Grid Parity - Tipping Point For Change

   While grid parity is where things are headed there are still many obstacles - starting with dollars and dollars of utility money to fight it. Start in Arizona to see the aggressive tactics used by utilities against grid parity. Grid parity will allow on-site power generation by independent and very small producers (a household) to be part of the discussion of the future of energy production in the United States, instead of  beening dismissed as insignificant. 
   Quality improvements and cost declines in batteries, as the article reports, are a major tipping point to make on-site surplus power generation practical for a growing number of people and businesses. While not mentioned in the article, there are recent significant performance improvements in small scale wind power production systems designed for residential rooftop mounting. With further price drops, a system that combines rooftop solar and wind electric production with battery backup becomes a practical goal for an urban dweller - not just off-the-grid back-to-the-hills people. Adding a solar hot water component further reduces off-site power needs.
    As more individual households become energy producers, the two-way potential of the grid begins to be realized. Up until now, the grid is primarily seen as a one-way street to the consumer. Deregulation has divided distribution from production but a lot of the same folks are still around and they would be happy if it stayed a one-way street. The continuing rise in on-site power production pushes the envelope though. I see two basic realities - first, less distributed power means less revenue and taxes and second, if a micro power producer wants to sell their power, they must be connected to the grid. Connection will cost money. Clearly a realignment of the present utilities vs. solar people paradigm is needed - the grid needs re-imagining with an emphasis on who is to receive the benefit - is it a democratic thing because everyone basically needs it or is it prone to corporate bottle-necks or choke points? 
   The inherent benefit of household power production is people keeping their money - the elimination of the massive wealth transfer from individuals to the corporations that control electricity production and distribution. People do not give up money streams without resistance. Corporations will go to great lengths to protect what they consider to be theirs. Grid parity is change - for forward looking people, it is a key element in a tipping point that can have significant effects on corporate and government revenues. Just as there are currently winners and losers, there are winners and losers to come. Hopefully these issues will soon be more commonly part of the discussion for everyone.
      

Grid parity: Why electric utilities should struggle to sleep at night

By Matt McFarland, Updated: March 25 at 9:02 am

What’s good news for those concerned with climate change, and bad news for electric utilities? That’s grid parity, which is sometimes called socket parity. It exists when an alternative energy source generates electricity at a cost matching the price of power from the electric grid.

As grid parity becomes increasingly common, renewable energy could transform our world and slow the effects of climate change. Advances in solar panels and battery storage will make it more realistic for consumers to dump their electric utility, and power their homes through solar energy that is stored in batteries for cloudy days.

“I think the grid gets disrupted,” said NRG Energy chief executive David Crane. “The only question is do you want to be the disruptor or do you want to get disrupted.”

Our world is increasingly cordless, and power appears likely to follow. While we’re not there yet, the momentum behind distributed energy is building.

The Rocky Mountain Institute has said that tens of millions of commercial and residential customers will have grid parity by 2030 and perhaps 2020. Hawaii is already there as a result of high energy costs associated with being an island.

Other estimates are more aggressive. A 2013 Deutsche Bank report said that 10 states are currently at grid parity: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York and Vermont. According to a 2013 note by Citi Research, Germany, Spain, Portugal and Australia have reached grid parity.

This shift has benefited from a dramatic drop in the price of solar panels, which dropped 97.2 percent from 1975 to 2012, according to GTM Research.

For electric utilities to truly be challenged, batteries are just as important as solar panels. With batteries excess energy could be stored. Tesla announced in February it’s building a gigafactory, which it envisions producing more lithium ion batteries by 2020 than were produced worldwide in a 2013. The scale of the operation should drive down prices further (Tesla estimates over 30 percent). Some of these batteries will be used by SolarCity, a leader in installing residential solar panels.

SolarCity has a pilot program in California, in which batteries store solar power. It has complained that electric utilities are slowing its rollout. NRG Energy hopes to have a similar product available by the end of 2014.

If utilities are dragging their feet on SolarCity’s initiative, it’s easy to understand why. As solar energy gets cheaper, traditional electric utilities are doing the opposite. The cost of maintaining the electric grid has gotten more expensive, but reliability hasn’t improved. The investments of electrical utilities appear to be poorly spent.

If customers leave electric utilities, it starts a downward spiral. Fewer customers will mean higher rates, which encourages remaining customers to jump ship for a solar-battery system.

Electric utilities appear poorly equipped for how technology will transform the energy industry. For years there hasn’t been an incentive to innovate, in part due to a lack of competition. Plus, making their product cheaper means less revenue, so why innovate?
Meanwhile, energy upstarts are led by forward thinkers with disruptive track records and eyes on society’s big problems, such as climate change and our dependence on fossil fuels for energy. SolarCity chairman Elon Musk co-founded PayPal and leads Tesla, which could transform the auto industry.
NRG’s Crane speaks of having his company mentioned in the same breath as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. It’s radical to imagine anyone feeling passionate about their source of power, but environmental concerns may make it common soon. New devices such as Nest’s popular thermostat are making consumers rethink what to expect from the companies and gadgets that manage their energy.
Crane highlighted the climate change concerns in a recent letter to shareholders: “The day is coming when our children sit us down in our dotage, look us straight in the eye, with an acute sense of betrayal and disappointment in theirs, and whisper to us, ‘You knew… and you didn’t do anything about it. Why?’”

© The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2014/03/25/grid-parity-why-electric-utilities-should-struggle-to-sleep-at-night/

Corridor H - DC To West Virginia Zoom Zoom

Published On: Tue, Nov 26th, 2013

Top Stories | By Parsons Advocate

DOH Opens Corridor H Section

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin III, along with Transportation Secretary Paul Mattox, and other state, federal, and local leaders were on hand for the opening of the newest section of Corridor H, Bismarck Connector at WV 93 to Scherr Connector at WV 93, Friday, November 22 at 12:30 p.m. The celebration took place at a scenic overlook on the new road, two miles west of the WV 93 Connector at Scherr. Members of the public were on hand to welcome this new stretch of roadway.

Senator Manchin invoked the memory of the late president John F. Kennedy on the 50th anniversary of his assassination. Manchin said that Kennedy owed a debt to the state of West Virginia for helping him get elected. And, he followed, the people of West Virginia owe a debt to the late president for his work in opening up the state with infrastructure. He also exacted a promise from Secretary Mattox that Corridor H would reach Davis in less than two years, which received cheers from the audience.

“Opening this section of roadway highlights years of aggressive work by many organizations to finish Corridor H as quickly as possible, stated Secretary Mattox. Since 2010, approximately 50 miles have been opened to traffic thanks to the leadership and support of the late Senator Byrd, Governor Tomblin, Senators Rockefeller and Manchin, and Congresswoman Capito. I am proud to join them to celebrate this great achievement for the citizens of the Potomac Highlands and the State of West Virginia.”

The 4.7 mile section between Bismarck and the Scherr WV 93 Connector comes at a cost of $65 million, and makes complete, the Bismarck to Wardensville section, totaling nearly 49 miles. A 16.2 mile section from Davis to Bismarck is currently under construction, with a Fall 2014/2015 completion date, bringing the total mileage of Corridor H open or under construction to nearly 108 miles, or over 76% completed.


http://parsonsadvocate.com/doh-opens-corridor-h-section/

Telecoms Stacking The Deck (And Sometimes Losing)

  A couple of things - good examples here of corporations writing and shaping laws and it should be noted that it is not just Big Cable but in an example below also phone companies - in this case an association of small phone companies.

Big Cable may have felled Seattle’s mayor, but it couldn’t stop this Colo. project

By Brian Fung, Updated: November 6 at 9:37 am

In 2009, Vince Jordan was one of a handful of Coloradans hoping to flip the switch on a next-generation fiber optic network in his area. Longmont's 17-mile loop of fiber would have been capable of connecting Jordan to the Web at speeds 100 times faster than the national average. The city owned the cables already. All it needed was approval from the city's voters.
But Jordan, the broadband manager for Longmont's public electric utility, failed to anticipate one thing: The cable companies.
"We got creamed," he says. "We lost by 12 [percentage points] in that vote."
On that election night four years ago, they were caught flat-footed. The cable industry had poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into thwarting its prospective government-owned challenger at the polls. It dwarfed the advocates' expenditures, which that year amounted to all of $95.

