All posts by Adam Aston

GreenBiz

Despite naysayers, green energy keeps growing | GreenBiz

Despite naysayers, green energy keeps growing Clean-energy programs find themselves squarely in the cross hairs of the GOP this election season. After pillorying the White House over Solyndra’s collapse, the House has been griping about everything from military spending on renewables to Obama’s failure to lower gasoline prices. So it may not be the best of times to crow about green energy success.

Or maybe it is. After all, while the past year may be remembered for cleantech’s struggles, green-energy companies turned in another banner year in the humdrum businesses of generating renewable electric power and biofuels.

All together, solar PV, wind and biofuel markets expanded by 31 percent last year to $246 billion globally, according to Clean Edge’s 11th annual edition of Clean Energy Trends 2011, a wrapup of key green-energy indicators. The expansion caps a five-year run during which these markets have grown by roughly a third each year.

To be sure, the market issues facing solar PV manufacturers, wind turbine makers and biofuel producers are very different, so I want to be cautious about generalizing. But the three share similarities. All are gaining sales in established markets dominated by fossil fuels. All have matured beyond startup stages and are, accordingly, seeing the emergence of sophisticated, large-scale players.

And, of course, all three have faced souring public support in the past year. Solar subsidies retreated in Europe. And in the U.S., tax benefits were eliminated for corn ethanol, while the wind industry is once again fighting for the renewal of its production tax credits.

Last year, “the industry became a modern-day whipping boy,” Ron Pernick, Clean Edge co-founder and managing director, said in a press statement. “The attacks… overlooked the fact that many clean-energy technologies are becoming increasingly cost-competitive, central to the expansion of energy markets in places like China, Japan and Germany, and a critical hedge against more volatile forms of traditional energy.”

Despite these headwinds, Clean Edge expects the markets to grow steadily — albeit more slowly — in the decade to come. It projects the clean-energy market will expand by 4.6% per year (compounded) to $385 billion by 2021. In all three technologies, falling prices will spur further growth.

Solar photovoltaic: Sales of PV panels globally surged to $91.6 billion in 2011 from $71.2 billion in 2010. The surge is all the more remarkable because it comes amid fast falling unit prices for solar panels. Put another way, dollar sales rose by 29 percent, while the volume of watts installed soared by 69 percent to more than 26 gigawatts worldwide last year from 15.6 gigawatts in 2010. Clean Edge projects that the cost to install solar PV systems will fall from an average of $3.47 per watt globally last year to $1.28 per watt in the next decade. The falling price will make solar PV cheaper than the grid average price in about a dozen U.S. states in that period.

Wind power: The volume of new turbines coming on line also hit a record last year, with 41.6 GW of wind capacity installed. Assuming, as a rule of thumb, that windmills produce about a third of their rated capacity, that’s the equivalent of more than a dozen nuclear reactors. The total spent to build that new capacity hit a record: $71.5 billion, up 18 percent from $60.5 billion in 2010.

Biofuels markets also established a new high in 2011, with $83 billion in global sales, up from $56.4 billion the prior year. Unlike the markets for solar and wind technology — where falling prices were the rule – per-gallon prices for ethanol and biodiesel rose through the year, reflecting the higher costs of feedstocks such as corn and plant oils, as well as higher fossil-fuel prices.

Venture capital. U.S.-based venture-capital investments in cleantech grew by 30 percent to $6.6 billion in 2011, from $5.1 billion in 2010, according to data provided by Cleantech Group. Clean Edge analysis found that cleantech deals accounted for a record 23 percent of the total U.S. venture-capital investments last year.

Just in time for GreenBiz’s VERGE meeting in Washington, Clean Edge’s report also focuses on several key trends highlighting the way that energy technologies, efficiency and infotech are converging to transform business and government practices. These include the potential for “deep” retrofits in commercial buildings; the growth of waste-to-resource business plays; the promise of energy storage on the grid; the U.S. military’s growing emphasis on clean technology and efficiency; and Japan moving into its post-nuclear future.

Check out the Clean Edge’s full report at http://cleanedge.com/reports/charts-and-tables-from-clean-energy-trends-2012 (click on “Download full report” on the left).

Photo courtesy of Vaclav Volrab  via Shutterstock.

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View the original article here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/03/14/despite-naysayers-green-energy-keeps-growing

Global CCS Institute

Lessons form California’s daunting carbon challenge | Global CCS Institute

Among US states, California is leading the race to explore and implement ways to lower its greenhouse gas output. Its goal: to cut emissions to one-fifth of 1990 levels by mid century. As such, other states and nations are closely watching the Golden State’s practices for inspiration and technical guidance.

What then, if a deep, hard look at California’s ambitious plans to lower its greenhouse gas emissions revealed that – even by pursuing an all-out, no-holds-barred mix of today’s technologies and aggressive efficiency measures – the state was only likely to get about halfway towards its goal?

That, roughly, is the conclusion that Jane C. S. Long comes to in a commentary published in the journal Nature last October. Titled Piecemeal cuts won’t add up to radical reductions, her note maps out, with remarkable clarity, the mountainous challenge ahead for California to achieve its climate goal. The bracing conclusion: California can’t just spend or deploy its way to an 80 per cent reduction or beyond – and neither can anywhere else.

Jane’s expertise stems from her role as co-leader of a team of energy analysts who wrote California’s Energy Future: The View to 2050 published in May 2011. By day, she’s principal associate director at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a global leader in research on energy technologies and policy.

One of the important implications that surfaces in Jane’s broader analysis is the central role of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). This is somewhat surprising given that California’s grid is all but coal-free.

California is different from most states, she observes, with 40 per cent of total energy used for transportation, versus 25 per cent nationally. Thus CCS must come into play less so for grid power than to help generate low-carbon vehicle fuels and other applications where neither electricity nor biofuels can substitute for existing fossil fuels.

The model Jane and her team developed strives to avoid what she calls ‘sleights of hand’ where it can be difficult to fully account for the secondary or tertiary impacts induced by switching to new energy forms. For example, rather than simply count solar panels as clean generation, Jane’s model more fully enumerates the impact of electric power generation at night and other times when solar panels are off line.

The analysis reveals that to achieve a 60 per cent reduction – well short of the 80 per cent goal California and many nations are looking to – would require all manner of tough-to-imagine steps:

[The state would have to] replace or retrofit every building to very high efficiency standards. Electricity would have to replace natural gas for home and commercial heating. All buses and trains, virtually all cars, and some trucks would be electric or hybrid. And the state’s entire electricity-generation capacity would have to be doubled, while simultaneously being replaced with emissions-free generation. Low-emissions fuels would have to be made from California’s waste biomass plus some fuel crops grown on marginal lands without irrigation or fertilizer.

