Will The City of the Future Be Planned Around Energy?

And water and pollution? Urban planning might be the best way to curb our resource problems.

Ports and Forts.

If you think about it, those have been the two operative principles of urban planning since thethe building of Ur 6,200 years ago. Cities needed to be connected to transportation links and, ideally, easily defended against roving armies and enemy ships. It wasn’t until Las Vegas that cities existed strictly for fun.

Now, modern megalopolises--particularly those in the emerging world--are being strangled by traffic jams, antiquated water and sewage systems, rolling blackouts and horrendous pollution. In Beijing, you might as well smoke, joke residents: walking around the city fills your lungs with the equivalent of a pack a day.

These problems don’t just exist overseas. Bostonians had to go without water for days after a main broke this year. Large portions of the U.S. water infrastructure are over 100 years old—50 to 60 percent of Chicago’s water never makes it to the tap.

Growth and survival might mean building cities with an eye toward access to resources. In Abu Dhabi, the government is putting the final touches on Masdar City, a zero-energy community that will contain a graduate school, housing, and an industrial park. Reliance on air conditioning is minimized by installing wind towers (to bring breezes down to walkway level) and plotting landmarks to create shade. (Here’s a video of the construction.) Cars are banned: to get around you hop around on robotic electric cars.

Will some object? Sure. Humanity has spent thousands of years overcoming the hazards of the natural world. Ideally, the compelling aesthetics of environmentally planned cities and homes will make people overlook that they are living within limits. But it will still take unprecedented planning and cooperation.

Can we get there, or will we get stuck in traffic?

Read more on this topic in a joint effort by General Electric Ecomagination and Greentech Media,and join the conversation here.

Sustainability Practices Are Really Risk Management

It’s not about going green. It’s about making money and minimizing risk.

What does sustainability in the supply chain even look like? Well, depends on who you ask. But that is changing, according to a panel hosted by SAP in New York City on Tuesday.

Sustainability today is not about greenwashing for most corporations; instead, it’s about managing risk, according to Peter Graf, Executive Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer for SAP. But whether the driver is compliance or corporate image, sustainability management is exploding. Not only do companies have to comply with government regulations, such as greenhouse gas emissions reporting mandated by the EPA or disclosing country of origin for wood products under the Lacey Act, but they also have to comply with the best practices established by other companies. If you want to do business with Walmart, you have to comply with any sustainability measurements that they have in place.

Furthermore, evidence is mounting that there is a strong business case to be made for making the switch. Sustainability practices in large companies can contribute to 38 percent higher profits, according to the National Environmental Education Foundation, and companies listed in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index consistently outperform the general market.

Following the supply chain, however, is still in its infancy. “The rules of the road aren’t there,” cautioned Jay Golden, Co-Founder of the Sustainability Consortium and Director of the Corporate Sustainability Initiative at Duke University.

But the road is being built. The Sustainability Consortium boasts some of the world’s largest companies as its members and is looking to build the methodologies necessary to truly measure sustainability. SAP is watching this evolution and also just released Carbon Impact OnDemand, the fifth version of its carbon software that now operates in the cloud and allows for full lifecycle analysis of products.

Even though there are reporting tools in place, such as software from giants such as Oracle and SAP, it’s not easy, according to Kevin Myette, Director of Product Integrity at Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI). Outdoor sporting companies have been far in front of many others on sustainability, but Myette admits that the language of sustainability is muddled. The biggest problem, however, is often getting everyone on board. “One of the biggest challenges in the supply chain is trust,” he said.

Myette said that even as the analytics come on board, there must be a parallel discussion among industries and within companies to define sustainability. Are you talking about water, carbon, social issues, or all of the above -- and beyond? The Outdoor Industry Association is trying to create some of those definitions and benchmarks for its own industry using an Eco Index, which assesses the lifecycle of products.

