We are. We are going to have that discussion live today on our radio network with the Ex-Dir from Environmental Entrepreneurs. We'll post something soon on that.
Ready for a low carbon economy?
Did you know that Global CO2 emissions did not rise in 2014 for the first time in 40 years, while global economy grew 3%? The milestone marks an historical moment because, for the first time in 40 years, pollutant emissions and economic growth are starting to decouple.
According to the Climate Group: "What we are seeing here is the cumulative
Carbon Disclosure Project is catalyzing change - find out how GHG Measurement & Reporting is growing around the world.
impact of growing levels of investment into low carbon activities, not least in China and other major economies," remarks Damian Ryan, Head of International Policy, The Climate Group. "Over the last decade we have seen tens and then hundreds of billions of dollars invested each year into renewable energy, energy efficiency and other green growth opportunities, like LED lighting and electric vehicles.
"At some point this spending on the low carbon economy was going to show through and it seems that the IEA's new figures are the first indication of the seismic shift we need to combat climate change."
This is good news but this is no time for complacency. Cities, States, Provinces and Countries are moving toward putting a price on carbon. What does this mean for your company?
Investments in renewables, as we've seen many times, can bring economic and social equity. By unburdening homeowners with high energy costs, as seen here, money comes back from the grid into the community and into families spending for education, health and welfare.
There are great organizations through out the world doing similar work. The goal is to bring energy independence--or as close to it as possible--in all low or affordable housing as a step towards personal and environmental sustainability. It is hard to list the many positive social benefits these programs bring our cities. The ROI, on all sides, is extraordinary.
Perhaps we did not see the social improvements transformation could bring us, but they are here and we should relish the results.
Program Aims to Reduce Energy Costs and Keep Rents Affordable in Bronx
Miguel Polanco, a Bronx building superintendent, and a boiler he had to tend every few hours.Credit Ángel Franco/The New York Times
Long before it finally died last month, the old, rusted boiler in the basement of the five-story apartment building in the Bronx needed to go. It routinely broke down, leaving tenants without heat or hot water. It burned through copious amounts of heating oil and ran up thousands of extra dollars in bills.
But the old boiler stayed in the building, at 2629 Sedgwick Avenue, because the owner, Workforce Housing Group, an affordable-housing developer, said it could not afford to pay $400,000 to replace it after taking over the property in 2012. “Before we got to the building, the boiler was a mess,” a partner in the group, John Crotty, said. “And it’s not a unique situation to this building or to this area.”
The Bronx is dotted with aging apartment buildings that have weathered the changing economic and social landscape of the borough and today offer some of the most affordable rents in New York City.
But unlike newer housing developments, which routinely include green technologies, many of these buildings do not have the resources to undertake major repairs and renovations to make them more energy efficient and to improve living conditions for tenants.
So the Bronx borough president, Ruben Diaz Jr., has teamed up with city housing officials to create a program that will help those buildings pay the upfront costs for energy improvements, such as replacing an old boiler, insulating windows or installing solar panels on the roof. In return, the building owners agree to use future energy savings to keep rents affordable for tenants and pay back the program through leasing fees for the equipment. “This is the type of thing that really sells itself,” Mr. Diaz said.
The Bronx program comes amid expanding efforts to address what many city officials, advocacy groups and others see as a growing crisis in affordable housing. Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has made housing a focal point of his second year in office, and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development announced this month that they were taking additional steps to protect and improve existing affordable-housing units. The measures include a “green-energy savings program” that would help small and midsize buildings finance energy- and water-efficiency improvements to lower operating costs.
“There’s an enormous need for smart energy retrofits,” said Moses Gates, director of planning and community development for the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, a research and advocacy group. “Rents are rising across the city, and keeping energy costs low is a key part of a responsible owner being able to keep rents affordable and buildings in stable financial condition.”
Mr. Diaz said that the Bronx program would start this year with about $2.5 million, of which $1 million would come from his office’s capital budget and the rest from private investors and other sources. It would be open only to buildings in the borough and would initially begin with apartment buildings with 50 or more units and eventually expand to include smaller buildings.