Given that California represents a best-case scenario for the rest of the US, Long’s assessment is a compelling case to accelerate the speed and scope of carbon-reduction efforts.

I’ll refrain from diving into the broader implications of her report here – better to check it out in whole. Instead, for the Global CCS Institute’s community, I wrote to Jane to tease out a bit more of her vision of CCS in California’s future. An edited version of our exchange follows.

Adam: You’ve said that CCS has a critical role in helping California achieve its goal of cutting emissions to 20 per cent of their 1990 levels by mid century. How so?

Jane: I would guess that CCS will not play much of a role in meeting the AB32 goals of 20 per cent reductions, but it may play an important role in meeting the longer-term goal of 80 per cent reductions by 2050. Natural gas generation is a large part of California’s electricity portfolio. If this is to continue and meet the emission reductions, CCS would have to be used whether or not that generation was within state or say, by wire from Wyoming.

In the long term, CCS may play a critical role in solving the fuel problem. We are unlikely to have enough biofuel to meet all of our demands for fuel even if we are successful in cutting demand in half through efficiency measures and electrifying everything we can. CCS could be part of a hydrogen scenario where we get hydrogen from methane and sequester the CO2 generated in this process. Or we might use biomass to make electricity and sequester the emissions to create a negative emission credit to counter the continued use of fossil fuels.

Adam: Yet CCS technologies remain immature and under-commercialized. Starting in what years would CCS need to begin entering into California’s energy mix to play this kind of role? And are we already behind that pace?

Jane: If we start now with demonstration projects, it could be possible to have all new fossil generation be using CCS within a few decades. We need that amount of time to be sure the demonstrations are working.

Adam: What lessons does California’s CCS case have for the transportation challenge in other countries?

Jane: The transportation problem in the developing world is really interesting because it’s not clear that countries like India, for example, should electrify automobiles as a first strategy. If their electricity is made with coal without CCS, electrification is not a clear benefit. If they move to de-carbonize electricity, then electrification of transportation and heat makes much more sense.

Adam: I’ve assumed that developing countries such as China and India ought to leapfrog to electric fleets ahead, and skip the oil-burning stage, to whatever degree possible. You’re suggesting that might not be the best bet for the climate?

Jane: The distance countries like China and India have to go to provide enough electricity at low emissions is huge. If having to run cars on electricity means they add twice as much coal-fired electricity without CCS it would be a disaster. As well, the biomass for biofuel problem is likely to be more acute in these countries as they face serious challenges with food supplies. In the same 2050 period that we are looking to more than double energy supply, we are looking to double food supply. As it takes some time to roll over the fleet of automobiles to electric vehicles, it probably makes sense to move forward with electric transportation at some level as this is what we need in the long term, recognizing it will make the need to decarbonize electricity even more acute.

Adam: Writing for the Institute, the Natural Resource Defense Council’s CCS expert, George Peridas, recently summarized California’s progress as “not a whole lot of progress on the CCS front to showcase since last year, but developments are expected soon”. How could the state reorder its CCS priorities to pick up the pace of technology development?

Jane: The state could get behind a demonstration project for a combined cycle gas plant. There are a lot of people skeptical about CCS. We need to have a concrete example that it works. A big issue in CCS is integrating all the complex industrial processes: electricity generation, capture, and storage. We need experience in actually doing what we theoretically ‘know’ how to do.

For an exploration of the broader report, along with further details on the technicalities of the model used in Jane’s analysis, check out Andy Revkin’s interview with Jane at his Dot Earth blog at the New York Times.

GreenBiz

Are green buildings safer? | GreenBiz

Are green buildings safer? Everyone knows that green buildings use less energy to operate. And studies show they’re healthier for occupants, which makes for happier residents and more productive workers.

But safer and more durable? Seems so. A study released this week suggests that greener construction can advance building resiliency.

To me, this link seems intuitive: green buildings are generally designed and built more carefully, with better materials and tighter finishes. It turns out that efficiency-focused features may also help green buildings and their occupants ride out long-term climate shifts — such as droughts or heat waves – and even give an edge in short-term disasters, by staying dry in floods and well sealed during high winds.

The report, produced jointly by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, outlines ways to extend the inherent resiliency of green buildings. Titled “Green Building and Climate Resilience: Understanding Impacts and Preparing for Changing Conditions,” it sets out adaptive strategies that green building pros can deploy. It follows that, like higher efficiency and health benefits, improved durability could boost the market appeal of green structures.

The enhanced quality of a newly built green home or office can be a visceral experience. Doors and windows shut tightly, with an audible “thunk,” like an insulated fridge door. These tight seals are a huge plus for energy insulation: little heat leaks out during the winter, while cool stays in during the summer.

Better sealed, less drafty buildings are a big plus in wind storms too. When tornadoes or hurricanes rake a community, some of the most costly, serious damage is done when wind and water infiltrate a building, sending water deep into hidden cavities. A small opening — whether a missing shingle or a poorly sealed window –can set off a domino effect of damage.

This analysis reminded me of how devastating the impacts of poorly sealed, shoddy construction can be. In 1993, The Miami Herald won a Pulitzer Prize for a Hurricane Andrew-related investigative series, which revealed that some homebuilders had systematically ignored building code to save money. On roofs, for instance, a builder used fewer nails than required by code to attach shingles to plywood or to connect roof beams to walls. The cheat saved pennies but cost billions. During Hurricane Andrew, the builders’ homes were disproportionately devastated when the roofs gave way, leaking disastrously or lifting off completely.

Water is another realm where green design can both protect buildings and enhance the environment. Permeable surfaces that let rain water soak into urban surfaces can dramatically lower the incidence of flash flooding, or overflowing from the storm water system when heavy rains overwhelm sewer systems. In drought-stricken areas, green buildings can capture rainfall, conserve fresh water and reuse grey water.

“In the wake of last year’s disaster activity, with tornadoes across the southwest, flooding from Hurricane Irene and even an earthquake on the East Coast, it is important that we develop and enforce safe and sustainable building codes to make our communities more resilient, and to protect lives and property in times of disaster,” Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said at the National Leadership Speaker Series on resiliency and national security this week.

He called on leaders from major corporations, government, academia, the scientific community and civil society to help advance green building as a complementary strategy to address pre- and post-emergency-management situations, ultimately forging more resilient communities, he said at the event.

Today’s building codes are designed to meet specific regional weather conditions, including the hottest summer days, the coldest winter nights, the highest wind speeds and the risk of floods. “Climate change has the potential to undermine some of these assumptions and potentially increase risks to people and property,” Chris Pyke, vice president at USBGC said in a statement. “There are practical steps we can take to understand and prepare for the consequences of changing environmental conditions and reduce potential impacts.”

You can download a free copy of the report at USGBC. The main body of analysis is only about 40 pages long; the report also includes another 200 pages of reference work on the impacts of climate change in different US region.

