Clean Energy Springfield

Spring isn't quite here yet, but we had a warm weekend, so my wife and I have opened up our windows a little bit. The storm windows will come down tomorrow (we're probably suckers here, but spring is all about hope, right?).

I also put up the clothes line this weekend and did some laundry. Depending on how much laundry you do, line drying your clothes can save up to 800 kWh per year (via Grist's Ask Umbra), which is a half metric ton of carbon not going into the air (or 1/10th of a car not being driven for the year). That's a big impact for a simple thing to do. Umbra has some other tips on getting started. And if you really want to do it right, check out Cheryl Mendelson's Home Comforts or Laundry. Both the library (and Home Comforts is available both for checkout and as a reference book!) and Barnes and Noble have it.

Welcome to the CES Blog! This will be a group blog authored by members of the community organization Clean Energy Springfield. Our goal is to encourage dialog about environmental and energy issues related to the Springfield area. Check back often for news articles, events, new ideas and discussion as this blog continues to grow.

The Washington Post covers the coal rush today. This popped out at me:

Even after a pledge last month by a consortium of private equity firms to shelve eight of 11 planned coal plants as part of their proposed $45 billion buyout of TXU, the largest utility in Texas, many daunting projects remain on drawing boards. Any one of the three biggest projects could churn out more carbon dioxide than the savings that a group of Northeast states hope to achieve by 2018.

Ouch! And of course, the reason? "Utility executives say that the coal expansion is needed to meet rising electricity demand as the U.S. population and economy grow." Bruce Nilles, of the Sierra Club, promotes the Springfield energy plan, but the Post gives it a pretty brief and desultory mention.

Grist has a couple of good responses. David Roberts says we need to change the terms of the debate, while Gar Lipow says we can phase electricity emissions out in a decade if we choose to. Heady stuff: all wind, with a better grid and 12 hours of storage. Sadly, all of that stuff is outside of our hands, and Lipow himself emphasizes that this doesn't even touch the issue of efficiency and conservation, which is where I think we can really shine at the local level.

In the talks that I've given recently, I try not to focus too much on the doom-oriented aspects of climate change. I give them a mention, but I think it's more useful to talk about the ways that reducing our greenhouse gas emissions can make for a better Springfield--more comfortable, more affordable, better for business.

That said, it's important to not let the bigger picture slip by, since that's what makes the problem so urgent. The big news the past couple of days has been the leak of an early draft of the second part of the IPCC's fourth round report. That's a mouthful, but it's important. The IPCC--the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change--was commissioned by the UN in 1988 to study climate change, and is probably one of the largest scientific endeavors ever. It synthesizes the state of climate change knowledge in rounds, and it's in the process of releasing the results of the fourth round now. A little over a month ago, it released the first part of the fourth round report, looking at the what we know about humanity's contribution to climate change (a lot, and what we know is that we're very certain--more than 90% certain--that we're contributing to the current warming).

The second half of the report, not due for another couple of months, looks at what impacts we're already experiencing and what we can expect in the future. Let's reiterate that: we're already experiencing climate change. It is not something that happens exclusively in the future. However, the future has even more in store for us, and there's not much good news. Droughts, flooding, famine, and no more habitats for polar bears.

What does this mean for Illinois? It's hard to know. So far, most of the attention has gone to Africa and Latin America, which are set to get hit the hardest in the near future. However, a couple of years ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists put together prospects for states in the Great Lakes region, including Illinois. This doesn't have the same heft at the IPCC, but it is specific to us. (Sadly, it's a little undercut by projecting out to 2100 only under a business-as-usual scenario, and not looking at the impacts under reduced emissions.) The basic idea? By 2100, Illinois's climate will be like that of present-day Oklahoma.

Two "Ouch!"s in two days is certainly too many, but I'm not sure what else to say:

Even the awe of Immanuel Kant’s famous “starry skies above” is lost to modern environmentalism, so obsessed is it with what data, graphs, and a good PowerPoint presentation can show.

Curtis White, of the Illinois State University, targets the rationalists among us environmentalists. White says that we need to reconnect with earlier spirituality in our respect for the Earth. Maybe he just hasn't seen the right PowerPoint. Normal isn't too far away...

I wrote most of the following post for my other blog but I think its worth re-posting here. In February I saw the documentary Kilowatt Ours, as part of the Sierra Club Energy Film Festival.

Documentaries are a difficult medium to make interesting but this one-hour film kept my attention. One aspect that made it more fun for me personally is that it focused on things happening in the Southeast, including East Tennessee, where I once worked for an environmental non-profit. I even saw two friends interviewed in the movie.

It covered the topic that first got me involved in coal-fire power plant issues: air-pollution in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The Smoky Mountains are the most visited National Park in America and it's also the most polluted park, largely due to coal power plants in the area built by the Tennessee Valley Authority.

There are few things I love more than hiking in the Smoky Mountains. I went at least every other weekend when I lived in Knoxville. Every summer, the Park releases warnings during bad air days when the pollution reaches levels that present a health threat to anyone with respiratory problems.

I took particular notice of this because I have asthma. What I came to realize during the time I lived there is that, despite my severe allergies, the things that aggravate my asthma the most are indoor and man-made pollutants. The Smoky Mountains are the most biologically diverse area in the United States but it was the air pollution that made me sneeze and wheeze more than any pollens or natural allergens.

There are now two kinds of smoke visitors may see when they visit the Smoky Mountains. One is a natural, low-lying blue smoke that most often appears after a rainfall. This is how the mountains earned their name.

I took the picture below during a hike on a rainy day when you could see the low-level blue smoke that's natural to the area.

