GreenBiz

What’s keeping electric vehicles from the mainstream? | GreenBiz

Advancements in electric-vehicle technologies have made them increasingly viable for consumers, fleets and car-sharing services, but they’re still not mainstream alternatives to conventional gasoline-powered cars.

One key missing link is more infrastructure and support services, but investors are wary to plunk down the cash for these pieces until there are more EVs on the roads. It’s a classic chicken-or-egg problem. Which should come first: EVs or infrastructure, like charging stations?

This question took center stage last week at GreenBiz’s VERGE DC event. The thesis behind VERGE — the convergence of energy, information, technology and transportation — fits the long-term vision for EV expansion, yet so far EVs haven’t integrated well with other networks, said the panel’s moderator, Beth Lowery, a principal with GreenOrder and a former General Motors executive.

To help explore how, where, and when the EV ecosystem is evolving, Lowery spoke with:

NRG is betting big by building the only privately funded EV recharging network in the country, including the largest network of “fast” chargers, which use high-voltage DC current to slash recharge times drastically. In Dallas, Houston and elsewhere in Texas, NRG is partnering with Walgreens and other retailers to install recharging hubs.

And in California, the company announced Friday that will spend approximately $100 million to build, own and operate a comprehensive EV charging network, including at least 200 publicly available fast-charging stations. (The deal is part of a settlement with the state’s public utilities commission over a dispute during California’s energy crisis more than a decade ago.)

Instead of range anxiety, “EV drivers should have full range confidence,” Banskota said.

Meanwhile, Eaton has seen growing convergence in the commercial vehicle space, where it has been developing hybrid and EV technologies, Wirtz said. The trend has yielded hybrid systems not yet seen in passenger vehicles, such as diesel electric hybrids and hydraulic-hybrids, which recover braking energy as mechanical energy.

“We’re trying to imagine what the world will look like when 75 percent of vehicles are EVs,” he said.

For Greenlots, convergence means using the data cloud to better integrate EVs, homes and renewable-energy sources into the grid. “In Germany, we’re taking wind power and matching that with EV battery storage,” Mahabir said. “In the U.S., utilities don’t yet know when EV drivers are going recharge.”  That lack of transparency can unnecessarily tax the grid.

Another challenge includes a lack of public understanding about EVs, even five years after their rebirth. When NRG surveys consumers if they’d buy EVs, Banskota recounted, typically around a third are inclined. “But after we show them how it works, where they can recharge, and the cost benefits, that share doubles,” he said. “Education is critical.”

Despite the press coverage they’ve attracted, EVs are so rare — just 17,000 GM Volts and Nissan Leafs have been sold so far — that few drivers have had hands-on experience. Getting the public to have more direct experience with EVs can be a game changer, Wirtz said. “First-time EV drivers always find the experience exhilarating,” he said, because the driving experience is so quiet, powerful and smooth.

In terms of policy, Mahabir believes that support should be focused on the battery problem. “Korea, Japan, and China are investing billions in batteries, and we need to do the same” he said.

Eaton’s Wirtz concurred: If the industry can get batteries right, charging networks will follow.  That means lowering battery prices, boosting their capacity, and shrinking their charging times. For EV adoption, we’ll see a “top up” strategy where, everywhere you go, drivers will want plug in — that’s different from gas driving, where folks are comfortable letting their tank get near to empty, Wirtz said.

“People talk about this being a chicken and egg problem,” he added. “We firmly believe if you get the battery price down, the infrastructure will come.”

Banskota replied that the lifetime cost of ownership of EVs is something consumers don’t yet understand properly. The Nissan Leaf, for example, is already the lowest-cost vehicle in terms of lifetime costs, including maintenance, fuel and sticker price. “EVs are already competitive,” he said.

One way to help lower EVs’ costs and drive adoption would be to standardize chargers, Wirtz said. “We’ve identified 11 protocols for vehicles to communicate to recharging points,” he said. That creates costly complexity and deters economies of scale.