Image courtesy of Iakov Kalinin via Shutterstock.

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View the original story here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/03/02/green-buildings-could-be-safer-regular-buildings

Global CCS Institute

With key contracts signed, Summit Power’s Texas CCUS project on track for July groundbreaking | Global CCS Institute

The Texas Clean Energy Project, a 400-megawatt, coal-fired plant designed to perform carbon capture, use and storage recently cleared two key milestones and is moving towards a July groundbreaking.

In February, TCEP inked a deal securing supplies of water and, on Valentine’s Day, the project announced agreements for engineering, construction and maintenance services for the new plant outside Odessa, Texas.

I’ve been keeping an eye on TCEP since last autumn when, on behalf of the Global CCS Institute I spoke with Laura Miller, the charismatic ex-mayor of Dallas who, after leaving public office moved to the Summit Power Group to help advance CCS solutions by becoming TCEP’s project manager.

TCEP is on track to be the world’s first integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) poly-generation facility, as well as one of the world’s cleanest coal-fueled power plants.

Summit Power’s Texas facility is designed to snare 90 per cent of the CO2 it generates, as well as 99 per cent of sulfur dioxide, 90 per cent of nitrogen oxide, and 99 per cent of mercury. Of the roughly 2.5 million standard tons of CO2 the plant will capture annually, about four-fifths will flow via pipeline to West Texas, where it will be shot into the ground to enhance oil recovery. TCEP’s remaining CO2 will be fed to a chemicals production facility to make urea, a feedstock for fertilizer.

Miller explained via email that of its 400-mw gross electric output, TCEP will sell 200 mw to a local utility (more on that below), about 85 mw will power commercial operations to make urea and compress CO2, and another 100 mw will be used internally to run project components.

Sited in Penwell, Texas, about 15 miles west of Odessa, TCEP is scheduled to come on line in 2015. If it can hit that deadline, the project will likely be the second US commercial CCUS facility to be sending CO2 to the oil patch: Southern Co’s 582-mw Plant Ratcliffe Project is currently under construction in Mississippi and is scheduled to fire up in 2014.

With a price tag of US$2.4 billion, TCEP is being financed mostly by private sources and has also been granted US$450 million from the Department of Energy’s Clean Coal Power Initiative.

The recent news: On 14 February, TCEP announced that it had signed engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contracts, as well as a 15-year operations and maintenance (O&M) contract for the new complex. According to a company press release:

The two, firm-price, turnkey EPC contracts that guarantee price, schedule and performance for the integrated coal gasification combined cycle (IGCC) project were finalized in December by the project’s three EPC contractors: Siemens Energy Inc.; Selas Fluid Processing Corp., a subsidiary of The Linde Group; and SK Engineering & Construction, a major Korean contractor. The total value of the EPC contracts is approximately $2 billion.

Selas Fluid Processing and SK E&C will supply a complete chemical block capable of producing syngas by gasifying Powder River Basin coal. A portion of the syngas fuels a Siemens power block, and the balance is used for the production of granulated urea. The chemical block captures 90% of the CO2 from the syngas and compresses the CO2 for sale to the mature, enhanced oil recovery (EOR) market in West Texas. The chemical block EPC contract also includes coal handling, coal gasification based on two Siemens SFG-500 gasifiers, gas cleanup, mercury removal, ammonia and urea production facilities, sulfuric acid plant, water treatment, CO2 compression, site preparation, plant buildings and other goods and services.

In the second EPC contract, Siemens Energy will supply a nominally rated 400MW combined cycle power plant capable of operating on syngas and natural gas. The power block is comprised of an SGT6-5000F gas turbine capable of operating on high-hydrogen syngas or natural gas. The power block includes an air-cooled condenser for plant cooling, which greatly reduces the water needed for the project, and a high-voltage switchyard.

A separate, 15-year O&M contract was also signed for the complete, turnkey operation and maintenance of the entire 600-acre facility, including day-to-day operation, and short term and long term maintenance. The contract, signed by Linde’s Gases Division, includes guarantees of performance and availability by Linde’s Gases Division and Siemens for the full 15-year contract period.

TCEP has cleared most of the other major milestones necessary to begin construction. It has signed a 25-year power purchase agreement to supply 200 megawatts of electric power to the municipal utility of San Antonio, CPS Energy. Whiting Petroleum Corp has agreed to a 15-year deal to buy the plant’s CO2 stream. And Summit has also signed a long-term deal with an un-named company to purchase the plant’s urea output.

Until recently, water supplies were an open question. Texas has been hammered by a millennial drought over the past few years. While the facility is designed to operate using minimal net amounts of water, securing water rights was a lingering challenge. TCEP tied up that loose end in February as well, Miller wrote, with a contract to buy “brackish underground Capitan Reef water” from a landowner west of the project. TCEP will pipe in the water and desalinate it on site.

So what next? Miller wrote to me that TCEP is hoping to close financial terms in June, and to break ground in July.

Before then, only one substantial hurdle remains. TCEP faces a frustrating glitch in the federal tax code, requiring the partnership to pay about US$150 million on its US$450 million federal grant. Summit Power is working with lawmakers to get an exception passed for the quirk. The effort is being led by US Sen. John Cornyn (R., Tex.) and US Congressman Mike Conaway (R., Odessa, Tex.).

Recently, the stakes got higher for TCEP’s success. Delays have slowed a similar project, Hydrogen Energy California (HECA), being planned for a sitebetween San Francisco and Los Angeles. As originally conceived, partners BP and Rio Tinto were working with the DOE to develop an IGCC facility, fuelled by a 3:1 mix of coal and petroleum coke, with full CO2 capture for enhanced oil recovery.

Last May, SCS Energy took over the project, and subsequently tweaked the design to also produce urea, similar to TCEP’s approach. According to an Energy Dept. source involved in the project, the revisions improve HECA’s economic viability and the project is currently progressing through front-end engineering design.

Writing for the Institute, NRDC’s George Peridas recently summarized the obstacles HECA has navigated:

After years of development, the project as we knew it came to an end. The price of power that was required to make the project viable (reported to be in the region of $300/MWh) was, unsurprisingly, not one that tickles the interest of local utilities.

Subsequently, the project changed ownership and management (from Rio Tinto/BP to SCS Energy) and is now undergoing design changes before proceeding with the permitting process afresh. Reportedly, these entail the co-production of fertilizer at the plant, and the use of out-of-state coal for the majority of its fuel needs.

It is not yet clear if and how fast the new version of the project will proceed, but we will likely know more in the coming months.

GreenBiz

Will Greener Shoes and Uniforms Bring Nike More Olympics Gold? | GreenBiz

Will Greener Shoes and Uniforms Bring Nike More Olympics Gold?Nike hopes to win both green and gold at this summer’s Olympics in London.