Mr. Diaz said that he expected the voluntary program to initially pay for energy retrofits in three to five buildings, and as those buildings paid the program back through leasing fees, to use that money to pay for additional buildings. The program would be administered by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
Bomee Jung, a city planning commissioner and a senior director of Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit research and finance group that has overseen energy retrofits of affordable-housing buildings, said the Bronx program could fund modest projects that might not get money or attention in larger programs. The program could work closely with individual owners to take other steps to promote energy savings, Ms. Jung said, such as installing monitors that track water use to identify leaks. “It sounds to me, in some ways, the perfect thing to do on a small scale and in a local context,” she said.
The Bronx program has also drawn support from building owners. “It’s acknowledging an operational deficiency and coming up with a plan to fix it,” said Mr. Crotty, whose group owns 14 apartment buildings in the Bronx. “It’s not terribly sexy, but if you live in the building, you’re happy someone’s paying attention.”
Mr. Crotty’s group paid less than $2 million to acquire the mortgage for the Sedgwick Avenue building from a bank in 2010 after the previous owner fell behind on payments, he said. Two years later, the group received the title to the building, which has 35 rent-stabilized apartments, and began making repairs, which included fixing water leaks and rebuilding a fifth-floor apartment gutted by fire.
But the group was unable to get additional financing to replace the building’s 1971 boiler, which consumed nearly three times the amount of heating oil as a new boiler. Mr. Crotty estimated that with a new boiler, the building’s heating oil bills would drop from an average of $16,161 a month this past winter to $3,500 a month.
Miguel Polanco, 34, the live-in building superintendent, said he managed to keep the oil boiler going through a patchwork of repairs. He had to manually refill the water every two to three hours because the automatic feeder line no longer worked. If he did not, the boiler would go out. “I had to wake up twice at night to feed the boiler,” he recalled.
After the boiler broke for good, there was no heat in the building for nearly four days until a temporary boiler could be installed. Mr. Crotty said his group now pays $8,000 a month to lease the boiler and $10,586 a month for oil. It has applied to city housing agencies for financial assistance to purchase a new boiler.
Pilar Ciraco, 65, a retired maintenance worker at Yankee Stadium who pays $882 a month in rent, said the boiler should have been replaced sooner. “I couldn’t do anything because there was no heat or hot water,” she said. “I didn’t cook, I didn’t take a shower. I stayed home and covered myself with a really good blanket.”
Are we good stewards of the Earth? Sometimes the answer seems to be a resounding "no".
However, we can be. We have knowledge and tools for change. All indications over the last decade show we can balance the economy with the environment. Sure, major changes still need to be made. A shift away from over consuming would expedite change. But, we are getting there.
Our beautiful, resilient world is blessed in so many ways. It has shrugged off or restored from damage caused by our over reliance on fossil fuel. As this story details, migrating even faster to a clean-energy economy is key to remediating the potential catastrophic damage of the last century. We can do this.
Climate change could kill off 1 in 6 of Earth’s species, says study
Wide-ranging extinctions, especially in Australia and South America, could occur if humans don’t act to limit climate change, warns ecologist.
By: Raveena Aulakh
If Earth's average surface temperature rises by 2C there will be some extinctions, says new research. But if it rises by 4C, then one in six species might disappear.
One in six of the Earth’s species will likely become extinct if we don’t take immediate action on climate change, warns new research.
The study, published Friday in Science, also says amphibians and reptiles face greatest risk, and chances of extinction are the highest in New Zealand, Australia and South America.
It is the most comprehensive look yet at the effect of climate change on biodiversity, analyzing 131 existing studies on this subject.
“One in six species would be a dramatic change to our environment,” said study author Mark Urban, as rising temperatures alter weather and vegetation patterns, forcing species to migrate to cooler areas to survive.
Urban, an ecologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, says in his analysis that if the average global temperature rises 2 C above the pre-industrial average and holds there, then 5.2 per cent of species might eventually be wiped out. But if it gradually tops out at 4.3 C above pre-industrial levels, one in every six species could ultimately disappear.
The trouble is many scientists think that keeping warming under 2 C isn’t achievable, given current estimates of future emissions.
The impact of climate change isn’t always immediate, said Urban, and not all species are affected similarly. In some cases, habitat might shrink to where it can’t support the species. In others, it might disappear altogether. In yet other cases, a species might die out before it can reach a new, welcoming homeland.
“Extinction is the tip of the iceberg … but there are a whole lot of other changes,” said Urban, citing population decreases, changes in distribution and even altered interaction between species.
