Tag Archives: energy efficiency

GreenBiz

How to jump-start the vehicle-based smart grid | GreenBiz

The triple tragedy that struck Japan in March 2011 is already remaking global energy markets. In the wake of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, public outrage over the meltdown delayed or derailed nuclear energy’s promised renaissance in many markets.

Yet if Japan’s tragedy hastened the demise of one energy technology, it may have jumpstarted another. In the year since, as Japan struggled to cope with crippling shortages of electric capacity, a handful of automakers have brought to market appliances that convert electric vehicle batteries into systems that can provide backup power to homes and help support the teetering grid.

In April, Mitsubishi Motors unveiled a portable adaptor, the MiEV power Box. For roughly $1,800, the appliance lets owners of MiEV electric cars plug in, and draw up to 1.5 kilowatts. A month later, Nissan followed suit with its Leaf to Home, a $7,000 device that, drawing power from a Leaf EV, can power a typical Japanese home for up to two days. Toyota too is demonstrating a similar system linked to its plug-in Prius hybrid in 10 homes and plans to launch a commercial version next year, if all goes well.

For the thousands of Americans suffering through power problems this summer—due to a punishing heat wave and storms in the mid-Atlantic—the appeal of these technologies is surely tantalizing. The case for EVs would sure seem more compelling if consumers knew the Chevy Volt or Nissan Leaf in their garage could also power their homes during an outage.

In fact, vehicle to grid, or V2G, has emerged as a sort of holy green grail. All manner of energy gurus — from Google.org to Rocky Mountain Institute-founder Amory Lovins to the DOE to Wired magazine — have recognized V2G as a grand solution to many of the problems that bedevil our grid and transportation fleet.

The promised benefits go well beyond household backup. As consumers buy more EVs, the combined stock of batteries offers utilities a low-cost path to grid-scale storage—why pay for grid batteries, if utilities can “borrow” EVs to perform the same trick? In turn, cheaper storage capacity paves the way for more solar panels and windmills by making it easier to store their notoriously variable output. And since utilities today pay for the sorts of storage services EVs might deliver, V2G systems could earn cash payments for EV owners, thereby lowering the cost of EVs and boosting their sales.

Yet despite Japan’s new systems, a comprehensive V2G solution remains years off. “[They are] a good first step, but they essentially turn the car into an expensive backup generator. There’s still a big leap to V2G,” says Ted Hesser, Energy Smart Technologies analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

In Japan, those new systems can support the grid indirectly, by feeding power back to the households and reducing their pull from the grid. But for now, they cannot link to the grid: by regulation, they’re strictly vehicle-to-home, or V2H, Ali Izadinajafabadi, a Tokyo-based analyst for Bloomberg New Energy Finance wrote in an email.

To make the leap from V2H to V2G will require navigating a thicket of barriers, including funding investment needs, upgrades to grid software, and creating cooperation between industry players who, so far, haven’t been eager to play.

The first of these barriers is a simple lack of standardization for two-way EV connections. It took big automakers years to agree on technical standards on how one-way charging plugs would be built. The effort didn’t account for two-way flow of power. Already dogged by high-costs and reliability concerns over EVs, carmakers are wary of imperiling warranty terms, or adding to the material and engineering costs to create two-way plugs that might not ever be used.

“It’s not that it can’t be done,” says Mark Duvall, Director of Transportation Research at EPRI, the utility industry’s policy research arm. “The automakers, utilities and the others involved have had a lot of other challenges to solve first.”

The Japan solution, Duvall explains, cleverly works around this barrier by offloading the technology necessary to manage the power flow out of the car into a standalone device. Both the Nissan and Mitsubishi systems tap into the EV batteries through high-power, 440-volt direct-current connections, which remain rare in the U.S.

Then there’s the closely related problem of the lack of a smart grid. For V2G networks to deliver grid-scale benefits, they will have to be connected into advanced systems able to communicate to vast numbers of EVs, in real time, to orchestrate hundreds of small power sources so that they behave as a single sizeable resource that can be tapped by grid mangers such as PJM. Those systems are taking shape, “But they’re not there yet,” says Bloomberg’s Hesser.