On Tuesday in New York City, the sporting-goods giant unveiled a new line of sportswear designed to help Olympians go faster, farther and longer. Nike is manufacturing its 2012 Olympic kits using less material — and more recycled plastics — than in the past.

The announcement came as part of a series of “cutting-edge, lightweight performance innovations designed for the track, the basketball court and beyond for this summer,” CEO Mark Parker said.

To me, the most visibly different ecoinnovation is Nike’s Flyknit shoe design.

Instead of the conventional assembly of fabrics, rubber, leather and other materials, the Flyknit comprises a single piece of a flexible mesh knit, a strong yet pliant fabric that fits like a sock over a wearer’s foot.

Eliminating so much material cuts each shoe’s weight by approximately 20 percent to about 160 grams. That may not sound like much, but multiplied by the 40,000 steps it takes to run a marathon, that totals about the weight of a car — a ton or so — that elite marathoners will no longer need to lift, said Martin Lotti, Nike’s global creative director for the Olympics.

U.S. Olympic team members Carl Lewis and Abdi Abdirahman discuss Nike's Flyknit shoe.Less material also means lower environmental impact. It’s an example “that sustainability can improve performance,” Hannah Jones, Nike’s vice president of sustainable innovation, told me.

Nike is rolling out two versions of the Flyknit: a racing flat and a training shoe. Athletes from Great Britain, Kenya, Russia and the U.S. plan to wear the Flyknit at the games. At the event this week, 10-time gold-medal winner Carl Lewis spoke with 2012 Olympic team member Abdi Abdirahman (both pictured at right) about the Flyknit shoes.

A similar idea helped shape the company’s new line of Olympic uniforms. Here, Nike has boosted its use of recycled polyester to produce lighter fabrics for a variety of shorts and tops – and even a wearable racing skin called Nike Pro TurboSpeed. It’s basically a speed suit that’s covered in dimples, which act like the surface of a golf ball, reducing drag by creating a thin layer of turbulence as an athlete cuts through the air.

By making the fabrics from discarded plastic bottles, the recycled polyester fabrics cut energy consumption by roughly a third compared with virgin materials.

Next page: How recycled plastic helps athletes as much as the environment

The national basketball teams from Brazil, China and the U.S. will wear Nike Hyper Elite uniforms made from plastic reclaimed from 22 recycled bottles (pictured below). The shorts are ethereally light, weighing just about 5 ounces, a quarter of the weight of uniforms worn by today’s NBA pros.

Lighter uniforms translate into less fatigue, more comfort and better performance, said Deron Williams of the New Jersey Nets, who endorses Nike and is expected to play for Team USA in the 2012 games.

These products, the USA Basketball tank top and Nike Pro TurboSpeed track suit, are made from recycled plastic bottles.Soccer players tend to be a bit smaller than basketball players, so just 13 bottles are necessary to make each of their kits. Still, it adds up: Nike’s reuse of plastic bottles has diverted more than 82 million of the containers from landfills.

Speaking with me after the announcement, Lorrie Vogel, Nike’s general manager of Considered Design, told me how competitive Nike’s designers are.

“It’s a company full of ex-athletes, where we’re constantly scored on our performance, and green-design benchmarking is no exception,” she said.

I wondered if that competition makes Nike protective of its proprietary-materials innovations. The recipe for an ultra-lightweight shoe that may be worn on the Olympic podium this summer is worth protecting.

The company shares sustainability know-how strategically, Jones told me. New product or new material design recipes are typically strictly confidential, but design tools and shared materials knowledge is just the opposite, she said.

Jones, pictured at right, believes that among the many industries pushing the sustainability frontier, sports gear makers are among the most collaborative. For example, Nike and its competitors, Adidas and Puma, “recognize the benefit of sharing the recipe for green rubber with our suppliers,” she explained. “We know that if our competitors start ordering it too, the price will fall, supplies will improve, and that will lead to the faster change on a larger scale.”

Hannah Jones, vice president of sustainable innovation at Nike, discusses the company's Olympic innovations.Consistent with that collaborative approach to competition, Jones reminded me that today’s announcement follows a burst of intraindustry green-design initiatives that Nike has announced in the past 18 months. These include:

  • Waterless dyeing. Earlier this month, Nike announced it was rolling out a water-free dyeing method. Though limited in application for now, the approach has the potential to radically reduce the enormous volumes of water the industry consume using conventional methods to color textiles.
  • Zero toxins. The waterless dyeing fits into a broader push to cut toxic emissions to nil. Last fall, as part of a coalition that also includes Adidas, C&A, H&M, Li Ning, and Puma, Nike released a roadmap toward a goal of achieving “zero discharge of hazardous chemicals for all products, across all pathways in our supply chain, by 2020.” The initiative ties together separate efforts in water reduction, organic cotton, green chemistry and materials traceability and sustainability.
  • Design tool sharing. Throughout 2011, Nike launched a series of proprietary tools to help designers speed up their selection of sustainable materials. Nike released its Environmental Apparel Design Tool, a data set and calculator incorporating more than a decade’s worth of knowledge about material attributes. The company uses a similar tool for its Considered Design methodology to assess the impact of its products.

As part of her ongoing “How She Leads” series on women in sustainable businesses, Maya Albanese interviewed Hannah Jones for GreenBiz.com earlier this month. Check out their conversation here.

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View the full article here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/02/23/will-greener-shoes-uniforms-bring-nike-more-olympics-gold

GreenBiz

Green Gamification Takes Root in the Big Apple | GreenBiz

Green Gamification Takes Root in the Big Apple

In my green lexicon, “gamification” gets a special prize: it’s among the clunkiest words to enter the sustainability conversation, yet may just have some of the greatest potential to alter the behavior of consumers, employees and households.

Businesses are fast picking up on the promise. Gamification has unique synergy with green behaviors, with a knack for turning virtuous green actions — such as carpooling or switching to CFLs — from worthy but kinda joyless chores into tasks that earn rewards, gain recognition, and can turn ambivalent consumers into eager eco evangelists.

As part of Social Media Week‘s sprawling, 12-city lollapalooza of digital media events, the New York series included a panel entitled “Gamification: Combining Social Media & Game Mechanics to Promote Sustainability” that I caught late last week.

The panel brought together two recently sprouted startups with two established green brands.

Practically Green and The Mutual are both building businesses predicated on the power of gamification to alter green behavior, attract advertisers, and help organizations spur change.

Joining them were two groundbreaking companies, each born from innovative new approaches to recycling,Recyclebank and TerraCycle, each of which is increasingly using gamification to extend its reach.

Here’s a quick run down of how these companies talked about how gamification is changing their businesses.

