Tag Archives: energy
Peter Newman: The Distributed City
The seven key innovations of resilient cities are set as city models (being detailed over the next several weeks here at “Eco-Compass”). While no one city has shown innovation in all seven areas, some are quite advanced in one or two. The challenge for urban planners will be to apply all of these city characteristics together, to generate a sense of hope through a combination of new technology, city design and community-based innovation, which together will create the Resilient City.
The third city model is the Distributed City (read about the first city model, the Renewable Energy City and the second city model, the Carbon Neutral City).
Cities will shift from large centralized power and water systems to small-scale and neighborhood-based systems, including expanding the notion of “green infrastructure”. The distributed use of power and water in a city can enable a city to reduce its ecological footprint as power and water can be more efficiently provided using the benefits of electronic control systems, and, particularly through water sensitive urban design, a city can improve its green character.
Most power and water systems for cities over the past 100 years have become bigger and more centralized. Now the new forms of power and water are smaller scale but often they are still fitted into cities as though they were large. The movement that tries to see how these new technologies can be fitted into cities and decentralized across grids, is called distributed power and distributed water systems.
The distributed water system approach is called Water Sensitive Urban Design and includes how to use the complete water cycle, from rain and local water sources like groundwater, to feed into the system and then to recycle grey water locally and black water regionally, to ensure that there are significant reductions in water used. This system can enable the green agenda to become central to the infrastructure management of a city as stormwater recycling can involve swales and artificial wetlands that can become important habitat in the city, grey water recycling can similarly be used to green parks and gardens, and regional black water recycling can be tied into regional ecosystems. All these systems will require ‘smart’ control systems to fit them into a city grid and also will require new skills by town planners who are used to water management being a centralized function rather than being a local planning issue.
In global cities, the traditional engineering approach to power has been that the most effective and efficient way of providing energy is through larger centralized production facilities, and extensive distribution systems that transport energy relatively long distances. This is wasteful because of line losses but also because large base load power systems cannot be turned on and off easily so there is considerable power shedding when the load does not meet the need. However renewable, low-carbon cities mostly involve a more decentralized energy production system, where production is more on a neighborhood scale and both line losses and power shedding can be avoided. Whether a wind turbine, small biomass CHP plant, or a rooftop photovoltaic system, renewable energy is produced closer to where it is consumed, and indeed often directly by those who consume it. This distributed generation offers a number of benefits including energy savings given the ability to better control the power production, lower vulnerability and greater resilience in the face of natural and human-caused disaster (including terrorist attacks). Clever integration of these small systems into a grid can be achieved with new technology control systems that balance the whole system in its demand and supply from a range of sources as they rise and fall and link it to storage, especially vehicle batteries through vehicle-to-grid or V2G technology. Small-scale energy systems are being developed to make more resilient cities in the future.
The same approach can be applied to water systems where there are now many cities that are able to demonstrate small scale local water systems that are very effective. The many developing cities that already have distributed water supplies from community bores and small scale sewage treatment, can look to a number of cases where these have been made safe and effective without being turned into expensive centralized systems. In Malang, East Java a small scale community sewage system was fitted into a squatter village to provide sanitation for 500 families.
Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, has a major system of wastewater reuse involving vegetables, rice, as well as fish in low lying Tranh Tri district which lies to the south of the city. Produce from the reuse system provides a significant part of the diet of the city’s people (Ho, 2002). Wastewater and stormwater are discharged untreated to four small rivers which play a dual role: drainage of wastewater from the city; and wastewater supply for reuse in agriculture and aquaculture. Conventional wastewater treatment plants have been constructed but lie idle due to lack of budget for operational and maintenance costs. About one-third of the city is sewered but its pipes are directed to these small rivers. The wastewater is 75-80% domestic and 20-25% industrial.
The system for treatment has largely been developed by the district farmers and local community over the past 30 years. Before 1960 the treatment area was a sparsely populated swamp where rice was grown but with low yields and frequent flooding. Aquaculture began to develop in the early 1960s with the construction of an extensive irrigation and drainage system to facilitate rice cultivation. Farmers began to stock seed of wild fish collected from the river in rice fields as they perceived the benefits of wastewater-fed aquaculture. Following the formation of cooperatives in 1967, land use stabilized into vegetable cultivation on higher land, rice/fish cultivation on medium level land, and year-round pond fish culture on deeper land adjacent to the main irrigation and drainage canals. Wastewater-fed aquaculture became the major occupation of 6 cooperatives with easy access to wastewater and a minor occupation of 10 others out of the total of 25 district communes.
The use of waste in a food production system must always be sympathetic to public health. Traditionally wastewater has been gathered around cities and re-used only after sufficient time has elapsed for human contaminants to be naturally removed. Excess wastes were flushed into the rivers but only if the value in those wastes was mostly removed for agriculture. The use of the bioregion for waste treatment was feasible as the capacity for it to treat was not exceeded. As cities have grown, the increase in waste has far outstripped natural capacities. Cities everywhere have to find ways of treating waste as well as re-using it. Approaches that can use new technology to totally remove waste are now feasible but a distributed approach would try to use waste as much as possible in the bioregion for agricultural production as in the East Calcutta Wetlands project.
Often public health authorities have tried to ban all use of waste for agriculture which just means that water and waste are not used efficiently or ecologically. Human health is the sole focus in this approach but it is generally not sustainable to continue like this as there is not enough water and organic fertilizer to enable bioregional agriculture to proceed ecologically. The city then tends to extract water and produce food in largely unsustainable ways. Thus approaches to water and waste will require new technologies and management systems that integrate public health and environmental engineering with ecologically sound planning (Ho, 2003).
