way of funding community-based public benefit projects.

The fate of the PACE program for residential properties remains uncertain, although in August, a federal district court judge in California ruled the FHFA violated federal law when it abruptly decided not to underwrite mortgages on homes that used PACE loans. That's because the FHFA did so without allowing any sort of public comment period.

A 2011 survey showed strong interest in residential PACE programs, so future rulings on the matter will be scrutinized closely.

For more about CaliforniaFIRST:

Website: https://californiafirst.org/overview

http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/news.display/id/24131

How Real Estate Financing Models Can Boost Solar

By Andrew Burger | October 2nd, 2012 

Triple Pundit

Financial innovation—particularly at the retail level—is critical to fostering ongoing growth and development of solar and renewable energy projects. To see the triple bottom line potential to be realized, one need only look at the popularity and rapid growth of residential and community solar energy providers using third-party ownership business models by making home solar photovoltaic (PV) energy systems affordable for a much wider range of Americans.

Adapting a well-known and tremendously successful investment vehicle—the Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT)—to finance solar power projects, San Francisco’s Renewable Energy Trust (RET) sees an opportunity to significantly broaden solar energy investment opportunities for individual, as well as professional, investors while at the same time substantially reducing the cost of capital for project developers.

Significantly for solar power project developers, San Francisco-based RET says applying the REIT structure to the solar power industry can lower the cost of capital for solar power development by as much as 20 percent.

Democratizing solar PV project investment

A similar tax-advantaged renewable energy investment vehicle initiative is under way in Washington, D.C. Senators Christopher Coons (D-Delaware) and Jerry Moran (R-Kansas) on June 7 introduced legislation that would extend master limited partnerships (MLPs)—special purpose investment vehicles that oil and gas companies have used to great effect—to renewable energy projects.

Applying the REIT structure to finance solar power projects, “would be the ultimate democratization of funding and support for the solar industry,” stated RET president, Karen Morgan, in a press release. “Individuals can actively invest, knowing their dollars will put up more panels—while buying them a piece of the action in the fast expanding clean energy sector.”

Asset financing for U.S. PV projects—has grown explosively, by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 58 percent since 2004, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which projects that some $6.9 billion in additional capital per year will be invested in developing solar PV projects through 2020. McKinsey & Co. forecasts that another 80-gigawatts (GW) to 130-GW of new solar PV generating capacity will be commissioned in North America by 2020, RET noted.

Opening up tax-advantaged solar projects to individual investors

Required to distribute 90 percent or more of their taxable income, REITs offer investors substantial tax advantages as well as relatively high yields and steday income streams. As they can be listed and traded on the major stock exchanges, they are also liquid.

“RET is extending a mature and fully-developed financing mechanism to a new asset class, in the same way REITs have done over and over. Innovation is a normal part of the REIT industry,” RET’s chief financial officer (CFO) Christian Fong elaborated.

“REITs became the dominant investment vehicle for commercial real estate, and then evolved to include real estate-dependent sectors from cell phone towers to data centers to energy transmission. And through RET, we believe they can soon be a key investment vehicle for accelerating the growth of solar power.”

Supporting RET’s initiative is California Clean Energy Fund (CalCEF), “an independent, non-profit corporation working to advance clean energy using tools from finance, public policy and technological innovation.” CalCEF itself employs an innovative “evergreen” fund-of-funds investment strategy in which profits are reinvested to further realize its objectives, working with partners at the local, state, national and international levels.

http://www.triplepundit.com/2012/10/sf-looks-solar-reits-boost-pv-project-investment-lower-cost-capital/

Debunking LA’s Urban Legend: “Green” McMansions

10.01.2012

DICK PLATKIN

City Watch

WHERE WE LIVE - New York might have alligators roaming its sewer system, but LA can now boast of its own urban legend: “green” McMansions.  Yes, that’s right; in Los Angeles, McMansions, those boxy, oversized, energy-demanding suburban houses plopped into the middle of older neighborhoods are officially considered to be sustainable development.

How could this be?  After all, McMansions require huge amounts of energy to assemble their building materials and move them to job site.  Furthermore, the houses themselves are massive, which means enormous heating and air conditioning bills, even if their windows are double-paned, their walls padded with extra insulation, and their restaurant-sized refrigerators and stoves Energy Star rated.