A Social Media Approach to Greener Behaviors

Practically Green helps organizations become greener by using technology and social networking to educate, motivate and reward people for making green changes to their work and home life.

Conceived in 2009, founder Susan Hunt Stevens took her inspiration for the Boston-based company from LEED, the exhaustive guide to designing and building greener buildings.

But instead of LEED’s focus on building insulation or low-flow faucets, Stevens’ approach tallies up over 400 green behaviors, from commuting by bike to buying local produce.

Speaking on the panel, Stevens described the program as “LEED meets Weight Watchers,” for its blend of points and behavioral reinforcement through peer groups.

One of the challenges with sustainability, Stevens said, is that communicating how and why to do it is tricky. “The content can be technically complex. Some of it is political for some folks. And much of it is preachy.” Gamification breaks down the complexity into small, learnable steps, and depoliticizes the issue, she added.

Working with large organizations including NBC Universal, Eileen Fisher and the Seattle Mariners, Practically Green customizes workplace programs where staff sign in, and register their green behaviors, earning points and badges along the way.

For companies looking at ambitious sustainability programs, Stevens said, the program offers a easy-to-deploy, web-based solution that can quickly speed up employee involvement with green programs. This, by the way, is one way Practically Green earns revenue: charging a dollar or so per month per employee to companies it engages with.

(For more, Practically Green’s Stevens spoke with Chrissy Coughlin for Nature of Business Radio here at GreenBiz last September.)

‘Groupon for Good’

Not yet a year old, The Mutual is a Brooklyn-based startup that has been called “The Groupon for good.”

To join, a member picks a pledge level — say $10 per month — and a charity to steer the donations towards: options include think tanks such as World Resources Institute, conservationists such as Oceana, and climate groups like Carbonfun.org.

The Mutual, in turn, relays four-fifths of the donation to your charity, and uses the remainder — a share that’s on par, or less, than the take of a typical charity fundraiser for overhead — to grow its network of members and business partners.

Members, in turn, are rewarded with perks from business members looking to connect with a big pool of green-minded consumers.

For example, using FourSquare, I checked into a recent Mutual event at Brooklyn Brewery, and thereby qualified for a contest, discounts at the brewery, and earned points online at themutual.com.

“I describe us as a social enterprise that rewards people for donating to charity with Perks from great brands,” said founder and CEO Dan Vallejo.

The startup is scaling fast, with the bulk of early participants from the Bay Area, New York and Boston.

Green Gamification’s Greatest Success Story

Now eight years old, Recyclebank offers one of the best known success stories in the power of green gamification.

Recyclebank’s original business — and still its core offering — is an ingenious system that rewards household recycling. It does so by tracking and identifying how much recycling a given household is putting out on the curb.

In around 300 cities in the U.S. and U.K., public garbage trucks automatically weigh recycling bins, use radio tags to identify which home the material came from, and records the transaction to a web site. Consumers can then track the volume of their recycling online.

That’s all well and good, but the real carrot is the points that the recycling earns for the household. The more a home recycles, the more points they earn.

Consumers can convert those points with a network of scores of well known brands that participate in the tracking program, offering perks that can be redeemed for products and services from the likes of WalMart, Coca Cola to Procter & Gamble, to Bed Bath & Beyond.

The model has proved scalable and increasingly adaptable. Cities like it because it boosts recycling rates, which lowers their landfill costs since more trash is diverted to reuse. Consumers, and especially households where kids get highly involved, like the rewards scheme. And the marketing partners are on board for access to consumers who have proven be top quality prospects, with a high likelihood of redeeming the perks, using the products, and spending more.

That was just the beginning though. In recent years, as Samantha Skey, Recyclebank’s chief revenue officer, told attendees, Recyclebank is proving its business model works for more than just recycling.

The company is expanding its business model, marketing partnerships, and web technology to extend to many other frontiers of green behavior, such as e-waste recycling, responsible junk disposal, and energy reduction.

Growing from Worm Poop to Packaging Reuse

TerraCycle, the Newark, N.J. based brand has evolved into a $20 million-a-year operation, since it was founded in 2001 by Princeton University dropout Tom Szasky.

In a few short years, the company has pivoted but not abandoned its original focus on “worm poop” fertilizer — the innovative organic plant food, packed in recycled bottle, that was brewed from worm-rich compost piles — towards a broader focus on packaging reduction and reuse.

Partnering with schools and numerous major consumer packaged good companies, TerraCycle is capturing both pre- and post-consumer packaging waste to upcycle it: such as converting Capri sun bags into satchels, pencil cases, and other merchandise.

What’s the gamification angle here? Albe Zakes, TerraCycle’s global vice president, media relations, explained: Since TerraCycle’s community skews heavily towards kids and moms, a teachable-game fit the bill.

Partnering with Manhattan-based Guerillapps, TerraCycle developed Trash Tycoon. Played in Facebook, players earn points, and privileges by cleaning up a small town, and building sustainable businesses from the trash. It works like a mash-up between SimCity and Farmville, but with a decidedly green wrinkles. Treehugger.com, for instance, provides real-time news feeds of eco-current events that appear in the game.

Customized to help kids learn about waste and recycling, Zakes explained the game is being customized so that virtual activity mirrors and reinforces the real-world efforts of its classroom brigades, the groups of school kids who raise funds — and compete with other class groups — by recycling packaging materials.

Balancing Real and Virtual to Boost Sustainability

Threading through the discussion was a concern that converting virtual do-gooderism into real world action is a challenge. The panelists acknowledged that there’s a risk that they may be able to induce a player to click a mouse — say, to “like” a green action, or to win a badge — but may not be able to actually spur that person to do the deed.

In Practically Green, Stevens explained, finding the mix of virtual incentives and balancing them against real world programs in the workplace is as much art than science. What’s more, she said, the workplace is a powerful arena in which to educate and stimulate such behaviors, because many people are driven more by peer perception in work environments than they are in their private lives.

This spurs competitive behaviors and, interestingly, lowers the risk of false claims where folks claim to have completed a green task, such as recycling their office paper: “Their friends and colleagues know, and they notice, and will call out their friends if they’re cheating,” explained Stevens.

For TerraCycle, which built its business in part from the fabric of social dynamics at schools, Zakes explained its game actually complements and extends an existing foundation of existing actions.

Still, at the splash screen of the game, there’s this encouragement: “Trash Tycoon is great, but make sure to get outside and collect some actual recycleables once in a while.”

Held in collaboration with Baruch College’s Robert Zicklin Center for Corporate Integrity at the City University of New York (CUNY), the panel was curated by Ashok Kamal (a graduate of Ziklin’s MBA program) who co-founded Bennu, which provides social media marketing for green businesses.

For a broader look at the origins and breadth of gamification, check out Kamal’s overview of the gamification phenomenon here in GreenBiz.