His paper also says the forecasts are gloomiest for species in Australia, New Zealand and South America — home to diverse species with small ranges. “A lot of these species often have smaller sizes and they are already at risk,” he said.
Risks in Australia and New Zealand are also exacerbated by small land masses, which limit how far a species can range to find a new home.
But, said Urban, there is still much that scientists don’t know about how species will react to warming, and some plants and animals species may evolve and adapt. “We need to refocus efforts on less studied and more threatened regions.”
While the goal of the study was to consolidate a range of research, its conclusions should be a wake-up call, said Urban, who believe we may still have time to act.
“We can begin to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. We can start to identify the species that need most help and begin conservation efforts,” he said. “If we can create good models of extinction risk, then we can figure out which species are in danger and put conservation measures in place to save them.”
Janneke Hille Ris Lambers of the University of Washington in Seattle, also writing in Science, called the research a “sobering estimate of climate change-induced biodiversity loss.”
There are uncertainties, she agreed but said if we do not take action “it is clear that we will soon to able to directly observe the impacts of climate change on diversity.”
It is starting to look as if state's are competing to be first in cutting greenhouse gases to their lowest possible level. That is one race we hope ends in a tie and they all win.
This is an exciting year, and one of the most exciting times to be alive. We are living the next great industrial revolution as we migrate from a fossil fuel-based economy to a clean-energy one. The transformation is speeding along at a very rapid rate. With it, we believe, will come new jobs, co;s, technology, lifestyle that will endure for generations.
California governor orders aggressive greenhouse gas cuts by 2030
By Rory Carroll
Reuters) - California Governor Jerry Brown issued an executive order on Wednesday to cut greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent by 2030, a move he said was necessary to combat the growing threat of climate change.
The targeted reduction was tied to 1990 levels and is "the most aggressive benchmark enacted by any government in North America to reduce dangerous carbon emissions," Brown said in a statement.
California operates the nation's largest carbon cap and trade system. The state sets an overall limit on carbon emissions and allows businesses to hand in tradeable permits to meet their obligations.
Achieving the new target will require reductions from sectors including industry, agriculture, energy and state and local governments, Brown said.
"I've set a very high bar, but it's a bar we must meet," Brown told a carbon market conference in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday.
Brown said the new target will position California as a leader in combating climate change in the United States and internationally.
Brown said he has spoken to leaders in Oregon, Washington and Northeastern states about collaborating with California to cut their output of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Those states could potentially link to California's carbon market in future years.
He said he has had similar discussions with leaders in the Canadian provinces of Quebec, British Columbia and Ontario, as well as in Germany, China and Mexico.
Quebec is already linked to the California market. Leaders in Ontario this month signaled their intention to join the program.
"This will be a local policy but it will be globally focused," Brown told reporters on the sidelines of the conference.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon welcomed the news and encouraged other states and cities around the world to also take action, U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said.
"California's bold commitment to tackling climate change is a strong example to states and regions all over the world that they can join their national governments in taking ownership of this critical issue and in showing leadership," Haq said.
The plan for how California will achieve the 2030 target will be hammered out over the next year by the California Air Resources Board (ARB), which oversees the cap-and-trade program.
"With this bold action by the governor, California extends its leadership role and joins the community of states and nations that are committed to slash carbon pollution through 2030 and beyond," said Mary Nichols, chair of the ARB.
(Reporting by Rory Carroll in Los Angeles and Laila Kearney in New York; Editing by Susan Heavey and David Gregorio)
Another interesting example of environmental changes and their potential impact on our climate. Algae, as you well know, is soon to be used in many different and new applications that will power our world in a clean fashion. However, for many years we've been fighting its rampant choking of ponds and the surrounding vegetation.
Again, there is much controversy on whether we are seeing accelerated warming or accelerated cooling across the globe (with predictions we will experience record low temperatures for the next decade in the US, as an example). Either way there's significant risk to our economy and quality of life. The Arctic is clearly in danger of suffering great physical change.
Blooming Algae Could Accelerate Arctic Warming
Blooms of algae in the Arctic Ocean could add a previously unsuspected warming feedback to the mix of factors driving temperatures in the north polar regions up faster than any other place on the planet, according to the authors of a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“By the end of the century, this could lead to 20 percent more warming in the Arctic than we would see otherwise,” said lead author Jong-Yeon Park, of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, in Hamburg Germany.