That history made last night's election results particularly sweet for the city's municipal fiber advocates. Longmont residents approved a $45.3 million bond issuance that will go toward funding a city-wide fiber network. But recent political fights haven't always had a happy ending for advocates of municipal broadband projects.
A nationwide campaign
Cable incumbents have been fighting to defeat municipal fiber proposals all over the country. We recently reported that cable groups invested money to defeat Seattle mayor Mike McGinn, a municipal fiber supporter. (For the record, Sena Fitzmaurice, a Comcast spokesperson, denied Tuesday that the company's political contributions had any connection with McGinn's broadband policies. She says Comcast has contributed consistently to the Seattle Broadband Communications Coalition of Washington over the past five years.) In early returns Tuesday, McGinn was trailing challenger Ed Murray, 56-44.
But the battle of Seattle is far from the only time advocates of new broadband initiatives have crossed swords with incumbent cable companies. Across the United States, cable lobbyists have helped erect legal barriers to stifle competition from public utilities. Industry groups have repeatedly filed lawsuits to block city attempts to roll out fiber service. And they have also opposed public referendums to allow cities to build their own networks.
Longmont, Colo., was merely one such battleground. In North St. Paul, Minn., a 2009 ballot measure to let muni fiber move forward was defeated by a resounding 34-point margin. Opposition to the fledgling network, PolarNet, was led by the Minnesota Cable Communications Association. In the weeks leading up to the vote, it and other opposition groups spent some $40,000 campaigning against the measure. MCCA alone contributed more than $15,000 to the effort over the same period.
Part of the organization's message was that despite consumer confusion about the options for commercial Internet, the local market for broadband was actually very competitive — people just didn't know it.
"So many things have happened since then," says Michael Martin, MCCA's treasurer. "The state has developed a mapping system that shows all the providers in an area so people can go to an objective source and identify the competitors that are available to them. That wasn't available at the time. A lot of what people knew about what was available came mainly through word of mouth. It was anecdotal."
Whatever workarounds may have been built since the push for PolarNet, the fiber optic cables it was supposed to light up with traffic remain dark today. Paul Ammerman, North St. Paul's economic development director, seemed resigned to the cable industry's will.
"We're trying to figure out if it's worth the effort," he says. "Certainly we've got a lot of capacity that's not being used. On the horizon there's always the next breakthrough that might do it. Some say maybe the last mile is not fiber; maybe it's wireless. But that gets beyond the current technology."
In Chattanooga, one of the few places where municipal fiber has managed to gain traction, the state cable association filed a lawsuit in 2007 alleging that the local public utility, EPB, would be breaking the law if it allowed its electricity division to cross-subsidize its fiber optic service. When a judge threw out the case the following year, Comcast filed its own suit. That too was dismissed — and once more on appeal in 2009.
Big Cable's big stand
Still, Longmont may offer the most vivid example of cable industry groups trying to hobble a public broadband provider. Colorado is one of more than a dozen states that have passed laws prohibiting or hindering municipal broadband deployments. (Tennessee and Minnesota made it onto the Federal Communications Commission's initial list in 2004; Colorado proposed its law one year later.) Under the restriction, known as SB 152, cities that want to use their fiber optic cables to provide Internet service must get the approval of its residents before doing so. The rule effectively forbids local governments from managing their own property.
Lobbyists played an obscure but important role in pushing the bill through. According to the National Institute on Money in State Politics, the Colorado Telecommunications Association, a group representing 25 rural phone companies, hired two different teams of lobbyists in 2005 to promote the idea. One, Axiom Strategies, Inc., received $6,000 in contributions from CTA in 2005, a review of state records shows. Lobbyist Patrick Boyle, received $20,616.60 from the industry over the same period.
This chain of events is what ultimately led to Longmont's failed 2009 referendum on muni fiber; under the newly-passed law, the city couldn't move forward unless a majority of residents gave their consent. The state's cable group — the Colorado Cable Telecommunications Association — intervened, donating nearly $225,000 to an opposition committee named No Blank Check. Armed with these funds, the group took out full-page newspaper ads assigning nefarious motives to foreign investors who might have played a role in the project.
But not long after the cable industry's victory, Google started floating the idea of installing gigabit fiber in various sites around the country. Some in Longmont suggested petitioning the tech giant to make the city one of its testbeds.
"That really helped us educate the community to the value of what we already have here," says Longmont's Vince Jordan. "So we went again [with another referendum] in 2011."
This time, CCTA went all-in on fighting the initiative. It upped its contribution to anti-fiber groups, giving $385,000 to a committee called Look Before We Leap. This, in a battle that saw total opposition expenditures top $419,000. In other words, 92 percent of the messaging war against Question 2A was funded by the cable industry.
Yet the increased industry spending hardly seemed to make a difference. By a 61-39 percent vote, city residents agreed that Longmont should be able to do with its fiber optic cables what it wished.
How much did pro-fiber groups spend in that encounter? Around $3,700, says Jordan.
There are 27,000 households in Longmont. Even if the city were to connect all of the eligible homes to its existing fiber network overnight, it would still reach only 1,100 residences. Cable companies therefore spent over half a million dollars trying to prevent four percent of city households from gaining access to municipal fiber on any reasonable timescale. That's around $600 a home, or six months' worth of Xfinity Triple Play.
Did Longmont set a precedent?
Perhaps that's why the cable industry has mostly given up fighting Longmont — it's not worth it anymore. On Tuesday night, voters overwhelmingly approved of the city's third fiber ballot measure since SB 152, Question 2B. Question 2B asks whether the local government should be allowed to issue $45.3 million in bonds to pay for a city-wide deployment of fiber, one that would finally connect all 27,000 homes, and every private business, to public fiber within the next three years. Proponents estimated that without the funding, it would take a half-century to complete the roll-out. Voters gave it the green light, by a 68-32 percent split. No group came forward to contest the measure. The cable companies had picked up their ball and gone home.
This doesn't mean they're going to start backing down everywhere. Critics of municipal networks continue to point to the financial risks taxpayers assume when cities decide to embark on such ambitious projects.
"We've been supportive of public-private partnerships where tax dollars aren't competing against private investment capital," says Comcast's Sena Fitzmaurice. "In general, cities have extensive infrastructure needs like roads, bridges and schools, and we think especially in times of fiscal tradeoffs that taxpayer money should be focused on those needs rather than competing with the private sector."
There are certainly more than a handful of municipalities whose fiber projects have failed. Provo, Utah famously sold its public network to Google for a single dollar this year (though the tech company will also assume the burden for Provo's construction loans, which is not insignificant, either). Still, the fact that some local governments have struggled to monetize their fiber, even as others have succeeded, is not an argument for preventing cities from experimenting.
Longmont's plan explicitly bars the use of tax money to pay off the bonds. Instead, it will rely solely on revenues from broadband customers. Whether that'll actually work out is hardly clear. But what Longmont's experience does show is how large the gulf is between an incumbent industry that can spend money on a massive scale to promote its interests and advocates of municipal fiber that often lack deep-pocketed allies. Those odds made the triumph of Longmont's municipal fiber backers all the more remarkable.
Correction: The original version of this post identified a lobbying contributor as the Colorado Cable Telecommunications Association when in fact it was the Colorado Telecommunications Association.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/06/big-cable-helped-defeat-seattles-mayor-mcginn-but-they-couldnt-stop-this-colorado-project/?hpid=z5

US Army Leading Trash To Gas Efforts

From The New York Times -

August 17, 2013

Trash Into Gas, Efficiently? An Army Test May Tell

By PAUL TULLIS

THERE is an indisputable elegance to the idea of transforming garbage into fuel, of turning icky, smelly detritus into something valuable.