Last but not least, you can watch a video of the full panel presentation from Social Media Week through the group’s website. Scroll to the very bottom of the page, where you’ll find two video links. The lower of the two is the first 90 minutes, including the four company presentations. The video above that is the final half hour, comprised mostly of Q&A.

Joystick photo via Shutterstock.

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Read the original story here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/02/22/green-gamification-takes-root-big-apple

GreenBiz

Venture capital investment in cleantech shrank by 4.5% in 2011 | GreenBiz

Why Sinking Cleantech Investment Data Aren't the End of the World

In cleantech, as in most realms of emerging technology, venture capital acts as a sort of incubator for the youngest, most promising technologies. That’s why it’s a cause for concern when venture capital investment slows or shrinks.That’s just what happened last year. In 2011, venture capital investment in early-stage cleantech companies fell by 4.5 percent, to $4.9 billion, compared with the 2010 tally, according to a round-up of full-year data by Ernst & Young published Feb. 1, based on data from Dow Jones VentureSource.Whether this downtick is cause for concern is open to argument. The question links to hot-button issues being debated in Congress, on the campaign trail, and in the media. I, for one, believe that given the headwinds facing cleantech, the numbers are cause for optimism. They’re good news, but I wish they were better.figure 1To make my half-full case, note that cleantech venture capital investment has been resilient despite both economic and political headwinds. Last year’s funding remains 29 percent higher than its 2009 total, when overall venture flows crashed in the wake of the global financial crisis.

What’s more, cleantech is nurtured by other streams of capital. As I reported last month, global investment in mature renewable energy technologies — new wind farms, solar panels, and the like — expanded by 5 percent, to $260 billion last year. That rise helped put total investment in renewable energy, efficiency, smart grid and related technologies over the trillion dollar mark last year.

Still, I’m a worrier. And there are reasons to furrow my brow at these numbers.

However promising cleantech may be, venture capitalists are finding more alluring options in other sectors. Cleantech’s decline comes despite a 10 percent rise of overall venture capital investment. Globally, for the year, investors placed $32.6 billion into 3,209 venture deals, according to Dow Jones Venture Source.

So while cleantech retreated, investment in healthcare and IT startups remained roughly steady. The big winner? Consumer information services — think Twitter, LivingSocial and Zynga — pulled in $5.2 billion, up 23 percent from the prior year.

But before I complain any further that clean technology shouldn’t be losing out to Twitter, let alone Facebook, here’s a bit more on what went down in cleantech over the past year.

• Battery technology is hot. Energy storage continues to attract interest, and growing flows of money. Venture investment in batteries rocketed up by 253 percent. And this is bound to accelerate. Growing volumes of electric vehicles, plus the graduation of wind and solar from emerging-tech status to mature technology, are all driving demand for energy storage, in a dizzying array of niches.

And while some segments of battery manufacturing are mature — increasingly subject to the sorts of commodity price dynamics driving down prices of solar PV — there is arguably bigger potential for scientific discovery to upend today’s batteries.

• Investment is tilting towards more mature plays. Cleantech companies already generating revenue garnered 69 percent of the funding, up from 50 percent in 2010.

• M&A exits dominate. Given the parlous state of IPO offerings, mergers & acquisitions continue to be the main path to maturity for cleantech players. In 2011, a total of $2.9 billion in M&A deals involved cleantech startups, some 79 deals, according to Ernst & Young’s analysis.

• IPO drought lingers. Just five companies IPO’d in 2011, not many more than the three that listed a year prior. Biofuels dominated last year’s public debuts, with Solazyme, Gevo, and KiOR. Intermolecular, a semiconductor R&D company focused on cleantech listed in the final quarter, as did Rentech, a clean energy solutions provider. The five raised a total of $688 million.

The low count of IPOs for cleantech is an indicator of a growing backlog and is one reason why new cleantech investment may be slowing. Without a clear line to exit, venture funders will steer their money to sectors where it’s easier to cash out.

Thus, Facebook. Good things may yet come of Facebook’s super-hyped IPO. Perhaps it will improve the atmospherics around cleantech IPOs?

But on balance I find the din disheartening. The very big IPOs by Twitter et al. smack of hype. To emphasize my point: Facebook’s pending IPO is likely to raise around $5 billion, more than was invested by VCs in the entire cleantech sector last year. Indeed, Facebook’s valuation is verging on speculation, maybe even magical thinking. The offering is slated to value the total company at $100 billion.

Compared with the foaming enthusiasm for all-things-Facebook, it can feel like cleantech has drifted into a period of backlash, however undeserved. Investment continues apace to be sure, but the narrative around cleantech is growing more polarized.

Long-time cleantech investor Ira Ehrenpreis put it this way, as quoted in GreentechMedia.com: “While I’ve never been more bearish on U.S. cleantech, I’ve never been more bullish about global cleantech.”

Blame domestic politics for the widening gap in cleantech prospects here compared with global markets. Leading the negative push—recklessly so—are House Republicans, who seem intent on vilifying federal support of renewable energy, using Solyndra’s failure as a political bludgeon against President Obama. Likewise, the GOP presidential aspirants have retreated on cleantech: far-right opposition of climate change is so dogmatic, even discussions of cleantech have become off limits despite the fact that practically all the Republican candidates have championed renewable investment in the past.

Meanwhile, media find it hard to resist the counter-intuitive appeal of the “cleantech is failing” tale, and are amplifying the meme. Picking up on the GOP’s talking points, the tally of stories of Solyndra’s failure far outpaces coverage of the fact that it’s been a record year for solar capacity growth in the U.S. Or that plummeting solar prices are a windfall for buyers of the technology, enabling even energy-poor regions such as India to light up.

Witness Wired magazine’s February story “Why the Clean Tech Boom Went Bust.” While its author, Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin, actually offers a reasonably measured take on the impact of cheap natural gas and the Solyndra scandal, you’d have a hard time figuring that out from the headline or the explosive artwork illustrating the story (at right, by Dan Forbes).

Lurid pictures of exploding wind mills, fiery biodiesel canisters, and a shattering PV panel left me thinking that John Doerr must be on the verge of switching back coal heat for his mansion. Meanwhile, elsewhere on Wired.com, the breathless all-technology-is-pretty-much-cool coverage of green developments continues apace.

Wired’s schizophrenic take on cleantech is not unique, but it deserves special attention because the magazine has been such a vocal, effective champion for innovation as a driver of economic growth. The editors’ tabloid take on cleantech is sure to gather clicks: scores of contrary comments and irate tweets suggest the story has generated a lot of attention.

But in gunning for controversy, Wired goes off target, loosing sight of the bigger, better idea that cleantech is a near-ideal innovation catalyst for U.S. economic growth. That’s why we should keep our fingers crossed that venture capitalists will keep steering more money into the sector too.

