AC Transit Cuts Take Effect Today

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by current events, transportation • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Significant adjustments to nearly 70 transit lines took effect today. According to the AC Transit website:

Significant changes include:

  • Reducing frequency on 28 lines
  • Starting service later in the morning and/or ending earlier in the evening  on 18 lines
  • Eliminating or operating shorter routes on weekends on four lines
  • Reconfiguring service in some areas, including West Oakland/Emeryville, Lakeshore Ave./Grand Ave. in Oakland, Bay Farm Island in Alameda, and San Leandro
  • Discontinuing service to Orinda BART and along Broadway Terrace in Oakland
  • Adding extensions to two lines to replace limited service in Piedmont, and service between Alameda and the Oakland Airport

All changes are listed in detail on the AC Transit website here.

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Is the Grid Ready for Electric Cars?

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by energy, transportation • Tags: , , , , , , ,

photo: the Nissan Leaf

There has been a lot of excitement surrounding electric vehicles as the first “mainstream” fully electric vehicles (EV) are hitting the road with the promise of many new models coming down the pipeline in the coming years. But are electric cars a truly “green” solution, or will we be simply replacing one problem (fossil fuel dependence) for another one (increased electricity demand, not necessarily met by “clean” energy technologies)? And, importantly, can the American energy grid sustain a powerful new surge in demand?

Casting around for answers, I have assembled a few of the arguments from both the “worry” and “don’t worry” camps.

Worry

– Grid stress could be felt on the local level if, for example, a single neighborhood has a high proportion of electric vehicles on one transformer and regular charging times are not sufficiently staggered or at off-peak hours.

– The only way to adequately manage supply-demand optimization is with smart grid technology that can communicate directly with vehicles and manage charging times. That widespread technology is still several to many years off.

– A 2007 Department of Energy Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNL) report found that even if smart grid technology were in place and charging regularly took place at off-peak hours, the nations energy infrastructure as it exists now could only accommodate a maximum 15% of vehicles being EVs.

Don’t Worry

– The average age of cars on the road is nine years and going up.  Thus, it is unlikely that electric cars will hit the road en masse, but rather slowly integrate into the car stock, giving utilities time to prepare for increased demand.

-Incentives provided by utility companies can be enough encouragement to persuade most drivers to charge at off-peak hours in the years before smart grid technologies are widespread. Time-of-use plans can have substantially lower rates at off-peak hours.

– Experiments with “Vehicle to Grid” (V2G) technologies (in which Eletric Vehicles actually can store excess energy when demand is low and feed it back to the grid at peak hours) are already underway around the world, and could play a key role  in the grid of the future. See Journalist Dave Levithan’s article on the subject here.

– The U.S. Government has pledged $2 billion in grants for the manufacture of EV car batteries as well as a $400 million “downpayment” to jumpstart EV infrastructure.

Read more articles on electric cars and grid capacity here:

PHEVs: Will the Grid be Ready?, Matter Network

Can US Power Grid Handle Surge of Electric Cars?, Aol News

8 Myths About the Electric Car, Alt Transport

Is the Power Grid Ready for Electric Cars?, MSNBC Answer Desk

Ford Studying Ways to Charge Electric Vehicles, New York Times

Assorted Links

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San Francisco transportation are transforming former parking meter poles into bike racks in the Civic Center and Golden Gateway areas.

The largest solar plant in the world receives final regulatory approval.

Greentech Media discusses what to expect from new lighting laws.

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$274 Million for Water & Sewer Upgrades

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by current events, water • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Fresno Bee reports that the EPA is awarding $127 million to California’s Department of Public Health and another $147 million to the State Water Resources Control Board.

The agency said at least 20 percent of the money must be used to fun so-called “green” infrastructure projects that improve water conservation, energy efficiency and environmental projects.

The two agencies will be responsible for awarding dozens of grants or low-interest loans to cities throughout the state for new sewers and drinking water facility upgrades.

Read the entire story here.

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A Gift to Fight Proposition 23

by current events, links • Tags: , , , , , , ,

Via the New York Times:

Citing figures from the California secretary of state, Maplight.org reports that Bill Gates has donated $700,000 to the campaign against Proposition 23, the ballot measure that would repeal a California law related to reining in global warming. According to Maplight’s list, that would make him the 11th-biggest contributor to the opposition effort to date.