But big drawbacks have prevented the wholesale adoption of trash-to-gas technology in the United States: incineration is polluting, and the capital costs of new plants are enormous. Gasification systems can expend a tremendous amount of energy to produce a tiny amount of electricity. Up to this point, it hasn’t seemed worth the trouble.

Mike Hart thinks that he has solved those problems. In a former Air Force hangar outside Sacramento, his company, Sierra Energy, has spent the last several years testing a waste-to-energy system called the FastOx Pathfinder. The centerpiece, a waste gasifier that’s about the size of a shower stall, is essentially a modified blast furnace. A chemical reaction inside the gasifier heats any kind of trash — whether banana peels, used syringes, old iPods, even raw sewage — to extreme temperatures without combustion. The output includes hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which together are known as syngas, for synthetic gas, and  can be burned to generate electricity or made into ethanol or diesel fuel. The FastOx is now being prepared for delivery to Sierra Energy’s first customer: the United States Army.

Ethanol has long been promoted as an alternative fuel that increases energy independence, and federal law requires the use of greater amounts of it. But most ethanol in this country is produced from corn, and many people worry that the mandate is pushing up food prices. Ethanol produced from trash — or agricultural waste, as others are trying — would allay such concerns.

Ineos Bio, a Florida company, announced last month that it had produced ethanol from gasified wood waste, using a method that it expects to be commercially viable, and KiOR Inc. will make one million to two million gallons of diesel and gasoline this year from wood waste at its plant in Columbus, Miss., according to Michael McAdams, president of the Advanced Biofuels Association. Mr. Hart said Sierra Energy’s technology should be complementary with the Florida company’s; the FastOx turns all municipal waste, not just wood scraps, into a gas that Ineos Bio could then transform into ethanol.

The FastOx gasifier is the brainchild of two former engineers at Kaiser Steel, patented by the grandson of one of them and commercialized by Mr. Hart. “It’s a modular system that can be dropped into any area,” Mr. Hart said, “using waste where it’s produced to make electricity where it’s used.” Once it’s off the ground, he said, “garbage will be a commodity.”  

From concept to construction, the story of the FastOx is of one fortuitous accident after another. And while Sierra Energy has not yet proved to be a successful company — it will be a long while before your garbage is shoveled into a FastOx — its system has become the first waste-to-energy technology acquired by the Defense Department, which paid $3 million for it through an environmental technology program. (The California Energy Commission, which supports renewable energy development in the state, also gave Sierra $5 million, to cover the portion of Sierra’s costs that the Pentagon couldn’t.)

The military is looking for ways to reduce its oil consumption, and to make it easier to supply the front lines with the fuel it uses in all its vehicles and generators. “These days, the supply lines are in the battlefield,” said Sharon E. Burke, the assistant secretary of defense for operational efficiency plans and programs. “And we consume a lot of fuel, which makes us a big target.”

MIKE HART got into the energy business by way of a train. In 1993, he bought the Sierra Railroad, a small freight and tourism line in Northern California. During the California blackouts of 2001, he had an idea: “As the lights were going out, I realized every one of my locomotives creates 2.1 megawatts of electricity,” he said — enough to power many hundred homes. “It’s a rolling generator, and inexpensive.”

The train-as-power-generator idea never really left the station, but it got Mr. Hart thinking about alternative energy. Then, as part of a settlement after a fuel spill from one of his trains, he promised to convert his trains to nonpolluting biodiesel.

Biodiesel, however, proved hard to find, and Mr. Hart started looking for new ways to source it. In 2002, he was asked to judge an annual business plan competition called the Big Bang, at the University of California, Davis. That’s where he met Chris Kasten.

Mr. Kasten came to the competition with an idea to use a modified blast furnace to turn waste into fuel. His grandfather, Bruce Claflin, a retired chief industrial engineer at Kaiser Steel in Fontana, Calif., had given him the idea.

Kaiser used blast furnaces to make steel, and Mr. Claflin and a colleague, John Jasbinsek, were tasked with finding “a way to make the blast furnace more efficient and less polluting,” said Mr. Jasbinsek, who is now 86.

Like all blast furnaces, Kaiser’s emitted a flue gas out of the top. It occurred to Mr. Clafin and Mr. Jasbinsek that this gas might have value. The two came up with the idea of injecting oxygen, instead of the atmospheric air that steel makers had always used, to create the chemical reaction that heats the inside of the furnace. This would cut pollution while raising the energy content of the flue gas — in essence, giving the steel maker a second product. But pure oxygen made the system too hot, so they added steam. This gave the furnace a third product: hydrogen, which can be used to produce electricity in fuel cells.

After Kaiser decided to close the Fontana plant in 1983, workers were told to toss all demolition debris into the blast furnace. It was then that Mr. Jasbinsek and Mr. Claflin realized that the furnace could take garbage, too. “No matter what they put in, the furnace melted and gasified it,” Mr. Kasten said. This meant a potential fourth revenue stream — from taking municipal waste that would otherwise go to landfills.

When Kaiser wasn’t interested, Mr. Jasbinsek recalled, “we took the idea to other steel companies, too.” But “nobody gave a damn!” he said. “Now there are hardly any steel companies left in the U.S.”

Kaiser Steel went bankrupt in 1987, so the idea belonged to Mr. Jasbinsek and Mr. Claflin. They were nearing retirement, though, so Mr. Claflin told his grandson about it. (Mr. Claflin died before the idea could be commercialized.)

Mr. Kasten’s first fruitful step in developing his grandfather’s idea was meeting with Chris Soderquist, founder of Venture Lab. “When you run a technology incubator, you see a lot of crazy and half-baked ideas,” Mr. Soderquist said. But Mr. Kasten’s was different; Mr. Soderquist could see right away the value of multiple revenue streams.

Gasification is more efficient than incineration and eliminates toxic byproducts that come from burning trash. But it was especially appealing from a business point of view because it relied on a proven technology and used materials in wide abundance: blast furnaces being abandoned as the American steel industry was collapsing.

“What was compelling from the start,” Mr. Soderquist said, “was repurposing existing infrastructure into a generator of clean energy, with a second revenue stream from people paying you to take their waste.”

Mr. Soderquist helped Mr. Kasten prepare for the Big Bang competition. “For a grad school business plan competition, it was quite a plan he presented,” Mr. Soderquist said, and the judges agreed: Mr. Kasten, now 43, won a $2,000 prize.

Mr. Hart, 51, as a competition judge and a serial entrepreneur, was intrigued. He had started his first business at 12, operating a string of candy machines in high schools throughout what would become known as Silicon Valley. Next, while still living at home, he opened a sort of temp agency for teenagers doing odd jobs. There were a lot of other businesses from the late 1970s to 1993, and stints as a developer for Steve Jobs’s company Next, and for Apple. Mr. Hart also did some consulting until he realized that he would make more money buying whatever devalued company he had been hired to help, and turning it around himself. That was when he bought the Sierra Railroad.

Mr. Hart checked out Mr. Kasten’s gasifier and decided to buy the patents. Then he applied to a Pentagon program established to shepherd proven concepts to the production stage. Results at the Defense Department’s testing facility near Sacramento have been promising; after about four hours, one ton of waste creates enough gas to produce 1,580 kilowatt-hours of electricity, which would power an average home in the United States for about a month and a half — at one-third the emissions of coal — and 42 gallons of renewably sourced fuel. And that’s with a 12-ton-a-day gasifier; existing blast furnaces can handle as much as 2,000 tons a day.

Now that the Pentagon is convinced that the FastOx will work as advertised, the system should be providing electricity later this year at Fort Hunter Liggett, a  training base in Monterey County, Calif., and fuel for vehicles and generators in early 2014.

