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Consumption

The History and Hope for a First-in-the-Nation City-Utility Clean Energy Partnership

written by John Farrell

In the past month, the city of Minneapolis and its two investor-owned utilities adopted the nation’s first clean energy partnership, with a wide range of goals including meeting the city’s ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction goals. How did it happen and what can it accomplish? The following 8-minute video from one of the “lead rabble rousers” on the Minneapolis Energy Options campaign, John Farrell, explains what got things started and where the partnership may lead.

The Beginning
One of the primary motivators of the Minneapolis Energy Options campaign was to say, “How much money do we spend collectively as a city on these energy services, and how much of that is actually leaving the city of Minneapolis.” The answer is $450 million each year, for electricity and gas services, with most of the profits leaving town. “A lot of it is money that can be recaptured within the local economy, especially…when you’re talking about a transformation taking place in the technology in the electricity sector allowing you to generate energy much closer to home than we ever have before.”

Organizers of the Minneapolis Energy Options campaign started around a conference table asking how this notion of the local energy dollar could be addressed, and immediately thought of the municipalization fight in Boulder, CO. But “it seemed sort of silly to be saying, “let’s go out and form our own utility” [when] we haven’t even really talked to the ones that we’ve got about what we could do with working with them.” On the other hand, the city needed leverage in its negotiations with utilities since most of the power in utility regulation is at the state and federal level. So the campaign was meant to elevate the notion of the city’s energy options, up to and including the formation of a city-owned utility.

The campaign was hottest during municipal elections in 2013: “we had a lot of candidates talking about it, the mayoral candidates talking about it, city council candidates talking about the campaign. We had the specter of a ballot initiative around municipalization.”

The result of the campaign was that the utilities came to the table to negotiate.

A Novel Partnership
As of October 2014, “we have a first-in-the-nation partnership between a city and its utilities to explore not only the two-thirds of climate emissions that are the result of electricity and gas consumption that the city really didn’t have any opportunity to influence before. But also that 450 million dollars that’s being spent in the local economy and how that can be kept more local.”

As one testifier at city council said, ‘Our job now is to figure out how this doesn’t become the quarterly coffee clatch for the city folks and the utilities, and how do we make sure we actually have real substantive conversations about it.’”

“What are the possibilities?”

Three Big Opportunities
“There are three key things at stake. The first one is, what ideas can we generate that are innovative and ambitious and measurable and achievable within a short time frame? Because we’ve established for ourselves that this partnership can go on as long as ten years. We’ve got a check-in point of about five years. Which means we really have to start having stuff happen within two to three years if we want to know whether or not this is working.” All of the parties – Minneapolis Energy Options (Community Power), the city, and the utilities are going to come with great ideas.  “What can this city put on the table with its regulatory authority over local property? What can utilities bring to bear with the data that they have about our local grid and the knowledge that they have about installing local solar?”

“Number two is, can we…set ourselves real benchmarks for accomplishing these things? Can we say two years from now that we are going to make meaningful and substantial progress on energy efficiency by retro-fitting a certain number of homes? Can we do it in a way that focuses on communities that have been traditionally disadvantaged, where folks pay a disproportionate share of their monthly income on energy?  What can we accomplish with community solar over the next couple of years in Minneapolis? What are going to be the opportunities to get synergies between energy savings programs for electricity and gas?

Number three is, “how do we then let this be part of the bigger national conversation about how do we structure a utility business model (see forthcoming ILSR report, to be released 12/2/14) that serves the principles and goals not only of the city of Minneapolis, but – writ-large – all of the utility customers who care about things like clean energy?”



November 20, 2014 0 comment
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Energy Efficiency is Essential—and it Needs to be Sexy

Energy Efficiency is Essential—and it Needs to be Sexy

written by CleanTechies.com Contributor

Why doesn’t energy efficiency excite people as much as a Tesla roadster? On the face of it, duh. It’s the brains of it that make it a head-scratcher.

