All posts by Adam Aston

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.

Global CCS Institute

NEORI’s promise: Pairing utilities with big oil to revitalize CCS development – Part 1 | Global CCS Institute

What’s in a letter? In the case of carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS, the ever more frequent addition of a U – short for use, or utilization – to the familiar acronym crystalizes a shift in thinking. Carbon dioxide is increasingly being seen as a potential money-making byproduct, rather than simply as a costly, harmful waste to entomb.

This shift got an official nod in May with the renaming of a top US meeting in the field. Over the past decade, EPRI – the Electric Power Research Institute, the research arm of the US utility industry– has convened an annual CCS meeting. Last month, that acronym grew by a U, to CCUS, with the opening of the 11th Annual Carbon Capture, Utilization & Sequestration Conference in Pittsburgh.

Even as publicly-backed CCS efforts are facing funding woes and political friction, CCUS is gaining traction precisely because of that U. The oil industry boasts deep pockets and a nearly insatiable appetite for CO2. Today, the industry gets its CO2 from natural deposits, but those are running out, even as demand is rising. When pumped into ageing oil wells at high pressures, CO2 has a unique ability to push out oil left behind by most other extraction techniques. What’s more, with more than 40 years of monitoring of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) sites, petroleum engineers are certain the CO2 stays put when pumped into these wells.

The marriage of EOR with CCS shows tantalizing promise to help fund efforts to scale up CCS processes, dramatically boosting US output from extant oil fields, all while potentially stashing gigaton-volumes of CO2 back into the earth. “CO2-EOR is perhaps the option with the greatest near- to mid- term potential, but the one about which policy makers know the least,” says Judi Greenwald, vice president for technology and innovation at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES) in Washington, D.C.

If EOR-CCS is such a game changer, why haven’t the oil and utility industries tied up a deal sooner? In short, price. The cost of captured CO2 has been too high, and oil has been too cheap. But with the former inching down and the later rising steadily, efforts are intensifying to nudge these two huge industries. If so, big oil can help fund the development of large-scale CCS. Today, oil drillers are buying CO2for EOR at around US$40 per ton, about half of what it costs to extract CO2 from current-generation CCS facilities. Of course, if the scale of CCS grew, CO2 prices would fall as the technology improved. Yet funding large scale projects has remained a work-in-progress.

Speaking at EPRI’s CCUS meeting last month, Greenwald and Eileen Claussen, president of C2ES, outlined an ambitious vision to solve this market inefficiency. Spearheaded by C2ES, the National Enhanced Oil Recovery Initiative (NEORI) brings together key industry players from the oil and utility sectors and proposes a set of revenue-positive federal and state incentives that will help spur the construction of a first generation of carbon capture infrastructure on power plants and other industrial emitters, to feed the CO2 to the oil industry. As important, in an era of near paralysis on many political fronts, the effort has attracted bipartisan support.

I followed up with Eileen and Judi after the conference to get their take on the promise, mechanics and timing of NEORI. The first half of our conversation follows. The second half will be posted next week.

In the US, the past year or two has seen a shift in the focus on sequestering CO2, to using CO2 whether as an input for chemical processes, or to help with enhanced oil recovery. Does CCUS represent a bridge to CCS?

Eileen Claussen: The potential for CCS to reduce emissions is undeniable. Studies show that CCS technology could reduce CO2 emissions from a coal-fueled power plant by as much as 90 percent. Modelling done by the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts that CCS could provide 19 percent of total global GHG emission reductions by 2050. That includes reductions from coal and natural gas-fired power plants, as well as all other sources.

But what we are doing right now to develop these technologies is not enough; it’s not even close to enough. We have two decades at most to deploy these technologies at the scale needed to achieve substantial reductions in emissions.

The participants in the NEORI believe that EOR using captured CO2 offers a safe and commercially proven method of expanding domestic oil production that can help the U.S. simultaneously meet future need for domestic oil, spur domestic investment, and help advance CCS as well.

This approach shifts the CCS problem from a largely public cost, into one where the private sector has incentive to invest. How do NEORI’s participants prioritize these benefits?

Eileen Claussen: NEORI’s participants agree that energy security, domestic investment, and environmental protection are important. But different participants would prioritize these goals differently. We all agree on the solution – incentivizing the use of captured CO2 in enhanced oil recovery – but we don’t necessarily agree on which reasons for doing that are most important. For some, the highest priority is increasing our nation’s energy security by reducing dependence on foreign oil, including oil that is imported from unstable and hostile nations. CO2-EOR potential in the United States equals 26-61 billion barrels of oil with existing technology. With next-generation techniques, the potential rises to 67 to around 140 billion barrels. Current US proven reserves are estimated to be 20 billion barrels, so we are talking about at least doubling US. oil potential. That’s huge.

For others, the highest priority that CO2-EOR addresses is creating economic opportunity. If we do this right, it will create jobs, boost tax revenues, and reduce the US trade deficit. We can put dollars we now spend on oil imports to work right here in the US economy.

How much money are we talking about? One estimate, from Advanced Resources International, projects that the reduction in oil imports associated with CO2-EOR would add up, year by year, to US$600 billion by 2030. (For further details on economic impacts, NEORI: Economic Benefits of CO2-EOR.)