Distributed power and water needs community support. In Toronto a possible model has been developed similar to those above in developing cities, when communities began forming ‘buying-cooperatives’ in which they pooled their buying power to negotiate special reduced prices from local photovoltaic (PV) companies that had offered an incentive to buy solar PV. The first co-op was the Riverdale Initiative for Solar Energy, or RISE, when 75 residents joined together to purchase rooftop PV systems, resulting in about a 15 percent savings in their purchase cost. This then spread across the city. The Toronto (and Ontario province) example suggests the merits of combining bottom-up neighborhood approaches with top-down incentives and encouragement. This support for small-scale distributed production—offered through what are commonly referred to as Standard Offer Contracts (SOCs, often referred to as “feed-in tariffs” in Europe), has been extremely successful in Europe where they are now common. The same can be done with new technologies for water and waste such as rain water tanks and grey water recycling as part of any urban approvals.
One other model can be seen in the redevelopment of the Western Harbor in Malmö , Sweden. Here the goal was to achieve distributed power and water systems from local sources. This urban district now has 100% renewable power and an innovative storm water management system that recycles water into green courtyards and green rooftops along with the solar panels (City of Malmo, 2005). The project involves local government in the management and demonstrates that a clear plan helps to drive innovations in distributed systems.
Distributed infrastructure is beginning to be demonstrated in cities across the globe. Utilities will need to develop models with city planners of how they can do local energy and water planning with community-based approaches and local management.
What do you think? Leave us a comment.
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Peter Newman is Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is the co-author of Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems, Green Urbanism Down Under, and Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change.
About Peter Newman
Peter Newman is a renowned Australian academic and planner who invented the term ‘automobile dependence’ to describe how we have created cities where we have to drive everywhere. For 30 years since he attended Stanford University during the first oil crisis, he has been warning cities about preparing for peak oil. Peter’s book with Jeff Kenworthy, Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence was launched in the White House in 1999. Newman is the Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, where he is best known for his work in reviving and extending the city’s rail system. From 2001-2003, Newman directed the production of WA’s Sustainability Strategy in the Department of the Premier and Cabinet. It was the first state sustainability strategy in the world. From 2004-2005, he was a Sustainability Commissioner in Sydney, advising the government on planning issues. From 2006-2007, he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Virginia Charlottesville and he returned there in early 2008 as Harry Porter Visiting Professor. His new book with Tim Betaley and Heather Boyer in late 2008 will be Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change.
Tim Beatley: Can Americans Learn To Share?
It would be an interesting exercise to inventory the “things” we have in our homes and offices—the objects, the equipment, specialized things, electronic and otherwise, that occupy space. Along with this accounting, might be some estimate of how recently the thing has actually been used, and how frequently. My hunch is that much of our home “inventory” consists of things that are used rather infrequently, if ever. Given the tremendous carbon and energy footprint associated with producing and transporting goods, not to mention their economic cost and disposal problems, it behooves us to find creative ways to reduce our material consumption, to de-materialize if we can. One category of possibilities is to return to that time-tested idea of sharing, and establishing new community institutions to facilitate sharing.
One of the most impressive local services we discovered when we lived in Australia, and we thought quite unusual at the time, was that of the local toy library. Seemingly every local council ran one, and sometimes it was a local non-governmental organization. When we lived in Fremantle, in Western Australia, we were frequent visitors to the council toy library. The concept was essentially the same as a lending book library—and indeed these toy libraries are organized in similarly efficient ways—bags of kids blocks each with check-out barcodes, games, even small cars and other rideable objects. In the case of our own Fremantle toy library, the service extended to helping you carry or push (often in a shopping cart) your new cache of toys to the car. With two small children there was palpable delight at each new toy, and by the time the toys had to be returned, they had run their course in terms of interest to the kids—they were ready for a new batch.
We came back from Australia duly impressed with this idea, only to learn later that there are toy libraries all over the world. There is even an international toy library association with an annual international conference no less! (I’m tempted to wonder what wild things toy librarians do when they get together, but I will leave this for another day).
Another similar idea is the tool library. A number of American cities actually already have them, including Francisco and Philadelphia. Columbus, Ohio, even runs a mobile tool library. Communities like Takoma Park, Maryland, have operated a community tool library directly behind their book library for many years. They offer just about any tool you can think of, with a few exceptions (chainsaws, for instance, perhaps for obvious reasons). And these make a lot of sense as well. Why spend limited family dollars to buy a commercial length ladder, for instance, that you may only need for that home paint job (every how many years?) or that post-hole digger, or specialized garden or woodworking tool?
Atlanta is home to probably the largest tool library anywhere, and a terrific story of sharing in itself. The Atlanta Community Toolbank, as it’s called, is really about institutional or organizational sharing—it’s a membership organization that schools, parks, churches, and other community organizations are able to join and for a small fee are able to access a large array of tools (rakes, shovels, pruners, hammers, ladders, etc.) for use in various community renovation, restoration or clean-up projects. Wandering around this modest building I had never seen so many tools in one place. And toolbank is embedded in a inner city neighborhood, and has been a major force in helping repair and renovate homes there. It serves as a staging ground for a host of community projects and volunteer efforts throughout the city and in that sense represents an example of time- and labor-sharing of generous Atlantans, as much as anything.
The benefits to these kinds are community sharing regimes are many, and extend beyond environment and energy. Use of one’s public library has been frequently cited by communitarian advocates as evidence of connection and commitment to the public realm. In economic downturns (such as this) sharing may represent an effective coping strategy, and the personal interaction and sheer fun of it are also not be underestimated.
But there are also obstacles to sharing, of course. It is often observed that Americans are rabidly individualistic, that we revel in not just the value and services provided by the objects we buy, but by the actual owning of things, and the status imparted through that owning. I’m not sure that is fair, and there is much evidence in our history as well of a generous and sharing culture. The surge of interest in car-sharing and in community bike systems (such as Paris’ Vélib’) may be sign for optimism. Perhaps sharing is something we’ve just gotten out of the habit of doing. Perhaps we just need to re-learn how to share?
What do you think? Leave us a comment.
