Tag Archives: cities

GreenBiz

How SAP and cities are boosting innovation through open data | GreenBiz

Listening to a couple of coders gush over the virtues of gamification, location-based mobile services and open data standards, I might have mistaken the techies for sneaker-wearing pitchmen at a Silicon Valley hackathon.

But this was midtown Manhattan. Instead of B-school dropouts, the geeks in question were actually silver-haired civil servants in charge of the IT operations for Boston and Edmonton. Though centuries old, each of the cities is racing towards decidedly cutting-edge goals of opening up access to municipal data for their residents and businesses to use and commercialize.

“Successful cities of the future aren’t necessarily the most efficient. It’s about engagement and citizen empowerment,” said Bill Oates, chief information officer for the City of Boston. “Our innovation is on people, to help constituents connect with the city.”

The CIOs were brought together by SAP to mark the U.S. launch of the software giant’s Urban Matters program, which aims to help municipal governments “deliver better-run cities” by opening up data streams for citizens and business to tap into.

As this software space matures, big companies also are exploring opportunities to integrate city data feeds into current and future services.

GM is grooming its OnStar unit to become the software hub for transportation services such as RelayRides’ peer-to-peer car sharing service. The automaker recently issued protocols that will let third-party developers integrate the data beginning to flow from cities — such as road construction information, or parking data — into future OnStar services.

In the world of smart buildings, Johnson Controls is likewise eyeing the opportunities emerging by tapping into huge, public pools of data on the performance of buildings in Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, Washington D.C. and other cities.

Back in Boston, SAP technology is powering the city’s Boston About Results website and accompanyingCitizen Insights iPhone app. Citizen Insights collects, analyzes and shares performance measures across scores of city departments from tree planting requests to fire response times.

By digitizing and opening up their data flows, most cities are trying to evolve into “better versions of themselves” rather than presume to compete with Silicon Valley, said Bruce Katz, vice president and director of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution.

Boston and Edmonton are pushing to lead a growing contest among cities aiming to boost their competitiveness by opening access to city data streams. Fighting to transform decades-old bureaucratic processes that tended to lock up key city information — such as property records or tax rolls — in hard-to-access formats, the goal is first to digitize as much information as possible.

As these programs grow more ambitious, cities face an outsized data challenge in scaling up these efforts. With centuries’ worth of property records or historical budget information, cities are typically sitting on mountains of data that are a challenge to digitize, standardize and make accessible.

Cities need “additional investment to deal with the analytics…of taking tens of thousands of data sets and looking inside them,” said Theresa Pardo of the Center for Technology in Government at the University of Albany (State University of New York, SUNY). “A lot of cities still have their records in paper form.”

Pardo’s center recently released a white paper, The Dynamics of Opening Government Data. The paper offers practical advice for government managers pursuing open data initiatives.

Edmonton started its open data efforts with a dozen public datasets in 2010. Today, “We have 257… San Francisco has 250,” said Chris Moore, the City of Edmonton’s CIO. Moore is pleased to be edging out one of the U.S.’s most wired metropolises.

Digitizing the information sequestered in city offices is just the beginning of the battle. Making those data streams publicly accessible and easily useable is essential for developers to build new services and businesses.

In Edmonton, for instance, the city transportation department recognized an appetite for access to information on road closures, resurfacings and the like. When the dataset went live earlier this year, it quickly became the city’s most popular feed. “After it was released, an Edmontonian created an app called YEG Constriction,” Moore told IT World Canada.

As Edmonton’s efforts unfold, Moore’s IT team hopes to stay at the front of city efforts by exploring gamification and the immersive 3D web as ways to boost public interaction with the data. For instance, the city is readying a Facebook game around traffic and safety, Moore said.

Behind all the enthusiasm for data transparency are bottom-line benefits that please city bean counters. The shift towards open data standards can deliver a big bang for the buck at a time when cities face rising demands for data services, yet have fewer resources with which to develop them.