“California produces 30 million tons of garbage a year,” Mr. Hart said. “If it decided to turn its waste into clean fuels, at that rate it could meet all its oil consumption needs and still export more fuel than some OPEC members.” That is, if the FastOx can do what no other waste-to-energy gasification technology has done before: take any kind of trash, in any succession, without additional separation or preparation.

Sierra plans to license its technology and to sell systems to make electricity or ethanol from the syngas produced by the FastOx. The first will be small and cost about $3 million. But Mr. Hart said he expects to sell larger systems to municipalities and biofuel makers that will go for much more.

Any waste-to-energy plan, however, must overcome a major hurdle: the wild inconsistency of the waste stream. “Until you’ve demonstrated that you can handle it all, nobody’s interested,” Mr. Hart said. “I can understand it; they’ve heard similar promises before. We’ve got 150 cities, communities and businesses lined up to be Serial No. 2. Nobody wants to be No. 1.”

NOBODY, that is, except the Pentagon. The Defense Department is the country’s largest single consumer of energy, spending $15 billion a year just on fuel.

“The mission drives this,” said Ms. Burke, the assistant defense secretary, “and the mission is inherently energy-intensive.”

The FastOx could reduce the military’s reliance on oil overseas and the grid at home. “I have a $24 million-a-year electric bill at Camp Pendleton” in Southern California, said that Marine base’s commander, Brig. Gen. Vincent A. Coglianese. “If I can reduce that cost, that’s more money I can put into training Marines and sailors.”

Ms. Burke added, “Something for military operations has to be really rugged, deployable, simple to use — all of those things.”

Consultants and municipal sanitation officials who’ve looked at the FastOx say it meets those criteria. John Conger, the acting deputy under secretary of defense for installations and the environment, who oversees management of military bases in the United States, says Sierra Energy’s technology should provide energy security for the military in the event of a blackout and provide budget savings as well.

The military’s cost of petroleum, when the costs of transporting and guarding it are factored in, can run as high as $50 a gallon. Moreover, about half of United States casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2003 and 2007 were of servicemen and servicewomen moving and protecting fuel convoys, according to an Army report.

The appeal of Mr. Hart’s Pathfinder system is that it would produce fuel on site, eliminating the need to truck in fuel to dangerous military outposts. It would also reduce the need for trash-burning on bases, which creates pollution and noxious odors that have contributed to locals’ distaste for the American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.  As a result, United States forces in Afghanistan are working to close burn pits.

“Waste is a problem,” Ms. Burke said. “So if we could dispose of waste and create energy at the same time, that would be a silver bullet.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 25, 2013
An article last Sunday about a Sierra Energy gasifier system that the Army will use to turn trash into energy referred incorrectly to a product of the system. It is hydrogen and carbon monoxide, together known as “syngas,” for synthetic gas; the system does not produce “synthetic natural gas.” The article also referred imprecisely to Fort Hunter Liggett, a training base in Monterey County, Calif. At more than 165,000 acres, it is not a “small” base.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 1, 2013



http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/business/trash-into-gas-efficiently-an-army-test-may-tell.html

How To Get To A More Energy Efficient House - UK Struggles

This article touches on a number of issues and includes a lot of info. For example, "fuel poverty" and the relation of energy costs in the UK and housing that is designed for poor energy efficiency.

Osborne plan to cut energy efficiency funds for fuel poor is 'unforgivable'

Government's own adviser on fuel poverty says chancellor's attack on Energy Company Obligation is 'completely inequitable'

• Damian Carrington
• theguardian.com, Friday 11 October 2013 02.00 EDT

George Osborne's plan to cut financial support for energy efficiency in poorer households is an "unforgivable" attack, according to the government's own adviser on fuel poverty.
With a political row raging over soaring energy bills, inflamed further by an 8% rise from the "big six" energy company SSE on Thursday, Osborne and No 10 sources have repeatedly indicated that the Energy Company Obligation (ECO) is being targeted for cuts or delays to reduce the government levies imposed on consumer energy bills.
But Derek Lickorish, chair of the government's Fuel Poverty Advisory Group, said: "It is completely inequitable to attack the only measure that is doing something for the fuel poor in England. It is unforgivable when we have energy prices that are going only in one direction."
In a letter to No 10, the Treasury and energy departments, seen by the Guardian, Lickorish labels the cuts "perverse", arguing that the fastest and cheapest way of reducing energy bills is through better insulation of the UK's ageing and draughty housing stock.
On Friday the business secretary, Vince Cable, said it would be "short-sighted and foolish" to ditch green levies that make up just under 10% of the average bill.
"The rise in energy prices is due to a whole variety of things, by far the most important of which is what's happening in world energy markets," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
"We've had over a period of years very rapidly rising demand in Asia, particularly in China. We've had restrictions on supply from countries like Iran. A combination of these things has pushed up oil and gas prices and that is what has fed through to consumers."

His comments followed a suggestion from the CEO of SSE, Alistair Phillips-Davies, that his company's 8.2% price hike announced on Thursday was "helpful" to focus the nation's spending priorities.
Phillips-Davies told the Daily Telegraph: "A price rise is never a good thing to do, but if it focuses everyone on to a debate about what we as a nation should be spending money on, then in one way it will be helpful.
"We need to think about what people really want to pay for; maybe it's time to retreat from decarbonisation and focus more on the cost of living. I think we have to have a debate about it.
"Do we want to be replacing one bit of [energy] generation that we can keep going for a bit longer with a new bit of generation that's going to cost more?"
According to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, the ECO costs billpayers £1.3bn a year and makes up 4% – or £47 – of an average annual energy bill.

The Lib Dem energy secretary, Ed Davey, launched a pre-emptive strike against cuts to the ECO on Tuesday by writing to energy companies, most of whom oppose the ECO scheme, demanding greater transparency over how much the policy actually costs them to implement.

Companies including SSE and the British Gas owner Centrica have warned that the ECO could add £100 a year to bills due to the cost of finding eligible households. About half of the ECO funding is targeted at those receiving welfare benefits, including pensioners, disabled people and jobseekers.
A Lib Dem source said the party would try to block Conservative cuts to the ECO: "The scheme is about improving the energy efficiency of the homes of poorer people and pensioners. If anyone is saying let's rip up ECO and stop thousand and thousands of homes getting energy efficiency measures … it's not happening." Conservative sources declined to comment. The coalition partners are also in dispute over the subsidies given to renewable energy.
Lickorish, who worked in the energy industry for more than 40 years including a period at energy giant EDF, said: "It's devastating how much energy prices have outstripped incomes. Fuel poverty has increased and it is well known that this is a contributory factor to the UK's unenviable record of winter deaths. We fully expect those deaths to have risen when the new figures are announced in November."
Jenny Saunders, chief executive of National Energy Action and a signatory of the letter, said: "The main reason our energy bills are so high is because we have some of the most energy-inefficient housing stock in Europe. ECO is the one policy that is helping cut fuel bills now rather than address longer term security of supply and reducing carbon to tackle climate change. It is vital we use ECO funds to improve heating and insulation for our poorest citizens."
On Thursday, SSE stated: "This year's ECO costs per customer will be over 5% higher than those of the similar government-imposed schemes last year". The company said the "cost of delivering ECO is expected to continue to increase as the scheme goes on". In a letter to party leaders on 1 October, SSE's Phillips-Davies proposed shifting the current £110 of annual green and social policy costs from customer bills into general taxation, "shifting the cost away from those [in fuel poverty] who can't afford to pay and on to those who can."
Lickorish agreed: "The most progressive way to pay for these measures would be through general taxation."
The National Insulation Association (NIA) warned on Thursday that the government's energy efficiency measures were "currently not delivering as expected by government with cavity wall installations 65% down and solid wall insulation over 70% down". In contrast to energy companies' call for a delay on meeting ECO targets, the NIA urged acceleration of ECO delivery.
Graphic: Paul Scruton for the Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/oct/11/osborne-plan-cut-energy-company-obligation

Community controlled local solar power generation - redirect the money inward instead of outward!