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Timothy Beatley is the Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities at the University of Virginia. He co-authored Resilient Cities and Green Urbanism Down Under and is the author of the upcoming Planning for Coastal Resilience.
About Timothy Beatley
Timothy Beatley is Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities, in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning, School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, where he has taught for the last eighteen years.His primary teaching and research interests are in environmental planning and policy, with special emphasis on coastal and natural hazards planning, environmental values and ethics, and biodiversity conservation. He has published extensively in these areas, including the following recent books: Ethical Land Use; Habitat Conservation Planning: Endangered Species and Urban Growth; Natural Hazard Mitigation; and An Introduction to Coastal Zone Management.In recent years much of his research and writing has been focused on the subject of sustainable communities, and creative strategies by which cities and towns can fundamentally reduce their ecological footprints, while at the same time becoming more livable and equitable places. He is the author of many books, including Biophilic Cities, Resilient Cities, and Green Urbanism (Island Press).
Peter Newman: The Renewable Energy City
The seven key innovations of resilient cities are set as city models, which will be detailed over the next several weeks here at “Eco-Compass.” While no one city has shown innovation in all seven areas, some are quite advanced in one or two. The challenge for urban planners will be to apply all of these city characteristics together, to generate a sense of hope through a combination of new technology, city design and community-based innovation, which together will create the Resilient City.
The first is city model is the Renewable Energy City.
1. Renewable Energy City. Urban areas powered by renewable energy techniques and technologies from the region to the building level. Renewable energy enables a city to reduce its dependence on fossil energy and its ecological footprint and if using biological fuels can be part of a city’s enhanced ecological functions.
Renewable energy production can and should occur within cities, integrated into their land use and built form, and comprising a significant and important element of the urban economy. Cities are not simply consumers of energy, but catalysts for more sustainable energy paths. Cities can become more and more a part of the earth’s solar cycle.
While some solar city projects, such as those in the indented paragraph below, are underway (including Treasure Island in San Francisco) there are presently no major cities in the world that are powered entirely by renewable energy. Vauban is a 100% renewable suburb in Freiburg, Germany. Cairo has a plan for 20% renewable energy by 2020 based on wind and solar. Movement towards a renewable-energy future will require much greater levels of commitment from cities themselves-from the local governments and municipalities, large and small that make up metropolitan areas.
Urban planning is necessary to create the infrastructure needed to support solar and wind power at the scale necessary to help power a city. While finding locations for large wind farms near urban areas has been controversial (such as the wind farm proposal that was defeated off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts), there are significant opportunities to harness solar and wind power. Studies are also now showing that wind, like PV solar can be integrated into cities and their buildings. A study from Stanford University examined the potential for wind power in regions and in cities. Researcher Cristina Archer said “The main implication of this study is that wind, for low-cost wind energy, is more widely available than was previously recognized.”
Hydro power has been used in cities such as Vancouver, British Columbia and Christchurch, New Zealand, for decades. Few people see much more potential for hydro power due to the impact of large dams but the role of geothermal power appears to be offering a similar level of base load renewable power.
Dongtan, Masdar and North Port Quay – renewable city models for the future.
Dongtan. . . “It is designed to be a beautiful and truly sustainable city with a minimal ecological footprint. The goal is to use Dongtan as a template for future urban design. As China is planning to build no less than 400 new cities in the next twenty years, Dongtan’s success is of crucial importance.” — World Business Council of Sustainable Development
Dongtan is a new Chinese city near Shanghai which is designed to use 100% renewable energy in its buildings, it will be self-sufficient in water and food sourced from the surrounding farmland, and it will feature a zero-carbon public transport system powered entirely by renewable-energy. What happens to cars in the city is not yet clear. Energy plant will burn rice husks, normally just waste, near the city center and the energy will be generated on a decentralised model, using combined heat and power.
Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates is an important first example of a city built from scratch with 100% renewable energy and zero car use (in theory anyway). It is being built with a 60MW Solar PV plant to power all construction, and eventually a 130MW Solar PV plant for on-going power as well as a 20MW Wind farm and geothermal heat pumps for cooling buildings. Electric automatic pod cars on an elevated structure will be the basis of the transport.
North Port Quay in Western Australia will be home to 10,000 households and is designed to be 100% renewable through solar PV, small wind turbines called wind pods and a nearby wave power system. The development will be dense and walkable with an all-electric transport system featuring electric public transport and electric private transport all linked to the renewable power through battery storage in the vehicles (see Went, Newman and James, 2008).
New models of how we can make cities 100% renewable are needed but rebuilding our present cities is just as important. Cities like Adelaide have gone from zero to 20 percent renewable energy in ten years by building four large wind farms.
The shift in the direction to the renewable city can occur through many actions: demonstration solar or low energy homes created to show architects, developers, and citizens that green can be appealing, procurement actions that source regionally produced wind and other renewable energy to power municipal lights and buildings and locally and green building standards and requirements for all new public as well as private buildings.
Few cities have been as active in seeking and nurturing a reputation as a solar city as Freiburg, Germany. Known to many as the “ecological capital of Europe” Freiburg has adopted an impressive and wide-ranging set of environmental planning and sustainability initiatives, many focused on renewable energy. Through its Solar Region Freiburg program, the city has sought to actively support solar energy as an important element of its economic base, and even a form of local tourism. A series of “solar tours” have been organized, for instance, as a way to visit and learn about their innovative solar energy projects in the city. And there are many such projects, from dramatic individual residences (e.g. Rolf Disch’s Heliotropic House) to prototype experimental homes (e.g. the Freiburg zero-energy house) to business structures (e.g. the zero-emission Solar Fabrik, the Solar Tower, high-rise office building), and public buildings and installations. The city has also become home to an impressive number of scientific and educational organizations dedicated to renewable energy to ensure it has an economic edge in the next industrial era.