And for still others, the priority addressed by CO2-EOR is protecting the environment. Capturing and storing CO2 from industrial facilities and power plants will reduce US greenhouse gas emissions, while getting more American crude from areas already developed for oil and gas production. By fully developing American reserves that are amenable to this practice, we could reduce CO2 emissions by 10-19 billion tons, an amount equal to 10-20 years of emissions from personal vehicle use in this country.

And the bonus is that it can help us further the commercial deployment of the CCS industry in this country – not just with coal and natural gas power plants, but with other domestic industries such as natural gas processing, ethanol and ammonia production, and steel and cement manufacturing. Driving innovation in CCS technology will allow us both to take advantage of our nation’s vast fossil fuel resources and achieve much larger CO2 emission reductions.

I have worked on the climate issue for many years now, and I assure you this is a big deal. Reducing US CO2 emissions by up to 19 billion tons while also advancing CCS technology would be a major achievement.

Can you put this in context? Relative to the other climate and energy solutions on the table, from renewables, to EVs, to greener buildings, how does CO2-EOR stack up?

Judi Greenwald: Of the many solutions to our climate and energy challenges we are working on here at C2ES, CO2-EOR is perhaps the option with the greatest near to mid- term potential, but the one about which policy makers know the least. CO2-EOR is an important strategy for deploying CCS, which will be needed to keep coal (and natural gas) as part of our electricity generation portfolio while reducing CO2 emissions across economic sectors. But public and policymaker awareness of the potential of CO2-EOR is limited, despite its diverse benefits. CO2-EOR offers the opportunity to enhance national security, decrease foreign trade deficits, and create domestic jobs and economic opportunity. What’s more, tax incentives given for CO2-EOR are likely to pay for themselves as federal and state governments receive revenues from increased EOR oil production.

What’s the problem with the current federal treatment of CO2 and how does NEORI propose to change them?

Eileen Claussen: Today, the major hurdle preventing the growth of EOR is there’s not enough readily-available CO2. And this is why our organization joined with the Great Plains Institute to convene the NEORI.

NEORI’s centerpiece recommendation is a competitively awarded, revenue-positive federal production tax credit for capturing and transporting CO2 to stimulate CO2-EOR expansion. This federal tax credit would more than pay for itself because it will lead to additional oil production subject to existing tax treatment (see below a chart forecasting cost of such an incentive, along with the increased tax revenues generated by increased oil output). The new incentive will enable a variety of industry sectors to market new sources of CO2 to the oil industry, and to reduce their carbon footprints. It will drive innovation and cost reduction in CO2 capture and compression, and help build out a national CO2 pipeline system.

For the near term and until the broader credit is in place, NEORI also recommends specific ‘good government’ changes to improve the workability of the existing carbon capture and storage credit known as Section 45Q.

Of course, states also have an important role to play in fostering CO2-EOR deployment. This is why NEORI identifies existing state policies that should serve as models for policymakers in other states to adopt and tailor to their particular needs. These policies include cost recovery for CCS power projects, long-term off-take agreements for CCS power, severance tax reductions for oil produced by CO2-EOR, and others.

Federal tax incentives: Annual revenues, annual costs, and net annual revenues to the Government (2013-2052) (Millions of $)

Watch for the second half of this interview next week.

Check out the original post here: http://www.globalccsinstitute.com/community/blogs/authors/adamaston/2012/07/06/neori%E2%80%99s-promise-pairing-utilities-big-oil-revitalize

GreenBiz

Procter & Gamble bets on Good Housekeeping green seal | GreenBiz

Procter & Gamble has been cautious in its treatment of green certifications. “There are a lot of seals out there,” said Chris Guay, a regulatory fellow at the consumer products giant.

However, one green seal not only caught its attention, but also offered the credibility the global packaged goods giant was looking for. With $83 billion in sales last year, P&G has now qualified two products under Good Housekeeping’s green seal: Tide Coldwater Laundry Detergent and Pampers Cruisers diapers for toddlers.

Good Housekeeping launched its Green Seal two-and-a-half years ago into a marketplace growing crowded with eco products, and where consumers faced a dizzying array of green certifications.

The history and iron-clad guarantee of the magazine’s century-old Good Housekeeping seal gave the new mark instant cachet. But how has the seal fared over the last 36 months?

I got the opportunity to catch up on Good Housekeeping’s green seal efforts, as well as the evolution of eco-labeling, last week at a luncheon and tour of the magazine’s in-house testing labs. I spoke with the program’s head, along with executives representing some of the latest products to earn the green mark.

The verdict? A couple of years on, the seal has matured, broadening the number of products and categories Good Housekeeping’s white-coated scientists have scrutinize, trialed, and dismantled to identified the greenest.

Still, despite the mark’s rigor, its potential impact remains narrow. By definition, the seal is awarded only to products advertised in the magazine and which pass eco-criteria above and beyond standards set by the magazine’s more familiar product seal.

And the mark is playing in a field that has arguably been tougher to crack than many brands first anticipated. “It’s proven tough for eco labels, marks, and certifications in the U.S. They aren’t as popular here compared with Europe,” said Michael S. Brown, co-founder of Brown and Wilmanns Environmental, which advised Good Housekeeping on the seal. “It’s a really hard road for an eco label to climb into consumer consciousness in any serious way.”