An American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) report released earlier this month ranked the U.S. among the least energy efficient of the world’s largest economies, at 13th overall. (Get the details in Climate Central’s summary.) This despite the fact that earlier ACEEE research found that economic data and the historical record suggest energy efficiency investments “can provide up to one-half of the needed greenhouse gas emissions reductions most scientists say are needed between now and the year 2050″ and “Investments in more energy-productive technologies can also lead to a substantial net energy bill savings for the consumer and for the nation’s businesses.” According to NRDC’s annual energy report, released in October, efficiency contributes more than any other resource toward meeting energy goals, and does so at less expense, saving billions of dollars and preventing millions of tons of carbon emissions.

In other words, energy efficiency is probably the single most effective greenhouse gas reduction strategy we have, and it saves you money. What’s not to get excited about?

Unfortunately, energy efficiency just isn’t sexy. Climate pundits have been lamenting this for some time: energy efficiency is the granny panties of the green economy. Many see the solution in language—what we need is a new term, one less evocative of slide rules and more inspirational. I’m all for optimal naming, but we need to look at the total package.

Energy efficiency faces two obstacles that strike me as more serious than its nerdy name: invisibility and implausibility. The beauty and the downfall of many energy efficiency measures is that they work in the background, without anyone being aware that they’re happening. And the potential savings from these measures often inspire skepticism more than any other reaction—people think that if a solution like that really were effective, it would already be standard practice. That assumption ignores the powerful forces of inertia and the culture of heedless consumption: most Americans haven’t worried much about saving energy because we haven’t had to.

When our own clients have faced this barrier, we’ve advocated “show, don’t tell” strategies. People need to see energy efficiency in action, and what they see has to be alluring, mesmerizing or at least moderately cool (to the intended audience, of course). There are many potential paths to this effect. The Nest thermostat is a great example of sexiness through design. The opposite of Nest’s chic minimalism could also be a winning strategy: show the energy efficiency happening through web interfaces, tickers, texts from your tires, whatever. Energy efficiency messengers and messages are also crying out to be amped up and taken out of the granny panties zone.

Will energy efficiency ever make our spines tingle? Maybe not (barring an electrical accident). But it can at least be made visible—and worth looking at.

Article by Sandra Stewart, a principal at Thinkshift Communications, which provides brand storytelling, messaging, PR and other strategic marketing services to cleantech and sustainable businesses.



November 10, 2014 1 comment
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Keeping up with the Green Joneses – Solar and EV Adoption

Keeping up with the Green Joneses – Solar and EV Adoption

written by

The most recent column on “groundbreaking innovation” Co-Exist from Fast Company was titled “If Your Neighbor Gets a Solar Panel, You’re Going to Want One Too: Whether  your neighbor has a solar installation is more likely to influence your decision than politics or income level.”

The articles’ author Ben Schiller cites studies which mapped 3,843 solar units installed in Connecticut between 2005 and September 2013. What they found was “‘considerable clustering of adoptions’ in ‘wave-like centrifugal’ patterns. When they looked at the dates of the installs, they found one decision in a neighborhood tended to lead to another.”

Pretty cool, but isn’t this old news? Back in 2005, a study in San Diego compared the influence on energy consumption between potential money savings vs concern for the environment vs peer pressure. The results clearly supported social influence, which reduced consumption by 10 percent.” Influence guru Robert B. Cialdini weighed in on the remarkably effective tactic of adding a smiley face to bills for energy reduction, which further reduced energy use: “People don’t just want to conserve energy, they want to be acknowledged for conserving energy.”

Electric Vehicle (EV) adoption also spread in clusters. Not surprisingly, EV and hybrid purchases have been most concentrated in affluent communities with early-adopter characteristics. But far more interesting and perhaps even more relevant, 50.5%  of all registrations are clustered in just three suburbs, Atherton and Los Altos (in Silicon Valley), and Santa Monica in Southern California. California has created an infrastructure for EV/Hubrids and is first in ownership, but if affluence was the defining attribute, wouldn’t EV/Hybrids be spread evenly across California’s many wealthy communities?

Now that many low- and mid-priced vehicles are offered in hybrid varieties (i.e., Toyota Camry, Honda Civic, and Ford Fusion), green social influence is moving from novelty for the affluent to smart money for the mainstream. It happened before with residential solar:  the highest concentration of Connecticut solar installations clustered in middle income, Republican-voting areas of the state.