Another scale problem: there aren’t yet enough EVs on the market to make big V2G plays of interest to utilities. Sales have been steady, but slow. Pike Research recently postponed until 2018 the year in which it projects EVs will hit 1 million in the U.S. Until they reach a critical number, they’re too thinly dispersed, and too few in number to provide megawatt-scale storage and other power services that interest utilities, adds Hesser.

Lastly, however appealing they look on paper, the economics of V2G networks remain less than compelling for EV owners, especially if early systems run as high as Nissan’s $7,000 unit in Japan.

Last year, NRG Energy unveiled a pilot program called eV2g. Targeting commercial fleets, the company estimates that each vehicle would net $440 per year, Erica Gieswrites in Forbes.com.

A 2010 study by CMU looked at consumer (not fleet) V2G. The researchers used market information on the value of the sorts of near-, medium-, and long-term energy storage services V2G networks could provide and estimated the total annual value for an individual EV owner at not more than $250.

These guesses also underestimate the costs utilities face to market these programs as well. “You have to convince consumers to adopt this very new way of owning a vehicle,” says Hesser. As we’ve seen with EVs, “That takes a massive amount of marketing and education.”

What then will it take to get V2G off the ground here? Progress will continue, to be sure. Writing in the New York Times Wheels blog, green car guru Jim Motavalli reports that Nissan and Mitsubishi are both evaluating the option of adapting their V2H systems to the U.S. Meanwhile, pilot scale V2G efforts, run by the DOE, NRG and others are ongoing — but they involve only tens or hundreds of vehicles.

Such projects won’t get to commercial scale anytime soon. For V2G to link up millions of vehicles, and fulfill its green promise, Hesser believes the industry will have to push the technology, rather than wait for consumers to pull it. “For V2G to work, it means lining up the interests of vehicle owners, carmakers, smart grid players,” he says. “There’s just too many players for this to happen anytime soon on its own.”

He likens the challenge to the conundrum facing energy-efficient appliances. In that market, the value of energy savings were too low, or spread out, to motivate consumers. So the DOE stepped in to establish efficiency and technology standards that have delivered huge aggregate energy savings.

Specialized commercial fleets also show early V2G promise. An MIT study cited by CleanTechnica.com suggests that fleets may offer a sweeter spot for V2G deployments, at least early on. Trucks or buses, after all, require bigger battery packs. And because they park in the same area, they offer big battery capacity in a single location, making them easier to orchestrate. The study estimates earnings potential of up to $1,700 per truck.

Very high prices for energy could jump start V2G, too. Consider Nuvve — to date, the leading commercial scale V2G effort in the world. Started in 2011, the company is based in Denmark where, importantly, electricity rates are roughly four times higher than in the U.S. Plus, a third of electric power comes from variable renewable sources such as wind, so storage services are paid at a high rate.

Based on business plans mapped out by Zachary Shahan at CleanTechnica.com, EV owners in Nuvve’s network will be able to rake in up to $10,000 from V2G services over a vehicle’s lifetime.Finally, there’s the hard-to-price appeal of backup for blackouts. The U.S., luckily, hasn’t faced power problems as dire as Japan’s. But if blackouts multiply, necessity may spur V2G invention here too.

GreenBiz

Starbucks’ green scorecard: A few full cups, two half empty | GreenBiz

Starbucks' green scorecard: A few full cups, two half empty

Starbucks’ latest self-assessment of the impact of its operations on the globe — measured in terms of energy, the environment, communities and agriculture — reflects healthy progress, moderated by a dash of frustration on some challenging fronts.

Call it: A few full cups and a couple half empty.

The good news is big gains on renewables, energy efficiency and cup recycling. Water consumption rose, however, and use of reusable cups has barely budged.

At its annual shareholders meeting today, Starbucks released its 11th annual Global Responsibility Report, detailing the coffee giant’s performance in 2011. Check out the report at www.starbucks.com/GRreport. I got an advance look at the report, along with the opportunity to speak with Ben Packard, Starbucks’ vice president of global responsibility.