P&G, for instance, places a high priority on the reputation of potential partners. In the green seal space, there are relatively few long-serving, proven seals. “We don’t want to put our name on just any green seal,” said Guay of P&G. “Once it’s on your product, then you’re joined at the hip.”

“Apart from Good Housekeeping, the only ones that consumers broadly know are Energy Star, the ‘organic’ label, and maybe one or two others,” Brown said in a telephone interview. “And of those that are known, it’s because there’s been a huge amount of marketing of just the labels themselves.” The recession and uncertain economy, too, have chilled early enthusiasm for green products.

In the face of these headwinds, the green seal’s steady progress deserves credit. “Consumers have reason to be very cynical about promises and claims. People are inundated with product claims that demand so much research,” said Miriam Arond, the director of Good Housekeeping Research Institute. “They’re hungry for guidance.”

Next page: Making a complicated message simple

“We have taken this slow and steady,” she added, emphasizing the quality of certifications over their number. “Companies are frustrated. They’re making environmental advances, but it’s such a complicated story for them to tell consumers. For them, the Green Good Houskeeping Seal sends a simple, clear message.”

Guay of P&G echoed that point. Because the Green Good Housekeeping Seal evaluates not just the product but broader corporate sustainability practices, he said, “As a company, you can’t be accused of picking high points here and ignoring the low points there.”

The seal’s message is built on a century-old tradition established by the original Good Housekeeping Seal, which debuted in 1909. It was a time of perilous product practices. In 1904, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle documented terrifying conditions in Chicago’s slaughterhouses, and crystalized public outrage over the lack of food standards or product safety liability.

Against this backdrop, Good Housekeeping made an unprecedented promise: if any product bearing the mark proved defective, the magazine would replace it or refund its price. More than a century later, the seal survives. It has even entered our language as shorthand, routinely used to explain similar authentication efforts: “It’s the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.”

Products for the green seal program must go through a multi-step process. Once the Good Housekeeping Institute approves a product for advertising, it can then be submitted for a conventional seal of quality. If granted, the product can then apply for a separate Green Good Housekeeping Seal.

At this stage, the product is put through a deeper evaluation based on life cycle assessment (LCA) practices. Detailed here, the process looks at a wide range of factors, from upstream variables such as raw materials, manufacturing, and supply chain, to down stream issues, including, packaging and product use, explained Michael.

Next page: Persuading wary corporate customers

Good Housekeeping’s long focus on quality has drawn brands, like P&G, that have eschewed other green labeling efforts.

For Benjamin Moore, the certification process proved a tough challenge, which has triggered deeper changes. “We had never been through anything quite like this process,” said Carl Minchew, director of product development. Benjamin Moore’s Natura line of interior paints was awarded a Green Good Housekeeping Seal in May 2012.

“We’re looking at other places and other ways of improving our products based on this input,” he added. “Maybe that’s a side intent of the process.”

Minchew is right on the money, responded Arond. “The goal is to get companies to raise the bar,” she said. The standards have been designed to be a stretch from the outset, and will be upgraded as practices change. “What’s green today may not be a stand out two years ago,” she added. “The standards will have to shift to raise the bar.”

By that measure, perhaps the greatest long-term impact of Good Housekeeping green seal will be how it trickles down into the magazine’s more familiar seal. Methods from the green seal are changing the way the institute evaluates all of its products.

Arond recounted a brand of mascara she declined to identify. “It performed great. But we’ve gotten to learn a lot more about product chemistry and just weren’t comfortable with the ingredients,” she explained. “Women liked it. But we couldn’t recommend it in the magazine.”

When launched in 2009, the Green Good Housekeeping Seal initially included only beauty and cleaning products. In 2011, it extended the standard to include appliances and paper products. Earlier this year, rules for paints and coatings were added.

Here’s the current roster of products granted the Good Green Housekeeping Seal. Note that products are certified for two years, after which they must reapply.

The links below go directly to product pages. For deeper detail on the specific green virtues singled out by Good Housekeeping’s labs, check out the detailed summary of current awardees at this link.

* Benjamin Moore Natura, indoor household pain;

* Bissell Little Green, steam-powered stain and spot remover;

* Miele S5 and S6, vacuum cleaners;

* Physician’s Formula Organic Wear 100% Natural Tinted, moisturizer;

* Proctor & Gamble Pampers Cruisers, toddler diapers;

* Proctor & Gamble Tide Cold Water, laundry detergent;

* Scott Naturals, bath tissue; and

* TENA Super Plus women’s underwear and Serenity overnight pads, incontinence protection.

Corporate Knights

Philly Mayor Michael Nutter puts his city on a greener path | Corporate Knights

Michael Nutter couldn’t have picked a worse time to win the keys to city hall. In late 2007, after 14 years as a city councilman, Nutter was elected as Philadelphia’s 125th mayor. His victory was built in part on a campaign promise to make his town in Pennsylvania “the greenest city in America.”

Yet mere months after he took office, Wall Street imploded, sparking global financial crisis and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Philadelphia’s fiscal outlook plummeted from surplus to billions in deficit, leaving Nutter facing painful choices.