Freiburg has, moreover, incorporated solar energy in all major new development areas including Resielfeld and Vauban, new compact green growth areas in the city. Both active and passive solar techniques are employed in these projects, and the city also mandates a stringent energy standard for all new homes. In Vauban, some 5,000 zero-energy homes—homes that produce at least as much energy as they need—have been built and a zero energy office complex was added in 2006, along with two solar garages where PV covers the roof of the only allowable parking in the area.
This emphasis on solar energy has in turn set the tone and context for what other businesses and organizations could do. The Victoria Hotel in the center of Freiberg, for instance, now markets itself as the world’s first zero-emission hotel, boasting that all its energy needs are satisfied through renewable energy sources, including solar hot water and photovoltaic panels on the hotel’s rooftop. A host of other environmental features are employed, including providing all guests with free transit passes for riding the city’s exemplary public transit system.
The City of Adelaide, in the State of South Australia also envisions itself as a renewable city, as a part of its larger green city initiative. It has designated solar precincts for the installation of photovoltaics on the rooftops of buildings, including Parliament House. There is a solar schools initiative, with the goal of 250 solar schools (schools with rooftop installations, and that incorporate solar and renewable energy into their educational curricula). This idea has since been taken up by the new Australian Federal government to be applied to every school in the country. And most creatively the city has been installing grid-connected PV street lamps that produce some six times the energy needed for the lighting. These new lights are designed in a distinctive shape of a local mallee tree. This is one of the few examples of solar art or solar ‘place’ projects.
Along with incentives (financial and otherwise), solar cities recognize the need to set minimum regulatory standards. Barcelona has a solar ordinance, which requires new buildings and substantial retrofits of existing buildings must obtain a minimum of 60 percent of hot water needs from solar. This has already led to a significant growth in that city in the number of solar thermal installations.
Transport can also be a major part of the renewables challenge. The more that public transport moves to electric power the more it can be part of a renewable city. Calgary Transit’s creative initiative “Ride the Wind” provides all the power needed for its light rail system from wind turbines in the south of Alberta. Private transport can now also be part of this transition through a combination of electric vehicles and new battery storage technology (together called Renewable Transport by Went, Newman and James, 2008 – see www.resilientcitiesbook.org). Electric vehicles not only can use renewable electricity to power their propulsion they can be plugged in during the day and through their batteries enable the power system to store four times their consumption in renewables. Thus they can provide a critical role in enabling renewables to build up as a much higher proportion of the grid. This breakthrough in technology will need to be carefully examined to ensure that cities use it to be fully sustainable and do not use it to justify further urban sprawl.
Renewable power in a city enables it to use energy for creating healthy and livable environments without anything like the impact of fossil fuels. But by itself it will not be enough.
Check back next week for the #2 city model resulting from innovations of resilient cities.
What do you think? Leave us a comment.
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Peter Newman is Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is the co-author of Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems, Green Urbanism Down Under, and Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change.
About Peter Newman
Peter Newman is a renowned Australian academic and planner who invented the term ‘automobile dependence’ to describe how we have created cities where we have to drive everywhere. For 30 years since he attended Stanford University during the first oil crisis, he has been warning cities about preparing for peak oil. Peter’s book with Jeff Kenworthy, Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence was launched in the White House in 1999. Newman is the Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, where he is best known for his work in reviving and extending the city’s rail system. From 2001-2003, Newman directed the production of WA’s Sustainability Strategy in the Department of the Premier and Cabinet. It was the first state sustainability strategy in the world. From 2004-2005, he was a Sustainability Commissioner in Sydney, advising the government on planning issues. From 2006-2007, he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Virginia Charlottesville and he returned there in early 2008 as Harry Porter Visiting Professor. His new book with Tim Betaley and Heather Boyer in late 2008 will be Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change.
Ann Vileisis: Will Obama take on food?
In the months leading up to the election, food activists (see the video by The White House Organic Farm Project, a.k.a. TheWhoFarm.org below) have been salivating over the possibility that they could convince the next president to turn up some sunny expanse of White House lawn and put in a lush and leafy organic farm. The bounty of veggies could feed not only the first family but also Washington’s needy and fresh-food-deprived school children. The example of the first family eating fresh vegetables, prepared by a savvy chef, could also direct positive new attention to the goal of reforming America’s notoriously unhealthy diet.
The election of Barack Obama makes this dream a distinct possibility.
Ever since I saw Obama’s logo, the now familiar O with undulant red-and-white stripes across the bottom half, evoking at once our American flag but also our agricultural landscape—spread before a dawning sun, I’ve been excited. I thought: WOW—This is the first time I’ve ever seen a candidate put land upfront, and the power of the sun to boot—both potent symbols.
About Ann Vileisis
Ann Vileisis is the author of Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need to Get it Back, which was recently recognized as a Finalist for the Connecticut Book Award.
Peter Newman: Resiliant cities and the crash
The financial crash is developing a whole industry of responses that can tell us where we went wrong and what we must do to make our future more resilient, especially in our cities where so much of the crash is hurting. Finance and economics dominate this discussion. We believe that a better understanding of what makes cities work will help in this debate, especially how urban transport and energy are fundamental to how the urban economy works or doesn’t.
What caused the crash?
Toxic loans are the target of most crash analysts. However although they locate the areas where these toxic loans were mostly taken up, they rarely show why these particular locations were so much more vulnerable to mortgage foreclosure. These locations were invariably in peri-urban areas which were often quite distinctly removed from the main metropolitan areas that developers assumed for the jobs and services of those living there. Whilst the post war suburbs are often called urban sprawl these areas could only be called urban scatter. These areas invariably had nothing other than houses, they had no real employment, shops or services, and transit was non existent. These were highly car dependent places where people had to travel long distances for anything.
