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Tag Archives: energy
Island Press authors in the field: March 23, 2010.
On the Huffington Post, Public Produce author Darrin Nordahl calls for changes in food policy:
[T]he rising cost of nutritious food–which is linked to rising energy prices, the weakening dollar, crop failure from more frequent weather aberrations, and produce recalls due to increased instances of pathogen outbreaks–has lead to severe implications for the most fundamental of human necessities: our ability to eat adequately, safely, and nutritiously at an affordable cost.
In San Francisco, a staggering 150,000 people–20% of the city’s population–forego food in order to pay their bills. The San Francisco Food Bank estimates the situation is direr for kids and the elderly of this high-rent city: 1 in 4 children and 1 in 4 seniors do not have sufficient food to meet their daily nutritional needs.
Lives Per Gallon author Terry Tamminen prepares his eulogy for coal power:
In 2009, nearly 15,000 megawatts of proposed coal fired power plants were canceled. To put that in perspective, that would represent about a third of all electricity generating capacity of a state the size of California. This is not a consequence of a slow economy alone – - eight years ago, 36,000 megawatts of new coal plants were on the drawing boards and a mere 13% of those were actually built. If coal is dying as a source of US power generation, what’s the cause and what will replace it as we power up the reviving American economy?
Water expert Peter Gleick spent World Water Day in Soweto:
[L]ike urban slums throughout the developing world, there is almost a complete lack of piped safe water and no formal sanitation. As the pictures below show, raw sewage and garbage flow through the streets and drainage ditches. I’ve traveled a lot. I’ve seen some of the poorest parts of the world, but even for me, what I saw today was a shocking reminder of the wretched conditions that literally billions of people face. It was perhaps no coincidence that the first commercial business you see on the way into Kibera is a coffin maker, nor that many of his coffins are for children.
Don’t Be Such a Scientist author Randy Olson interviews Ed Begley, Jr.:
EB: I think our [celebrities'] duty is the following: If you have had the types of experiences I’ve had, and what I mean is, I’ve been fortunate enough to be part of groups where we have met with Nobel laureates organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists. We’ve sat at breakfasts, at lunches, at dinners, at meetings, in Hollywood, out of Hollywood, where people with Ph.D. after their name have talked to us about climate change, plastics in the ocean, air pollution, ground pollution, groundwater contamination, on and on. We’ve heard from people that are quite knowledgeable, who have been published in good peer-reviewed scientific reputable journals.
Peter Fox-Penner, Smart Power author, argues for utilities that sell energy services:
The first wave of deregulation in the power industry was oversold, with its promoters promising a rate cutting bonanza when modest improvements were more likely, said Fox-Penner.
The move to address climate change carries with it a desire by government to plan out the energy future and while room exists for that, it has to be done carefully and planning should rely more on market forces.
Smart meters mean customers will see the real-time cost of power and that will lead to a more competitive energy services sector.
We are all from Wise County
Want to get really angry about health care and global warming? Not the ginned-up rage of the Obama-was-really-born-in-Kenya crowd, but an anger that fires you up to take action in the name of justice? Anger like the rage felt by so many white Northerners and Southerners in 1963 when they saw Birmingham’s fire hoses turned on patriotic African-Americans, a rage so profound that they too joined the civil rights revolution?
Well I invite you, in a brief audio and video tour, to bear witness to what’s happening in Wise County, Virginia. This Appalachian region, only a few hundred miles from the policy fog in Washington DC, clarifies what the health care/climate policy fight is all about. And if you’re not angry enough to take action after hearing these voices and seeing these images, blame yourself when DC-powerbrokers like Don Blankenship (more on him later) once again have their day.
Let’s start with what’s good about Wise County: its hard-working families. Taking a look at this community calendar, you’ll see all that is right with rural American communities and their urban counterparts. From January to December, the citizens of Wise County celebrate the legacy of Dr. King (January 19), perform plays (March 17), honor our country and its veterans (July 4 and October 8 ) and get involved in all of those glorious community, spiritual and volunteering activities that capture the essence of the American experience. In Wise County, it’s not hard to find the best of ourselves.