Rather than retreat on his green agenda, however, Nutter looked to sustainability to help right the city’s finances. In 2009, he unveiled Greenworks Philadelphia, an ambitious blueprint to help the city run more efficiently, with less pollution, and become healthier all while using less energy and money to do so. “Cities are incubators of innovation,” said Nutter in an interview with Corporate Knights. “Congress can’t figure out energy or climate policy. Breaking new ground is happening at the city level because this is where it has to.”

Philadelphia’s eco-planners developed the program by auditing a vast array of urban metrics – from the amount residents walked to the availability of fresh, whole food. Then, they cast the data into the future, assessing how the city might look if “business as usual” continued. Finally, they combed through the numbers to set tough but achievable goals touching on dozen of actions. The final report organized the targets under 15 broad categories.

As an integrated vision for urban sustainability, Greenworks won plaudits for its unusually ambitious timeline. When it comes to energy or climate goals, it’s not unusual for governments to set targets a decade or more into the future. But distant goals can erode political will, Nutter notes, so his team agreed to peg the bulk of the plan’s targets to 2015.

Three years in, the results are showing up on Philadelphia’s city streets, and on its bottom line. Some of the programs are helping the city’s day-to-day operating budget. Consider recycling: The city saw rates soar to 18.9 per cent in 2011, more than triple the benchmark rate of 5.4 per cent in 2006.

The city made recycling both easier and more rewarding. Recycling days were shifted to the same day as regular garbage pickup and doubled in frequency. The city also eased the sorting hassle by expanding the types of plastic that could be recycled to numbers 1 through 7. Most U.S. cities accept just a few of those types.

The shift is turning a cost into a revenue source. Each ton of trash diverted to recycling bins not only saves about $68 in landfill costs, it generates more than $50 from the sale of bulk recycling material.

Other efforts promise to deliver huge, long-term capital savings. For example, Philadelphia was facing a $10-billion tab for new sewage facilities to prevent storm water from tainting regional waterways. Instead of a costly infrastructure fix, though, the city is spending $2 billion over 25 years on a multifaceted solution that restores the urban landscape’s ability to absorb rainfall.

Additional trees, parks and urban green space, all of which act as natural sponges, top the city’s to-do list. For buildings, the tricks include rain barrels and green roofs to collect and hold rainfall. The city is building out permeable road surfaces that let drops of rain soak slowly into the ground, rather than race down to storm sewers. “We recognized we could save money, not dig up half the town, and improve our parks and green spaces,” says Nutter.

The mayor’s green team tapped private partners to help multiply public efforts. To help cut citywide energy use, city programs aim to reinsulate homes and recoat black-tar roofs – which become oven-like hotspots in the summer – with cool, reflective white coatings. To spark homeowners’ competitive impulse, the city teamed up with Dow Chemical on the “Coolest Block” contest. Residents competed to win energy-saving cool roofs, insulation and other efficiency upgrades donated by Dow to their entire block. Said the mayor: “We can’t do this alone.”

For Nutter, the city’s green programs are delivering growing rewards, too. Philadelphia closed a multi-billion dollar budget gap as Greenworks took root. In its 2011 self-assessment, the city found that 135 of its initial 151 green goals have been completed or are underway. That quick success, Nutter says, has fired ambitions, spurring the addition of dozens more new eco-goals.

Perhaps the greatest measure of success for Nutter is re-election. He won a second term in November, assuring he’ll be there to push Greenworks through its 2015 deadline, and beyond.

See the original story here: http://www.corporateknights.com/report/2012-greenest-cities-america/philly-mayor-michael-nutter-puts-his-city-greener-path

Global CCS Institute

MIT study refines estimate of CO2 storage capacity of US saline aquifers | GCCSI

Deep, saline aquifers in the US have sufficient capacity to sequester a century’s worth of CO2emissions from the nation’s coal-fired power plants, according to a research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on April 3.

The findings substantially refine estimates of the storage capacity of these reservoirs, which the Global CCS Institute recognizes as having the most promising potential of any geological storage option. Previous measures of their capacity in the US spanned from a few years’ of CO2 emissions, to tens of thousands of years’ worth.

Earlier assessments tended to oversimplify the problem, leading to the wide range. “We felt that there was such a big disparity in numbers out there that CCS deserved a closer look,” team leader Ruben Juanes, MIT’s ARCO Associate Professor in Energy Studies in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, told The New York Times.

MIT researchers improved the accuracy of these estimates by building a more detailed mathematical model. Previous models were “missing some of the nuances of the physics,” said Christopher MacMinn, a doctoral researcher and co-author of the study, via a press release.

Image: MIT

The MIT team modeled micron-scale fluid dynamics to better understand how liquefied CO2 is trapped in deep saline aquifers. Including some 20 parameters, the team designed the mathematical model to be flexible enough to evaluate the potential of saline aquifer formations at the scale of hundreds of miles, and in different regions of the US.

“The key is capturing the essential physics of the problem,” said Michael Szulczewski, a doctoral researcher and co-author of the study, “but simplifying it enough so it could be applied to the entire country.”

Using glass beads to simulate the way liquefied CO2 would percolate through the tiny poor spaces of deep rock formations, the approach helped the MIT team to better understand rates of injection and how the CO2 is sequestered through the dynamics of capillary trapping and solubility trapping. Of key concern was estimating the pressure and rates of CO2 injection necessary to prevent fracturing of the reservoir or its over-capping structures.