Here’s my take on what’s full, half full, or half empty in the 2011 report.

Full cups

Front-of-store recycling. Starbucks has been chiseling away at a commitment to boost the recyclability of its cold and hot beverage cups for many years. It has set interlinked goals of developing “comprehensive recycling solutions for our paper and plastic cups by 2012” and implementing “front-of-store recycling in our company owned stores by 2015.” (Starbucks has nearly complete recycling rates for cardboard packaging from its receiving, replenishment and other back-of-store operations.)

The goals are daunting: About 80 percent of the Starbucks’ containers leave its stores and, of the share that can be re-captured on site, recyclers have shown little love for the hard-to-reprocess plastic-lined paper cups. (The chain’s plastic cups, made of No.1 plastic, are proving somewhat easier to sell into recycling flows.)

Boosting recycling of paper cups, in particular, has required near herculean efforts — not just putting out a bin in the front of a store, but ensuring that haulers and recyclers in a given market will take the cups and process them into new materials. The chain has piloted recycling in a variety of cities, including New York in 2010, an effort profiled by Jonathan Bardelline in GreenBiz here.

As one of a series of city-by-city trials, Starbucks has run a pilot in Chicago area stores, for example, to take used cups, and remake them into napkins that come back to the store. To lick this problem, the coffee chain has instigated three industry wide Cup Summits, inviting competitors, peers and service providers to collaborate on recycling solutions.

The efforts are showing progress. In 2011, Starbucks saw a big gain in the share of its stores with front-of-store recycling, to 18 percent of company-owned stores in US and Canada, up from 5 percent in 2010. The number of sites where you can drop your white and green cup into a recycling bin now exceeds 1,000.

The fastest progress, Packard said, has been in “big markets where conditions were right in terms of hauling, recycling infrastructure and demand for end products.” These include most of Canada, Chicago, and parts of Southern California.

Energy per store and LEED. After resetting its energy efficiency targets in 2010, the chain made big gains over the past year. Working towards a goal of cutting its energy intensity by 25 percent by 2015 against a 2008 baseline, the coffee giant’s progress is gaining momentum.

It notched an improvement of 7.5 percent, bringing down to 6.29 kwh the average electricity used per square foot per store per month in company-owned stores in the U.S. and Canada. In 2008, that figure started out at 6.8 kwh

The biggest slice of those gains, Packard explained, came from replacing in-store lighting with LEDs.

.The next frontier of efficiency, he explained is wiring up stores to enable real time remote monitoring and control of HVACs, ice makers and other big energy users.

In a related development, Starbucks reported that three quarters of its newly built company-owned stores (121 of 161) have achieved LEED certification. That share is constrained, Packard explained, in part because Starbucks has limited control over the environment of some its buildings it leases space in.“

Renewable energy. Towards a 2015 goal of buying all of its electric power from renewable sources, the coffee chain reported a big increase in the total volume of green power it bought in 2011: 873 megawatt hours (mwh), up from 580 mwh last year.

Yet despite that big uptick, the share of renewables of total power the company reported appears to have retreated to 50 percent, from 58 percent last year.

What gives? Previous data covered U.S. and Canada only, while for 2011 the coffee chain tallied up its global purchase of renewables — a good move.

Half full

Water. In past years, Starbucks has made laudable gains cutting the volume of water used in its outlets by, for example, by shutting off the all-day flow of water through “dippers,” used to rinse kitchenware.

From 2008 through 2010, those efforts cut water use by nearly a fifth, to less than 20 gallons per square foot of retail space per month.

But in 2011, that figure edged back up by 5 percent. While some of the culprit was higher sales of beverages, the main culprit, Packard told me, are revisions to the way pitchers are cleaned.

That’s under close scrutiny for next year. Plus, “We’re working with equipment vendors to see what we can squeeze out there — from water filtration, to ice makers, it all adds up,” said Packard.

Half empty

Re-useable cups. One of the biggest steps Starbucks could take to lower the impact of its operations would be to get its customers to switch to reusable tumblers. Even though its cups are made of 10 percent recycled pulp, the billions of hot beverages it serves annually translate into virgin trees being cut, pulped, cooked and formed into paper — a very energy intensive process.