See the original story here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/02/06/why-sinking-cleantech-investment-data-arent-end-world

Ensia

Peas on Earth: How PepsiCo is aiding Ethiopia’s chickpea farmers to secure its supply chain | Ensia

Say “Pepsi” and most folks think of the nose-tickling cola that has been Coke’s archrival for over a century. Or chips: About half of PepsiCo’s $58 billion in yearly sales comes from snack foods such as Lay’s and Doritos.

But chickpeas? Also known as garbanzo beans, the protein-rich legumes are a key ingredient in hummus, one of PepsiCo’s fastest-growing products. In 2007, the food and beverage giant inked a joint venture with Israel’s Strauss Group to sell Sabra-brand hummus and other foods in North America. Led by demand for the garlicky blend of chickpeas, olive oil and sesame, PepsiCo’s sales of dips in its Sabra line soared by 45 percent in 2010. In early 2011, the partners agreed to extend the deal to sell Sabra hummus and other spreads globally.

This lip-smacking growth gives PepsiCo a new challenge: How to secure a steady supply of chickpeas. In 2012, the company expects to buy several thousand tons; two years later, the shopping list calls for roughly twice that amount.

To help meet this need, PepsiCo is combining its business agenda with the development goal of helping 10,000 Ethiopian farmers double their production of chickpeas in a program it’s calling Enterprise EthioPEA. “This initiative will positively impact the livelihood of local farmers, address the critical issue of famine in the Horn of Africa and create sustainable business opportunities for PepsiCo,” said Indra Nooyi, chairman and CEO of PepsiCo in a statement.

The strategy is as unconventional as it ambitious. After all, Ethiopia is better known for famine than for food export. Enterprise EthioPEA aims to reverse that condition by bringing together international partners with local stakeholders. From overseas, PepsiCo, the United Nations World Food Programme and the U.S. Agency for International Development are joining forces. Within the country, the effort is led by the Ethiopian Institute for Agriculture Research, the Ministry of Agriculture and Omega Farms.

For Ethiopia, where half of all kids are stunted by malnutrition, chickpeas offer a familiar but underexploited dietary option, explains Tara Acharya, PepsiCo’s director of global health and agriculture policy.

With around 22 percent protein, chickpeas offer a nutritious alternative to meat and require fewer inputs to grow. The crop is also a rich source of complex carbohydrates, fiber, minerals and vitamins.

Ethiopian farmers routinely grow chickpeas today, but typically as a secondary crop between regular harvests of grains. In addition, dependence on less-productive seed strains and a paucity of irrigation limits harvests, says Acharya. As a result, yields have historically been too low to ensure stable market prices, and farmers tend to keep most of what they grow, for food and as seed stock for future crops. In 2008, Ethiopian farmers produced 287,000 tons of chickpeas, exporting roughly 14 per cent of that. For most farmers, chickpeas “haven’t had significant commercial importance,” says Acharya.

But with PepsiCo’s commitment to buy excess production, if all goes to plan, both output and prices will rise. Working with farmers in Ethiopia’s wetter, more fertile north, Enterprise EthioPEA is introducing more vigorous seed strains along with technical and financial assistance to deploy low-cost flood irrigation. “Irrigation would also allow farms to add a second crop of chickpeas, during the dry season,” Acharya says, “and once installed, irrigation will help other crops, too.”

As harvests grow, Enterprise EthioPEA is working with local food processors to create an affordable supply of chickpea-based ready-to-consume supplementary food that will be used to feed 40,000 malnourished Ethiopian children.

Famine continues to take a toll in Ethiopia and neighboring countries. Rains did not fall in southern stretches of the country or in neighboring regions in late 2010, nor did they come in time in 2011 to save spring plantings. In parts of Kenya and Ethiopia, 2010–11 was one of the driest years since 1950–51. The tragic result is that today, some 13 million people face famine across the region. In Ethiopia’s southern provinces, 3.7 million are receiving food assistance from WFP.

Making a dent in these numbers will take time. Enterprise EthioPEA started last fall, and is slated to last through August 2013. By the following year, PepsiCo hopes crop yields will have doubled, producing enough to not only supply Ethiopia’s domestic needs, but also allow for export of about one-fifth of the crop, thereby doubling export income to farmers. By that time, PepsiCo hopes it can count on Ethiopia for about a tenth of its global chickpea needs.

Should Enterprise EthioPEA succeed, PepsiCo hopes to copy and repeat the strategy with other crops in other developing markets, says Acharya. A recipe that successfully blends profit with sustainable development is one few would want to keep secret.

ADAM ASTON is a Brooklyn-based writer covering energy, environment and green biz. Follow his work at adamaston.com or on twitter at @adamanyc.

Please check out the original article at Momentum, here: http://environment.umn.edu/momentum/issue/4.1w12/connections.html

GreenBiz

Dan Hendrix: The Future of Interface is Bright & Greener than Ever | GreenBiz

Dan Hendrix: The Future of Interface is Bright & Greener than Ever

Because of the enduring green epiphany of its charismatic founder, Ray Anderson, the influence of Interface has always been outsized in the world of sustainability.

In the wake of Anderson’s death last autumn at age 77, following a nearly two-year battle with cancer, the focus has shifted to Daniel Hendrix, Interface’s CEO and president. Yesterday, at theGreenBiz Forum 12 in New York City, senior writerMarc Gunther caught up with Hendrix to see how the billion-dollar carpet maker is moving ahead with its founder’s eco-vision.

At Interface, sustainability continues to evolve from an operations focus into tool for innovation and market development, Hendrix reported. One example of this shift will soon be found up in the air.

After a four-year development process, the company’s carpet tiles were okayed for use on commercial jets. Developing the product required reducing the weight of the tiles by nearly half, while meeting stringent fire and toxicity standards as well as passing Boeing’s grueling performance tests.

Southwest Airlines will be among the first to start using the tiles as part of its Green Plane initiative, a project to outfit a Boeing 737 cabin with green products. “It’s a big win for us, and for the airline industry,” said Hendrix.

Promoted to his post in 2001, Hendrix has been running Interface’s day-to-day business for over a decade. Hendrix, who will celebrate his 30th anniversary with the company next year, worked closely with Anderson through an acquisitive period in the 1980s to scale-up the business. A decade later, when Anderson had his green epiphany and declared this intention to transform how the company would make tiles, Hendrix recounted that he was a disbeliever: “I thought Ray had lost his mind.”

It didn’t take long for Anderson to convert Hendrix, or the rest of the company. To aid his effort, Anderson turned to a green “dream team” to make the case to his colleagues. A veritable who’s-who of sustainable manufacturing, the team included Paul Hawken, Bill McDonough, and Amory Lovins, among others. The case altered the thinking of Interface’s leadership, and re-set the company’s course towards a goal of making carpets using less oil, water, and other inputs, with less waste overall.