The study “demonstrates that the rate of injection of CO2 into a reservoir is a critical parameter in making storage estimates,” said Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer with the MIT Energy Initiative and another co-author of the PNAS paper, in a release.

While this study is focused on the saline aquifers in the US, the method can be extended to similar geologies around the world, MacMinn added.

The abstract for the paper, Lifetime of carbon capture and storage as a climate-change mitigation technology is published at PNAS.

Also, below is a video where Juanes and his team members explain their work. The first half-minute or so is a basic overview of carbon storage. Stick with it; starting around 0:45 Szulczewski goes into greater detail of the model’s approach to the subsurface dynamics of CO2 injection.

Global CCS Institute

Project update: In Canada, partners pull the plug on CA$1.4billion TransAlta CCS project | GCCSI

A group of energy companies abandoned a project to capture, use and store 1 million tons of CO2 per year from the flues of an Alberta coal-fired power plant.

Pointing to weak project economics, TransAlta, Canada’s largest investor-owned electricity generator announced on 26 April that its partners Capital Power and Enbridge would halt the CA$1.4billion project after completing initial engineering and design studies. Construction was due to start this year.

According to TransAlta’s first quarter results, the partners “determined that although the technology works and capital costs are in line with expectations, the revenue from carbon sales and the price of emissions reductions are insufficient…”. The Pioneer plant aimed to sell CO2 for enhanced oil recovery, but found no firm buyers.

“What’s really needed, of course, is a regulatory framework on CO2 that puts a value on that CO2 – a significant value,” Don Wharton, vice-president of policy and sustainability at TransAlta, told The Globe and Mail. Wharton added that: “If [a price on carbon is] done properly, then CCS projects, as well as other emissions-reducing projects, would be more encouraged to go ahead.”

The province of Alberta currently charges certain industrial emitters CA$15 per ton of CO2 beyond a pre-determined level. That price doesn’t support the cost of the project, and there’s “little certainty on future revenue”, Cheryl Wilson, carbon capture and storage analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance told Bloomberg News. “Pioneer had too many factors working against it.”

Located about 70 kilometers west of Edmonton, the project was slated to capture 1 million tons of CO2 from the exhaust of TransAlta’s Keephills 3 facility, a 450-megawatt coal-fired power plant that went on line in September 2011 at a cost of roughly CA$2 billion.

A portion of the captured CO2 was to be sold to oil and gas drillers operating in the nearby Pembina oil fields, to enhance the recovery of oil from mature wells. Another share of CO2 was to be permanently sequestered in deep saline formations nearby, as well.

The Pioneer project was granted public funding in October 2009. The lion’s share, CA$436 million, was committed by the province of Alberta, and another CA$343 million was pledged by the Canadian Government. The Global CCS Institute also put up AU$5 million.

According to TransAlta, the company and its partners had spent just CA$30 million on the project to date, with CA$20million of that coming from government.

Speaking to Thomson Reuters News, Chris Severson-Baker, managing director of the Pembina Institute, an Alberta-based environmental think tank, said: “Within Alberta, this was the one coal-plant application of CCS and it was the most important application. There are significant emissions from coal operations… and there are few other options to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions from those types of operations without CCS.”

Meanwhile, the province has funded three other CCUS projects which will reach critical decision points in the next year or so. These are:

Global CCS Institute

Mapping a continent’s potential: North American Carbon Storage Atlas released | GCCSI

If a picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes, then perhaps the new atlas of North American Carbon Storage, might be worth a gigaton or two?

In a first-of-its-kind assessment of continent-wide storage potential, the North American Carbon Storage Atlas was released on 1 May 2011 at the 11th Annual Conference on Carbon Capture Utilization and Sequestration (CCUS) in Pittsburgh.

NACSA synthesizes data from Mexico, the United States and Canada to map out known geological storage reserves as well as the location of some 2,250 large stationary CO2 sources.

Tallying up all of the reserves, the report estimates the continent has at least 500 years worth of CO2 storage capacity, and as much as 5,000 years, based on current emission rates. The 500-year case estimates potential capacity of 136 billion metric tons for oil and gas fields, 65 billion metric tons for coal fields, and 1,738 billion metric tons for saline reservoirs.

“This new atlas provides the kind of fundamental information that, combined with technology innovation, can help fossil-fuelled facilities continue their essential energy role while reducing carbon pollution,” said Steven Chu, United States Secretary of Energy, in a statement.

“This initiative can also help identify opportunities for enhanced oil recovery projects that can further increase domestic oil production, enhance American energy security and support economic growth in states across the country,” Chu added.

Also being launched alongside the printed-copy of the atlas were the NACSA website and online viewer. In addition to maps of CO2 stationary sources and storage resources, the website also presents methodologies for estimating storage resources along with links to additional information.

Intended for a broad range of users, the online viewer also provides interactive access to the map layers and data used to construct the atlas.

The carbon storage atlas project has been produced under the auspices of the bilateral Canada-US Clean Energy Dialogue as well as a trilateral program under the North American Leaders’ Summit.