Trust is also a constraint within companies. “You would be shocked at the innovation when you just get a few people talking about the same thing,” said John Gagel, Manager of Sustainable Practices for Lexmark. He noted that engineers sometimes need the push to rethink a product, and that for Lexmark, bringing in engineers who deal with the end of life of a product to talk to the design team has been essential. “It’s screws versus snaps, plastic versus metallic,” he said. “Those conversations need to happen at the beginning of the design phase.”

Although the guidelines for getting down the supply chain and measuring it accurately are just coming out of the starting gate, the panel agreed it’s imperative to start digging deep. The result is cash savings, according to all of the panelists. Cutting carbon equals cost savings, and more importantly, risk reduction. “Sustainability is a mega-trend,” said Graf. “If you want to cover all of your risk, you have to go all the way down [the supply chain].”

Katherine Tweed : September 29, 2010

NTR Encounters Surprises in Solar and Wind Projects

Time after time, Irish project developer NTR set out to develop a renewable opportunity and discovered it was doing something unexpected.

“If you cut us,” said Jim Barry, CEO of Dublin-based renewables developer NTR, “we bleed development.” One aspect of development is foremost in Barry’s thinking today. “When you overlay the risk profile of launching new technology in 2010 against the state of financial markets and the general macroeconomic context,” he said, “you have challenges.”

NTR has more than 30 years of experience with development challenges. Founded as an Irish toll road developer in 1978 (NTR stands for National Toll Roads), it has worked on everything from bridges to car parks. Some projects succeeded and some did not, but development is “deep in the DNA of this company,” Barry said.

In 1999, NTR decided to develop utility-associated startups where they saw structural growth opportunity. “In electricity,” Barry said, “we went into wind.” That piqued the company’s curiosity for two reasons. “One, it opened us up to the forces reshaping the energy industry, which are climate, energy security and, more generally, sustainability. And we learned a lot about the electricity industry.”

The first surprise came with the building of NTR’s first 12-megawatt wind farm in northwest Ireland. “We had to go out and create a fully integrated, $75 million supply business in order to be able to give ourselves a contract in the wind farm for the electricity.”

Cuillagh in Dunegal was the first merchant wind farm in the world. From the experience, NTR learned the wind business from towers in the ground to electricity markets. It made them, Barry said, “a much better electricity developer.”

By 2007, Airtricity, NTR’s wind development subsidiary, was a major international wind player, the biggest offshore wind developer in Europe and the biggest onshore wind developer in Ireland and the U.K.

Then came the next surprise. They discovered they were paying excessively to own the wind projects versus “what anybody would do to fund the businesses.” They saw the European move to offshore wind coming and decided they “did not have the balance sheet.” So NTR sold Airtricity to big utilities.

Looking to reinvest, NTR founded Wind Capital Group and went back to “classic” (onshore, moderate-size) wind development in the U.S. Midwest. Surprisingly, Barry said Wind Capital is now making plans to build wind projects in the Southeast, where conservative opponents of wind in the U.S. Senate claim the resource is inadequate.

Seeking out further utility-scale renewable opportunities, NTR began looking into solar power plant technology. It discovered Stirling Energy Systems (SES), a builder of the innovative and otherworldly-looking dish solar power plant technology. “My mantra for years was, ‘We don’t do technology. We’re project developers.’ But we took a view that if we wanted to play at the utility scale in solar, we would need to take a proprietary interest in technology,” Barry said. “Otherwise we’d be waiting a long time.” 

Three things about the SES concept attracted NTR. “The economics, number one. Second, no water. Third was the modularity of the technology.”

What was difficult about solar power plant development, NTR came to understand, were the inordinate delays associated with permitting and transmission access. That’s why NTR chose SES. “What we loved about the projects, was that they were at the top of the queue on grid and on the California Energy Commission’s and BLM’s hierarchy.”