The company has tracked these metrics steadily since 1996. Since then, the company has lowered the oil intensity of its products to 60 percent from 90 percent, Hendrix reported. Roughly 40 percent of its carpet are produced from post-consumer recycled materials, remade from used carpet tiles where fiber is shaved off for reuse, and the heavy backing is re-melted to recapture its embodied energy. “We’ve seen an 82 percent reduction in water use, and a similar improvement in waste sent to landfill,” Hendrix said.

One of the latest efforts to deepen Interface’s green practices is a program to develop environmental product declarations, or EPDs, a sort of successor to a life cycle assessment (LCA). “It creates transparency,” said Hendrix, as a kind of environmental nutritional label for each product, showing key content such as carbon footprint, toxicity data, and water usage.

“It’s like an LCA but with more detail. It takes a lot of the mystery out of what impact this product has on the environment,” said Hendrix. “It’s far from being standardized. And we’re one of the first to pursue it in the U.S.”

After nearly 20 years of sustainability efforts, the process of extending green practices within the organization, born with Anderson, continues today. “Ray gave Interface a wonderful gift: There’s a tremendous emotional capital that continues to motivate our people to get up everyday and think there’s a higher purpose than just a paycheck,” Hendrix said.

Interface is looking to its employees for guidance on how and where to innovate. “We call the exercise ‘appreciative inquiry,'” said Hendrix. “We interviewed employees and a few customers, to help push towards a goal of zero emissions.” A lesson that emerged from this exercise was to cross-pollinate staff between offices, sending high performers from Bangkok to Europe, or from the U.S. to Australia, to learn and to exchange innovative ideas.

For more on Anderson’s legacy, check out Joel Makower’s memorial to the ” iconic and iconoclastic industrialist“. And in the first of an ongoing series called “Radical Industrialists” here at GreenBiz.com, read an essay contributed by Interface’s Lindsay James and Mikhail Davis, “Mind the Void: Interface after Ray.”

Photo by Sophia Wallace.

Check out the original story here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/01/25/dan-hendrix-future-interface-bright-greener-ever 

GreenBiz

Why the Big Apple Can Be the World’s First VERGE City | GreenBiz

Why the Big Apple Can Be the World's First VERGE CityAs if recent football results weren’t enough to heat up the rivalry between New York, Boston, and San Francisco, add to the contest the quest for title of “greenest city.”

At the GreenBiz Forum 12 in New York City today, this rivalry took the form of a panel question: Can the Big Apple be the first VERGE city in the U.S., or maybe even the world?

Of course, New York has a long history of leadership in finance, media, and fashion. But green? Why not Masdar, or one of the new built-from-the-ground-up green utopias, asked session moderator Andrew Shapiro, co-founder of GreenOrder.

The city’s strength is partly its age, size and complexity. “The reality is that the majority of cities aren’t green field opportunities,” said panelist David Bartlett, IBM’s vice-president of industry solutions during the session. “Old infrastructures are where the opportunity for innovation lies. I think that makes New York the best candidate,” he added.

The city’s aged infrastructure is more opportunity than obstacle, said panelist Steve Cohen, Director and CEO of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, pointing out that it’s better for a city like New York to have an aged subway, in need of repair, than to have to build a new system from scratch, at nearly insurmountable costs.

“It’d be nice to have a computer controlled subway system, but I’d rather have what we’ve got, than to dig up the whole city today,” said Cohen. That said, the city has a track record of committing to billion-dollar scale green infrastructure, from the 3rd Water Tunnel, to the 2nd Ave Subway line. “This city is used to spending billions on capital. We’re not going to go through the anti-tax disinvestment cycle,” that has taken hold in other areas of the country, said Cohen.

In New York, the political leadership starts with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has led a sweeping effort to ready the city for the stresses of climate change and an additional million residents expected by 2030. The resulting blueprint, PlaNYC (pronounced plan-why-see) points the way to increased building efficiency, higher levels of renewable energy, less waste, cleaner air and water.

The technology tools that will make possible this smarter, more efficient future are entering service today. “There’s a huge proliferation of smart sensor technology where we can see — with much better x-ray vision — what’s happening with our building, with our transport system, with our energy networks,” said Bartlett. “Visibility, control, and automation, they’re the heart of smart.”

“No one is listening holistically to buildings,” said Bartlett. There’s automation device by device, or system by system, but no one is watching the sum of the systems, and doing do can deliver savings of 40 percent or more. “It’s a concept I call ‘the building whisperer,'” he said.

The city’s competitive edge also includes its “brain base”. “Boston is known as a college town,” said Cohen. “But we have more students in New York City than there are people in Boston,” said Cohen, implying perhaps this may be a reason the Giants will have an edge over the Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI.

The city is deepening its considerable R&D resources. Cornell University recently beat out Stanford University, winning a beauty contest to build a cutting-edge green campus for a new engineering school on Roosevelt Island.

Uptown, Columbia University is building a new satellite campus in northern Manhattan, which will be home to a brain and behavior research science center, along with additional capacity for engineering, business and continuing education. “The west side of Manhattan used to be full of factories and stevedores,” said Cohen, “And now those stretches are filled with brain workers.”

In many ways, cities offer more fertile ground for VERGE technologies to flourish than national or regional efforts. City mayors are “among the least ideological people around because the do real things: making sure the garbage gets picked up,” Cohen said. “The best minds in the world want to be here,” and even if they don’t want to live here, “It’s never hard to have a meeting here,” he added.

The challenges facing cities mirror the larger test facing the nation. At the national level, pragmatism is painfully absent, and has led to the polarization of energy debates into debilitating over simplifications, most recently with the Keystone XL pipeline, about which Cohen writes at his blog at Huffington Post.

The issue we need to address is America’s role in a sustainable global economy. How do we compete and protect the planet that sustains us? How do we ensure that other nations join us in an effort to achieve global sustainability?

“We’re talking about a post-industrial way of living. It will require innovation and creativity,” said Cohen today. “This is a little bit like arguing about landlines for telephones 20 years ago.” Energy technologies now on the blackboard may make debates about pipelines quaintly obsolete in the near future.

The rivalry for greenest city continues next week, as the GreenBiz Forum 12 heads to San Francisco on January 30 to ask a similar question: Can San Francisco be America’s first VERGE city?

My friend and GreenBiz impresario Joel Makower suggested the Bay Area may be the natural leader of the greenest city race, at least until the final minutes of the contest, when it fumbles away its lead to lose by a hair to New York.

No hard feelings from here in Giants land: At least in the green race, both cities can be winners.

Manhattan photo via Shutterstock.

Check out the original story at GreenBiz.com, here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/01/24/why-big-apple-can-be-worlds-first-verge-city