Then we need to consider their multiple bathrooms and heated outdoor pools and spas, the most energy intensive features of modern houses.

Other McMansion features also have their detrimental environmental effects.  During demolition they release dust and asbestos into the air.  After construction, their large patios, pools, spas, and double driveways reduce natural open space.  Combined with their elimination of parkway trees and landscaping for driveway cuts, the cumulative result is a heat island with less penetration of rainwater.

Last, but certainly not least, we need to factor in their transportation system.  All McMansions are built on single-family residential lots located away from bus stops and transit stations.  This is why McMansion residents rely on their cars to get around; the only difference being that most of their vehicles are large, thirsty SUVs.

Given this environmental profile, some advanced jurisdictions, like Marin County, require a full energy audit of all new houses larger than 3,500 square feet.  Many other cities, like West Hollywood, simply restrict the size of R-1 homes to prevent McMansions.

But, certainly not in Los Angeles where the treatment of McMansions has raced in the opposite direction.  Our city government offers a “green” incentive to contractors so they can super-size their McMansions.  Finally, all this is done through a misnamed ordinance, the Baseline Mansionization Ordinance.  It purports to stop mansionization, but, in fact, does exactly the opposite.

Just like the Patriot Act, that curbs civil liberties, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, that stops the regulation of derivatives, and the Farm Dust Regulation Prevention Act of 2011 that bars the EPA from regulating soot, the Baseline Mansionization Ordinance -- despite it name -- is deliberately filled with enough exemptions and bonuses to permit McMansions to still be built by-right in most of Los Angeles.

Since 2008, after two years of detailed research and preparation by the Department of City Planning, public hearings and adoption by the City Council, and then signed by Mayor, mansionizers still have a free rein in most of Los Angeles.  This is why they are building McMansions at an accelerated rate as market conditions improve.

This fraud was deliberately and carefully crafted as follows:  Unlike large lots, the 77 percent of the LA’s single-family lots zoned R-1 grant homes have a Floor Area Ratio (FAR) of .5.  This means that in Los Angeles houses built on a typical 6000 square foot R-1 lot begin at 3000 square feet, already a thousand square feet larger than the average R-1 home.  Then, if the contractor adds such green features as extra insulation, double-paned windows, and new appliances, they get an additional 600 square feet through a 20 percent “green” LEED bonus, for a total of 3,600 square feet.

After that, the McMansions' attached garages, which are often surreptitiously used as play rooms or storage, are exempted for an additional 400 square feet.  This increases the McMansion total to 4,000 square feet.  Next are the exemptions for high entryways and semi-enclosed decks and balconies.  They legally raise the total to 4,350 square feet.  In some cases slip-shod plan check and inspections appear to allow even more massive structures.

Voila.  These tricks result in the same McMansions that were built before the Baseline Mansionization Ordinance was prepared and adopted under the pretense that it would stop McMansions.

How easy would it be fix this fraud?  The answer is that it is simple.  A minor amendment to the Baseline Mansionization Ordinance would stop mansionization in its tracks.  If R-1 lots were treated like large lots, and their by-right FAR became .35, most of the work would be done.

To put some frosting on the cake, if the exemptions and bonuses, especially the “green” bonus or the garage exemption, which are spurious to begin with, were ratcheted down to 900 square feet, McMansions would then be limited to 3000 square feet.  This is the size of the largest existing homes in most R-1 neighborhoods.

But the real questions are not technical because municipalities all across the United States have devised many effective legislative and administrative procedures to stop mansionization, such as design and environmental review.

In Los Angeles, the real question is political.  Do we have any elected officials who are willing to show leadership and prevent vast swaths of Los Angeles’s residential neighborhoods from being quickly wrecked by speculators bulldozing charming older homes and then building and flipping McMansions?

(Dick Platkin is a city planning consultant who teaches sustainable city planning at USC’s Price School of Social Policy.  He is a CityWatch contributor and can be reached atrhplatkin@yahoo.com) 

http://www.citywatchla.com/lead-stories/3843-debunking-las-urban-legend-green-mcmansions

Urban Green and the Cost of Progress: A Counterintuitive Book on Sustainability

James Grundvig

Huffington Post

Neil Chambers' book, Urban Green: Architecture for the Future, opens with the author gleefully test-riding a new e-bike on the streets of downtown Manhattan. Believing it would change the world, he rushed home to write a review on Ultra Motor's A2B electrical bicycle. As he finished the piece, doubt began to creep into his mind, until it prodded him to ask more profound questions about sustainability.