The decision has paid off with very recent final approvals for the 709-megawatt Tessera project in California’s Imperial Valley. But the surprises have not stopped. For NTR, development may not be possible, because the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has been very slow in rolling out loan guarantees necessary to make Tessera economically viable.

Without loan guarantees, financing may not be available even though the final approvals make it possible to get construction underway by the end of 2010 and thereby to obtain a Treasury cash grant for 30 percent of the project cost under provisions made available in the 2009 Recovery Act. “The reality is the DOE loan guarantees are the gate keepers,” Barry said. “The industry is very challenged to get shovels in the ground on the back of that impediment.” Developers need both the cash grant and a loan guarantee. “This is big capital stuff,” Barry said.

Discussing the more general challenges still facing utility-scale wind and solar, Barry singled out the lack of supportive “policy cohesion.” The state of the world economy, he said,  “has made it very challenging for our policymakers to make the case over the long term.” Therefore, he said, renewables are “easy for politicians to ignore.”

Barry described himself as “pretty cynical” and added “there’s no point getting frustrated. It is what it is. It will take dramatic events to shape or reshape policy.”

He is in Washington, D.C. once a month. “The big problem we have in the democratic system is the influence of money.” There are politicians, he said, “who are not interested and will play the single tune after whoever pays the piper.” There are those, he said, who are “interested but really can’t get their head around it and end up confused and tend to go with the sense of a silver bullet, what seems like the easy solution. The third category is those that actually invest the time to really understand. That would be the narrowest data set.”

For the time being, Barry expects development to be slow, like the economy. “I would expect that the next two or three years would be a time of consolidation in the industry, and we have the opportunity to pick up some great assets very cheap. But then it will pop again -- and when it pops, it will pop big,” he said. “I’m optimistic about our species’ ingenuity in the face of adversity. But I think our political systems are enormously challenging.”

Herman K. Trabish : October 8, 2010

Future-proofing Biomass at Imperative Energy

A former Irish forester intends to keep biomass sustainable, avoid the fate of biofuels and export Irish innovation

“All of the wood we use comes from sustainably managed forests,” said Joe O’Carroll, the Managing Director of Imperative Energy, describing steps his company has taken to guarantee biomass is a renewable energy.“If you’re going to build,” he said, “it would seem foolish not to try and future-proof that.”

Sustainability is an Imperative Energy keystone. “We don’t want to happen in the solid biomass market the same thing that happened in the liquid biomass market,” O’Carroll said. “We’ve taken it upon ourselves to impose this obligation.” And, he said, “there are rules.”

The United Nations Clean Development Mechanism (UN CDM) must certify that the project is “carbon neutral” from the source to the generation if it is to provide the carbon credits that help a company meet its European Union emissions reduction obligation. The rules guarantee, O’Carroll believes, wood biomass cannot be a future source of electricity and heat generation unless no more is being harvested than is being grown. This is what he meant by “future-proofing.”

The company’s name came from something then-New York Senator Hilary Clinton, now the U.S. Secretary of State, said during the 2005 energy bill debate. “She made the point,” O’Carroll said, that “renewable energy is not alternative energy it is ‘imperative energy.’ And that’s where we got the name.”

Imperative Energy was conceived in 2005 but began doing substantive business in 2007, when O’Carroll worked in forestry management. “Essentially what we do is convert biomass to energy, a pretty traditional tried and tested technology.” The company’s technology allows for using biomass to make hot water or steam to generate electricity and also recaptures the heat by-product for reuse. O’Carrroll saw the forestry industry using waste wood and realized it could be done in other industries.

The original shareholders in the company were O’Carroll and Green Belt Ltd., a private forestry management firm. The original intent was to use forest thinnings to obtain benefit from “a low value commodity that nobody wanted” and prevent its wasteful decay into methane, a climate change-aggravating greenhouse gas.