Today, visitors are more likely to see an unnatural haze that limits visibility in the park. I took the next picture of Mt. Cammerer on a day without a cloud in the sky. The Mountains in the background on the left half of the picture should be clearly visible but you can hardly make them out because of the polluted haze.

Unfortunately, many people visit the park each year without realizing that the yellow haze blocking their view is pollution, not natural smoke. In addition to causing problems for people with asthma, the pollution from coal power plants are also a threat to trees and other plant life in the park.

This is what first drew my attention to the problems of coal power plants in 2002 and I've become more involved in the issue since learning more about the global warming problems they cause as well.

TVA is a big part of the problem, but they're also helping to find a solution. Living in Knoxville is when I first learned about the concept of green energy buy-in programs that allow utility customers to pay more to ensure that a portion, or all, of their energy comes from clean, renewable sources. The extra money paid helps to fund the purchase and development of more renewable energy, such as wind.

TVA has had a green pricing program for several years and soon City Water Light & Power will have one due to the agreement with the Sierra Club.

Those were the parts of the film that stuck out for me personally, but there were other interesting ideas and concepts that make it worth watching. I strongly recommend it for anyone who wants to learn the basics of what realistic alternatives there are to high-polluting methods of supplying energy.

The big debate at tonight's utilities committee meeting was definitely alderman McNeil pulling representatives from KBV (the contractors building the new Dallman IV power plant) and a couple of the unions to talk about getting more minority workers out at the power plant. Fierce!

By contrast, the first wind power contract discussion was relatively mild. Aldermans Kunz and Edwards had some aggressive questions, but I think CWLP gave them good answers and seemed to address their concerns. The utilities committee put it on the debate agenda for next week's city council meeting on Tuesday, and (apparently) gave it a "do pass" recommendation.

I'll have more details tomorrow, but I'll hit the highlights now. First, the contract under consideration tonight is for the first 20 MW of the 120 MW CWLP will eventually purchase. CWLP is still hammering out the details for the other 100 MW, and fulfillment of this contract is contingent on that one going through.

Why two contracts? These 20 MW are part of an existing wind farm owned by Florida Power & Light (FPL) in Hancock County, Iowa. The next 100 MW are in a farm under construction is Osceola, Iowa, whose target completion date is January 2008. Under the terms of the contract, CWLP would start purchasing these 20 MW starting July 1 of this year. Both contracts will be 10 years long.

The cost comes in at just under CWLP's anticipated cost of $60 per MWh--over ten years, the average price will be $50.79/MWh. The price is set to start at $41.43 per MWh, and rise at a rate of 4% per year. Assuming that the price of energy on the market rises at 3.5% per year, total cost to Springfield ratepayers will be $2300--basically nothing, according to CWLP.

CWLP described that energy inflation rate as a conservative estimate--over the past 10 years, the price of energy has gone up 9% on average. The more that price goes up, the more revenue CWLP will bring in on this. Finally, it sounded like CWLP said that revenue that the wind power brings in will go toward a negative fuel adjustment charge--i.e., lowering ratepayer's per-kWh cost of electricity.

I'll see how the SJR covers this tomorrow, as well as how comments over there go. In the meantime, anyone with any questions about the contract, or more broadly about the energy plan in general, feel free to post them here or email them to cleanenergyspringfield at gmail, and I'll try to address them from my notes and from the handout that CWLP gave out.

Chris Wetterich has pretty solid coverage of the wind power deal in this morning's SJR. But man, oh, man, when do we get to retire this: "But CWLP and the Sierra Club say that by buying it, CWLP will reduce the overall amount of carbon dioxide emitted by fossil-fuel power plants, which most scientists believe causes global warming"? How much agreement do we have to have before the SJR can just say "carbon dioxide causes global warming"? Is it enough that, politically, there is bipartisan agreement? How about that three major energy associations now not just agree that carbon dioxide causes global warming, but are calling for compulsory carbon caps. Ditto ExxonMobile. Or check out long-time warming skeptic Ron Bailey talking about how he came to believe he'd been wrong.

The presence of a few people that deny the connection between HIV and AIDS doesn't lead to this sort of CYA, does it?

TriplePundit has an interview with one of the authors of Green to Gold, about how businesses can find profit in environmental performance. I got GtG for my birthday last year, but haven't been able to crack it yet. I'll try to get to it soon, and get a review up.

As mentioned below, FPL is the power provider that CWLP selected for its wind power. This post is just collecting together a few tidbits about FPL that came up last night, and that I've been able to find online. First of all, here's their generation mix: about half natural gas, slightly under one-third wind, eleven percent nuclear, and a mix of others for the rest. (No coal, unless it's in the 2% for "Solar and other.") According to the FPL rep last night, while wind accounts for slightly less than a third of their total capacity, it only accounts for 21% of their total electricity generation. Further, their 4000 MW of wind accounts for 34% of US marketshare of wind power; they are the largest wind power provider in the country (according to this 2003 slideshow, that's actually down from 43% that year). Here is a fact sheet about their wind power facilities.

Something that was mentioned in passing is that FPL only sells to municipalities. I can't find anything to back that up, and it seems somewhat incredible (particularly since it is not, itself, a municipal utility), so I might have misheard.

FPL, as the name suggests, is based in Florida. It's origins are in Florida Power and Light, a regulated utility. At some point, they got into the energy marketing game, and split off FPL Energy; they are now both owned under the umbrella of FPL Group. FPL Energy, with whom we're on course to deal with, has energy resources literally across the country. (At one point, I had a map showing all of their energy resources, but I can't find it now.) Sadly, they centralize operations of all of their national energy resources in Juno, FL. Their Juno facility runs 24 hours a day to monitor their facilities.