His vision that e-bikes would flood the streets of New York and San Francisco, akin to the swarms of bicycles zipping around cities in Vietnam, has not come to fruition since that day in 2009.

What happened? In a word, "green."

Like many of today's misused buzzwords, such as "cloud" and "collaboration," what Mr. Chambers would soon discover there is no a silver bullet to solve our energy, waste, and environmental problems. We simply can't accelerate into the future.

Change, like all manmade processes, takes time. It requires iterations, trials and errors, tinkering, and refinement before moving to the next phase of development. Even then, unintended consequences of successful end products have come back to challenge, if not haunt us.

Take the city of Youngstown, Ohio. It has seen its population collapse since the 1970s. As Chambers notes, with more than half its residents gone, today's city sewer system can't handle the lack of flow from the underutilized toilets, sinks, and showers. The city is now forced to pump clean water through the pipes to keep them from clogging.

Such nuggets not only populate the pages of this unflinching look at the human debris trail from our modern existence, but it does so convincingly that it will give the reader pause to contemplate our full impact on the earth, its myriad ecosystems, and the larger environment as a whole.

Had Mr. Chambers simply railed against all that is bad with modernity, he might have come off as an alarmist. But the second half of his book is brilliant. He pops bubbles in the euphoria of green building practices and sustainable design. Then he goes one step further by offering a grand version of what sustainable can be. But he feels that bright future, where we live in harmony with species and promote biodiversity, won't occur for another century.

The Challenge of a Sustainable Future

Progress is slow; change can't come fast enough. Not when the world, mired in the global economic slump, still produces more than 500,000 buildings a year. And all of them will consume massive amounts of energy and material, leave scars with their carbon footprint sprawl, while further encroach on habitats, wetlands, and grasslands.

Can earth's species and the environment sustain rapid growth when another 5 billion people come online in the global population of 2060? It's hard to say. But water wars are already taking place between states in drought-stricken southeast and southwest.

"Sustainable development is not a new concept. Rather, it is the latest expression of a long-standing ethic involving people's' relationships with the environment and the current generation's responsibilities to future generations," wrote Mir M. Ali, PhD, and Paul J. Armstrong for the University of Illinois in a white paper "Green Design of Residential High-Rise Buildings in Livable Cities."

That ethic involves three components: Environmental, economics, and socio-cultural.

But Mr. Chambers would only partly agree with that thesis, since he sees how green building design hasn't gone far enough. Tall buildings and megacities will push many animal species to extinction.

In chapter "The Cities of Tomorrow," he writes:

"If the goal is to have all buildings around the world save energy in accordance with LEED (Leadership Energy & Environmental Design) guidelines--say, the 14% it mandates--the overall savings is even less. A mere 3% reduction would be realized on the global scale."

That sobering fact, and we are nowhere near that optimum state, hits hard as hundreds of fossil fuel power plants come online this decade in India and China alone to provide more energy that will be consumed by the growing economic engine.

History and Habitat Fragmentation

What works in Urban Green is Neil Chambers' extensive research. It's deep, used just enough, and interwoven into his lively prose, which flows between nuanced detail (coal power plants waste 70 percent of energy due to inefficiencies in burning) and a broader macro view.

The book also does a good job of using life-defining moments through human history, from the collapsed civilizations of Hopi and Anasazi tribes of America's southwest, due to deforestation and to the 1973 oil embargo, which kicked off the green era in the energy-savings movement.

For every new roadway paved or community built in rural areas, another slice cuts into some habitat or wetland, impacting too many species, putting more stress on wildlife, while shrinking livable space and breeding grounds. Dams and trying to unnaturally quicken the flow of rivers by straightening out their natural bends and turns does more damage than we realize.

Glass in windows kills birds more often than big wind turbines unwittingly installed in migratory paths. In Mr. Chambers' view architecture needs to be blown up and radically reinvented.