Average temperatures in the region are already 2.7°F higher than the 1971-2000 average — twice as much as the warming seen in other parts of the world. Even without this newly identified algae feedback, summer temperatures in the region could be as much as 23.4° F warmer in summer than they were before human emissions began in the 1800s. Add 20 percent to that and you’re up to 28° — a level that could thaw permafrost drastically, and release even more heat-trapping CO2 into the air.
There’s no question that algae blooms are on the increase as Arctic ice thins. Scientists have generally believed that more algae — more specifically, the type known as phytoplankton — would be good for the climate, since they thrive on CO2 while alive, then carry the carbon they’ve absorbed down to the sea bottom when they die. Some experts have even suggested that fertilizing the oceans to encourage algal growth would be one way to counteract global warming.
But Park and his co-authors point out that thicker layers of algae on the sea surface would prevent sunlight from penetrating deeper into the water.
“More heat is trapped in the upper layers of the ocean, where it can be easily released back into the atmosphere,” Park said. He and his team reached this conclusion by marrying computer models of how ocean ecosystems behave to models that simulate the climate. Then they ramped up levels of CO2 to see how the algae would respond to the resulting warming, the extra carbon dioxide itself, and changes in sea ice.
The analysis makes sense, according to independent scientists — up to a point, anyway.
“The authors show that phytoplankton plays a role in the vertical distribution of solar energy reaching the Arctic Ocean,” Mar Fernández-Méndez, a sea-ice biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Biology, in Bremen, Germany, said. “But while the study is credible, it’s based on model results, not observations.”
That being the case, Fernández-Méndez said, any incorrect assumptions in the model would lead to an incorrect conclusion. The particular model Park and his colleagues used, she said, is not specifically designed for the Arctic, where a number of factors could skew the results.
One, which the authors themselves note, is that the warming of the Arctic Ocean that is already happening could trap nutrients in deeper, cooler layers that would make them less available to feed algae blooms. Another is that an increase in Arctic cloud cover — a plausible outcome of global warming, which promotes evaporation from the oceans — could deprive algae of the sunlight they need to thrive. Nevertheless, said Fernández-Méndez, “the results stress the importance of taking biological processes into account in climate models.”
This study, like virtually all research that breaks new ground, is hardly likely to be the final word on the matter.
“This aspect of climate change has not been adequately modelled in the past,” said Victor Smetacek, of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar Research, in Bremerhaven, Germany. The new study, he said, is an important step in the right direction.
This is perhaps an unexpected result of the world's aggressive investments in renewables, but we think it is a good one. When a community starts to invest in locally produced energy, jobs flow and money comes back into the economy as most communities are not in areas that produce oil or natural gas. Most of us are spending lots of money bringing fossil fuel into our homes and cars.
Then,, of course, there's the value of fixing costs and protecting the environment and health. We can also avoid building new power plants to meet growing demand (efficiency does this as well), and it prevents very high peak-season demands that force costly consumption of energy.
We think this will lay the ground work for more micro-grids as well.
Utility Sales May Drop by Half as Homes Make Their Own Renewable Power
SAN FRANCISCO -- Utilities in the U.S. Northeast stand to lose as much as half of residential sales by 2030 as customers install solar and battery-storage systems and generate their own power, according to a report by the Rocky Mountain Institute.
Residential and commercial customers who opt for alternatives to traditional, utility-supplied electricity could erode power sales in the region by as much as $34.8 billion, the Snowmass, Colorado-based energy consultant said in the report released Tuesday. Fewer kilowatt-hours sold to customers also will affect utilities’ ability to raise the estimated $2 trillion that needs to be spent to maintain power grids between 2010 and 2030.
A drop in the cost of solar panels and new leasing programs that offer installation with no upfront customer payment has led to a boom in U.S. rooftop systems, which have climbed more than 50 percent annually during the past three years. Utilities in some states have sought added fees from customers who generate their own power, saying the funds will support a grid that users sell excess supply to and rely on when their own systems aren’t available.
“For owners and operators of central generation and transmission, our findings are likely bad news,” James Mandel and Leia Guccione, staff members for the institute, wrote in the report. Utilities need to find new business models that incorporate these systems into their networks, they concluded.