The story is here.

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Substandard Workmanship in Weatherization

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by current events, energy • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

The New York Times Green blog reports on a recent audit by the Department of Energy’s inspector general:

An audit by the inspector general focused on some work done by the Community and Economic Development Association of Cook County, one of 35 agencies in Illinois that are expected to share $91 million over three years. The audit looked at 15 homes and found that 12 failed final inspection “because of substandard workmanship.” In some cases, technicians who tuned up gas-fired heating systems did so improperly, so that they emitted carbon monoxide “at higher than acceptable levels.”

In eight cases, initial assessments of the houses and apartments called for “inappropriate weatherization measures.” In one case an inspector called for more attic insulation but ignored leaks in the roof, which would have ruined the insulation, the audit said. And for 10 homes, “contractors billed for labor charges that had not been incurred and for materials that had not been installed.’’

You can read the entire story here.

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Assorted Links

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Lake Mead hits a record low level.

A new study by researchers at Yale University suggests that Americans’ knowledge of climate science is limited and scattershot.

Walmart plans to buy more locally grown produce.

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Cool Planet – Art Rosenfeld

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by energy • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In Berkeley, we are fortunate to have such events as Science at the Theater, where Lawrence Berkeley National Lab researchers give talks on their work at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. The lectures are free and get a pretty sizeable audience.

On Monday, October 11, I was in the audience as researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (and the beloved Art Rosenfeld) gave a presentation titled “Cool Roofs, Cool Cities.” The post below consists of Part 4 of my record of the presentation – Art Rosenfeld gives an overview of how cool roofs and cool cities can leader to a cool planet. All portions are included in chronological order.

An ellipsis (…) indicates that I was not able to capture the words or thoughts skipped. The presentation is transcribed as accurately as possible – punctuation choices are mine. I also added any images.

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I’m going to bring us into modern times and the question of global warming … Two thousand years ago, people tried to figure out how to keep houses cool, then a couple hundred years ago, we tried to figure out how to keep the cities cool, and now we’re trying to figure out how to keep the planet cool.

Taking a trip around the world … [looking at photos].

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Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

In Bermuda, they use sloped white roofs to collect water.

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Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

In Santorini, Greece, even the sides of the buildings are white.

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Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

In Hyderabad, people like to sleep on the roof to be cool at night.

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Here’s a Wal-Mart store in Northern California with white roof – they’ve done 4500 of their stores, and have 1500 to go.

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Here’s an overview of UC Davis … Since 2005, the CEC Title 24 has required that if a roof is flat, cool roofs are required …

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Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Here’s the University of Tucson in the middle …  residential areas nearby also have white roofs … …

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Here’s Washington, DC (federal) … The House and Senate office buildings do not have white roofs.

The most fun was this – this is the Pentagon. I went to a hilarious meeting – I got invited to give a talk at the Pentagon. There were innumerable generals and such around …

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Now what about the Earth? … Part of what keeps the earth cool is ice and snow, which is decreasing in size … It would be nice to add some more white … …

Atmospheric climatologists have been aware of this issue for years, and back in the 1980s, Jim Hansen published a paper wondering whether cooling cities would make a difference – and he got an answer of about a 1/10th of a degree … But we weren’t so worried in those days … But we asked, maybe there’s a better way to sell this? … Look, carbon dioxide reflects heat, that’s called a positive radiation forcing onto the ground. And white roofs reflect heat … Carbon dioxide has a price … So we’ve got to do it per unit … 1000 square feet, winds up being about 10 tons of carbon. Suppose we multiply this by about 3 billion, since there are about 3 billion units of roof in cities, then avoid the heating effect of 25 billion tons of carbon dioxide…over the life of the roof. So let’s say 1 billion tons a year for 25 years … This winds up being 300 million cars off the road for 20 years … There are only about 600 million cars right now …