Grassroots green projects 'are way to low-carbon UK'

Coalition of groups representing 12 million people hails localising of energy generation, but bemoans lack of state support

• Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent
• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 1 February 2012 06.45 GMT

Beach houses with solar panels in Mudeford Sandbank, Dorset. Photograph: Peter Titmuss/Alamy

Community-owned green energy projects present the best chance of converting the UK to a low-carbon economy and should receive more government support, civil society groups representing 12 million people said on Wednesday.

Giving local people a stake in energy generation often overcomes planning objections to structures such as wind and solar farms, and dozens of communities across the UK have seized the opportunity to create their own power. But the move has not been fast enough, according to the coalition of community groups, which adds that many places are missing out on the chance to produce their own low-carbon and low-cost energy, supported by government subsidies.

The civil society groups include some of the leading non-governmental organisations in the UK, including the Co-operative, the National Trust, the Church of England and the National Federation of Women's Institutes.

Representatives of all the groups were set to meet Chris Huhne, the energy and climate change secretary, to press their case.

Community energy received a serious setback last year when the government first introduced plans to restrict the subsidies available for solar power to small-scale domestic projects, then slashed solar subsidies across the board in a move the High Court subsequently branded unlawful. Though ministers have had to rethink their plans, the outlook for community solar projects has been dimmed, and the Guardian has uncovered numerous examples of community-scale projects that have been shelved as a result.

The setback came despite pre-election promises from ministers to give people more of a stake in their local energy generation.

The civil society coalition wants ministers to come up with new ways to ensure that community energy is prioritised, for instance by letting local people share in the profits from renewable energy projects.

Patrick Begg, director of rural enterprise at the National Trust, said: "Many other European countries are way ahead of the UK, as we found out when visiting German communities last year. Germany produces over 20% of its electricity from renewable sources, with communities generating about a quarter of this. In the UK, less than 1% is generated by our communities, a figure this [civil society] coalition wants to dramatically increase by 2020. We are asking the government to support us in this."

Ruth Bond, chair of the National Federation of Women's Institutes, said the organisation had a long history of supporting low-carbon energy generation, and that allowing local people greater ownership of energy production would help to overcome the objections to many projects. She said: "The WI has been active on renewable energy since the 1970s. We see community energy as people working together, not having schemes imposed on them. This is a great opportunity for our 7,000 WIs across the UK to tackle climate change and leave a legacy for the next generation."

Their call came as the Co-operative launched its "community energy challenge", a competition under which six communities will be supported to set up their own energy generation, with some of the £1m the Co-operative plans to spend this year on community energy projects.

Paul Monaghan, head of social goals at the Co-operative, said: "We want nothing less than a clean energy revolution, with communities controlling and benefiting from their own renewable energy. Talk of a new dash for [shale] gas, which could see up to 3,000 wells installed across the UK, highlights the choices we face – more and dirtier sources of fossil fuels or clean energy owned and controlled by communities."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/01/community-green-projects-low-carbon-uk

Aiming 4 Zero

Feature: Absolute Zero

Despite the downturn, home builders take lead role in energy and water efficiency.

Source: BIG BUILDER Magazine
Publication date: 2011-07-01

By Steve Doyle and Cary Lowe

Photo: Courtesy Toll Brothers

SOLAR STRATEGY: Toll Brothers is making solar panels available on homes in several of its communities, including Vista del Verde in Yorba Linda, Calif. The solar panels don't add extra dollars to the sales price since they are owned by a third party and leased to the homeowners.

In most endeavors, striving for a score of zero is a fool's errand.

In green home building, however, it is the gold standard. The trick is to keep it from becoming fool's gold.

Despite the housing downturn and its drag on home builders, real progress has been made toward achieving the goal of building homes that consume no net energy. Unquestionably, some of this progress has been forced by the government. Still, the home building industry, battered as it has been, is taking a leading role in the movement toward reducing consumption of energy and water resources. It is realistic to expect that, over the next few years, energy use in new homes will approach zero, and water use will drop to a level one could call insignificant.

Using California as a case study, consider how far the industry has come. Homes built in the last few years use 25 percent less energy, and generate 25 percent less greenhouse gas emissions, than those built just 20 years ago. This results from relatively simple improvements in building materials, construction techniques, insulation, and appliances.

Similarly, recently constructed homes use one-third less water indoors than those built in the mid-1970s, simply due to installation of more efficient fixtures. These are production homes, using standard features. The numbers are even more impressive for homes which incorporate custom, high-efficiency features, and photovoltaic or other onsite power generation facilities.

New homes in California account for a growth of only about 1 percent of the total housing stock in a given year during strong economic times—and only a third of that during the current recession. About 60 percent of homes statewide predate any meaningful energy conservation requirements, and more than 80 percent predate water-conservation standards. Achieving significant improvements in energy and water efficiency in the residential stock would require retrofitting large numbers of those older homes. That will happen over time, driven by the utility cost savings associated with such efficiencies.

Meanwhile, new housing stock begins to demonstrate the efficiencies that can be achieved and, over time, R&D in new-home building will gradually make them more affordable.

Much of this improvement in home efficiency has been driven by changes in the California Building Standards Code, contained in Title 24 of the California Code of Regulations. What began as a set of standards and requirements related to safety and structural integrity has evolved to address environmental issues of concern to the state and its residents. This has focused most heavily on achieving greater energy efficiency.

The need for space heating and cooling has been dramatically reduced by more efficient air-conditioning units, improved wall and attic insulation, heat-resistant windows, better sealing of ductwork, and passive energy design systems. Energy use related to domestic water has been reduced through more efficient water heaters, recirculating hot water systems, and insulated pipes. Electrical demand has been further reduced by installation of more efficient lighting fixtures and domestic appliances. (On the other hand, increasing consumer desire for the newest and best in electronic gadgetry continually adds to the per-person demand for electrical power.)

In recent years, as water supply has become an increasingly critical consideration in connection with new development, Title 24 has focused on water conservation as well, setting standards for more efficient plumbing fixtures and water-using appliances.

Photo: Brookfield Homes

Energy conservation:-Tight ducts (less than 6% leakage) -Radiant barrier roof sheathing-Tankless water heaters-R-30 or 38 ceiling insulation-Low-E windowsRenewable energy: -Photovoltaic solar panels (optional)Water conservation: -WaterSense bath faucets-Low-flow showerheads-Tankless water heaters-Insulated hot water loop lines-Water-sensitive landscaping-Dual-flush toilets (optional)

Photo: Brookfield Homes

How LowCan You Go? Houses in Brookfield Homes' Rockrose community extend 35 percent above California's energy-efficiency standards. The eco-savvy homes focus on energy efficiency, water conservation, indoor air quality, as well as other environmentally friendly features. As part of Brookfield's focus on water conservation and environmentally friendly features, its Rockrose community showcases native and drought-tolerant plants. The builder also engages prospective home buyers with its sales office displays that tell its eco-savvy story.

This trend toward increasing conservation and efficiency requirements was accelerated by enactment of A.B. 32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act, in 2006. With about 22 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in California attributable to residential and commercial buildings, clamping down further on energy consumption is vital to meeting the emissions reduction standards of A.B. 32.

That has been a prime driver behind the California Green Building Standards Code, now incorporated into Title 24. As part of a broad array of environmentally friendly building requirements, the new code includes requirements for accurate sizing of heating and cooling systems, sealing and insulation of ductwork, and sealing of openings between conditioned and unconditioned space. It also includes changes for plumbing fixtures that will result in a 20 percent reduction in potable water use, as well as weather or moisture-based outdoor irrigation controllers.

In addition to satisfying environmental regulatory requirements, these kinds of features will produce substantial cost savings for homeowners. The average California household consumes about 5,900 kilowatt hours per year. Based on typical utility rates, reducing their electrical consumption by one-third would result in an annual savings of about $375. Because electrical rates are tiered, with higher per-unit costs for higher levels of consumption, a household using 10,000 kilowatt hours per year would save nearly $1,000 annually.