In Edmonton, the city hosted Apps4Edmonton.ca, a contest to develop apps for city residents and businesses. “For around $50,000 we developed dozens of apps,” says Moore. Were the applications developed conventionally, he speculated, the cost of a single study of the business case would have exceeded that figure.

Code sharing between cities can further compound these savings. Boston’s New Urban Mechanics initiative encourages public collaboration to develop innovative civic services, explained Oates, the city’s CIO. Among the program’s most popular apps is Street Bump, an iPhone app that helps detect and report potholes. As a result of these efforts, nearly every pothole complaint in Boston is resolved in two days or less. A couple of years ago, less than half were completed that quickly.

Now, Boston is extending and sharing its New Urban Mechanics platform with dozensof other cities and towns, where apps can be adapted or further customized.

To be sure, cities aren’t going to threaten Silicon Valley’s software titans anytime soon. But the afamiliar, infectious air of competitive innovation is developing in municipal software circles. Earlier this month, Emily Badger at The Atlantic Cities rounded up the best open data releases of 2012. From listings of green roofs in Chicago to bikeshares in Boston, the apps are promising examples of how smart software can transform existing, static city data into dynamic, interactive tools that promise to make cities greener and more efficient.

While incremental, the boom in city data apps highlights how metropolises are best positioned to push ahead with effective innovation. “Cities are a lot more pragmatic than state or national governments,” said Brooking’s Katz.

Illustration of key opening file folder provided by Artgraphics via Shutterstock.

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Check out the original story here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2013/01/03/how-sap-cities-boosting-innovation-data

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

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

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

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

BusinessWeek

Green Buildings: The Hitch in the Upgrade Plans

Landlords, who would shoulder the financial burden, may hold up cities’ ambitions to make commercial buildings more energy efficient

On Earth Day last month, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the latest step in New York’s ambitious campaign to green the Big Apple. The proposal, likely to become law, calls for 22,000 of the city’s biggest buildings—from iconic office towers to humble apartment blocks—to undergo detailed energy audits. Guided by the findings, building owners will then be obliged to invest in upgrades such as insulated windows or more efficient boilers.

To soften the burden on landlords, they’d only be forced to bankroll changes that would pay for themselves over five years through reductions in energy use. The mayor says the plan will deliver $750 million in annual savings on utility bills, add thousands of new green jobs, and cut the city’s greenhouse gas output by 5%.

One tricky problem: The financial benefits of these retrofits flow mainly to tenants in the form of lower electric, water, and gas bills, not to the building owners who are expected to cover the costs. This leaves the owners facing a regulatory stick but no carrot. Without a better reward on the table, the landlords will drag their feet, predicts Jennifer Henry, real estate sector manager at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit green advocacy group.

The obstacle is slowing eco-upgrades beyond New York, just when the nation needs them most. A McKinsey & Co. study suggests energy efficiency upgrades in buildings and appliances are the most cost-effective green strategy for the U.S., where buildings consume about 35% of all the energy used each year. That’s why President Barack Obama has made retrofits a priority, setting aside $2.8 billion in the federal stimulus package to promote them. “You have to fix existing structures,” says Marc Heisterkamp, director of commercial real estate at the U.S. Green Building Council, a standard-setting trade group.

CHILLY RECEPTION

In New York, Bloomberg is trying to jump-start the process, but he got a chilly reception from big property owners, the group he expects to pay for the upgrades. It’s not for lack of interest in energy savings. Rather, the current situation and the mayor’s proposal offer too few financial rewards.