But one item on the same calendar reveals what is not right: the July 24 – 26 “Remote Area Medical Health Fair” at the local fairgrounds. Sound innocuous? Well take ten minutes to listen to this recent report from NPR on this event, hosted in Wise County, that served 2,700 ‘tired and desperate’ people from 17 different states. In the words of NPR, it was “a Third World scene with an American setting.” It’s heartbreaking: entire families waiting in line overnight to get just some of the basic health care that they cannot afford. Hear about the young boy with a battered nose and an oozing ear; the single mom with a gallbladder so enlarged it’s about to kill her; and the many patients getting all of their teeth pulled. That’s right – for over 20 years, while DC politicians have been promising a better health care system, your fellow Americans in and around Wise County have been suffering. Angry yet?
And take a guess what industry dominates this part of Appalachia. No surprise, it’s coal. Like in so many parts of the country, excessive reliance on coal means high levels of poverty – the kind of poverty that creates the need for this health ‘fair.’ A recent study out of West Virginia University puts it clearly: “Coal-mining economies are not strong economies. [Coalfield communities] are weaker than the rest of the state, weaker than the rest of the region, and weaker than the rest of the nation.” There’s no doubt that the 1000s of employees of the (increasingly capital-intensive) coal industry are hard-working, admirable people; the problem is that in the 21st Century, coal helps them at the expense of others.
The second part of coal’s legacy in this area is mountain top removal. Take this extraordinary virtual flyover of Wise County to view its devastation. The human effects of this destruction are captured in the words of Wise County’s Kathy Selvage. Listen to her speak about the ‘terrible injustice‘ created by coal, literally in her backyard. And memo to the ‘birther’ crowd: if you think that the fight against mountain top removal is some godless liberal conspiracy, see this testimony from Kathy: “It was my Mother’s custom to have her early morning Bible reading on her front porch. [Because of mountaintop removal,] she was forced to move inside because she could no longer stand the noise, dust, and smell that was invading her ‘Morning with the Lord.’”
In Wise County, poverty, environmental destruction and powerlessness come together, and the result – despite the resilience of hard-working Americans who call it home – is sick families, destroyed mountains, a dysfunctional economy and at least one good lady who finds it harder to pray.
Now there certainly are winners in all of this: take Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Coal, a modern version of Daniel-Day Lewis’s ruthless oilman in There Will Be Blood. It’s hard to know where to start with this guy:
- Blowing up mountains throughout the country
- Buying off judges in West Virginia (Bonus: watch him punch an ABC reporter!)
- Polluting rural communities like no one else
And he seems to be a coward to boot. When James Hansen accepted Blankenship’s challenge to debate global warming, the Massey CEO suddenly backed off.
So climate warriors, let’s get angry: about inexcusable poverty, the destruction wrought by coal, and the lobby-laden system that helps Blankenship thrive while too many of the good people of Wise County suffer.
And if you are angry, what are you going to do about it? Will you be willing to get arrested standing up to Massey Coal, like Jim Hansen? Lead civil disobedience against Dominion Power, right there in Wise County? Or at least, show up to your elected officials’ town meetings and speak loudly and clearly in support of health care and climate change legislation? With some hard work, maybe we can reveal Blankenship and his ilk for what they are: the Bull Connors of the dirty-energy age. There’s no time to waste.
About Jonathan Isham
Jonathan Isham Jr. is Professor of Economics at Middlebury College, where he teaches classes in environmental economics, environmental policy, introductory microeconomics, social capital, and global climate change. Since early 2005, he has spoken widely throughout the nation about building the new climate movement. Isham serves on advisory boards for Focus the Nation, Climate Counts, and the Vermont Governor’s Commission on Climate Change. He was the co-recipient, representing Middlebury College, of the 2005 Clean Air–Cool Planet Climate Champion Award for advancing campus solutions to global warming. In January of 2006, he was featured on National Public Radio’s Radio Open Source program “Global Warming Is Not an ‘Environmental Problem.’” In January of 2007, he was trained in Nashville, Tennessee, as a member of Al Gore’s Climate Project. He has published articles in Economic Development and Cultural Change, Journal of African Economies, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Rural Sociology, Social Science Quarterly, Society and Natural Resources, Southern Economic Journal, Vermont Law Review, and World Bank Economic Review. He was the coeditor of Social Capital, Development, and the Environment (Edward Elgar, 2002) and has coauthored chapters in books published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and New England University Press. He holds an AB in social anthropology from Harvard University, an MA in international studies from Johns Hopkins University, and a PhD in economics from the University of Maryland.