Our projects, as previously mentioned, are in Iowa. The first one is in Hancock County; the second is planned in Osceola, and it doesn't look like they've put a profile of it yet.

This is probably of interest to no one but me, but I'm going to explain a little bit of what I picked up from CWLP's presentation last night about how they picked FPL. They received 16 offers from 8 companies, many of which came with several pricing options: fixed costs across the lifetime of the contract, escalating (where it goes up a certain percent each year), and staired (which I didn't catch the explanation of--perhaps it only escalates every few years?). CWLP staff knocked out 7 projects, then worked with The Energy Authority to analyze the remaining 25.

The Energy Authority is essentially a co-operative effort of municipal utilities to pool resources and purchase expertise in energy marketing that would be too costly and intensive to purchase alone. What it seems they specifically did here was provide a strong modelling background for rigourously comparing the 25 offers. This took the form of stochastic modelling, which means running your model with random (though probabilistic) combinations of your key variables. What emerges, I believe, is essentially a likelihood determine of outcomes.

It sounds like the key variables that they were considering was climate (i.e., wind availability) and energy prices, based on the location of each proposal, and compared on a time-of-day basis. This means, if I'm understanding correctly, that they weren't comparing, say, the average cost price of electricity and the average amount amount of electricity the wind turbines would produce. They matched when the electricity would be generated to the likely price of electricity at that time of day. (Both wind patterns and energy price patterns have long datasets to back this up.)

In the final analysis that they presented to the committee, CWLP offered a chart of yearly projected market prices compared with the contracted price per megawatt. Included in this chart were two primary variables: the capacity factor (i.e., what percentage of nameplate capacity will the turbines produce at?) and the energy inflation rate. Capacity factor was listed at 26.3%, which seems low. There wasn't any discussion of this number, so I don't know if this is their best estimate or something more conservative. The energy inflation rate was 3.5%. As mentioned last and in the SJR, recent history puts the energy inflation rate at something more like 9%. And the higher that inflation rate, the better the return to the city, and the lower our bills will be.

Cleantech Blog has some information on Dell Computer's efforts to offer more green options. Neal Dikeman looks at two of their programs: Plant a Tree For Me, which plants trees as carbon offsets for the typical first three years of energy use for whichever model you buy, and some of their efforts to make computer use more energy efficient. (Sadly, he doesn't mention their takeback program for computers, which is one important way that, to my mind, they're leading their competitors--I may be a little out of date on this, though.)

Tree planting gets a lot of grief from environmentalists (who's the treehugger now, eh?), but I think overall this is a good start for Dell. As Dikeman notes, they don't yet offer offsetting for their operations (that is, for building the computer), and the piecemeal by-appliance approach doesn't strike me as particularly sensible (if I'm interested in offsetting my energy use, why not just offset my electricity bill? Is Amana going to be offsetting my refrigerator next?), but I can see it as an easy way to get the low-hanging fruit--people who'll do carbon offsets on impulse, but not stick with it month after month like you'd need to offset everything. (Why, if only there were some way to get billed for your offsets, right alongside your energy use? Gosh, that would be great. ;) )

Still, it's good to see them getting started on this. I wouldn't be surprised to see them get stung with the greenwashing tag. (And I just noticed that the first comment at Cleantech says that tree-planting efforts can get certified, which it doesn't appear that Dell is doing.) Still, it's easier to get someone who's made a commitment to do good than to get someone doing bad to do good, so I take this as a positive step.

ALSO: And I am more than ready for the day that computer makers compete on the basis of efficiency, rather than just brute computing power. Of course, with Microsoft ramping up its computing requirements whenever it fumbles a new version of Windows into the market, that's a hard sell.

Brad Plumer at TNR has a good background article on the recent division among evangelicals that made the news this week. As you've probably heard, the National Association of Evangelicals (led by vice president for governmental affairs Richard Cizik) is getting mean letters from prominent, politically-connected evangelicals like James Dobson, for Cizik's push for more attention to creation care, their word for environmentalism. It's pretty interesting, and worth reading. (SIDE NOTE: I have a TNR login, but not a subscription, so let me know if anyone has problems accessing this.)

That said, if you're only going to read one TNR article this year, make it Ryan Lizza's profile of Young Mr. Obama, and his formative years organizing under Saul Alinsky's method. Great not just for background on Obama, but for an introduction to hardscrabble, power-oriented organizing.

As a general rule, I think that distressed properties ought to be rehabilitated rather than demolished. I think it's easier to reinvest in rehab than it is to get funding for new construction. I think that older buildings are assets that ought to be cherished when there isn't something immediately in the offing.

Which means that I'm distressed that most people in Springfield default to thinking that these properties ought to be demo'd. And that means that I'm doubly upset that there are apparently problems with the city's rehab program.

I think this is a good starting point for finding out about the problems, and I hope that Chris Wetterich is able to follow up on this article, which is mostly he-said, she-said stuff, and dig into what the program has accomplished and how widespread the problems are. What kind of tracking and reporting of its spending and successes does the city do?

Not hollowing out the core of Springfield is an important element to growing smart--good neighborhoods draw investment, which will otherwise continue to concentrate in the far west side of the city. (Of course, this means we need neighbors that welcome new development, but that's another, much bigger topic...)

To get a sense of what's possible by pursuing a strategy of rehabbing and reinvestment, rather than demolition, check out the success of Patterson Park Community Development Corporation, in Baltimore (a city that pretty defies all attempts at improvement).