GreenBiz

Recyclebank’s iPhone app aims to ease London traffic congestion | GreenBiz

Recyclebank's iPhone app aims to ease London traffic congestion

In an era of rising congestion and shrinking budgets, big cities face a major challenge making the most out of aging transportation networks. Some, such as London and Singapore, have opted to use a stick: congestion fees to nudge commuters out of their cars, onto subways, buses, bikes or even their feet. Yet congestion fees can be politically unpopular. Similar efforts in New York City have failed.

But what if city planners could use a carrot, instead, to induce different commuting behaviors? That’s the vision behind re:route, a new program being rolled out by Transport for London (TfL) and developed by New York-based Recyclebank, a pioneer in the field of using incentives to spur greener behaviors.

Announced this week, re:route is an iPhone-based app that encourages Londoners to walk and cycle more by awarding points for each trip they re-route away from conventional alternatives. The credits can be redeemed for valuable rewards, from food perks to products, at participating retailers.

For London, the goal is to reward switches that improve public health, reduce pollution and ease congestion. “By virtue of human nature, people tend to respond more immediately to a positive signal than they do to a negative one based on penalties,” said Ian Yolles, chief sustainability officer at Recyclebank, in a phone interview last week.

Part of a broader effort by TfL known as Get Ahead of the Games, the launch of re:route is timed in advance of the summer Olympics. (Read more about the greening of the Games here.) With 350,000 visitors inbound, TfL hopes to lure Londoners out of the city’s overtaxed subways and taxis and onto bicycles and footpaths. Last week, the city’s taxi organization announced that 40 percent of drivers would quit the streets during the Olympics in anticipation of potentially paralyzing gridlock. Many city streets will be closed for official use only.

TfL’s goals with re:route reach past the Olympics though. As part of a multidecadal, city-wide effort to lower greenhouse gas emissions and improve public health, TfL has set out a long-term goal of boosting cycling by 400 percent by 2025, compared with 2000. TfL also wants to boost the share of trips done on foot above its 24 percent share.

For Recyclebank, re:route is a first step into the urban transportation market, a bid to help cities devise new solutions to help ease the large and growing problem of congestion, spur the use of public transport and enhance public health.

Recyclebank iPhone appBy marrying available technology — mobile phones, apps, GPS, transport schedules and online maps — “we can create greater efficiencies in cities, catalyze citizen engagement and drive behavior change for public benefit,” Yolles said. “We’re launching this in London, but it would be easy to reskin the front end to use in New York, Chicago, Washington or San Francisco.”

Here’s how re:route works: After downloading the free iPhone app and signing up for a free Recyclebank account, a user enters a starting point and destination. The app will show different options, including walking, cycling (using either one’s own bike or a bike share) and public transportation. Upon arrival, re:route uses GPS to sense the end of the commute and rewards the user with five Recyclebank points. Users also see the calories they’ve burned, and CO2 they’ve saved compared to other transport modes.

One of the appealing features of the program is that it encourages small-scale incremental shifts. Rather than substitute an entire subway commute with a bike ride, for instance, re:route is built to exploit “switchpoints”: spots along a regular commute where a user could exit and switch modes. “So perhaps you exit the tube a stop or two early and walk or bike the remainder,” Yolles said. This increases exercise, reduces congestion and can shake up force-of-habit commuting behaviors.

Recyclebank worked hard to simplify what the user sees. Recyclebank teamed up with R/GA, a digital advertising agency with deep experience in building mobile interactive media. R/GA helped Nike develop their Nike+ GPS running app, which tracks, shares and rewards runners’ efforts. “We thought that was interesting because it’s also focused on behavior change,” Yolles said.

Behind the scenes, the complexity is much greater. The app relies on information provided by TfL’s journey planner, which serves up relevant data about location, travel distance and trip time, and helps calculate travel options. “TfL’s choice to develop and open that data to developers has made all of this possible,” explained Yolles. TfL hopes to use the data to guide future plans. As users and trips multiply, the resulting database can help TfL refine or augment existing transportation infrastructure.

Back on the London’s streets, users will find the program is geared to generate meaningful rewards quickly. By joining, participants earn 75 points. For each trip that is rerouted to a greener option, five points are added. A back of the envelope calculation shows that if a participant modifies each commute, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, the annual tally will hit 2,500 points, though it would be easy to boost that figure significantly with addition trips during the day.

At this rate, the rewards initially offered under the program are easily achievable, and include both useful and mildly indulgent offers. A quick sampling: For 75 points, participants can get £5 off a £25 tab for food, wine or booze at Marks & Spencer. For 100 points, they can score half off a Champneys Town & City Spas treatment, or get a free bar of soap at LushFree. Recyclebank predicts participants will be able to earn up to £250 worth of credits per year using re:route.

To tap users’ competitive impulses, the app awards achievement badges for accumulated savings, and makes it easy to share results through Facebook and email.

It remains to be seen just how much re:route can influence the tide of London’s commuting crowds. With a population of 7.6 million, plus another million commuting to and from the city each day, Recyclebank hopes to attract more than 100,000 users near term, with the ultimate goal of “motivating and tracking” half a million journeys per week.

Bikeworldtravel / Shutterstock.com

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Visit the original article here at  Recyclebank’s iPhone app aims to ease London traffic congestion | GreenBiz.com.