Peter Newman: The Eco-Efficient City
Cities and regions will move from linear to circular or closed-looped systems, where substantial amounts of their energy and material needs are provided from waste streams. Eco-efficient cities will reduce their ecological footprint by reducing wastes and reducing resource requirements.
The fifth city model is the Eco-Efficient City (read about the first city model, the Renewable Energy City; the second city model, the Carbon Neutral City; the third city model, the Distributed City; and the fourth city model, the Photosynhetic City.
A more integrated notion of energy and water as outlined above also entails seeing cities as complex metabolic systems (not unlike a human body) with flows and cycles and where, ideally the things that have traditionally been viewed as negative outputs (e.g. solid waste, wastewater) are re-envisioned as productive inputs to satisfy other urban needs, including energy. The sustainability movement has been advocating for some time for this shift away from the current view of cities as linear resource-extracting machines. This is often described as the eco-efficiency agenda.
The eco-efficiency agenda has been taken up by the United Nations and the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, with a high target for industrialized countries of a 10-fold reduction in consumption of resources by 2040, along with rapid transfers of knowledge and technology to developing countries. While this eco-efficiency agenda is a huge challenge, it is important to remember that throughout the Industrial Revolution of the past 200 years, human productivity has increased by 20 000 per cent. The next wave of innovation has a lot of potential to create the kind of eco-efficiency gains that are required.
The urban eco-efficiency agenda includes William McDonough’s ‘cradle to cradle’ concept for the design of all new products, and new systems like industrial ecology where industries share resources and wastes like an ecosystem. Good examples exist in Kalundborg, Germany and Kwinana, Australia.
The view of cities as a complex set of metabolic flows might also help to guide cities dealing with those situations (especially in the shorter term) where considerable reliance on resources and energy from other regions and parts of the world still occurs. Policies can include sustainable sourcing agreements, region-to-region trade agreements, urban procurement systems based on green certification systems, among others. Embracing a metabolic view of cities and metropolitan areas takes global governance in some interesting and potentially very useful directions.
This new paradigm of sustainable urban metabolism (seeing them as complex systems of metabolic flows), will require profound changes in the way cities and metropolitan regions are conceptualized as well as in the ways we plan and manage them. New forms of cooperation and collaboration between municipal agencies, and various urban actors and stakeholder groups will be required, for instance municipal departments will need to formulate and implement integrated resource flow strategies. New organizational and governance structures will likely be necessary as well as new planning tools and methods, for example cities that map the resource flows of their city and region, will need to see how these new data can be part of a comprehensive plan for integrating the green and brown agendas.
Toronto has a trash-to-can program, which allows them to capture methane from waste to generate electricity. This not only reuses waste and provides an inexpensive energy source, but captures a significant amount of methane that would otherwise be released in the air. Before it reached capacity in its operation, it is estimated that the Keele Valley Landfill generated three to four million dollars annually, and provided enough power for approximately 24,000 homes (Clinton Climate Initiative best practices, www.c40cities.org/bestpractices/watse/toronto_organic.jsp).
One extremely powerful example of how this eco-efficiency view can manifest in a new approach to urban design and building can be seen in the new dense urban neighborhood of Hammarby Sjöstad, in Stockholm. Here, from the beginning of the planning of this new district, an effort was made to think holistically, to understand the inputs, outputs and resources that would be required and that would result. For instance, about 1000 flats in Hammarby Sjöstad are equipped with biogas stoves that utilize biogas extracted from wastewater generated in the community. Biogas also provides fuel for buses that serve the area. Organic waste from the community is returned to the neighborhood in the form of district heating and cooling. There are many other important energy features in the design as well, most importantly perhaps is the close proximity to central Stockholm and the installation (from the beginning) of a high-frequency light rail system that makes it truly possible to live without a private automobile (there are also 30 car-sharing cars in the neighborhood). While not a perfect example, it represents a new and valuable way to see cities, and requires a degree of interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral collaboration in the planning system that is unusual in most cities.
Eco-efficiency does not have to involve just new technology it can also be introduced into cities through intensive use of man-power as in Cairo’s famous Zabaleen recycling system (Box 6). There are many other examples of how cities across the third world have integrated waste management into local industries, buildings and food production.
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.
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.
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 of High Tech Trash, Chasing Molecules, 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.