Such urban areas are highly vulnerable to the multiple problems of car dependence, particularly peak oil. In recent years their financial fragility has been pointed out through a number of studies which have shown that household budgets needed to find 40% of their income to pay for transportation. Large houses with big heating and cooling bills made it worse. Doubling and tripling of the oil price set in motion the end of so many toxic loans but they occurred mostly in areas where the land development was just as toxic.
As the fall out from the toxic loans rolled across the US economy it began to pick up bad debt estimated at over $18 trillion – The Wall Street Journal estimates about 16% of Americans now own homes worth less than they owe. From there the crash spread out into the highly linked global economy, picking up similar kinds of debt in cities around the world and leading inevitably to the September 15th 2008 Wall Street crash.
Peak oil over the next decade will ensure that fuel prices will rise again. The International Energy Agency are estimating oil will go into permanent decline of between 6% and 9% per year soon. Climate change will only exacerbate this trend away from highly fossil fuel-dependent urban and building design. As global governance on climate change sets in there will be increasing costs right through the housing and transport system that will further challenge the development of cities through high capacity roads, peri-urban scatter and large fossil fuel-hungry houses.
Crashes in Urban History
The coming of industrialism can now be seen to have occurred in a series of waves of technological innovation. These waves show the booms and busts of the economy based on technological systems that boom in the adoption phase and then bust as they reach limits. The first waves were based on water power, then coal and steam boilers, then electricity, then oil…. At each stage the city adapted to the new energy and transport system after they went through a crash based on the end of the previous system.
The shift in oil prices has exposed the underlying vulnerability of highly car and oil dependent urban development from the Fourth and Fifth Waves. Once the fuel price increased, the loans which were used to form these suburbs became toxic. At the same time a more global limit was reached with climate change and the cities of the world faced a new limit whereby they must phase out all fossil fuels. Although not yet part of the main market place, the undermining of confidence in the long term future of heavily-fossil fuel dependent industry and land development, was already underway. The crash of September 2008 signals the end to the urban economy based around oil in particular but all heavily fossil fuel-dependent urban development as well.
What is next?
What is next for urban development? The Sixth Wave replaces oil and all fossil fuels with radical resource productivity eg 50 to 80 percent less fossil fuels by 2050 as many countries are now committed and which has been set as the goal by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) through the United Nations processes. Critical to this will be fast electric rail with Transit Oriented Development as its focus for development in a poly-centric city and supplemented with electric vehicles. The new wave of industrialism also includes a new series of sustainability technologies related to renewables and distributed, small-scale water, energy, and waste systems (building on clever control systems and Smart Grids) all of which are more local and require far less fuel to distribute. We have called this the Resilient City in our new book from Island Press.
At the transition point between the different waves, the crash was followed by a new boom. But the swing back was based around the new technologies (not based around propping up of the old systems). The 1890s depression was severe as the world’s cities moved away from horses, wood and the first steam-based coal-fired industries into the much more extensive use of electricity, tramways and electric trains. Then the 1930′s saw the transition to oil and motor vehicles with cities spreading out as though these could be used in limitless amounts. The 2008 crash signals that this era is over and the birth pangs of the new Resilient City are emerging in our cities – if we let it.
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Peter Newman is Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is the co-author of Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems, Green Urbanism Down Under, and Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change.
About Peter Newman
Peter Newman is a renowned Australian academic and planner who invented the term ‘automobile dependence’ to describe how we have created cities where we have to drive everywhere. For 30 years since he attended Stanford University during the first oil crisis, he has been warning cities about preparing for peak oil. Peter’s book with Jeff Kenworthy, Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence was launched in the White House in 1999. Newman is the Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, where he is best known for his work in reviving and extending the city’s rail system. From 2001-2003, Newman directed the production of WA’s Sustainability Strategy in the Department of the Premier and Cabinet. It was the first state sustainability strategy in the world. From 2004-2005, he was a Sustainability Commissioner in Sydney, advising the government on planning issues. From 2006-2007, he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Virginia Charlottesville and he returned there in early 2008 as Harry Porter Visiting Professor. His new book with Tim Betaley and Heather Boyer in late 2008 will be Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change.
Elizabeth Grossman: Last minute Bush Administration actions
On November 4, from the White House to state houses and the unsung offices of Soil & Water Conservation and Public Utility Districts, American voters elected what is likely an unprecedented number of pro-environment candidates. By Thursday of last week, the Office of the President-elect had already posted the “Obama-Biden comprehensive New Energy America” plan. Among its goals are putting a million hybrid 150 mpg plug-in cars on the road by 2015, creating five million new “clean energy jobs” in the next ten years, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050. The new administration also promises to double federal funding for scientific research, increase support for science education, technological research and development, and to “restore scientific integrity to the White House.” What would be a tall order in the best of times has been made even more challenging by the past eight weeks’ events.
Not only will the Obama administration take office amid the greatest economic distress perhaps since the Great Depression, but the Bush administration has also been busy issuing end-of-term regulations that will considerably increase environmental protection challenges.
Among these new rules are:
- A proposal that would make it impossible to use the Endangered Species Act to curtail greenhouse gas emissions and global warming even when they harm a listed species.
- A revision of how power plants measure their emissions that could result in greater overall emissions.
- A Bureau of Land Management plan to sell oil and gas leases on millions of acres in Utah previously off-limits to such resource extraction and approval of new uranium mining just outside Grand Canyon National Park.
- A Surface Mining Rule that could effectively eliminate a 100-foot buffer zone to protect streams from mining waste generated in mountaintop removal coal mining operations in Appalachia.
- Revision of how waste discharges from confined animal feedlot operations (often called “factory farms”) are regulated that would allow farms to decide when such permits are needed.
- An EPA proposal not to regulate perchlorate in drinking water – a contaminant toxic to the thyroid now found in hundreds of water sources in over thirty states.
- Approval of the pesticide methyl iodide to replace ozone-depleting methyl bromide, long favored by the U.S. strawberry industry. Over fifty scientists – including Nobel laureates – have written to the EPA protesting use of this powerful neurotoxin and potential carcinogen.