GreenBiz

Seven lessons learned from driving 24 million EV miles | GreenBiz

In the world of electric vehicles, nothing attracts as much speculation or disagreement as the debate over exactly how EV drivers behave. Do they need 100 miles of range or will 30 miles do? How many public recharge stations do they need? Do energy prices influence charging? And so on.

The answers to these questions could have huge implications for the success of EVs. If drivers are satisfied with lower-range cars, fewer recharge points and overnight recharging, then the overall challenge of electrifying the nation’s fleet could be resolved at lower costs and more quickly — with greater economic and environmental benefits.

The best way to answer these questions, of course, is to watch EV drivers and to learn what they’re actually doing.  To assist in that process, the Department of Energy commissioned an industry collaboration — involving a wide range of carmakers, utilities, retailers, government entities and technology providers — to help identify current and potential barriers to EV adoption.

Dubbed the EV Project, the program began in late 2010; gathering data from EV drivers willing to share that information. And last week, the EV Project announced it had amassed an unprecedented volume of behavioral data drawn from more than 24 million miles of EV driving.

The DOE awarded management of the project to ECOtality, which manufactures EV charging units and related software. Chevrolet Volt and the Nissan LEAF are project partners, too. Qualifying Volt and LEAF drivers also receive a residential charger and installation at little or no cost to themselves.

“We’re beginning to really see how people are using chargers,” said Colin Read, vice president of corporate development for ECOtality. I spoke with Read while he was in New York City.

So far, the EV Project is tracking some 4,600 vehicles. And including public sites the EV Project is also monitoring 6,200 charging stations, made up mostly of the Type II chargers that operate at 240 volts.

Geographically, the project is tracking EV behavior in 18 markets, including the “Birkenstock Belt”— those eco-conscious parts of West Coast: Washington, Oregon and California — plus sites in Arizona, Texas, as well as Tennessee, where Nissan builds the LEAF. “We picked regions with very little in common on purpose. We’re seeking a diversity of driver experience,” Read said.

The EV Project is also buying EVs from dealer lots, much like regular consumers do, to understand the overall buying experience. “We call it the ‘Noah’s Ark of EV programs,’ because we buy a pair of every EV on the market,” Read joked. The project does make some exceptions, however, with the most costly models, where just one car is enough.

So, what are some of the project’s early lessons?

  1. The current EV driving distance is modest. According to a pool of EV drivers, made up most of LEAF drivers, average daily mileage is running at 27.7 miles. That distance is very much in line with the overall, rule-of-thumb estimates that most Americans drive less than 40 miles per day.
  2. There’s range anxiety, but not the sort most expected. Project data is showing a curious quirk. There’s been a collective worry that ‘range anxiety’ stifles demand for EV. But data from a small but growing pool of Volt drivers reveals that its drivers work hard to stay in all-battery mode — rather than routinely taking advantage of the extended range provided by the Volt’s gas engine. To stay within the Volt’s 40-mile battery range and not use any gasoline, “[Volt drivers] are being very disciplined,” Read said. “They want to drive all-electric, so we’re seeing them plug in more frequently than LEAF drivers.”
  3. Recharge times are fairly short. Given these relatively low daily-driving distances, the amount of time EVs are actively drawing power to recharge is averaging about 1.5 hours. The average amount of time the car is plugged in (although not necessarily drawing power) is 8.5 hours. And the bulk of cars are reportedly plugged in during a window that spans 8pm to 8am. The upshot? “Drivers don’t need to recharge continuously overnight,” Read said. This data suggests the transmission grid may be better prepared to handle large volumes of EVs than originally thought.
  4. Price signals work. The EV Project looked at San Diego, where utility San Diego Gas & Electric runs one of the nation’s most sophisticated time-of-day consumer pricing programs. And according to the Project, there’s a strong demand there for low-cost, late-night power. SDG&E sells power at four tiers: full price, half price, one-quarter price and, from midnight till early morning, one-sixth of the full price. “We see almost no charging until midnight, when prices fall to their lowest,” Read said. This has implications for grid use: “The knock that the grid will need more capacity to handle a lot of EVs isn’t true; if we can shift charging to night, it will actually balance out the grid.”
  5. Topping off is habitual, but maybe not necessary. The EV Project data shows that daytime charging rises from 9am to 4pm. “People plug in when they’re at work, regardless of whether they need the charge,” Read said. At the moment, because the daytime chargers are free, this behavior may not be reflecting real-world conditions. “People recharge more out of convenience than out of fear,” Read notes. “If the charger is available and free, they’ll plug in.” But higher prices for daytime pricing are inevitable, he adds, and that change will likely drive down demand for daytime plug time.
  6. Installation costs must fall. ECOtality is also tracking installation costs and procedures in its test markets. The costs to permit and install a home charger vary widely and must come down, Read said. Installation costs can run as high as $1,400, and “this has made us rethink the design of the installation process and charging device,” he said. Earlier chargers had to be hard-wired into the wall — but now they can be plugged into a heavy-duty 240V wall plug, like those used for clothes dryers or ovens.
  7. It’s too early to judge true demand. Read’s final point: criticism of EVs in some industry and political circles is premature and unjustified. Critics have been pointing out that the LEAF and Volt fell short of sales targets in 2011, with a total volume of just over 17,000 vehicles. But Read points out that Toyota’s Prius sold just 5,000 units in 2000 – the year when first-generation hybrid cars such as the Prius and the Honda Insight were first sold. “We’re about to see a more real-world test of demand,” he said, with the arrival of Toyota’s plug-in Prius hybrid and the debut of Ford’s battery-powered Focus EV.