Another barrier: EVs don’t necessarily fit well into legacy car retail channels, Mahabir pointed out. Dealers don’t love the financial impact of EVs on their profits, since battery-powered cars are relatively expensive, leaving a thinner margins. What’s more: EVs need less maintenance, which hurts shop income.

In terms of federal incentives, the focus ought to be on early-stage research and development, said NRG’s Banskota, in order to drive progress in the basic battery science.

Locally, giving EVs access to HOV lanes and preferential parking are low-cost ways for cities to stir interest in EVs. “It would provide a huge boost for EV owners,” Banskota said.

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View the original story at: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/03/23/whats-keeping-electric-vehicles-mainstream

GreenBiz

Making cities sustainability centerpieces | GreenBiz

At the heart of GreenBiz’s VERGE initiative is the thesis that the coming together of economic and technological factors is driving innovation. During a lunch session as part of the VERGE DC event, we focused on how cities are emerging as hothouses where these dynamics are unfolding most quickly.

Increasingly, the 21st century is likely to be dominated by cities, with dense gatherings of capital, technology and skills where public and private players can collaborate at high speeds. In a physical sense, cities are where technologies—energy, information, building, and transportation—are hybridizing most quickly and most productively, driving economic growth, creating jobs, and spurring competitiveness.

To spark this roundtable discussion, we looked to a recent report exploring these trends. Titled “Citystates: How cities are vital to the future of sustainability,” and produced by SustainAbility in partnership with GreenBiz and sponsored by Ford Motor Company, the report lays out seven characteristics, or states, that drive growth-nurturing synergies between cities and business. Click here for a PDF of the report.

As an overview of its analysis, SustainAbility shared a video:

Citystates from SustainAbility on Vimeo.

The Seven States

The report defines seven characteristics that SustainAbility concludes can help cities and business thrive symbiotically. Here’s how co-authors, Chris Guenther and Mohammed Al-Shawaf describe these “citystates” and the opportunities they open to businesses:

1. The Connected City: Growing technological sophistication and traditional social connectivity provide opportunities for greater awareness, trust and collaboration among stakeholders. How can business both bolster and create value from this essential connectivity?
2. The Decisive City: Cities often have the urgency and accountability to act decisively. For example, cities lead state and national efforts in the areas of climate change mitigation and adaptation. How might companies improve their own decisiveness, and/or leverage that of cities, to drive sustainability?
3. The Adaptive City: Cities are among the most adaptable structures in society. How can business grow more adaptive while collaborating with cities on their mutual survival?
4. The Collaborative/Competitive City: The healthy tension between peer-to-peer collaboration and economic and brand competition among cities has potential to drive precompetitive sustainable innovation and rapid diffusion of solutions. How might industries exploit this tension in their own parallel drive for sustainability and competitiveness?
5. The Visceral City: Urban living is shaped by numerous real and potential feedback loops. As urbanization progresses and its impacts become more pressing. How can companies beneficially tap into these feedbacks to drive both value creation and sustainable development?
6. The Personal City. The influence of shared identity and values — in cities and elsewhere — is a particularly powerful driver of individual and collective action. How can businesses connect with citizen-consumers’ values to drive demand for more sustainable products and services?
7. The Experimental City: Cities are inherently creative, experimental social systems. This opens up links between R&D and low barriers to entry for nontraditional actors. How can business embrace the growing democratization of innovation and leverage cities as laboratories to test and scale sustainability solutions?

In the discussion that followed this presentation, it became clear that companies and cities face an increasingly co-dependent future. Businesses are agile, quick to innovate and develop sustainability technologies. Cities meanwhile, face pressing needs to improve urban environments, and to boost the efficiency and sophistication of city services.

Given the right mix of markets, public policy, and economic potential, businesses can help cities tackle problems ranging from transportation congestion to water treatment, and from energy efficiency to building and infrastructure upgrades.