So, people like us talk a lot about CFLs. But everything has a catch, and one of the biggies for CFLs is their mercury content. (Although it's important to note that they still contain less mercury than coal plants release into the atmosphere through the use of incandescents.) Still, it's important to do right, and that's why it's good that the Illinois EPA, Sangamon County, and City of Springfield offer a yearly hazardous waste collection at the Fairground. This year, it's on April 21 (click here for other dates and locations in other counties), and here's what they will and won't take.

I didn't make it last year, but I had a CFL blow out a couple of months ago that I stuck in a draw. If I were smart, what I'd do is get a crate, designate it for hazardous waste, print out the list of what's acceptable to deposit, and put stuff into it throughout the year, so that it's just a matter of taking the one crate every year.

Sadly, though I've seen signs for this year's collection around work, it doesn't look like the marketing is out there yet. In particular, I can't find a website for it, other than the EPA's, which is limited to what the EPA itself will guarantee. So, how about Springfield and Sangamon County? Let's see a website for this.

In this post, I'm going to report a little bit about the questions asked by the aldermen in last week's committee meeting, because I think it's useful and kind of fascinating. I basically actually kind of enjoy their discussions. They take on a certain kind of performance art to me. Anyway, this is the last post about the committee meeting, unless other questions come up.

Chairman McNeil, Vice-chair Selinger, and committee aldermen Edwards, Kunz, Bartolomucci were there, as well as aldermen Strom and Yeager, who are not on this committee. Selinger, Bartolomucci, and Yeager did not, that I noted, ask any questions. McNeil only asked a few, Strom asked a few more, and Edwards and Kunz, as mentioned last night, were pretty aggressive in asking what seemed like mostly fair questions (which were sometimes rooted in misunderstandings).

I'm not going to cover every question, just going to hit a few that got the most discussion.

Early on, Edwards asked about the energy escalation rate. Specifically, he wanted to know what "our" escalation rate has been recently. Jay Bartlett said that it had been about 9% over the past 10 years. Kunz jumped in to clarify that Edwards and Bartlett were referring to different things. Edwards was asking about Springfield rates, which are set by city council, whereas Bartlett was talking about prices on the market. (Technically, I think, CWLP has to sell all of its power to the market, and then buy it back. This is costless, since we're selling to ourselves, but it means that they pay attention to those market rates, in addition to any time that they have to buy from the market because of plant down time.) There followed (and occurred again later) discussion of what would happen if the energy inflation rate were higher or lower than expected: higher means more revenue for the city and a negative fuel adjustment charge for ratepayers; lower means that CWLP has to cover the gap in some way. If it happens after Dallman IV (the new coal plant) comes online, any excess revenue from sales of excess generation to the market can cover it; if it happens before Dallman IV comes online (or if for some reason Dallman IV revenues can't cover it), the result will mean higher rates.

Second, McNeil asked why CWLP was proposing to start its purchase now. This was addressed again later when Kunz was confused by one of CWLP's charts, which showed revenue to the city in parentheses and red font, and costs to the city in black, which is the reverse of how you'd normally show it. This confused me, too--CWLP: if you're reading, don't do that; and also: the y-axes on all of your charts should be at zero: your chart of CO2 emissions for in-city electricity sales makes it look like we're cutting CO2 in half, when that's not nearly the case.

Anyway: the question about why CWLP wants to start now. First, apparently, the Hancock County energy comes at a good price. It's not broken out by Hancock versus Osceola, so I'm taking their word on that. Second, increasing demand for carbon-free electricity is driving wind prices up, along with wait times for building wind farms, so waiting longer will be more costly and take longer. Kunz asked why CWLP was presenting the two contracts separately, since they're interdependent. Bartlett said that they finished this one first, and figured there was no point in sitting on it. Also, he said they were getting a lot of requests to find out when the contracts would be ready. In particular, he mentioned that the State has started making CO2 reduction commitments, so they are eager for CWLP's wind power to come online, to show they're making progress.

Third, Strom asked whether the price in the next contract was already negotiated, and what it was. Bartlett said yes, and that it's the same price structure as this contract. Strom also asked when the second contract would start. Bartlett said that it would start when the Osceola farm came online, which is expected to be January 1, 2008. I didn't catch it, but Will said that someone said FPL is running ahead of schedule on that.

Fourth, there was some misunderstanding about the nature of our wind power commitment, asking whether we'd be in trouble if the wind didn't blow or, in the alternative, if our commitment could be filled early if the wind is particularly strong. Bartlett made clear that we've committed to the capacity, and we get whatever it generates.

Fifth, one point that CWLP's slide show contained was that FPL guaranteed an average of 90% uptime over a rolling 24-month period. So, if the wind turbines that we're licensing are down more than 90% of the time, FPL will pay a penalty to CWLP. Kunz asked whether CWLP put this in because they wanted to make money or because the Sierra Club required. Bartlett said that we want what the wind power provides (carbon reductions and protection from price fluctuations), so they wanted to make sure that CWLP got those.

Those were the biggest questions, according to my notes. Overall, I think these were good questions. It's clear that Kunz and Edwards don't want to do anything more than they have to, but I think their questions also reflected a concern for ratepayers. Personally, I'd prefer that concern be leavened with a little more foresight about the future and comprehensive view of CWLP's role. But Kunz, in particular, seems to be almost maniacally dedicated to what his constituents want, and you can't blame him too much for that.

One of our goals with the website here is to put together a list of what innovative energy initiatives other cities are doing. A lot of these are small affairs--how they structure incentives for incremental improvements in energy efficiency, for instance.

Today, though, I came across a startling example of what can be done. Soldiers Field, WI, town of 635, passed an ordinance mandating that all new commercial buildings would get at least half of their energy from solar power. They ramped up their thermal performance standards to twice Wisconsin's standards. They passed a solar access law, to ensure that future buildings wouldn't steal the sun from all of those solar panels.