The company now has 17 installations in the UK and Ireland and is presently doing due diligence on acquisitions in Washington state and Canada. “When you look at the U.S.,” O’Carroll said, “there’s an unbelievable biomass resource there.” The most attractive resources, he said, are in “the Southeast, the New England states, and the Northwest.”

In the Southeast, he said, “we believe that we would have no problem contracting about three million tonnes of biomass per annum. In just the three states Imperative Energy has studied, he said, “we believe we can contract ten times more biomass than we have contracted here in Ireland. We have enough biomass here to target 200 megawatts, so ten times that would be 2,000 megawatts.” That’s the equivalent of two huge nuclear power plants, within the company’s stringent sustainability imperatives that promise ongoing production.

The recent sharp drop in natural gas price has slowed the company’s growth “only slightly” because it is very selective in targeting large institutional customers that lack access to natural gas lines.

“Whether the client is a hospital or a school or a distillery or a food processor, they move from a situation where they have an oil-based boiler having no idea what the future price of that is going to be,” O’Carroll said. “We give them carbon neutral energy but no carbon penalties, remove their exposure to fossil fuels and now there’s somebody that does all the service.”

O’Carroll said a wider value of forest biomass to energy has also been studied. “The similar issue that people raise is that we know the biomass is carbon neutral but what about the supply chain, the harvesting and the transporting?” The UK government authority charged with overseeing the nation’s emissions reduction effort has studied the life cycle question, O’Carroll said. “They say it has a lower life-cycle carbon footprint that using gas.”

O’Carroll insisted that rather than doing harm to the forests, Imperative Energy is protecting them. “Where you get a lot of dead wood, that accelerates the danger of fires,” O’Carroll said. “We move in and harvest the thinnings. We’re not doing clear-cutting, we’re diminishing the forest fire risk.” By creating value for the thinnings and waste, they are driving sustainable forest management.

“Sustainably managed biomass is a finite resource,” O’Carroll said, “so our company believes that we must ensure that it is used as efficiently as possible.” Imperative Energy wants to see biomass used only and always to generate electricity where the by-product heat can also be captured for use district heating, resulting in 85 percent efficiency.

“The last thing we should be doing with a scarce biomass resource,” O’Carrroll said, “is using it in power stations that typically operate at 30 percent efficiency where 70 percent of the value goes up the cooling tower.”

O’Carroll is often called on to explain that he is not “cutting down forests,” he said. “Clearly what’s important is that we use them on a sustainable basis. Everything is a carbon cycle, even the fossil fuels,” he said. But those carbon reserves, he explained, took tens of thousands of years to be stored and have been released in a hundred year period, resulting in worsening CO2 concentrations. That’s why all Imperative Energy’s contracts pass on its commitment to sustainability. “They would be acquiring us knowing that is one of the keystones.”

Update on Cape Wind and East Coast Energy Production

September 28, 2010

WASHINGTON — The strong winds off the Atlantic Ocean could become a cost-effective way to power much of the East Coast — especially North and South Carolina, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virginia, a new study released Tuesday says.

The report by the conservation advocacy group Oceana argues that offshore wind could generate 30 percent more electricity on the East Coast than could be generated by the region's untapped oil and gas. It predicts that wind from the ocean could be cost competitive with nuclear power and natural gas to produce electricity.

The study appears just as new developments are starting to push U.S. efforts to catch up with Europe and China on tapping the energy in offshore wind. Great Britain last week opened the world's largest wind farm, and China built its first pilot offshore wind farm in 2008, using turbines from the nation's largest wind turbine producer, Sinovel.

The Department of Energy earlier this month issued a draft plan for creating a U.S. offshore wind energy program.

"Offshore wind energy can help the nation reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, diversify its energy supply, provide cost-competitive electricity to key coastal regions, and stimulate economic revitalization of key sectors of the economy," the study says.

The nation's first offshore wind farm, Cape Wind in Massachusetts, has received all its permits, but is embroiled in lawsuits. Three offshore wind projects are in the permitting process — one off Rhode Island's Block Island, another off Atlantic City, N.J., and a third off Rehoboth Beach, Del. A pilot project is planned in Lake Erie, off Cleveland.