Environmental advocates have great expectations for what an Obama administration can achieve. But it won’t be easy. Environmental protection at a time of badly strained budgets and economic turmoil will require ingenuity and persistence – and I think, accounting for the full lifecycle costs of everything we use, including all the costs of global warming, pollution, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion.
What do you think? Leave us a comment.
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Elizabeth Grossman is the author of High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health.
About Elizabeth Grossman
Elizabeth Grossman is the author ofHigh Tech Trash, Watershed: The Undamming of America (Counterpoint Press, 2002), and Adventuring Along the Lewis and Clark Trail (Sierra Club Books, 2003). She is also the co-editor of Shadow Cat: Encountering the American Mountain Lion (Sasquatch Books, 1999). Grossman’s writing has also appeared in a variety of publications, including Amicus Journal, Audubon, California Wild, Cascadia Times, Chicago Tribune, Environmental News Network, Grist, The Nation, New York Times Book Review, Newsday, Oregonian, Orion, the Patagonia catalogue, Salon.com, Seattle Times, Washington Post, and Yes! A native of New York City, she has a BA in literature from Yale University. She now lives a minute’s walk from the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon. When not at her desk writing she's out exploring—hiking, camping, paddling, sketching, and watching birds.
Walker Wells: Solar, the benefits are big but the funding is not
In the green world, the “benefits of solar” is bandied about as dogma. But exactly what kind of benefits are we talking about? Economic? Environmental? Social? All of the above?
As part of preparing to moderate the Affordable Housing panel at the recent Solar Power International conference, we tried to answer this question by running a few simple analyses. If the sun powered every affordable housing development in the country, how many kilowatts of energy could we create, what would that energy be worth, what kind of green economy stimulus would result, and what would this do for climate change?
Our calculations show that if all of the 75,000 units of affordable housing built annually were designed to be fully powered by the sun, it would result in a 2 billion dollar annual investment in alternative energy and avoid 66,578 tonnes of carbon emissions each year. These are big numbers with correspondingly large benefits to the housing developers, regional economies, and the global climate. So why don’t we see solar on every development?
In a nutshell, it’s because solar is still relatively expensive and it takes a long time for the economic benefits to flow back to the developers – at least if you are paying full price. The recently extended federal business investment tax credit results in about a 30% reduction in cost, but in most places, and for most affordable housing developers, the need to raise the remaining funds is still a major hurdle.
Both numeric and anecdotal data shows that in places where incentives like rebates and tax credits exist, developers are well on our way to realizing the potential of solar. In California for example, the strong, long-term incentives have made powering a development’s common areas with solar nearly standard practice. Going a step further, some developers are pursuing the aggressive goal of net zero. In other states like Massachusetts, support for solar has come through a one-time catalyst fund distributed to developers willing to pilot solar. Through the affordable housing program of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, 8 development partners were awarded 25 million several years ago to bring a solar component to 60 affordable housing projects. These efforts have been effective in demonstrating to the solar industry that affordable is a viable, and potentially lucrative market.
But there are still more hurdles to cross. Two of the biggest are in the decidedly unglamorous terrain of the large government bureaucracy. First is the utility allowance. Traditionally housing authorities are responsible for determining what portion of the housing burden is the result of utility expenses. These “utility allowances” are deducted from the allowable housing burden to determine what owners can charge tenants for rent. So it follows that if utilities are lower due to use of alternate energy sources, the utility allowance should be reduced and the owner would thus be able to increase the rent by a comparable amount. With more revenue the developer could then pay back the loans used to purchase the photovoltaic (or solar thermal) system. This is a win for everyone: the tenants get more stable energy costs, the developer gets a more stable asset, green jobs are created, and less carbon ends up in the atmosphere. Until recently this approach was been simple in theory but very difficult to apply in practice.
The good news is that the IRS recently expanded the group of organizations that can develop a utility allowance to include the utility companies, thus giving developers options. Setting what may become a national example, the state of California is about to approve a new methodology that includes the ability to account for onsite generation in the utility allowance. It is expected that the state’s utility companies will take the lead in preparing, or at least verifying, this type of analysis. The improved accuracy of this schedule will allow developers with energy strategies to get full credit for their innovative efforts in their pro-forma.
The other issue is metering. Due to either state or local regulation, each individual dwelling unit is usually required to have a separate meter and inverter to account for the electricity generated for, and used by, the unit. Doing this adds cost and complexity in design and construction and precludes aggregating energy use and production across multiple dwelling units during operation. For example if one apartment has a net gain of energy one month it can’t be shared with an apartment that has a net loss. Several years ago, Massachusetts figured out a smart way around this through “neighborhood” or “virtual” net metering. In this situation all the energy generated is accounted for at a single meter and the credits produced are then spread “virtually” to the individual units on their monthly bills. This approach simplifies the PV system design and dramatically reduces the number of inverters. Just last week the California Public Utilities Commission adopted a similar approach, which greatly increased the odds of there being more net zero affordable housing projects in the near future.
By removing these barriers we can expect an accelerated rate of solar adoption in California and other states that put in place similar regulations. However, there still needs to be the base level of support provided by the federal tax credit and state incentives. Only by combining a progressive regulatory environment with predictable and sufficient rebate programs will solar cease to be a novelty and instead become as conventional as windows, lighting, or appliances. When this occurs we can talk about the benefits that solar is providing, instead of thinking wistfully about missed opportunities.
What do you think? Leave us a comment.
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Walker Wells, AICP LEED AP, is Director of the Green Urbanism Program at Global Green USA and the editor and co-author of Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing.
About Walker Wells
Walker Wells, AICP LEED AP, is Director of the Green Urbanism Program at Global Green USA and the editor and co-author of Blueprint for Green Affordable Housing. He is a member of the American Institute of City Planners and is a LEED Accredited Professional.