The snag with paying for retrofits mainly affects major upgrades in large leased properties, especially multitenant buildings, which make up the bulk of the 5 million commercial properties in the U.S. In these buildings, widely varying rental terms—depending on the amount of leased space, market conditions, and lease duration—can make the financing of ambitious retrofits “seem almost byzantine,” says NRDC’s Henry.Consider a routine upgrade to common-area lighting systems. Occupancy sensors that turn out lights when no one is around can pay for themselves in a few years. But landlords generally pass on operating expenses such as electricity, including for shared areas. So their costs wouldn’t fall because of the upgrade, and they have little pecuniary incentive to pay for improvements. “If a building’s systems are inefficient but still fully functional, the owner won’t bother [with a green upgrade],” says Sean Patrick Neill, principal of Cycle-7, a New York consultancy that focuses on green-building financing.

BALKING BY BANKS

Such barriers lead to a second problem: Without a clear way to make money from energy savings, “banks have found it difficult to finance big retrofits,” says Mike Pedersen, group head of corporate operations at TD Bank Financial Group. Up front, there’s the catch-22 that banks want to see “track records of proven savings resulting from the retrofits,” he adds. That’s tough to provide if the projects can’t get financing. Banks are also uncomfortable with fuzzy arrangements, such as lending to an owner backed by hypothetical savings drawn from multiple tenants.

A determined landlord can find novel financing models. New York’s Empire State Building is trying to cut energy use by 38% as part of a $500 million planned rehab. Carrying little debt, its owners can use the building, rather than energy savings, to back the loan. In Chicago, Vornado Realty Trusts’ Merchandise Mart, the world’s largest commercial building, has paid for eco-improvements from its own ongoing operating budgets, eking out incremental savings by updating mechanical systems, windows, and maintenance routines.

And in Toronto, TD Bank (TD) works with owners, tenants, and other banks to identify and finance retrofits. With the right market-based solution, “tenants will see energy cost savings, and owners can monetize a share of those savings to finance investment,” says David Pecaut, a senior partner at Boston Consulting Group and co-chair of the Greening Greater Toronto initiative. “Then green retrofits will take off.”

Originally published in BusinessWeek, see the online version here.

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Cleaning Up an Effluent Society: New EPA rules have spawned a wave of spending aimed at stemming the flow of stormwater-borne contaminants into local waterways | BusinessWeek

What’s driving Chicago to pour $3 billion into a 109-mile network of tunnels and reservoirs hacked out of the limestone underlying the Windy City? It’s the same fetid force that spurred Los Angeles voters to O.K. a $500 million bond last November. Construction titans and big-box retailers are getting more serious about it, too. It’s causing thousands of other U.S. cities and companies to yank up manhole covers and storm grates and take a closer look at the witches’ brew of garbage, hydrocarbons, and bacteria that flows down curbside drains and eventually into local waters. Under foot and out of sight, those conduits are a growing problem. They empty untreated stormwater into rivers and lakes. This water can, at its worse, “kill fish and wildlife, close beaches, and threaten human health,” explains Steve Fleischli, executive director of Waterkeeper Alliance, a nonprofit watchdog group based in Irvington, N.Y.

2008 DEADLINE. That’s why the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has made cleaning up stormwater a must-do for the nation’s municipalities. The EPA Web site describes storm runoff as “one of the most significant sources of water pollution in the nation, comparable to contamination from industrial and sewage sources.”By the end of 2008, EPA rules say that cities with population of more than 10,000 must have a plan in place to stem the flow of debris and contaminants from curbside into local waterways. The rule has unleashed a wave of spending on everything from megascale engineering projects like Chicago’s Deep Tunnel to innovative drain drop-ins that cleanse the water that passes through it.

Stormwater can pollute, sicken, and even kill. First, it’s highly polluted from the get-go. While rain water may fall from the sky clean, it becomes foul the instant it hits the street. The contaminants include an estimated 1 million gallons of dissolved hydrocarbons — oil and gas dripping from the nation’s 200 million-plus vehicles — per year, as a toxic stew of animal and human fecal bacteria, rubbish, and traces of heavy metals, pesticides, and herbicides, particularly in suburban and rural areas.