Yet breaking customer’s cup-to-go habit remains one of the most stubborn tasks on Starbuck’s eco-punch list. GreenBiz first highlighted the slow progress in 2010.

The chain served just 1.9 percent of total beverage sales in reusable containers last year. That figure has barely budged since 2009, when it debuted at 1.5 percent. That same year, the chain set out a goal of serving 25 percent of beverages in “reusable serverware or tumblers” by 2015.

With this report, Starbucks has revised that target: To serve 5 percent of beverages in “personal tumblers” by 2015.

Packard explained that the goal has proven elusive for a number of reasons. Given that about a fifth of sales are consumed on the premises, “We thought we could effectively boost the use of in-store ceramics,” he said, to make up the bulk of that 25 percent goal. Yet that’s proven challenging: Shrinkage from breakage and theft of the mugs is another barrier.

Spurring the use of tumblers isn’t much easier. Starbucks trialed some behavioral incentives to boost tumbler use in Seattle test sites, but found the response lower than it hoped for. Starbucks currently offers customers a dime discount if they bring their own mug.

For 2012, Packard said, the chain is rebooting efforts to encourage the use of ceramic-ware in store. The latest store designs position reusable mugs in plain sight behind baristas, cuing customers to opt for ceramic and accelerating order processing.

Increasing the value of the 10-cent cup discount isn’t something Starbucks is likely to tinker with. “I don’t think it’s the amount, necessarily” said Packard, “Charging 5 cents for plastic bags wasn’t what triggered the big switch there. It was part of a larger behavioral shift.”

Fair point. But I’m not sure Starbucks should let go of that lever. In the case of plastic bag fees, the value of that nickel charge was probably less important than the repetition of the message that the bag comes at a cost.

Makes me wonder: Perhaps a similar tact could drive greater change at Starbucks? Rather than only reward the virtuous behavior of bringing in a tumbler, why not also identify more clearly the cost of each paper cup in an order.

Without changing prices, the chain could, for instance, simply break out a nickel “cup cost” charge on every receipt. It’d be critical to communicate to consumers that this isn’t an extra fee, but an existing cost they can avoid — and then some — by bringing in a tumbler. It’s worth a shot, or two.

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I’ve focused mostly on resource use and recycling here. Starbucks has also reported progress in its coffee farming and processing program, labor and community issues. Here’s the company’s summary of its work:

Youth Action Grants: Starbucks exceeded its 2015 community goal to engage 50,000 young people in community activities by engaging more than 50,000 in 2011.

Coffee Purchasing: Increased purchases of coffee sourced under C.A.F.E. Practices from 84 percent to 86 percent in 2011.

Farmer Support: Starbucks provided $14.7 million to organizations that make loans to coffee farmers, working toward a goal of $20 million by 2015.

Forest Carbon Programs: Continued work in coffee-growing communities in Chiapas, Mexico, and Sumatra, Indonesia, through Starbucks partnership with Conservation International, demonstrating how coffee farmers can adapt to and address climate change while increasing their income.

Community Service: Starbucks put a special focus on community service for its 40th anniversary celebration. In 2011, Starbucks more than doubled the number of hours from the year before with 442,000 hours contributed. Starbucks is working toward its goal of generating one million hours annually by 2015.
Photo of a latte via Shutterstock.com. Infographics courtesy of Starbucks.

GreenBiz

Amory Lovins on ‘Reinventing Fire’ with convergence and innovation | GreenBiz

Amory Lovins on 'Reinventing Fire' with convergence and innovationFor energy visionary Amory Lovins, the antidote for America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels is convergence on the grandest of scales.

His recipe: We must cease engaging the nation’s energy challenges one by one, as we have long tried. Rather, companies, planners and experts must devise hybrid solutions that solve parallel problems facing the U.S.’s most energy-intensive sectors — buildings, electricity, industry and transportation.