Peer influence is also having an impact in the corporate world, where renewable energy  is replacing fossil fuels in industry clusters. Benchmarking in industries and companies – comparing your sustainability performance against your peers – leads to greater adoption of renewable energy.

As reported in the solar industry’s third annual Solar Means Business, solar installations cluster by industry, with retail leading the pack. Walmart remains the top solar user overall, spurring its leading competitor Target to move from 16th to 8th ranking with the addition of 15 new solar systems. Retailers’ large flat store roofs are well-suited to roof-top solar apps and their razor-thin margins make energy cost reduction perhaps a higher priority, but other industries are following suit. Apple, which once eschewed environmental concerns, is now fourth in solar installations. Their acknowledgement? Apple appeared first alongside Google and Facebook (their data farms run on wind power) in the Greenbiz article “Apple, Facebook, Google score in Greenpeace data center ratings.”

Peer influence, whether in a corporate or a residential setting, modifies environmental behavior. Can peer shaming work too? Freakonomics economist Steven Levitt, would argue yes. In his words: “…society actually likes it when other people get shamed. … it’s actually a really incredibly efficient mechanism for punishing people who do things we don’t like.”

Another experiment tests peer shaming empirically. San Francisco and Berkeley have both passed legislation requiring that as of March 1, 2015, gas station owners must put climate change warning labels on all gas pump nozzles. The labels say how much carbon dioxide is emitted for every tank of gas burned, saying explicitly how using gas as fuel is contributing to climate change.

Reflecting in The Guardian on a University of Minnesota study that again showed the power of social influence, Adam Corner of the University of Cardiff says, “We may currently compete through demonstrations of conspicuous material consumption, but material goods are simply a marker for social status. It’s the social status that’s important – and the markers we use to signify it can easily change.”

Article by Carol Pierson Holding.  Article originally appeared on CSRHub, appearing courtesy 3BL Media. 



November 7, 2014 0 comment
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American’s Energy Usage Jumps in 2013

American’s Energy Usage Jumps in 2013

written by Environmental News Network

Despite many individual efforts to decrease energy usage for 2013 increased by 2.3 Quadrillion thermal units over the previous year. These statistics have been monitored and presented by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in the most recent energy flow charts measuring renewable, fossil and even nuclear energy.

The annual flow charts are generated by the LLNL and illustrate the nation’s consumption and use of energy. The Laboratory also has released a companion chart illustrating the nation’s energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. Americans’ carbon dioxide emissions increased to 5,390 million metric tons, the first annual increase since 2010.

Wind energy continued to grow strongly, increasing 18 percent from 1.36 quadrillion BTUs, or quads, in 2012 to 1.6 quads in 2013 (a BTU or British Thermal Unit is a unit of measurement for energy; 3,400 BTU is equivalent to about 1 kilowatt-hr). New wind farms continue to come on line with bigger, more efficient turbines. Most new wind turbines can generate 2 to 2.5 megawatts of power.

Natural gas prices rose slightly in 2013, reversing some of the recent shift from coal to gas in the electricity production sector. Although this did cause carbon dioxide emissions to increase in 2013, “the power industry is building a lot of natural gas plants,” said A.J. Simon, group leader for Energy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “Gas plants are cheaper than coal plants. Natural gas is going to be a winner into the foreseeable future.”

Overall natural gas use increased by 0.6 quads. Losses in the electricity sector were more than offset by greater gas use in the residential, commercial and industrial sectors. “2013 was a cold winter,” Simon said. “We expect to see continued high gas consumption in 2014, due to another tough winter on the East Coast.”

Nuclear energy was greater in 2013 than in 2012. “The use of nuclear energy fluctuates a little from year to year,” Simon said. “It’s likely that in 2013, fewer reactors were down for refueling than in previous years.” However, a few of the nation’s about 100 reactors have recently closed for good, such as the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in Pendleton, Calif.