So what to do now? First, get other states to follow California… Arizona and Florida and Georgia have followed suit with cool roofs … The problem is a lot of the rest of the country, the hot part … the United States relies  on model building codes, and states are not required to adopt them. They can make them stronger and adopt them, but they are not required to adopt them. Texas doesn’t have any, the cities there have taken the lead …  DOE is going white, the Marine Corps is going white …

We’re going to launch a private club called 100 Cool Cities, with some DOE help, where were’ going to approach the 100 largest cities, which gets us  to a population of 200 million, where we’ll talk to them about cool roofs and try to get it into the building code … This will involve the Sierra Club, the Clinton Global Initiative, USGBC, ICLEI, the Energy Foundation, the Alliance for Climate Protection, ACEEE, and others …

Steve Chu will offer assistance to the first few countries to sign up to address this issue … …

So things are moving along nicely, and thank you very much.

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Part 1 is posted here. Part 2 is posted here. Part 3 is posted here.

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L.A.’s Electric Vehicle/ Mass Transit Experiment

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by current events, energy, transportation • Tags: , , , , , , , ,

photo: Wikimedia Commons

The County Metropolitan Transit Authority (Metro) of  the City of Los Angeles is partnering with EV Connect to bring a large scale roll out of electric vehicle charging stations at strategic locations throughout the city’s transit network.

The pilot program will assess the viability and appeal of integrating electric vehicle charging into a mass transit network. Patrons will be able to leave an electric vehicle at a charging station, and then continue their commute on transit. The partnership will monitor and study the program to create benchmarks for a potential “charge and ride” transportation industry.

The pilot will help Metro move toward its sustainability goals for regional transit. See other environmental initiatives of Metro here.

Read a full story from the Kansas Star on the new program here.

Cool Pavements – Melvin Pomerantz

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by energy • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In Berkeley, we are fortunate to have such events as Science at the Theater, where Lawrence Berkeley National Lab researchers give talks on their work at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. The lectures are free and get a pretty sizeable audience.

On Monday, October 11, I was in the audience as researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (and the beloved Art Rosenfeld) gave a presentation titled “Cool Roofs, Cool Cities.” The post below consists of Part 3 of my record of the presentation – Melvin Pomerantz gives an overview of cool pavements. All portions are included in chronological order.

An ellipsis (…) indicates that I was not able to capture the words or thoughts skipped. The presentation is transcribed as accurately as possible – punctuation choices are mine. I also added any images.

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Now we’re talking about cool pavements … because they are a significant fraction of a city … including the streets, parking lots, driveways, and sidewalks.

We need to understands that they are a composite material … they are aggregate, an array rocks of different sizes … We then have to hold them together. So we have to glue the rocks and sand together by coating each rock with a  binder of some sort. For “asphalt”, the binder is asphalt, which is a petroleum product …  We can also bind the rocks together with cement, which is a mineral product, and we call that concrete … The key thing is that because you’re coating the aggregate, you mostly see the color of the binding … Our target is the binder.

Of the third of the city that is covered with pavements of various kinds, 50% is streets, 40% are exposed parking, and about 10% are sidewalks … Because it covers about 90% of the paved city streets, our target is the asphalt concrete.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Start with fresh asphalt concrete … which is very black and has a solar reflectance of about 5%. As it ages, sunlight breaks it downs … Typically, its solar reflectance goes up to about 15% … The question is can we do any better … If you use a light-colored aggregate, it will show as the binder wears off … can use seashells, or porcelain … For old pavement, which required resurfacing periodically … we can put on a layer of asphalt emulsion, and put light-colored aggregate on top. That is called a “chip seal” … One issue is that aggregate is heavy, so it’s expensive to ship. So we want to use rock that’s nearby, and it may not be white … If the road stay cool, it doesn’t deform as much …

An example is from San Jose … They happen to have a quarry nearby that has white rock, and they’ve used a chip seal …

The other type of road, a little less common, is cement concrete … Fresh cement has a solar reflectance of about 35% … as it ages, it gets darker and reflectance drops to about 20% … The fine aggregate tends to float to the top … If you have light-colored fine aggregate, you can get an initial solar reflectance of about 40% …

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Part 1 is posted here. Part 2 is posted here. Part 4 is posted here.

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