Speaking with Joel Makower on stage yesterday at GreenBiz’s VERGE conference in Washington D.C., Lovins reviewed some of the ways this can be done, as laid out in his latest book, “Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era.” The culmination of four decades of work by Lovins and theRocky Mountain Institute — the think tank he founded and chairs — Reinventing Fire maps out an radically ambitious vision to expand the U.S. economy by roughly 2.5-times by mid-century, without using coal, oil or nuclear energy.

Cutting the fossil fuel use is only part of the benefit. By combining efficiency gains — and reducing energy use — Reinventing Fire foresees a much larger economy while saving some $5 trillion in net present value costs, compared with business as usual.

And this can all be done with no new technologies, no acts of Congress, with administrative decisions and led by business, for profit. Lovins explained: “None of these strategies required an Act of Congress. They could all be done administratively or at a state level.”

An example: The majority of states still reward utilities for selling more power, rather than cutting the bill. Reversing this is critical to enlisting utilities in the push to improve efficiency. Altering rules to encourage fair interconnection and open competition on the grid is controlled by FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), and needs no legislative overhauls.

Lovins has been thinking very big for a long time. Getting to these goals, he argues, is about scaling up our thinking — a tough challenge for policy makers and technicians trained to think incrementally. “If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it,” said Lovins, quoting a line attributed to Eisenhower. “Sometimes a problem can’t be solved not because it’s too big, but rather because the values were drawn so narrowly that it didn’t encompass enough options, degrees of freedom and synergies to make it solvable.”

Another unique element of RMI’s strategy is how Lovins and his team approach the process of innovation. Rather than focus on technology and policy, Lovins said his team factors in design — with deep understanding of process technologies, such as how carbon fiber can be used to radically cut vehicle weight, and business strategy. By getting competitive rewards right, he explained, there is scant need to regulate many of these transformations.

The triumvirate of buildings, cars and the grid offer an example of the synergies has RMI identified. Buildings consume three-fourths of our power, yet neither buildings nor the grid have meaningful ability to store energy. Vehicles meanwhile are electrifying, with the development of hybrid and battery-powered cars. By converging electrified vehicles with buildings and the grid, Lovins explained, the car’s battery pack can provide both transportation and back-up abilities: The grid can feed renewables to it and buildings can draw from it. “It’s much easier to solve the automotive and electricity problems together than separately,” Lovins said.

Indeed, remaking the grid from its original centralized design, Lovins explained, represents one of the greatest challenges ahead, but that comes with enormous rewards.

“Networked island-able microgrids” is a mouthful, but describes Lovins’ vision where energy is generated locally from solar, wind and other resources and used by hyper-efficient buildings. When each building, or neighborhood, is generating its own power, with links to other “islands” of power, the security of the entire network is vastly improves.

As our grid becomes increasingly vulnerable to faults from equipment failure, willful attack or even sunspot activity, the risk of a cataclysmic national scale grid failure is rising. In the face of hundreds of blackouts in 2005, Lovins said, Cuba reorganized its power transmission into networked island-able microgrids and cut the frequency of blackouts to zero within two years — limiting damage even in the face of two hurricanes. (Check out this case study for more on Cuba’s efforts.)

Perhaps best of all, and given the location of this discussion in the nation’s politically polarized capital, Lovins’ approach is nonpartisan.

“It doesn’t matter whether you care most about profits, jobs and growth, or about national security, or about health and environmental stewardship,” he said. The best solution for any of these individual problems is the same. So whether or not one believes in climate change, the imperative to boost economic growth justifies the same approach. By focusing on outcomes, rather than motives, Lovins said, disagreements should disappear.

For more on this work, check out Lovins’ recent Q&A with Joel Makower: Amory Lovins’ Burning Quest to ‘Reinvent Fire’

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View the original article here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/03/16/amory-lovins-reinventing-fire-convergence-and-innovation

GreenBiz

HOW GREENER cities are leading the way | GreenBiz

Convergence is often be intangible. The technologies of data, communications, buildings and transportation are rapidly merging, steadily enhancing one another in subtle ways. But convergence can also be tangibly real. For instance, humanity is inexorably concentrating in cities, enabled by many of those invisible technologies.