In reaching the author via email, he wrote:

"One of the driving forces for me was to express my vision for the future and show that it is practical and achievable. I would like to see humanity move closer to being a keystone species in the next century. This would mean that we'd have to completely revamp the way we design and build our society from infrastructure to buildings. Redesign, well, everything."

Keystone Species Is Key to the Future

"Urban Green inspired me to push harder toward the goal of having us be keystone species. Two ways I'm trying to practice this is with my work with oyster restoration and building design. My company has been a major partner with an oyster project in Myrtle Beach, SC," he explained. "Over the last four years, the team of designers, biologists, policymakers, business owners, and residents has restored oysters to the large Withers Estuary. Since the book was published, we have been awarded funding to expand our work to two new estuaries in the region. We are now starting an oyster shell-recycling program."

On the future:

"I see buildings change along with how we occupy them. The building industry is seeing the enormous benefits from green building, while also seeing that radical changes are needed to curb energy consumption and reduce our carbon footprint. Cities will become very green places -- both in terms of what green means today, and, literally, being the place trees and wilderness grows.

I think the goal for us moving forward isn't to create a sustainable society, but to become keystone species on this planet. The difference is fundamental. Sustainability hopes to teach people how to have a smaller impact on earth. Being a keystone species means that the byproduct of our lives is a more rich and interconnected natural world. I believe this would lead to a more advanced society."

In reading Urban Green, growth can now be equated to a ticking time bomb. Something in society and nature has to give. But what? Other species? Us? Or can people as the keystone species lead the way to a better, truly sustainable world?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-grundvig/urban-green-and-the-cost-_b_1930449.html

Report: Online tool cut cooling bills

BY SANDRA GUY Business Reporter
Chicago Sun-Times
 October 2, 2012

The summer’s record-breaking heat raised ComEd customers’ bills about 7.2 percent, as Chicagoans tried to stay cool inside. But consumers who used an online energy-saving tool wiped out most of the extra cost, according to a report being released Tuesday by the Citizens Utility Board.

Chicagoans who used the online tool erased 70 percent of the extra costs caused by the record heat, CUB’s report said.

The city’s third-hottest summer cost Commonwealth Edison consumers an extra $64 million — about $5 a month for the average customer over the four-month summer season, CUB said in the report. But those who used CUB Energy Saver, the agency’s free online tool at CUBEnergysaver.com, paid only an additional $1.50 a month, on average, according to the report.

This summer’s 45 days of 90-degree or higher temperatures included six days of record-tying or record-breaking heat or dryness, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

The records included the highest temperature, 103 degrees, and highest low, 82 degrees, both on July 6.

The study said Illinoisans used an average of 7.2 percent more electricity this summer than last, but CUBEnergysaver.com users saw only a 2.1 percent increase.

Energy savers used fewer lights, turned off the air conditioner when they were away and turned off energy-slurping appliances such as coffee makers, said David Kolata, CUB’s executive director.

The top 10 actions CUB Energy Saver users have taken, ranked according to popularity, are:

◆ Use fewer lights at home.

◆ Replace traditional incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs.

◆ Turn off the coffee maker after brewing.

◆ Dry clothes outside or on a drying rack instead of using the dryer.

◆ Lower window blinds on summer days to keep the home cooler.

◆ Use a smart power strip, which can help consumers combat “vampire power,” energy eaten by computers, TVs and other appliances that are plugged in but not being used.

◆ Wash larger loads of dishes.

◆ Use the microwave, which burns less power than an oven and doesn’t overheat the home.

◆ Buy an efficient gas clothes dryer rather than an electric one.

◆ Turn off the air conditioner one hour before leaving home.

Anaergia to deliver London, England’s first large scale anaerobic digestion system that converts food waste to renewable energy

BURLINGTON, ON, Oct. 2, 2012 --/PRNewswire/ - UTS Biogastechnik GmbH (UTSBiogas), a subsidiary of Anaergia Inc., a global leader in the generation of renewable energy from organic waste, today announced the successful commissioning and operation of an anaerobic digestion facility in Glenfarg, Scotland, as well as the award of London's first food waste to renewable energy facility that will be located in Dagenham, UK.

Food waste and other organics typically represent 30%-40% of the waste generated in a given community.  In order to divert this organic waste from landfill and beneficially use, Source Separated Organics (SSO) programs are being implemented across a variety of venues including single family residences, multiple family residential units, commercial businesses, food processors, grocery stores, schools, airports and hospitals.  Anaerobic digestion technology is then used to convert this energy rich organic waste into renewable energy and natural fertilizer.