What’s more, many storm systems flow directly to waterways and lakes. Tom Leary, stormwater program officer at the City of Long Beach’s Public Works Dept., explains that when it rains in the Los Angeles/Long Beach area, anything within the 875-square-mile Los Angeles River drainage area “is flushed into the sewers and eventually into the river.” Last year that included some 12,000 tons of rubbish that washed up on city beaches.

BAD BEACH DAYS. Sewage spills pose a related, more complicated problem. Many cities linked their storm drains to sewage pipes — in part or in whole — because of the hazard posed by untreated stormwater. The idea: By passing storm runoff through sewage treatment plants, rainwater can be cleared of garbage and toxins. And this works when the pipes can handle the flow.

Yet in cases when a heavy rain fills up both pipe networks, they can back up and flood city streets with sewage-tainted water, as used to happen in Chicago. The contaminated water is then forced into nearby rivers or lakes. Sewage spills can spike bacterial (fecal coliform) counts for days, exposing bathers to cholera and other diseases. Along California’s coast, for example, “Closed Beach” days have been common in recent years because of health risks posed by sewage plumes.

Big companies are in the firing line, too. Construction projects and multi-acre parking lots are particularly serious sources of what the EPA describes as “non-point pollution” flowing into sewers. The agency has lately been turning up the heat on big-box retailers and large property developers, says Fleischli. Together with the U.S. Justice Dept. and a number of states, the EPA reached a settlement with Wal-Mart Stores (WMT ) in 2004 for violating the Clean Water Act during store construction. The retailer agreed to pay a $3.1 million civil penalty and to reduce tainted runoff from its sites.

RESURRECTED RIVER. Chicago’s approach has been to build what amounts to a very big holding tank for its sewage and rain water. Formally known as the Tunnel and Reservoir Project, the EPA-funded network was begun in 1974 and is made up of subterranean tunnels, many the width of a locomotive, connected to a series of concrete caverns. By storing wastewater until it can be processed by sewage treatment plants, the largely completed system is already helping to make Chicago area waters cleaner.

Once infamous for its lifeless, inky, and occasionally even flammable water quality, the Chicago River has been resurrected with the return of some 50 species of fish, along with canoeists and riverside cafés, if not swimmers quite yet. You can see the progress at this slide show.

Compared to Chicago’s big dig, Norwalk (Conn.) has taken a micro approach. Rather than tear up its streets, the city turned to privately-held AbTech Industries Inc. to buy a high-tech filter that can be dropped into the existing stormwater drains. AbTech’s Ultra Urban Filter (UUF) liners are made of a patented polymer that lets water pass through, but bonds permanently with oil, PCBs, and other toxins, while also catching more common trash. When treated with a proprietary anti-bacterial, nontoxic coating, the sponges can also zap harmful bacteria as water passes through the popcorn-like material. In addition to routing debris removal, typically done with storm sewers, the UUF’s anti-bacterial and oil-trapping capacity lasts about two years.

LIGHT TREATMENT. Other cities and companies are following suit. Long Beach, for example, is using a “treatment train” combining UUFs, garbage nets, and a handful of mechanical separators that spin wastewater to separate debris. Alternatives include more costly chlorination, ozonation, and/or power-hungry devices that use ultraviolet light to sanitize water as it passes through.

Yet, none combine antibacterial properties with the ability to drop them into existing storm drains, with a minimum of costly construction, explains Glenn Rink, president and chief executive of AbTech. At about $1,000 per drain, UUFs can help a city clean up its waterways, for thousands or millions of dollars, rather than billions. With over 275 UUFs in key areas around Norwalk paid for by a $500,000 EPA grant, the filters are proving to remove, on average, 75% of harmful bacteria, and up to 99.9%.

With the EPA’s deadline drawing nigh, pressure to clean up stormwater runoff is just beginning to rise. Nationwide, the number of roadside catch basins — in cities and rural areas — is estimated to be over 5 million. Cleaning them all is a Olympian task, but you can do your own small part: Rather than toss that cigarette butt or dog poop down a sewer grate, look for a trash can instead.

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