The transportation sector is using more renewable energy, specifically biomass that is converted to ethanol. “This has been going up over time,” Simon said. “We’re expecting the fraction of biomass in transportation to remain relatively steady.”

The majority of energy use in 2013 was used for electricity generation (38.2 quads), followed by transportation, industrial, residential and commercial. Energy use in the residential, commercial transportation and industrial sectors all increased slightly.

Read more at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.



April 3, 2014 0 comment
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Calculating Your Water Footprint

written by Walter Wang

Water scarcity affects 2.7 billion people worldwide for at least a month each year and in the same way that each of us has a carbon footprint, Professor Arjen Hoekstra of the University of Twente in the Netherlands posits that every person also has a “water footprint”. Our water footprint is calculated by counting the amount of fresh water that we each use daily and the amount of water required to produce the goods and services that we

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February 11, 2014 0 comment
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Are Most Americans Unaware that Electric Vehicles Exist?

written by Walter Wang

Here’s an article on electric vehicles that suggests that three-quarters of new car shoppers are unaware that EVs even exist. I’m somewhat surprised by that, and I wonder if the questions weren’t worded improperly or the sample isn’t somehow skewed.

I’m reminded of my interview with Dr. Michael

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November 20, 2013 0 comment
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A Comprehensive Energy Productivity Portfolio

written by Walter Wang

Like a good financial portfolio, it appears that diversification is a successful strategy for America’s Energy Productivity according to the environmental action group, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). But, the NRDC notes that while the energy portfolio clearly should include a combination of all energies, the single most effective tool in maximizing our energy

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October 11, 2013 0 comment
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Happy World Environment Day 2013

written by Walter Wang

Today is World Environment Day, a date established in 1970 to raise awareness of pressing ecological issues. Every year, the United Nations Environmental Protection agency chooses a theme to promote on this date; in 2013 the theme is food waste. One third of the food produced globally is wasted and, with it, we waste a great deal of energy and water as well, since

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June 5, 2013 0 comment
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There’s No Free Lunch in Renewable Energy, But It’s a Cheap Date Considering the Alternative

written by Walter Wang

Here’s a good discussion of what I call the “no free lunch” theory of renewable energy: everything we do, whether it’s solar, wind, hydrokinetics, etc., comes with a non-negligible ecological cost. The issue, obviously, is objectively identifying all costs – ecological, financial, and human (e.g., disease and death stemming from various types of energy generation and consumption),

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March 12, 2013 1 comment
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Does ‘Green’ Help or Hinder Behavior Change?

written by Walter Wang

The Green Power Hike, which recently took place in Hong Kong, is an annual fundraising event that focuses on environmental conservation and education. It’s a great initiative, but it serves as another reminder of just how inundated my daily life has become by the word “green” and how many different meanings the word has come to adopt. I am beginning to think that

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February 6, 2013 0 comment
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The Huge Cost of Traffic Congestion

written by Edouard Stenger

According to a new study carried out by the English Centre of Economics and Business, traffic congestion in the United Kingdom, Germany and France cost each year up to 18,327 billion euros (around $24 billion).

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February 5, 2013 0 comment
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Growth in US Energy Production Outstripping Growth in Consumption

written by Walter Wang

In a recently released report, the Annual Energy Outlook 2013 (AEO2013), the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) projected the US energy markets through 2040. Their projections only take into account the effects of policies that have already been implemented in law or final regulations. The EIA found that the growth in energy production has

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December 27, 2012 0 comment
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Coal May Rival Oil As World’s Top Energy Source by 2017, IEA Says

written by Yale Environment 360

Coal could rival oil as the world’s largest energy source within five years as consumption continues to climb in most regions of the world, a trend that could have profound effects on the climate, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says.

While coal consumption is expected to decline in the

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December 19, 2012 1 comment
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Do You Have the Right Stuff? The Water-Energy Nexus Blogging Contest

written by Walter Wang

Every now and then, an exciting opportunity to experience the world comes by and you just have to say what the heck and toss your hat in the ring. If you are interested in sustainability and in particular the so-called water energy nexus, the opportunity of a lifetime is here.

The Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week, taking place

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December 18, 2012 0 comment
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