Opponents say the wind project could alter the habitat, risking migratory birds, sea mammals and other wildlife. In addition, they say that government subsidies tilt the economics of wind farms to give the appearance that they're economically feasible.

Oceana opposes offshore drilling and presented its study as a better alternative.

The authors based their costs for offshore wind — 10 to 13 cents per kilowatt hour — on a 2007 study, but it's also the target price that the Department of Energy has set for the next two decades.

"In 20 years we assume we'll use up all the oil, but we won't use up all the wind," said Oceana's Jackie Savitz, one of the authors.

The study concludes that offshore wind could generate 127 gigawatts of power, or 48 percent of the electricity in the top 11 states with the best wind — which it ranks in order as Delaware, Massachusetts, North Carolina, New Jersey, Virginia, South Carolina, Rhode Island, Maryland, Florida, New York and Georgia.

The total amount of wind power assumes that one-third of the areas with strong winds (Class 4 or higher) would be developed in the area three to 24 nautical miles from shore and less than about 100 feet deep.

The Oceana study said that North Carolina has the largest offshore wind capacity — 37.9 gigawatts, or enough to power 12.8 million homes. That's more energy than the state needs — or 112 percent of its need, according to the report.

It estimated South Carolina could get about 64 percent of its electricity from wind, or enough to power 5.9 million homes. Florida could get 16 percent of its electricity from wind, enough to replace its use of oil for electricity.

The top-ranked states, Delaware and Massachusetts, could get more than 130 percent of their energy from wind power. Georgia, ranking 11th, was projected to get only 3 percent of its electricity from offshore wind.

The report also argues that offshore wind would result in fewer environmental impacts than nuclear energy, natural gas, coal and oil would bring.

Oceana's study didn't factor in any tax credits for wind or a fee placed on emissions from fossil fuels. It found that coal-fired electricity would be cheaper as long as carbon dioxide emissions remain free. If coal plants had to capture the heat-trapping gas and bury it, however, coal's price advantage could disappear. In addition, the study said the cost comparison doesn't factor in public health benefits from reduced emissions of smog, soot and mercury.

While Oceana argues that the country could get more energy for less money from offshore wind than from offshore oil and gas, the calculation is tricky because oil and gas prices vary so much over time.

That variation, however, works to wind's advantage, said Jim Lanard, director of the Offshore Wind Development Coalition, a lobby group formed in July.

"The beauty of renewable energy is that the fuel, either the sun or the wind, is free. As a result, developers can establish a fixed stable price for a long period of time, and that allows them to get a long-term contract," he said.

The first U.S. offshore wind farms will be expensive because they'll have to pay for up-front costs of things such as vessels and other infrastructure, Lanard said. However, the effort will quickly gain economies of scale and bring prices down, he said.

The Department of Energy's new plan to promote offshore wind will mean large investments in research and development to bring U.S. costs down.

"That's what this nation needs from an energy security and an environmental security perspective — and also national security, so we don't have depend on foreign sources of energy," he said.

Oceana also argued that offshore wind would create more jobs than offshore drilling, including manufacturing jobs. Transportation costs are high for the large turbine parts, and a local market would encourage the development of a local supply chain, Savitz said.

Britain's 100 turbines off Kent have a capacity of 300 megawatts, enough to supply more than 200,000 homes. Britain also has several other offshore projects in the pipeline as a way of reaching its target of 15 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.

China National Offshore Oil Corp. is beginning to build an offshore wind farm off Shandong Province, and other companies are in the early stages or projects or studying the possibilities.

"Chinese wind turbine manufacturers are investing heavily to grab a share of the market," the Communist Party's main newspaper, People's Daily, reported earlier this year.

Renee Schoof | McClatchy Newspapers

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