Of course, as exciting as this is, it's actually a little depressing that it happened in 1978.

In more contemporary news, 143 towns in New Hampshire have passed a resolution calling on the US to commit to greenhouse gas reductions. The resolution is here. It has support from all sorts of groups, from the environmentalists to the American Snowmobilers Association, and including (if I read it right) Stonyfield Farm. This is particularly clever politics, given New Hampshire's privileged position in the upcoming presidential election.

Will sent me a copy of the Sierra Club's candidate survey yesterday, and asked if I wanted to make any comments. I zeroed in on the sprawl question and decided to write something about it:

6) What actions would you take to encourage development within Springfield’s city center, and discourage sprawl? but then couldn't find any quick way.

Last night's mayoral debate solved that!

Both candidates were asked about the possibility of "large-scale" residential growth downtown and its role in having a vibrant central city.

Davlin said he didn't "see downtown as having what's in downtown Chicago" and didn't know if he'd support "large-scale development." He said he likes the mix there now and hailed the growth of second-floor condos in downtown buildings.

Strom said downtown housing is as important, if not more so, than continued growth of the bar and entertainment industry. He favors "a philosophy ... that we need to increase residential properties downtown to drive the economy for other things."

There is so much attention in the urban world on the great American cities--Chicago, New York, Baltimore (my bad!), Philadelphia, and so on--that it's easy to forget that we used to have real urban small cities. In grad school, we worked for awhile with Jackson, Michigan, a city of 30,000 that used to have a solid union middle class, with a wonderful downtown. Now, it's struggling to keep its jobs, and it's downtown has been hollowed out to just a thin strip surrounded by parking. Sound familiar?

You can see the bones of Jackson and Springfield's urbanism, and they're good. It's a low-lying density that allows for walkability, work, retail. It's called neotraditional design or New Urbanism now, and it's trendy. But what they're creating aren't the dense urban cores of Chicago and New York. They're recreating the downtowns of Springfield and Jackson.

We don't need to recreate. We just need to fill back in.

I'm getting lucky with the news today. I hung off commenting on the H.D. Smith expansion last night, hoping that today's SJR would have more details*, and sure enough: it did! And even better, it crucially converges with one of the Sierra Club's survey questions:

Many cities, including Normal Illinois, have adopted ordinances that promote sustainability, energy conservation and environmental concerns for buildings. Do you think Springfield should promote green building practices such as providing incentives for developers, or rewriting zoning, stormwater management, building, and other ordinances? If yes, what steps should Springfield take to implement these standards?

According to the SJR:

The "green buildings" will be constructed using the latest environmental and energy-efficient technology, according to Smith.

Now, it's unclear whether the "green buildings" means specific buildings on the campus, or everything. And it's unclear how far they intend to go. Hopefully, it's everything and all the way. In particular, it would be great if they pursued LEED certification, which evaluates how "green" they've managed to be, along a range of factors, such as location efficiency (compactness v. sprawl), energy use, materials use and re-use, landscaping, and water use. LEED has several levels: Certification, Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum. The certification process is tough, but it would be wonderful to see an out-in-the-open application in Springfield. It would be a great learning opportunity, especially if HD Smith manages to make it costless (which it can be, but often is not).

Moreover, let me tentatively thank for HD Smith for choosing a reasonable location. It's tough to place a campus-sized complex on an infill site, but if I'm not completely misunderstanding "off Sixth Street north of Stevenson Drive" (and since it's the Fiat-Allis site, I assume it's along Fiat Drive), it looks like it's not just infill, but bus accessible (route 1 and maybe route 10).

Of course, some people might say that HD Smith proves that a city ordinance calling for green buildings is unnecessary--the free market is working successfully. I don't think that's the case, for a couple of basic reasons. First, there's often an incentive split between developers and ultimate property owners/users, which results in focusing on minimizing the upfront construction costs of the development, potentially at the expense of efficient design, which often (but not always) is cheaper over the long-term, but costs more upfront.

Second, most people--developers and architects included--tend to operate on the basis of routines, within realms that they're comfortable. So, if they're used to building a certain way, they'll tend to keep building that way unless something forces them to do otherwise. That something can be community pressure, a persistent client, widespread press, or ... regulations. What we're seeing more and more recently is that LEED certified buildings are getting closer and closer in upfront cost--which means that their long-term savings are just that--savings--and not payback. But until people get used to designing for green status, they'll overlook those savings.**

(As an aside, I think--and I'm sure CWLP would contest this--that this is part of what happened when CWLP commissioned the new power plant. They pursued a typical strategy of looking for emissions reductions, and found something in line with what they were already doing. When pressed, though, they found that they could emit far, far less than that, and because of the emissions market, that cleanliness will pay off to the tune of $38 million.)

* Speaking of which, I am not an SJR subscriber. However, I will happily plug AT LEAST one SJR story a day if they give me full online access to each day's articles and letters to the editor for free. I'm just throwing the idea out there.

** Saying this gives me an opportunity to link to my Favorite Economist Joke Ever.

The Washington Post has a shortish article about how species respond to climate change. It's focused on Maryland, and notes that the Baltimore Oriole is shifting northward, while Louisiana's brown pelican is starting to show up. It touches a little bit on the troubles that other species may have--birds are relatively mobile, after all. Can plants shift northward as quickly? They can certainly shift in response to natural climate changes (and in fact, Illinois is a prime example of those shifts, as it floats between forest and prairie land depending on temperature and precipitation changes), but manmade warming is going to happen a lot faster than that.