Keep an eye on the EV Project’s progress at http://www.theevproject.com/documents.php.

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Image of concept alternative electric vehicle by AlexRoz via Shutterstock. 

Check out the original article here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/04/30/how-evs-are-changing-driver-behavior-7-lessons-24-million-miles

The Daily

How free recycling helps Best Buy stand out from its competition | The Daily (NewsCorp)

Practically everyone has them. They’re those household items that shouldn’t go in the trash and can be really tough to recycle.

It could be a cumbersome tube TV in the basement. Or maybe it’s a drawer full of out-of-date cellphones, or even that long dormant fridge in the garage.

Retailing giant Best Buy will recycle them all — for free.

Though battered by a CEO scandal, store closings and withering online competition, Best Buy has turned recycling into an unlikely success story. Begun three years ago, the chain’s nationwide program earns a small profit by selling mountains of broken gizmos and defunct appliances to partners who dismantle the gear and harvest valuable commodities.

“It’s profitable,” says Leo Raudys, senior director of environmental sustainability at Best Buy. “But just barely.”

What’s more, in many regions, it’s one of the only options available to consumers to dispose of hazardous e-waste. When they launched the program nationwide in 2009, Best Buy executives were uncertain if the program could ever break even. First year costs were projected to run $5 million to $10 million.

“We didn’t know what we were getting into,” says Raudys. If costs stayed that high, he added, the program might have been scrapped. Though Best Buy declined to share more recent cost figures, the fact that it covers its costs — and then some — has helped extend its reach, Raudys says.

At its launch, the chain required consumers to buy a $10 store card to drop off recycling. But last November, Best Buy dropped the fee.

As the program has matured, a few streams of revenue have grown to offset Best Buy’s costs.

First, a small percentage of the waste is recovered and resold. Operational cellphones, for instance, are often reconditioned as replacements.

A larger stream of revenue comes from the recycling companies with which Best Buy partners. They return a share of the value of the recycled plastic, gold, lead and other materials to the retailer. Prices for such commodities have been volatile in recent years, but have been climbing over the long term.

Big, well-known electronics brands also contribute materials to Best Buy’s recycling operations. Twenty-five states have issued rules requiring manufacturers to recover a minimum percentage of what they sell, Raudys said: “Our network can deliver efficiencies that [the electronics makers] can’t match, so they buy access to it.”

As its recycling operations have grown, Best Buy has steadily driven down key labor and transportation costs to collect and haul the waste. Best Buy has also been able to negotiate higher rates from its recycling partners as the volume of waste has grown.

In the cutthroat business of electronics retailing, Best Buy’s take-back program distinguishes it from competitors such as Amazon.com that can’t match the service.

Whether recycling actually lures additional customers to Best Buy’s storefronts remains unclear, though. It’s difficult to identify incremental sales that happen because of the recycling policy, says Raudys. “We see this as a service.”

To avoid the export of hazardous materials, Best Buy pays third parties to audit the practices of its recycling partners. The aim is to enforce a corporate recycling policy designed to match or exceed state and federal guidelines.

Scrutiny of how e-waste is handled rose sharply following revelations in recent years of companies exporting e-waste to poor countries.

The majority of waste collected in the U.S. for recycling is sent to Asia and Africa, says Jim Puckett, executive director of Basel Action Network, an e-waste watchdog group. “It is often smashed, burned, dumped or processed in conditions that endanger the health of workers,” he adds.

Best Buy works with three e-waste recyclers: E Structors in Baltimore; Regency Technologies in Cleveland; and Electronic Recyclers International, or ERI, in Fresno, Calif. Appliances are processed by Regency Technologies and Jaco Environmental in Snohomish, Wash.

Currently all three of Best Buy’s recyclers meet an industry-backed code of conduct for e-waste known as R2. Just ERI is currently certified under the more stringent e-Stewards code, created by the Basel Action Network and other environmental groups.

“Only e-Stewards is consistent with international agreements barring export of hazardous e-waste to developing countries and forbids using municipal landfills or incineration for hazardous e-waste,” says Puckett.

Only about half of states have e-waste rules, although Best Buy accepts recycling nationwide. For the rest, Best Buy’s take-back program is one of only a small number of options available.

There’s a big need for more such programs, if the growth of Best Buy’s program is any indicator. It is expanding by 10 to 15 percent per year. In 2011, roughly 4 million customers dropped off 86 million pounds of electronics and 73 million pounds of appliances.

Since its debut, Best Buy has collected more than a half billion pounds of recycling, divided roughly evenly between appliances and e-waste.

That puts the retailer on track to hit a target of 1 billion pounds of consumer goods in just a few years.

Gizmos continue to multiply as they fall in price. And as they are replaced ever more quickly, the need for an easy recycling option is only growing. Best Buy is well positioned to mine this growing mountain of digital detritus for cash, and divert more waste from landfills in the process.

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Originally published 2012-04-30 by The Daily, an iPad-only venture created by NewsCorp. Original publication URL: http://www.thedaily.com/page/2012/04/30/043012-biz-best-buy-recycle-aston-1-4/