A partnership agreement between The TEG Group and UTS Biogas, a subsidiary of Anaergia Inc., was established to deliver scalable and adaptable solutions that combine in-vessel-composting and anaerobic digestion under a Design-Build-Own-Operate-Finance (DBOOF) model.  The Dagenham and Glenfarg facilities utilize the DBOOF model and will both operate under 20 year power purchase agreements owned and operated by The TEG Group.

Anaergia provided the anaerobic digestion system to the Glenfarg facility in Perthshire, Scotlandthat is owned and operated by TEG Biogas (Perth).  The newly added biogas facility is currently processing 15,000 tonnes per year of residential and commercial food waste into 700 kW of renewable energy. The renewable electricity is distributed through the national electrical grid and heat produced onsite can be supplied to the new Binn Eco Park development.  The organic residual from the digestion of food waste is converted to soil amendment that is sold to local farmers in order to replace conventional chemical fertilizers.

Anaergia is also under contract to provide a second anaerobic digestion system to the TEG Biogas (London) facility in Dagenham about 35 km outside of London.  The total treatment capacity will be 49,000 tonnes per year, 19,000 tonnes of which will go to the in-vessel-composting plant. The anaerobic digestion facility, will convert the remaining 30,000 tonnes per year of London's food waste into 1,400 kW of renewable energy.  Combined, the two UK based projects will generate nearly 17 million kilowatts of renewable energy each year which is enough to power the equivalent of approximately 3,500 homes.  In addition, these projects will prevent 900,000 tonnes of food waste from entering landfills during the 20 year contracts.

The Mayor of London, Mr. Boris Johnson highlighted his interest to further support renewable energy generation using anaerobic digestion facilities across London.

Mr. Boris Johnson indicated, "We are set to support more facilities of this nature across the capital working with boroughs and the London Waste and Recycling Board." (September 4, 2012 - Waste Management World)

"These projects demonstrate forward thinking and environmental stewardship by selecting anaerobic digestion technology to generate renewable energy while diverting food waste from landfills," said Ludwig Dinkloh, Vice President of UTS Biogastechnik.  "We are proud to be a part of the London Sustainable Industries Park and the Binn Eco Park due to the contribution they make to a sustainable environment as well as their contribution to the local economy through the development of hundreds of new jobs."

"Our first co-located anaerobic digestion and in-vessel-composting plant became operational inPerthshire earlier this year and is testimony to our confidence in the benefits of co-located organic waste technologies," says Mick Fishwick, CEO of TEG. "Combined anaerobic digestion and in-vessel-composting sites offer front-end flexibility on feedstock, enabling us to process a wide variety of waste streams including food waste only, green waste only or co-mingled organic waste.  We have been delighted with the performance of the Anaergia Anaerobic Digestion plant at Glenfarg,which has already exceeded the planned power output, and we look forward to working with UTSagain in delivering the AD plant in Dagenham."

"These projects are a further example of the global trend to divert waste organics from landfills and convert them into renewable energy and natural fertilizer using anaerobic digestion technology.  We are proud of our partnership with TEG and believe that offering anaerobic digestion technology under a power purchase agreement is an emerging service model with strong benefits to communities.  The model provides competitively priced renewable energy, extended landfill life and a smaller carbon footprint without a capital investment by the communities," said Steve Watzeck, CEO of Anaergia.  "With more than 20 years of experience using anaerobic digestion to generate renewable energy from high strength organic waste, Anaergia is well suited to support municipalities reach their sustainability goals and reduce costs."

http://www.sacbee.com/2012/10/02/4873939/anaergia-to-deliver-london-englands.html

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/10/02/4873939/anaergia-to-deliver-london-englands.html#storylink=cpy

To Encourage Biking, Cities Lose the Helmets

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

New York Times

Published: September 29, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joshua Sabatini | 09/12/12 
SF Examiner 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taxes Show One Way to Save Fuel

September 11, 2012

By EDUARDO PORTER

NY Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SF clean-energy program may profit Shell

Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross

San Francisco Chronicle 

September 11, 2012

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

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

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

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

But the final product isn't what everyone expected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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