This reminds of something I think would be great to have: an indicator garden. Long-time horticulturalists can see climate change in their records, as their flowers bud and bloom earlier. And we know that species will shift around in response to climate. Why not set aside a little portion of one of parks to serve as a publicly maintained climate indicator garden: connect it to records of when the species within it typically bloom and where different species are native to, and with just a little management we'll be able to see climate change happen on a year to year basis. This would be a phenomenal education tool, as well as providing a natural amenity.

I'm going to task this to the Illinois Native Plant Society.

Industrial-scale carbon sequestration is in the news again: an MIT report (and here) says the coal industry is way behind in getting sequestration off the ground. A lot of people (including my second link) see sequestration as absolutely crucial to our future energy system. (See wikipedia for a good introduction to sequestration, and ignore the stuff about biological sequestration for now.)

As I'm sure you'll be surprised to know, I'm not so sure. (And I'm important! I have the blog to prove it!) Sequestration is a tricky thing--ocean sequestration may be a new form of pollution, while underground sequestration may be risky due to, you know, earthquakes. One thing I'm fairly confident on, though, is that sequestration doesn't need subsidies. The fossil fuel industry is fully mature, and it got that way through a century or more of public support and subsidy. It can afford to look after itself, if it wants its product to make the transition to a future de-carboned world. Public money is scarce, though, and so it ought to go to support technologies that we know can work, like improved efficiency, solar, and wind.

I know some people will croak at the thought of solar and wind being proven technologies, but to my mind the only thing holding them back is battery capacity. And building a better battery--or, at any rate, a lot more batteries--seems like more a sure thing than tucking a gas into gaps in the deep ground, such that it won't escape. And, of course, wind and solar (not to mention my pet favorite, geothermal, and not to mention the really new kids on the block like tidal power) are still comparably new. Subsidies can help mature these industries that can become the core of the our energy the easiest. Moreover, anyone can get in on solar and wind and all the rest at this point--someone as little as CWLP has the potential (in my mind) to be a major driver of geothermal, for instance. Not so for coal: subsidies there are going to go to one of a few well-established massive energy companies.

It was not my intention to post this much today, but you go where the news takes you, right?

The bar got higher today, as Kansas City Power and Light reached an agreement with the Sierra Club and Concerned Citizens of Platte County, in which KCP&L agrees to certain conditions in exchange for those two groups dropping their objections against KCP&L's new coal-fired power plant. In fact! It's an agreement that "can serve as a model for environmental groups and utilities working together"! Indeed!

In all seriousness, from the brief skimming I've done, it looks like the process out there has been much uglier--6 years long, to start with, with much more counter-suing and allegations that KCP&L had broke the law (violation of New Source Review).

From their webpage, it looks like KCP&L is an investor-owned utility serving Kansas City and 24 counties in Missouri and Kansas, with 500,000 customers and 4000 MW of generating capacity (75% coal--er, "lower cost coal"--unsure on what basis that percentage is).

The agreement calls for them to add 400 MW in wind energy, create 300 MW of energy efficiency (kind of an odd phrasing, but I like the focus on performance, compared with our agreement's focus on dollars spent), reduce carbon emissions by 20% by 2020 (at some point, I think I saw that one primary mechanism of this will be that they have to offset in its entirety the emissions from their new plant), and reduce emissions from the new plant and their older plants (I haven't yet compared their goals with our goals). They'll also look into upgrading or closing an older plant, work on a net-metering plan, and finance several other projects in Kansas City recommended by the KC Climate Protection Committee. (I should note at this point that, in addition to having a Climate Protection Committee, Kansas City has also signed onto the Mayor's Climate Protection Agreement.) The agreement, in its full legal glory, can be found here.

So, congratulations to the Concerned Citizens of Platte County, KCP&L, and the Sierra Club!

City council unanimously voted in favor of CWLP's proposed contract with FPL. There was not a whole lot of debate--alderman Edwards confirmed that the prices on this contract were the same as those for upcoming 100-MW contract; he also asked whether CWLP's anticipations of future revenue were the same between the two contracts (no, because the second contract is in a different location and across a timeframe). Alderman Strom asked what assurances there were that the prices in the second contract would be the same. Todd Renfrow said that there was a verbal agreement, and then clarified that if something happens with the second agreement, this one gets nullified as well. Alderman Selinger asked when the second agreement would be ready; Jay Bartlett said two to four weeks; they pulled up the representative from FPL, and he said two to three weeks, that they were in the final stages of drafting the contract, and that CWLP's outstanding concerns were minor. He also confirmed that the price structure was the same.

And that was it.

I don't, actually, have a lot to say about Al Gore's testimony in front of the US Senate today, even though it's been the buzz of the environmental sector for a few days now. David Roberts at Grist has a run-down of the core elements of what Gore is calling for. Some stuff we've heard before, some stuff is new. I'm pretty tickled by his proposal for "Connie Mae," a carbon-neutral mortgage association, to help defray the upfront costs of energy-efficient building." That would be pretty nifty. It's probably something we could even do locally, lacking federal leadership.

Getting a late state, but I started planning the garden tonight. [Insert relationship between local food and clean energy. ;) ] Last year was my first garden, and it was a little overambitious. Nevertheless, I think I'm going to try to keep with it this year. That means, off the top of my head, I'll be cramming tomatoes, carrots, celery, pumpkins, broccoli, peppers (green and yellow), cucumbers, zucchini, chard, onions, lettuce, sugar snap peas, beans, beets, and okra into 32 square feet, not to mention flowers and herbs. (I'm a square foot gardening guy, and plenty stupid.)

What are y'all planting? Anyone else looking forward to your CSA or the farmer's market? Would anyone be interested in setting up a recipe-share group focused on what's coming into season, either in the market or in our gardens?