Similarly, a typical new single-family home consumes about 59,000 gallons of indoor potable water and about 115,000 gallons for outdoor irrigation annually. Reducing the indoor use by 20 percent pursuant to the new code, combined with an achievable reduction of 40 percent in outdoor irrigation, would save about $300 annually. Again, because of tiered water rates, the savings would be much greater for homes with more fixtures and more landscaping.

Some home builders are taking the quest for efficiency significantly further. Brookfield Homes' Rockrose community in Carlsbad, Calif., is incorporating standard features that reduce energy consumption by 35 percent below Title 24 requirements. These features include radiant barrier roofs, more thermal-resistant windows, quality installation of insulation, insulated and tightly sealed ductwork, tankless water heaters, and highefficiency furnaces. Photovoltaic solar panels are available as an option.

Water consumption is reduced further by the use of dual-flush toilets, looped and insulated hot water lines, high-efficiency irrigation controllers, and drought-resistant landscaping.

Other builders are trying different approaches.

Toll Brothers is introducing a variety of energy-saving options but is focusing particularly on renewable energy generation. The company is making photovoltaic solar panels available on homes in several projects, including in the Vista del Verde community in Yorba Linda, Calif., at no increase in sales price, by having the panels owned by a third party and leased to homeowners, who then receive lower-cost electricity. Toll similarly is making available geothermal heating and cooling systems in projects such as the Hills at Southpoint in Durham, N.C. KB Home is installing solar panels as a standard feature in several new projects. Pacific Housing is taking this a step further in a Sacramento project, installing a battery storage system as a backup to rooftop solar panels.

Surprisingly, these kinds of features are not significantly impacting housing affordability. Taking into consideration all rebates and tax credits available, construction costs in the Brookfield project are only increased by $1.50 per square foot on a net basis, allowing it to remain one of the most affordable new housing developments in San Diego County. This project also benefits from the moderate, coastal Southern California climate; such energy efficiency improvements would cost considerably more in the warmer inland climate zones.

In Phoenix and other markets, Meritage Homes has been able to include an array of energy-saving features, including solar energy, while keeping sales prices under $230,000 for a 3,000-squarefoot home, by incorporating these elements into their standard design rather than adding them as options. Moreover, as an optional upgrade, they are offering sufficient additional solar panels to eliminate electrical service costs.

As these kinds of offerings become more commonplace in the home building industry, the question will be how far such efficiency can be taken, particularly by production builders. The goal of many developers, consumers, and environmentalists is to be able to produce homes that are net zero with regard to resource impacts, i.e., homes with on-site features that reduce consumption to zero, through some combination of efficiency and renewable energy generation.

To achieve such net zero results with regard to energy will require taking significant additional steps in most cases. These might include thicker exterior walls, heat-resistant roof tiles, higherefficiency heating and cooling equipment, conditioned attic space, passive heating and ventilation features, fewer and better insulated windows, strategic orientation of the structure, and planting of deciduous trees. In all likelihood, it also will require installation of on-site energy generation facilities, particularly photovoltaic solar, geothermal, solar water heating, and/or wind turbines. This is all readily doable now, but at a cost of $40,000 to 50,000 for a typical new detached home.

Photo: Courtesy KB Homes KB Home is another builder installing solar panels as a standard feature in several of its new projects, including Newbury at the Enclave in Eastvale, Calif.

At the same time, an energy savings greater than that available from a full range of green building features can be obtained by simply locating homes in walkable communities or transit-oriented locations, as energy use and greenhouse gas emissions associated with vehicular transportation typically exceed those of the house itself. Such locational considerations will be increasing in significance in California, in particular, as the state implements not only the mandates of A.B. 32 but also other statutory requirements for reduction of vehiclerelated environmental impacts.

Bringing water consumption down to net zero is more challenging. Significant reductions can be achieved by using the lowest-flow fixtures indoors, planting the most drought-resistant landscaping, and using both collected stormwater and domestic gray water for irrigation. However, in the absence of onsite water treatment capability, net zero will not be achievable.

Individual zero-energy custom homes are popping up, especially in areas with temperate climates, and a handful of zero-energy subdivisions are being built. These homes typically also receive LEED certifications and come with a certain cachet of environmental consciousness.

It is reasonable to ask, however, whether achieving zero-energy status and near-zero water status is a particularly worthwhile goal.

Noted new urbanist architect Andres Duany has taken the lead in criticizing LEED and other similar programs for requiring large expenditures to meet extreme standards, when nearly the same level of environmental gain can be achieved at far less cost. Achieving that last increment comes with a highly disproportionate price tag. Just as a given level of energy reduction can be achieved through retrofitting older homes at one-eighth the cost of achieving the same reduction in already more-efficient new homes, the cost of taking a standard new home to a zero net energy level could instead pay for signifi- cant energy reductions in several new homes. Furthermore, new urban, infill, and transitoriented developments already substantially reduce their energy use footprint simply by virtue of their locations, and therefore should be viewed as effectively below net zero compared with new homes in locations that generate high vehicle miles traveled.

Zero net energy is a lofty goal, and its application to even a small percentage of new homes serves as a proving ground for new technologies and new design methods, some of which can be applied to production homes. It is not, however, a feasible or practical approach for all new housing. Nor should it be.

We can accomplish far more in the way of reducing our energy and water use by applying more cost-effective methods on a larger scale, to both new housing and the existing housing stock. This will take political courage, however, because new homes do not have a political constituency, while existing homes certainly do.

Until conservation and efficiency become real goals for the general public throughout the country, new housing alone will bear the financial burden, to the detriment of both housing affordability and environmental goals.

BB Steve Doyle is president of Brookfield Homes, San Diego. Cary Lowe is a San Diego land use lawyer and planning consultant.

http://www.bigbuilderonline.com/Industry-news.asp?articleID=1603853&cid=NWBD110712002

Office Building Possibilities Availabalble Now (Then, 2008)

Saving the Earth Inside the Office
Discovery Turns Its Spotlight Inward

By Alejandro Lazo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 25, 2008

Larry Laque, an executive with Silver Spring-based Discovery Communications, felt something amiss last year as his company began gearing up to announce a 24-hour television channel devoted to an all-green lifestyle.

Discovery would be preaching environmental awareness around the clock on its Planet Green network, but Laque thought the company was not doing all it could do to recycle, conserve energy and pollute less.

So when the company's chief executive, David Zaslav, requested ideas to help market the new channel, Laque proposed an initiative to "green" the two-building headquarters.

Walking through those two buildings last week, Laque pointed to several changes the company had made. Green-handled, low-flush toilets had been installed in every restroom. Three 400-gallon tanks in the garage stored rainwater to irrigate the company's lawn. And numerous unnecessary light bulbs had been removed, such as vending machine lights.

"I do believe it is a lot of little things that add up," Laque said last week, standing in one of several sun-bathed conference rooms. "We are a big part of the problem, but we are also a big part of the solution."

Discovery ultimately decided to seek the highest level of certification possible through the District-based U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program -- platinum status. Only 62 buildings in the United States have won the designation. Two are in the Washington area: the Sidwell Friends School, on Wisconsin Avenue in Northwest D.C. and the Green Building Council's headquarters, on Massachusetts Avenue NW, just south of Dupont Circle.

The council's rating system has become the commercial real estate industry's benchmark for the design, construction and operation of environmentally friendly buildings. Businesses have rushed to embrace the system as fears of global climate change have become more prevalent and green credentials more marketable. Buildings are considered to be major energy consumers and big contributors of carbon emissions.

But even those who praise the LEED system say it is far from perfect. Developers get the same credit for taking steps that require relatively little effort as for those that require significant expenditures of time and money.