Walker Wells: Green Products and ROI
Financing isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you here the term green building. Instead it’s usually solar panels, bamboo flooring, or a piece of plumbing equipment you’re not sure you really want to understand. But just like other building materials, green products cost money. What makes them different is that green products typically provide a greater return on investment than conventional products.
One example is – yes you guessed it – a plumbing product; the dual-flush toilet. This fairly straightforward innovation recognizes that you need less water to move liquid waste than solid waste, and thus dispenses water allocation accordingly. Less water means a lower water bill so that, over time, the approximate $150 increased investment in the toilet gets returned threefold, with net savings over the 15-year lifespan of $300 and an annual return on investment of about 13%. This makes the dual-flush toilet an excellent long-term, low-risk, high-return investment.
Green buildings exhibit these same characteristics. The initial upfront investment of about 3% delivers predictable energy and water savings and reduced maintenance costs year after year. The challenge lies in figuring out how to fold this added value into the project’s financing structure. Most of the time there is a chasm between construction and operation budgets. Funds saved through integrated design can’t be stored away to pay future bills. While property managers certainly appreciate lower operating costs, providing construction funding that will be paid by the difference between the hypothetical bills and the lower actual bills is often seen as an esoteric, and impractical, accounting exercise.
The aversion to using creative accounting to bridge the gap between construction and operation budgets is only growing stronger with the current fluctuations in the market. Increased scrutiny is already being applied to the underwriting process for many deals. This reaction may be good at the level of individual project, but will be severely counterproductive if applied to the affordable housing industry at large.
To date, the path to crediting borrowers with the benefits of green building has been rocky and not well followed. Much effort was put into establishing the energy-efficient mortgage and later, a location-efficient mortgage. Both products credited single-family purchasers with additional income, based on assumptions regarding lower utilities in Energy Star homes or lower transportation costs when homes are close to transit. With more income the borrower could afford a slightly more expensive home, which was one way to cover the increased costs associated with the green features. These are good ideas, but by focusing on the income side of the equation in a period when mortgage lenders were rolling out much more aggressive income-enhancing products, both the EEM and LEM were largely unused by mortgage underwriters.
To be truly attractive, the green loans needed to address the loan-cost side of the equation, or the interest rate. This is how people shop for loans and is the context in which interest in the green-based products would be attractive. It also makes sense because if green buildings are more stable in terms of utilities and maintenance there should a reduction in risk and in turn an ability calculate a more accurate risk-adjusted return (or lower interest rate) While no major commercial mortgage lender had put a reduced-rate green product on the market before the housing lending market started to unravel, some interesting ideas were being put forward.
Perhaps the best developed proposal to date came from the State of New Mexico Mortgage Finance Authority. Their proposal was to offer a home loan at 50 basis points below current interest rate to buyers of certified green homes. They’re reasoning behind the reduction was this “In recent year, the affordable housing community has come to recognize that energy-efficient environmentally-friendly design and building methodologies can make significant contributions to both environmental protection and community sustainability and can create housing that is both healthy and less costly for residents to own and operate. ” Unfortunately the program was launched just months before “creative” mortgage lending ceased to be seen as a good thing. At this point the program still exists on paper but it is unclear if the product will weather the current financial lending storm.
The lending world would do well to take this market turmoil as an opportunity to reexamine underwriting criteria to determine if the information requested is actually productive at reducing risk, or if other information would be more useful. And if important data is being overlooked or ignored, now is the chance to introduce it into the process. The design and construction of green buildings has seen incredible growth and sustained innovation over the past decade. It is time for the financial community to catch up. Instead of focusing on how to leverage short-term profits, efforts should be redirected to determine how to best value the long-term benefits of going green.
What do you think? Leave us a comment.
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Walker Wells, AICP LEED AP, is Director of the Green Urbanism Program at Global Green USA and the editor and co-author of Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing.
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About Walker Wells
Walker Wells, AICP LEED AP, is Director of the Green Urbanism Program at Global Green USA and the editor and co-author of Blueprint for Green Affordable Housing. He is a member of the American Institute of City Planners and is a LEED Accredited Professional.
Terry Tamminen: Cap, Baby, Cap
Political conventions are largely mass entertainment for the party faithful, punctuated by self-serving interpretations of both current events and history. Like summer big-budget movies, this year’s Democratic and Republican sequels were replete with familiar heroes and villains, funny costumes, and predictable dialogue. But instead of “I’ll be back” or “Make my day”, this year’s installments will be remembered for a punchline of a different kind — “drill, baby, drill.”
More than once during the Republican convention, the crowd chanted that slogan in response to the numerous calls for more oil drilling in the US. Like some mystic initiation rite, those intonations and chanted responses highlighted the degree to which a significant part of the American public still suffers from the delusion that our energy supply — and prices — will be bent to our will by some wave of a magic wand. Make no mistake, this is not solely the fantasy of Republicans, but the choice of oil drilling as the theme for their week on center stage merely highlights the need for a reality check for us all.
First, let’s get one thing straight — there’s almost nothing that politicians can do about the price of oil or fuel. They can investigate “speculators”, but there’s nothing illegal about investing in commodities and reselling them at a profit — and we call them “investors” when the same methods are applied to gold or stocks — while these kinds of transactions add little to the price of gas anyway. They can facilitate drilling along our coasts or in wildlife preserves, but it takes nearly a decade to bring new resources to market (so no short-term price relief) and there are no untapped reserves that would offset so much of our 80 million barrel per day global addiction that prices would be affected.
But there might be one rationale for more domestic exploitation of oil. If we capped our use and then started incentivizing the alternatives, so demand would be reduced every year, it would make a lot of sense to move our oil supply chain closer to home until we just wouldn’t need it anymore. Without the cap, we’re trying to cure the addict by increasing the supply of the drug, but as long as we are using oil, perhaps we should bear all of the impacts — despoiled landscapes, impoverished villagers, and destruction of air and water supplies. If our communities and coastlines suffered the same fate as those of Nigeria or Ecuador, perhaps more people and politicians would support a cap and whatever else it took to break the addiction once and for all.