Norman Hinderliter has a letter to the Illinois Times this week--in his words, "my yearly reminder to those citizens who are fed up with working 40 hours a week to just sign their paychecks over to local gas stations: Try bicycling this summer -- not just to save gas money but for health as well." I totally endorse that sentiment, but there's one quibble I have.

At the end of his letter, Hinderliter says bike parking is unbeatable, since bikes can park anywhere. To which I say: Not in my experience, sir! I have about six places I bike to repeatedly: work, downtown, the library, the grocery store, Hometown Pantry, and Walgreens. At work, I chain up to a tree; ditto at the grocery store (County Market on Monroe). Maldaners and the library both offer downtown racks, as do Hometown Pantry and Walgreens.

Bike racks--like bike lanes on heavily traveled roads--don't just make it easier and more convenient to cycle, they also signal that bicycling is an important part of our transportation system. Their absence--say, from workplaces, from grocery stores, from downtown at the old state capitol--communicates the reverse: bicycling is fringe and frivolous.

Bike racks are not expensive, and a tree is not a parking space.

One of the points I tried to make in a past presentation, and which I hope to bloviate about more here in the future, is that looking at energy as just a technology or just a commodity--and thus subject to simple economic calculations--is to play the laggard's game. We need, instead, to look at energy as multiple things, and one of the key ones is that it plays a cultural role. Most fundamentally, this means that our culture today is adapted to (and in turns shapes) our energy use and our energy sources. The easiest examples of this are always in the past, of course: Think of what the drive-in used to be, and think of what enabling technologies it required to exist. That sort of thing.

One likely result of this is that changing our energy sources and system will encounter resistance (people resist cultural change, because it changes who they are), and that the relation between culture and energy will go in unexpected directions. On the other hand, it also clear that culture and values are currently some of the primary drivers of exactly this change.

So, with that in mind, here's a link to anthropologist Grant McCracken talking a little bit about how anthropologists go about noticing things. It's not at all about the environment or energy use, but I think this sense of being able to see mundane things as new and interesting is important. As it says in the title to his blog, McCracken works at the intersection of anthropology and economics, though when he says "economics" he seems to mostly mean "corporate business and marketing". Still, it's an interesting read.

Incidentally, when I did my graduate work (talking to businesses in a small city in Michigan about their interest in participating in a green power program), I created my interviews based on a handbook by McCracken, The Long Interview.

P.S.: I created a new category for this post called "Culture shock," because--hey, electricity is shocking, right? Anyway, it should be considered a temporary category until I think of something a little less aggressive. Mostly, right now I just want to call attention to my pun.

Again, not a direct energy issue, but a couple of nice appreciations of the biggies in the plant and animal worlds. First, the ten most magnificent trees in the world, with an honorable mention of an old favorite of mine, the Tree That Owns Itself, an Athens, GA, landmark. (My dad is a Bulldog.) Second, an overview of the role that whales play in the oceans, along with what lowered whale populations entails.

Tomorrow is World Shut-Off Day, asking us all to Step Away From the Computer for just one day. I'm torn: I have so much great blogging to share with you all. On the other hand, there is spring cleaning and a garden to putter around in. So, if you don't hear from me tomorrow, it's because I'm being virtuous, not that I'm lazy.

UPDATE (Saturday morning): So much for that.

If you've found your way here from my View, you know I think the next few years are a great opportunity for us to have a citywide conversation about how we meet our energy needs into the future. I have definite ideas about where I think we ought to go, but I know I don't speak for everyone. So let us know in comments what you think and, please, tell it to CWLP on April 19, too.

This is going to be a somewhat rambling post about the nature of environmental concern and how it relates to economic growth. (See Lee's ponderings here for a recent example.) A lot of the debate over environmentalism is: to what extent does improving our environment hurt our economy. I don't think that has to be the question, though. I think the question can be something more like: can we move to an economy that is a healthy part of the environment and that meets everyone's needs, broadly construed (so: material needs--do you have enough to eat? clothing? leisure time and materials?--but also our needs for useful work and meaningful relationships).

I'm going to start, though, with something that just plain tickles me. The Journal of Industrial Ecology (here is a rough and not-great explanation of what industrial ecology is) recently gave free access to a proof of an upcoming article, The Changing Metabolism of Cities, about how our cities have changed their use of materials, energy, and water over time. It's an interesting article and not too technical, though it's also not intended for a lay audience. However, I'm going to skip all of that, and just post a funny picture:

That's the urban metabolism of Brussels, Belgium, in the 1970s. If you look closely, you can see that it has flows (arrows) for solar energy, for precipitation and evaporation, for materials coming into the city, and solid waste going out. (I'm a goof for this stuff; here's a slightly more legible flow chart, showing how all energy in the US (in 2002) began and ended.)

The serious point lurking here is that these kinds of flow tools are stolen wholesale from the science of ecology (heck, industrial ecology even stole the word). And that gives a useful way in to understanding the relationship between our environment and our economy.

People often say that nature is incredibly efficient. And it is. But it's useful to understand that it's Nature As a Whole that's efficient; any one part of it is likely to be incredibly inefficient--for example, the tree in my front yard produces thousands of seeds every year; even if it weren't surrounded by the road, sidewalk and my pristine, glistening lawn, this is an amazing amount of effort with very little possibility of return. But it's because nature has so many layers of uptake--that is, that any waste becomes food for someone else--that the system overall becomes efficient. If it weren't for decomposition--which is a living process, composed of innumerable kinds of decomposers--my tree would soon be up to its elbows in seeds.