‘Utility Scale’
The Edison Electric Institute, a Washington-based group that represents utilities, had no immediate comment on the study. Eversource Energy, which supplies customers in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and Consolidated Edison Inc., which serves New York, had no immediate comment.
The report may overestimate the lure of local generation, said Rudy Wynter, president of federally regulated businesses at National Grid Plc, which supplies power to 3.4 million customers in New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
“Larger scale solar installations and wind are much more economic when done at utility scale,” said Wynter.
The report warns there is a “real risk” that power plant owners selling into competitive markets may have to write down the value of their assets as solar and battery systems sap sales. The study was done in partnership with Homer Energy LLC, a Boulder, Colorado-based provider of software and services for microgrids.
Grid Charges
Companies including SolarCity Corp., NRG Energy Inc. and SunEdison Inc. sell the home solar panel systems, which reduce demand from traditional utilities.
Utility owners have been countering with proposals to reduce the amount customers are paid for the excess electricity generated by their solar panels and instituting monthly grid- connection charges. In Arizona, SolarCity filed a lawsuit last month challenging a plan to charge solar customers a minimum monthly connection fee of $32.44.
Customers in New York, California and Hawaii will find solar and storage systems less expensive than relying exclusively on grid-supplied power within the next 10 to 15 years, the study found.
Regulators in those states are already considering ways to allow power companies to earn money while accommodating more solar and power storage on their grids.
California utility owners PG&E Corp. and Edison International have said they see growth opportunities through network investments to allow for two-way flows of electricity as more customers install solar and storage units.
“These conversations about new regulatory frameworks and rate structures need to be happening more quickly than it has at present,” report author Guccione said in a telephone interview. “There is a real, actual and significant cost to doing nothing.”
Good timing on this. This comes on the heels of a great victory in RI as West Warwick became the first town (or city) to invest in 100% clean energy. They will be the off-taker of three 1.5 meg wind turbines that will be built this summer in a nearby town. This comes on top of their significant investments in solar. The world is building a new economy and nature is powering that.
Renewables
Account for 75 Percent of New US Generating Capacity in First Quarter of 2015
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- According to the latest "Energy Infrastructure Update" report from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's (FERC) Office of Energy Projects, wind, solar, geothermal, and hydropower combined provided over 75 percent (75.43 percent) of the 1,229 megawatts (MW) of new U.S. electrical generating capacity placed into service during the first quarter of 2015. The balance (302 MW) was provided by natural gas.
Specifically, during the quarter, eight new "units" of wind came on line with a combined capacity of 647 MW — accounting for 52.64 percent of all new generating capacity for the quarter. It was followed by 30 units of solar (214 MW), one unit of geothermal steam (45 MW), and one unit of hydropower (21 MW). Five units of natural gas provided the new capacity from that sector.
FERC reported no new capacity from biomass sources for the quarter nor any from coal, oil, or nuclear power.
The numbers for the first three months of 2015 are similar to those for the same period in 2014 when renewable energy sources (i.e., biomass, geothermal, hydropower, solar, wind) provided 1,422 MW of new capacity and natural gas 159 MW while coal and nuclear provided none and oil just 1 MW.
Renewable energy sources accounted for half of all new generating capacity last year.
Renewable energy sources now account for 16.92 percent of total installed operating generating capacity in the U.S.: water - 8.53 percent, wind - 5.65 percent, biomass - 1.38 percent, solar - 1.03 percent, and geothermal steam - 0.33 percent. Renewable energy capacity is now greater than that of nuclear (9.11 percent) and oil (3.92 percent) combined. Moreover, as noted, total installed operating generating capacity from solar has now reached and surpassed the one-percent threshold.
Note that generating capacity is not the same as actual generation. Generation per MW of capacity (i.e., capacity factor) for renewables is often lower than that for fossil fuels and nuclear power.
According to the most recent data (i.e., as of December 2014) provided by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, actual net electrical generation from renewable energy sources now totals 13.2 percent of total U.S. electrical production; however, this figure almost certainly understates renewables' actual contribution significantly because EIA does not fully account for all electricity generated by distributed renewable energy sources (e.g., rooftop solar).
The trend lines for the past several years have been consistent and unmistakable. Each month, renewable energy sources — particularly wind and solar — increase their share of the nation's generating capacity while those of coal, oil, and nuclear decline.