Nevertheless, the rapid acceptance of the Green Building Council's system has led to a transformation of the commercial real estate industry. New buildings are being erected to meet the new standards while real estate brokers seek accreditation from the council to better market existing office space to prospective clients. Green investment funds have been created by major real estate companies to pay for upgrades to existing buildings.

"I don't think any initiative that we have seen has been so quickly adopted and embraced in this business," said Mitchell N. Schear, president of Vornado/Charles E. Smith, a commercial real estate firm with a large presence in the Washington region.

The District and Montgomery County are among several local governments that have passed ordinances requiring that new construction adhere to the green standards.

The LEED system rates buildings by the number of points achieved in sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection, indoor environmental quality and innovation.

The certification process is typically conducted via the Internet. To certify a project, a developer or owner must first register the building with the council.

Once the building is ready, the owner works through a checklist and submits documentation to back up the claims. A decision is typically rendered in one to three months. The average cost of certification is about $2,500.

Certain minimum requirements must be met to achieve certification. For example, pollution from construction sites must be controlled, certain minimum energy requirements must be met, recyclables must be properly collected and stored, and smoking must be prohibited.

To achieve LEED certification, a builder or developer must earn at least 26 points out of 69. Achieving higher designations such as silver, gold or platinum requires more points. While a builder or owner is free to choose which points are pursued, reductions in both energy and water usage are often necessary to advance. Discovery, for example, reduced its water usage by 25 percent and electricity consumption by 26 percent as it strove toward platinum certification, according to Laque.

Company representatives declined to disclose how much the green initiative cost because Discovery is in a quiet period before an initial public offering, expected this summer.

For new construction, the push to achieve top certifications can lead a developer to embrace a collaborative design process in which architects, engineers and contractors discuss from the onset what is desired, what is possible and what is economically feasible.

The early discussion is important, analysts and builders said, because one design change can often affect another. A building's orientation, for example, may affect what kind of windows are installed, which may then influence the type of lighting employed or what heating or air conditioning system may be required.

Such collaboration is intended to consider these trade-offs to create a more efficient building, developers and analysts said.

"Really that line between architecture and construction has become blurred," said Marnie Abramson, a principal with the Tower Cos. "You have to have a more comprehensive approach."

But some see flaws in the way points are doled out. Bill Oatey, owner of the Oatey Co., a Cleveland plumbing supplier and manufacturer, had one of his company's distribution centers certified under LEED. What perplexed him was that he earned one point for building the plant on a cleaned-up industrial brownfield site and one point for installing a bike rack on the premises.

But if the system is not perfect, for Discovery's Laque it at least allowed his company to set energy-saving goals, foster a team spirit and engage in ruthless self-evaluation. And as the year drew to a close, Laque's ambitions grew.

"We are going for platinum, we are going to do it," Laque recalled telling his staff. "We are going to do this, or we are going to die trying."

The Green Building Council awarded Laque and his team the platinum certification this year.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/02/25/ST2008022500790.html

Green Housing Developer In Sacramento

Local green developer wants to change how people look at communities

By Sena Christian

Some good has come to town. Literally. LJ Urban, our friendly neighborhood green developers, recently began accepting contracts for its Good housing project in the Washington neighborhood of West Sacramento. This LEED-certified development located at Fourth and B streets, right across the river from downtown, will eventually contain 35 units when it’s completed by the end of next year. LJ Urban built the development around eco-friendly measures, but more so around people, which is why plans incorporate porches, a community garden and a park with a bike path weaving around the space.

“We don’t want to just build and sell houses. We want to change how people think about communities. We want to make cities better,” said Levi Benkert, co-founder of LJ Urban.

The project began three years ago, back when there was a trailer park on the site and green building had not quite hit the mainstream here in Sacramento. LJ Urban bought the trailers and relocated the handful of residents to apartments, then set to work researching the heck out of every possible option for the green houses, looking for the most reasonably priced sustainable choice.

Designed by Craig Stradley of local architecture firm Mogavero Notestine Associates, with interiors by Sacramento-based BlankBlank, the houses are prime examples of modern eco-urban living. The houses have dual-flush toilets and tankless water heaters to conserve water. Kitchens are equipped with Energy Star appliances and countertops made from recycled paper and resin. Concrete floors are made with fly ash (a byproduct of the coal-burning process). Recycled insulation made of used phone books and denim jeans keeps building shells efficient, and NightBreeze systems create natural ventilation and limit air-conditioning use. Reflecting aluminum roof sheathing frames the buildings, which helps prevent heat from penetrating through roofs and walls during the summer and escaping during winter.

The developers decided to leave three large oak trees, and although they had to remove several walnut and cedar trees, the wood was reclaimed and transformed into shelving and exterior window shades. A vegetable garden will be planted next to the oaks.

“We want community gardens all around,” Benkert said. “We love them.”

To keep the houses comparatively affordable (units range from $339,000 to $450,000), solar panels are optional, and LJ Urban will pay a substantial portion of the cost for those who choose this feature. Even without photovoltaics, LJ Urban estimates the monthly gas and electric bill will average $15.

Good isn’t claiming to be the greenest housing project in existence. It’s not entirely off-the-grid and biodegradable. But then again, that was never the point. Yes, sustainability means green products and design, but the concept also means creating a community where people want, and can afford, to stay over the long haul.

The company’s mantra is “Dream big, live small and do good,” and the folks at LJ Urban mean it. They partnered with a nonprofit in Burkina Faso—a West African nation, and one of the poorest in the world—and funded the organization to train 38 masons through the Good project.

Benkert and his wife, Jessie (LJ Urban co-founder) will relocate from their home in East Sacramento to Good in September, downsizing by 900 square feet, which they don’t see as a sacrifice. Because what they get instead is a bike path for their three kids to ride on and a park right across the street, and hopefully, a collection of friendly neighbors.

When the Benkerts moved here from San Francisco 10 years ago, they started up two coffee shops before establishing Asante Homes in a garage in West Sacramento. For several years, they were land developers, but frustration with all the crazy suburban sprawl in the area prompted them to become builders as well and rename themselves LJ Urban.

“Making [green] lifestyle changes are simply impossible in a suburban home,” Benkert said. Suburbs require new roads, new sewers and significantly more resources than infill, where developers can tap into infrastructure already there. LJ Urban currently has 11 projects in the works, all within a mile-and-a-half of the state Capitol building.

“Sacramento has an opportunity to be a leader in the sustainable-urban model,” Benkert said. “If you want a low-footprint lifestyle, you can really do it here.”

http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/good-to-go/content?oid=699132

Recycled Granite Curbs?

I am curious about the comment at the end of response that the granite used for curbs is recycled. I will have to find out more about that.



A concrete suggestion for speeding up the installation of curbs

ROBERT THOMSON
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 27, 2011; T18

Dear Dr. Gridlock:

Having just watched the District install curbs on Massachusetts Avenue, I was wondering whether you know how much more it costs to install granite curbs rather than simply pour concrete ones.

My anecdotal observation is that granite curbs take longer to install than concrete, thus prolonging the traffic disruption. They have to cost more than concrete. (Have you priced kitchen countertops?) And after a few seasons, they are indistinguishable from concrete.

Carlos Bonilla, the District

DG: When you see streetscaping projects underway across the Washington region, you're often going to see granite curbing being used. Traffic engineers say granite curbing is likely to be much more expensive to buy and install than concrete. The granite must be brought in from a quarry and cut into the proper segments for the curb. Concrete can be delivered faster and is easier to work with. A road crew will probably move faster using it. But granite looks better, to the point of looking like a frill to some passersby. Many communities see it as a neighborhood enhancement. And it will last a lot longer than the concrete, which might have to be repaired after a few years as it suffers the effects of weather and starts to deteriorate. Granite is likely to retain its appearance and require less care until the time comes to replace it. Granite also can be recycled, transportation planners say. Concrete will be broken up and disposed of.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/25/AR2011012504442.html

Food Scraps In Vermont = Electricity

From The Burlington Free Press (Vermont):

October 4, 2009

A new view of food scraps’ potential

There’s power on your plate

By Nancy Remsen, Free Press Staff Writer

Instead of thinking “yuck” when faced with shriveled brown apple cores, slimly spinach leaves and stinky chicken bones, Dan Hecht of Montpelier thinks “energy.”