And this is where I think we go wrong in talking about the environment. We want to lessen our impact. Some of the highest praise we have for a sustainable home, for instance, is that it's zero energy or zero impact. But my tree doesn't have zero impact: it has a beneficial impact. It's part of a healthy system. We should make our economy like that. What prevents us from doing so is that we harvest too fast and our waste products are toxic, or they evolve too quickly.

Biomimicry is one route into the change that we need. Another is the focusing on lessening negative impacts (which, yes, I just got finished criticizing). We don't know all the tools for this yet, but I think it's something we can grow into.

SOME OTHER STUFF: Lee follows up his post about growth and environmental quality with this one, about those two, plus happiness, plus the role of local economies. I agree with him that re-localizing is important. And I think that re-asserting traditional sources of identity, religious and community, is important, because these bring a sense of how to find happiness that we've been missing for awhile, as we've been left looking to just our material possessions. However, if you're not quite ready to make the culture shift yet, Matthew Yglesias has good news for you: When you hear people talk about how much fighting global warming is going to lessen how fast our economy grows, bear in mind that doesn't mean that we'll have less stuff, it means that we'll get more stuff slower in the future.

I'm going to be on a panel discussing the movie Power Shift on April 11 at the Lincoln Library. Because I'm special, I get to see the movie in advance; otherwise, I'd just drool on the other panelists for half an hour. It's good--anyone interested in clean energy and sustainability should drop by. In particular, you get to see Bill McDonough, co-author of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. McDonough is one of those people who's been a real visionary in promoting the kind of viewpoint shift in environmentalism that I talked about earlier: away from lessening impact and toward working like nature. And he's an architect--a businessman--so he's focused on balancing societal and environmental benefits with his need to keep his company afloat. So, come out and hear his pitch for how we can make our buildings net energy generators, rather than energy users.

ALSO: Check this out: Navarra, Spain, gets 70% of their energy from wind and solar power. That's insane! That's nuts! And that's not good enough for them: they've set a goal of 100% by 2010.

Representative Henry Waxman has introduced his Safe Climate Act into Congress for consideration. I think that it's the strongest bill floating around Congress right now, but also probably the best. As David Roberts in that Grist link notes, the strength isn't just in the ultimate greenhouse gas emissions limits (80% decrease by 2050), but that it's structured to have small decreases on a yearly basis. That makes it very predictable, and prevents companies from delaying and delaying until it becomes exorbitantly expensive to comply. What's more, those limits are for a cap-and-trade system, which will give a bonus to those businesses and *cough* municipalities that are ahead of the curve.

The basic set-up (the bill also includes subsidies for new technology, including renewables and energy efficiency) is that emissions would be capped in 2010 at 2009 levels. They'd then decline 2% a year until 2020, when they'd hit 1990 levels. From that point on, they'd decline at 5% a year until 2050.

From an electricity perspective, that means we're in pretty reasonably shape. When the emissions limits kick in, CWLP's emissions will already be at 1990 levels. We'll have prices for CO2-limited electricity locked in until 2017 and 2018 (when our wind contracts expire, if everything goes according to plan). That's seven years when we can be investing in the next wave of lowering our CO2 emissions--maybe more wind power, but maybe solar in Springfield, geothermal, and superefficient retrofits of our existing homes. (Surely, all new homes will by that time already be net energy generators, right?)

Now, CWLP has indicated that it intends to keep all carbon emissions reductions from its wind power for itself/us. However, since those reductions are what allow CWLP to meet its obligations under a plan like Waxman's, it can sell 100% of its new reductions in the carbon trading system. That makes it even cheaper to start investing in our alternative energy infrastructure now--laggards in other states will be in effect subsidizing us.

Of course, CWLP can't solve all of our problems: we use a lot of oil, too, as well as natural gas, and we consume a whole host of energy-intensive consumables (like December grapes from Chile). That's why we need to start planning for CO2 limits now. The energy plan has given us one vital headstart. Let's not squander that.

Nothing strikingly new here, but researchers have identified climates in the world that are likely to disappear entirely, as well as zones that will have new climates, unlike any others we experience today. This doesn't have much meaning for Illinois (we're the new Oklahoma, Canada is the new Illinois), but having grown up in the south, I am not excited at the prospect of visiting my parents' new Venus-like home. Read the full story. Here's the picture that's worth a thousand words:

For your skimming pleasure, I present "Change is in the Air: Toronto's Commitment to an Environmentally Sustainable Future," that city's brand-spanking new combined climate action/air quality plan. There's an overview here, and some griping about how it's all hot air talk here.

From my almost surely industry-deadened perspective, this looks like an ambitious start, with plenty to fill in over the next forty years (the plan calls on Toronto to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050). I'd like to point to a couple of things that I found pretty nifty.

First, it must be said that they have a strong base to work from. There are several "completes" and "implements" in their action section that suggest Toronto's going to have an easier job getting to their targets than a lot of other places. That's the virtue of starting early.

Second, it builds on local resources. It does so most explicitly when it promotes substitution of locally produced goods for imported ones. However, local resources lurk in other places, such as using its Local Large Water Body as a source of cooling energy.

Third, it's kind of tucked in at the end, but I find it interesting that it calls for direct engagement with existing neighorhood planning efforts, tying climate change directly into what they do. Given that compact development is an important strategy for reducing transportation emissions, and neighbors are a primary opponent of densification, that's an important step.

All in all, an interesting start, with ambitious goals. One thing that I'd like to see a little more strongly is a sort of environmental SWOT -- Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats -- assessment, making explicit what tools the city has for reducing its emissions, and what obstacles its likely to face. In fact, not coincidentally, I think such an analysis would be a great thing for Springfield to do.