Discussions of the interplay of these trends — invisible technology and visible cities — took center stage Wednesday at GreenBiz’s VERGE conference in Washington, D.C. Private and public sector leaders mapped out the scale of these dynamics, offering examples of how technologies are evolving to serve the ongoing conglomeration of we humans.

Starting a few years ago, homo sapiens officially become an urban species. Home to over half the world’s population, cities are scaling so fast that by 2050, roughly 70 percent of the global head count will live in urban areas. Compared with the developed West, where most of the population is already urbanized, practically all the growth in the coming decade will happen in the developing world, especially in China and Africa, explained Manish Bapna, Interim President of the World Resources Institute.

Bigger cities are only half the story, though. Urbanization is inextricably linked to income growth, Bapna explained. So while there are roughly 1.8 billion people in the middle class worldwide today, another three billion will join their ranks in the next 20 years. “The pressure this places on resources — water, electricity, food, fuel, and so on — will be unprecedented,” he said.

The scale of these needs, as well as the size of urban markets, are driving corporate strategy to focus new services and products offerings on cities, explained Daryl Dulaney, President and CEO of Siemens Industry. Last March, to tap this potential, Siemens reorganized key operations, totaling $23 billion in revenues, into a new unit called Infrastructure & Cities.

Cities are dense ecosystems that foster innovation and connectedness, and do so with great efficiency, Dulaney said. Pointing to ambitious urban sustainability programs in Philadelphia, New York and Chicago, he said, “I like working with cities. Mayors are focused on getting things done. Politics comes second.”

It’s a similar story in China. Despite Beijing’s reputation for powerful central leadership, WRI found that city mayors were more responsive to efforts to upgrade energy and environmental practices. “The demographic pressure is front and center. Plus, mayors have a lot of authority in China, and they care about seeing their cities succeed,” said Bapna.

By that measure, the mayors of Tsingtao, China, and Philadelphia have much in common. Both see greening their cities as a competitive imperative. Tsingtao’s mayor wants the city to be the most economically attractive in China, and he knows that means he has to attract the best. To do so, he wants to be the greenest city possible.

Philadelphia is rebounding from an era when the City of Brotherly Love had a larger population than today. That’s left the city with amble infrastructure, but a challenge to maintain and optimize it. Green programs can do so, while also making the city more livable, said Alex Dews, Policy and Program Manager in the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability of the City of Philadelphia.

Public-private partnerships are playing a crucial roll in the effort, Dews explained. The city is working with The Dow Chemical Co. on an initiative to test the advantages of installing white roofs on homes.

During hot summer months, bright white roofs are substantially cooler that conventional black tar roofs. The Coolest Block program is re-coating roofs using Dow products and tracking the long-term performance of the converted homes to tally up the benefit. “We look for solutions that are beneficial to government, the public and business,” said Dews.

In another example, Philadelphia has seen recycling rates more than triple in neighborhoods where it rolled out Recycling Rewards, a collaboration with RecycleBank. Philadelphia’s program tracks household recycling by weight, using a system of barcoded bins.

Households earn rewards based on the overall performance of their neighborhoods — the more everyone in a neighborhood recycles, the more each house in that area is awarded at an online account. Credits can be redeemed through RecycleBanks’s network of affiliated brands, ranging from T-Mobile to Subway.

Getting the messaging right took time, Dews explained. Initially there was an epidemic of bin theft. Residents believed that credit was being awarded house-by-house, rather than as a neighborhood average. The city benefits by lowering the volume of waste it sends to dumps.

Looking ahead, cities will remain hotbeds of sustainability innovation. Rising affluence and growing populations will only boost the need for greener ways to house, feed, and care for urban populations.

For cities that are pioneering green programs, the challenge is maturing green efforts, Dews said. The next priority is to deepen pilot environmental programs so that they are institutionalized in city policy.

While much of Philadelphia’s sustainability work has been linked to Mayor Michael Nutter, said Dews, the next step is to make those shifts permanent, so that practices carry over to future administrations, as well as other cities.

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View the original article here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/03/15/why-cities-are-leading-way-green-efforts