“There is value to be derived from stuff we throw away,” he said.

In an age when finding alternative sources of energy is both a state and national priority, Hecht points to the potential in a squandered resource: food scraps.

For one thing, it’s plentiful, Hecht said: “Every city and town in America already possesses a major source of renewable energy, one that does not need to be mined, harvested, refined or transported long distances.”

Hecht is project coordinator for the Central Vermont Recovered Biomass Facility, a research project that’s assessing the feasibility of collecting food waste, mixing it with manure and letting it stew until it releases methane gas, which can be used to produce heat and power, plus environmentally safe byproducts.

“The food garbage is the big innovation here,” Hecht said of this waste-to-energy project, seeded by a $492,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. “Nobody is doing post-consumer food waste.”

Once the research phase is completed in December, the food power project would move from the proof-on-paper phase to proof in practice.

The plan is to tap 14 tons a day of food scrap in the Central Vermont Solid Waste Management District, combine it with 10 tons a day of manure from area dairy farms, and feed it into a biodigester to be built on the campus of Vermont Technical College in Randolph. The methane produced would be used either to fuel the college’s heating plant or to generate electricity for the campus.

What’s left — likely a thick, dark liquid — would have several potential uses, such enriching soil on farmers’ fields.

Hecht said this project is intended to produce a roadmap that others in Vermont and across the country could follow to make better use of food scraps. Hecht tries to avoid calling food scraps “waste” because they have so much energy potential: 200 to 400 percent more energy per ton than manure.

Ponder the potential in greater Burlington, with its many eateries, educational institutions and a medical center, Hecht suggested. New data developed by consultants for the research project estimate 245 tons of food materials is produced weekly in Chittenden County.

First step: fetch the food

Start where the food scraps originate, such as the dining hall at Norwich University in Northfield.

Twice a week, a truck from Central Vermont Solid Waste Management District comes to Norwich and collects 22 totes full of food scraps, said Paul Bento, general manager of dining services at the university. Serving 716,000 meals a year, Norwich ends up with a lot of food scraps: 207 tons last year, Bento said.

The Central Vermont district began diverting food scraps from landfills in 2004, sending the material instead to two composting sites.

“We had identified organics in 2001 as a priority for diversion,” said Donna Barlow Casey, executive director of the waste district. It’s part of the district’s zero-waste commitment.

Because of the largely rural nature of the district, Barlow Casey said the food-scrap initiative has focused on commercial and institutional producers, not residential. That would remain the case even with the added demand of feeding a biodigester, she said.

To satisfy the end-users of the food scraps, the district had to provide contaminate-free material — no plastic wrap or foil, just food.

“We have one the cleanest food-scrap programs in the nation,” Barlow Casey said. “When we talk about contamination, it’s just the tiny stickers on fruit and vegetables. We work with every single business that comes on board. We train their kitchen staff. There is a feedback loop. If we see forks, plastic or paper, we reject that tote. It’s that feedback system that keeps the food clean.”

The totes aren’t small like the composting jars that homeowners may keep on their kitchen counters. They are 48-gallon rolling trash barrels with lids.

How smelly is that? Barlow Casey says putting sawdust in the bottom and layering more sawdust or coffee grounds with the food scraps buffers the odor.

“It does work,” confirmed Bento at Norwich.

Barlow Casey said there are more than enough sources of food scraps in Central Vermont to continue to provide material for the two composters and meet the 14-ton-a-day requirement of the new digester. New data estimate 98 tons of food scraps are produced weekly in the region. The district currently has 77 customers providing 18 tons of food scraps a week. In anticipation of having to ramp up collections, she said, the district just began recruiting new customers.

Collecting and delivering the food scraps is an expense that has to be balanced against the benefits of producing energy from it, Hecht said. In planning how to collect it, he said, “You have to do it with the shortest possible distance.”

Now the power part

There are many variables but fewer unknowns about the process that would transform rinds, bones and eggshells into power once they arrived at the biodigester, proposed for a site on the back portion of the Vermont Technical College campus, Hecht said.

Simply, he said, the food waste would go into a “blender” with some water and the manure to create the feedstock that would be put into an anaerobic digester. Some microbes would break down the organic materials into two byproducts: methane gas and a nutrient-rich liquid.

One of the questions yet to be answered is what regulations apply to this process, Hecht said.

“As of right now, we don’t have specific rules for digesters,” said David DiDomenico, environmental material engineer with the Department of Environmental Conservation. State regulators have been working on revisions to composting regulations, he said. “Our plan is to make it more of an organics rule. We’d like to put in a part for digesters.”

Other pending questions have to do with the best uses for the methane and the liquid effluent.

The methane, for example, could replace the oil that fuels the college’s central heating system and warms 15 buildings, said Frank Reed, a consultant working with Vermont Technical College on the project.

But what about in summer, when heat isn’t needed? Reed said the methane could be used to make electricity. Or maybe making electricity would be the best option year-round.

There also are options to weigh with the liquid effluent. It could be spread on fields, or perhaps used to grow algae in a process that would produce biofuels, Reed said.

Four consultants will provide models to help the college identify the options that best fit its energy goals and wallet. Hecht noted the reports from the consultants will provide others interested in food power with information about alternatives that might work under different conditions than those found at Vermont Technical College.

VTC will decide this winter whether to go ahead with planning and construction. Reed predicted that when the reports come in later this fall, “I think we will find it is feasible.”

What will Chittenden do?

The Chittenden Solid Waste District is pursuing its own research on how to divert more food and other organics from landfills. The district recently requested proposals from consultants for a comprehensive study.

“What is happening now is, we are about to head into the second era of modern solid-waste management,” said Tom Moreau, executive director of the Chittenden district. “This is the second wave of investment, and organics are going to be a big piece.”

Moreau said he is monitoring the development of the central Vermont project. He has no question about the feasibility of the biodigestion process.

“I’m confident it will work,” he said. “It will demonstrate to us in Vermont that once we collect it, we can handle it.”

For him, the challenge is food collection — whether from residents or commercial producers.

“People get lazy. They just want to throw things away,” Moreau said. “How do you collect the material in a cost-effective and energy-efficient way, and how do you get over the yuck factor?”

Contact Nancy Remsen at 651-4888 or nremsen@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com.

Additional Facts

Key terms when discussing “food power.”

• BIODIGESTER: An airtight container in which anaerobic — meaning without air — digestion takes place over periods that range from five to 60 days. The output from biodigestion is methane gas and a nutrient-rich, liquid.

• BIOMASS: Plant materials and animal waste that can be used as fuel to produce energy.

• FOOD SCRAPS: Food that is leftover from meals plus trimmings from food preparation.

What’s so great about food power?

• Food scraps are available in significant volumes.

• Food scraps produce 200-to-400 percent more methane than cow manure.

• Biodigestion of food scraps captures methane, reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

• Food scraps don’t go to waste. Biodigestion creates valuable byproducts.
Source: Dan Hecht

Project facts

• WHAT: The Central Vermont Recovered Biomass Facility is conducting a study of the feasibility of biodigesting food waste along with cow manure to produce electrical power and heat.

• WHO: The project is being carried out by a partnership that includes the Central Vermont Solid Waste Management District, Vermont Technical College, Vermont Environmental Consortium and Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund.

• WHERE: The biodigester, if feasible, will be built on the campus of Vermont Technical College in Randolph. The food scraps would come from commercial and institutional sources in central Vermont.

• FUNDING: The feasibility study received a $492,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, with addition funding coming from the Vermont Department of Agriculture, the Clean Energy Development Fund, the state and Seventh Generation Foundation. The U.S. Department of Energy has promised $952,000 for advanced design and construction. Total construction is estimated at $3 million.