Compelling as this vision is, participants shared many examples of the fundamental limitations that slow down city programs, or that stymie public-private interaction—budget, manpower, politics, and the like.

Here are some key ideas that caught my attention. We covered more in the 90-minute session than I’ve captured below, so I hope participants will weigh in below, via comments, to share other ideas and reactions, as well as expand the discussion.

Racing to beat election cycles. The long-term, multidecadal nature of many city sustainability plans can be stymied by the relatively short-term tenures of elected officials. City leaders face pressure to institutionalize programs before elected leaders move on. The private sector can help by helping to cement successful practices into city operations.

Private-sector’s bully pulpit. City leaders emphasized that private-sector leadership on sustainability and climate issues can help sway politicians and bureaucracies who remain shy or averse to tackling these topics. Indeed, where “environmentalism” can be a politically tainted phrase in some circles, “sustainability” has positive connotations that can catalyze change. “I consider urban sustainability the third wave of the environmental movement,” said a city leader, adding: “Our future is one of Manifest Density.”

Open-source efficiency. Nonprivate, noncopyrighted software projects, such as those pioneered by Code for America, can be more cost-effective laboratories to develop, test and trial software services. By sharing code between cities, services can evolve faster and deliver effective solutions for a tiny fraction of the cost of using conventional contracting methods. The lower cost and quicker deployment, in turn, makes it easier to experiment with a greater variety of ideas, and to explore even small-scale initiatives.

Sensing cities. The falling cost of hardware, especially the growing smarts of sensor networks, promise substantial gains. Lost-cost monitoring of public infrastructure such as storm water systems can help identify problems and lower damage, by sending repair crews to the right place, sooner.

Un-silo information and expertise. It’s a problem within any large organization: siloed expertise and misaligned interests can stymie public-private interactions too. For example, moving a Zip Car a block close to highly-trafficked area might benefit the city, commuters and the company. But getting all the parties involved—company execs, transportation department managers, and property owners—can make otherwise easy fixes hard to execute.

Tour de Sustainability? Just as cities have developed walking tours of historical sites, they should also offer sustainability walks: paths that could take residents, visitors, and students on a journey to see green buildings, storm water features, grid infrastructure, white roofs, and the like. Given that sustainability can be an abstract idea for non-experts, such tours could normalize sustainability, inspire and educate.

Cultivating failure. The private sector has developed a tolerance for failure, some even appreciate the lessons unsuccessful efforts can teach. Yet in the public sector and especially among elected leaders, failure is deeply feared. This can lead to bad projects being pushed past failure, at great cost. Is it possible to cultivate a more experimental, failure-tolerant culture in the public sector?

Image courtesy of RATOCA via Shutterstock.

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Check out the original post here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/03/22/why-cities-are-hotbeds-innovation

GreenBiz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Full cups

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Half full

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

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

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

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

Half empty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GreenBiz

Can Lit Motors’ self-balancing electric motorcycle succeed where Segway couldn’t? | GreenBiz

What rolls on only two wheels, but can’t be toppled? No, it’s not a Segway. But it does look a little like a Tron-inspired light cycle. The answer is Lit Motors’ C-1 virtually uncrashable electric motorcycle.

At GreenBiz’s VERGE DC confab last week, Lit Motors founder Daniel Kim made a case for why this super-stable electric motorcycle may just succeed where the Segway failed – and why it has the potential to accelerate our breakup with internal-combustion-powered four-wheelers.

What makes Lit’s C-1 so VERGE–y is that it’s a mashup: It combines old-school motorcycle design with cutting-edge sensory and stabilization systems.