In four years, when the party hats are donned and balloons are again released from the rafters, perhaps the chant will evolve — perhaps we will evolve. If we do, the chant that fills the halls then might just be “cap, baby, cap.”
What do you think? Leave us a comment.
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Terry Tamminen is author of Lives Per Gallon: The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction. You can visit him at www.terrytamminen.com.
About Terry Tamminen
From his youth in Australia to career experiences in Europe, Africa and the United States, Terry Tamminen has expertise in business, farming, education, non-profit, the environment, the arts, and government. Tamminen is a U.S. Coast Guard-licensed ship captain, has run a real estate company, a recreational services business, a tropical fish breeding business, a sheep ranch, and assisted Nigeria with the creation of their first solid waste recycling program. An accomplished author, Tamminen’s latest book, Lives Per Gallon: The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction, is a timely examination of our dependence on oil and a strategy to evolve to more sustainable energy sources. Tamminen helped to found and lead the Santa Monica Baykeeper, the Environment Now Foundation, and the Frank G. Wells Environmental Law Clinic at the University of California Los Angeles. In 2007, he was named the Cullman Senior Fellow and Director of the Climate Policy Program of the New America Foundation, and an Operating Advisor to Pegasus Capital Advisors. Tamminen was appointed as the Secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency and the Chief Policy Advisor to the Governor. He continues to advise the Governor on energy and environmental policy. He currently travels throughout the world, lecturing and providing private consulting services to clients, including several Governors and Canadian Premiers on climate and energy policy.
Elizabeth Grossman: McCain and Palin’s Environmental Policies
“I beg to disagree with any candidate who would say we can’t drill our way out of our problem,” says Alaska Governor Sarah Palin – What his VP pick says about McCain’s environmental policy
Upon learning that Senator John McCain had chosen Alaska Governor Sarah Palin for his vice-president my immediate thoughts were: 1) oil, 2) the New York Times photograph of a polar bear swimming in the Chukchi Sea, apparently heading towards the nearest ice some 400 miles away, and 3) what choosing Governor Palin says about a McCain administration’s energy, environmental and science policies.
The news media has immediately focused on Governor Palin’s personableness, her experience, strong “pro-life” position, NRA membership, and efforts to reform Alaska’s government corruption. Here are some other notes to consider:
With Arctic Sea ice at its lowest point since measurements began – scientists assessing Arctic conditions say what’s happening indicates we’re moving past the point of no return – under Governor Palin the State of Alaska filed suit against the Department of the Interior to stop the Endangered Species Act listing of polar bears. Alaskans don’t need other places telling us what to do, says Palin. Although she’s fished commercially, she supports the Pebble Mine – what would be North America’s largest open pit copper and gold mine – that would threaten Bristol Bay’s wild sockeye salmon run, the largest in the world.
Palin established a sub-cabinet committee on climate change but doesn’t believe global warming is caused by humans. She strongly favors oil and gas drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and has called the area under consideration “flat and barren.” Those opposed to drilling in ANWR (a group that would include former President Jimmy Carter), she labeled “extremists.” A Wall Street Journal column called her “penchant” for increased oil and gas exploration “even bigger than John McCain’s.” And in July, Palin told Investor’s Business Daily, “I beg to disagree with any candidate who would say we can’t drill our way out of our problem….” Palin is eager to see to see oil extraction in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas – areas now literally on the front lines of climate change. She’s been praised for standing up to big oil companies. What this entails, however, is negotiating better deals for Alaska, a state whose economy depends on oil revenue.
Palin voices respect for animals but opposed a bill that would ban aerial hunting of wolves - a practice authorized under her administration’s predator control policy, which includes killing of grizzly and black bear mothers and cubs, and bear-baiting – previously not allowed in Alaska. In September 2007, dozens of scientists signed a letter to Palin, protesting these practices and urging her to re-examine the biological and ecological basis of Alaska’s predator control programs. As for science in a McCain administration, if his VP has a say as she did during her gubernatorial campaign, it would support teaching creationism alongside of evolution.
There are hard questions about energy and environment to be asked of Obama and Biden but Biden’s League of Conservation Voters ratings ranged from 88 to 96% until missed votes lowered his 2007 score to 67%. McCain’s average score is just shy of 28%. It was 0 in 2007 when he missed every environmental vote – including bills to increase energy efficiency and consider global warming’s impact on water resources (all bills Biden and Obama voted for). Meanwhile Obama’s first term rated 96% and like Biden dropped to 67% due to missed votes last year.
Governor Palin may bring fresh personal energy to the McCain ticket and she clearly relishes time in the great outdoors, but her record does not signal a fresh policy direction for Republicans on energy or the environment.
What do you think? Leave us a comment.
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Elizabeth Grossman is the author of High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health.
About Elizabeth Grossman
Elizabeth Grossman is the author ofHigh Tech Trash, Watershed: The Undamming of America (Counterpoint Press, 2002), and Adventuring Along the Lewis and Clark Trail (Sierra Club Books, 2003). She is also the co-editor of Shadow Cat: Encountering the American Mountain Lion (Sasquatch Books, 1999). Grossman’s writing has also appeared in a variety of publications, including Amicus Journal, Audubon, California Wild, Cascadia Times, Chicago Tribune, Environmental News Network, Grist, The Nation, New York Times Book Review, Newsday, Oregonian, Orion, the Patagonia catalogue, Salon.com, Seattle Times, Washington Post, and Yes! A native of New York City, she has a BA in literature from Yale University. She now lives a minute’s walk from the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon. When not at her desk writing she's out exploring—hiking, camping, paddling, sketching, and watching birds.