The stabilization systems evolved from the digitally controlled gyroscopes first used to stabilize the Hubble Space Telescope. The C-1 uses a pair of advanced gyros as the foundation of a covered, electric motorcycle that — for all intents and purposes — can’t be knocked over. Sounds ridiculous? Well, check out the scale models in this video to see how it works:

Here’s how Lit explains the techno-mojo behind all that stability trickery:

Utilizing electronically controlled gyroscopes located under the floor (putting out over 1,300 lb/ft of torque), the vehicle balances at a stop and stays upright in the event of a collision. In-wheel electric motors (40 kw) provide the power and regeneration, while hub steering keeps you pointed in the right direction. With a top speed of over 120 MPH and battery packs providing 200 miles per charge, the C-1 is perfect for commuters and city dwellers alike.

Since 2010, Kim’s team of nine has logged nearly 20,000 hours developing the C-1 and its constituent technologies. In the process, they’ve applied for 13 patents and designed for a compact manufacturing operation — all on a budget well south of $1 million. Talk about lean innovation.

Kim is aiming for something that transcends slick electric motorcycles. Like a growing generation of transportation thinkers, he sees traffic as a vicious problem that’s seen very little real innovation during the century-long reign of the car. Given that three-quarters of vehicles are driven alone, converting them into the smaller footprint of single-passenger C-1s could effectively free up half of our existing road capacity.

Lit Motors founder Daniel Kim talks about the C-1 electric motorcycle.

Daniel Kim, founder of Lit MotorsThe gains could go further, too. Imagine if the C-1 were mated with the autonomous vehicle systems being developed by the likes of Google and Audi, which promise to reduce congestion by optimizing vehicle behavior. The result could be agile, self-driving robot cars whizzing along fast-moving, jam-free roads. That is, at least until the inevitable robot rebellion.

Back to the C-1. As a motorcycle and bicycle-loving technophile, it’s hard for me not to enthuse about this tantalizing technology. But in truth, the transportation world is littered with achingly smart gizmos that crashed and burned. High atop that list, of course, is Dean Kamen’s Segway, a two-wheeled, self-balancing scooter packed with such blinding promise that Time magazine judged it a “reinvention of the wheel.” Yet these days, Segways are exiled to duty on Paris’ lazy-tourist circuit.

To be fair, the C-1 gets right much that was wrong with the Segway. The Segway promised to revolutionize urban transportation, but was quickly mired in legal wrangling over whether it belonged on sidewalks or roads. The C-1 clearly belongs on roads. The Segway was open, exposed to the weather, while the C-1 is sealed like a car.

Another problem was that the Segway offered a costly solution for shortish journeys, for which plenty of perfectly good, cheap alternatives exist – feet, bicycles and buses, to name a few. In contrast, the C-1 looks to be a true alternative for distant commutes. Kim emphasized that its range would more than cover the average U.S. daily commute.

And don’t underestimate the cool factor. Aside from the above-mentioned reasons, the Segway also was doomed by a chronic case of “I’d be embarrassed to be seen on it” design. It screamed park ranger. Conversely, the C-1 stirs science-fiction dreams. In a chat after his presentation, Kim explained that the fab shop that produced the Tron lightcycle for the recent remake of the sci-fi film helped to build the first C-1 prototype.

Of course, the C-1 has a long way to go to reach the market, and many speed bumps, detours and dead ends can crop up on the road from lab to factory. Passing federal safety and classification standards are costly obstacles. Then there’s the marketing challenge: It will still have to overcome the Segway curse.

Yet, really, it all comes back to one basic question: Who wouldn’t want to commute on a light cycle?

You can put down a deposit on one for as little as $250 at http://litmotors.com/reserve/. Kim is hoping the first commercial models will roll out on U.S. roads in 2014, priced in the neighborhood of $24,000.

Photos from VERGE DC taken by Goodwin Ogbuehi for GreenBiz Group.

GreenBiz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GreenBiz

HOW GREENER cities are leading the way | GreenBiz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writer, editor, content advisor, creative leader – energy, climate | Chief storyteller at RMI | Co-founder of T Brand at The New York Times