I often feel that hard core transit advocates deep down hate electric vehicles. I’ve heard comments to that effect, that EVs are just a shiny new product to justify avoiding building new urban environments and encouraging people to walk, bike, or take transit. Plus, many transit advocates simply hate cars, for the danger they pose to pedestrians and bikers, the physical distance they put between people and divide communities, and the environmental destruction they cause by enabling sprawl and polluting the skies.
But as someone focused on greenhouse gas reduction, I am a big EV booster. It won’t solve everything, but we need to switch out of petroleum and to bring more investment in battery technologies, which EVs provide. It’s just not realistic to think that everyone can move into an urban, non-automobile environment or that we can entirely retrofit our car-centric built environment in time to avoid climate catastrophe.
So for all the EV haters who love transit, maybe they will love Proterra’s new 180-mile range electric bus:
The extended-range Catalyst XR is available in configurations carrying between 129 kWh and 321 kWh of energy storage, and can be recharged in a little over an hour.
“Operating successfully in cities across the country, the Proterra Catalyst is the most energy-efficient transit bus on the market,” said Proterra VP Matt Horton. “Adding extended-range capabilities to our existing portfolio of fast-charge products enables us to help our customers meet more of their most demanding service requirements. The flexibility of our platform allows our customers to more confidently invest in the future of transit.”
Who wouldn’t love a silent, clean and smooth-accelerating bus in their neighborhood? Plus, those batteries could be repurposed for bulk energy storage, while potentially charging at key times when renewable energy is at surplus. And perhaps most importantly, they pay for themselves pretty quickly through saved fuel costs, leaving more transit funds for other purposes.
This could be a kumbaya moment for EV and transit advocates.
UC Berkeley and UCLA Schools of Law will be hosting a free legislative lunch briefing next Tuesday on expanding access in California to clean energy data, the subject of the Knowledge is Power report that the law schools released last month. The energy data could include improved customer access to long-term usage patterns, utility statistics on distribution grid needs and pricing, and anonymized, aggregated energy usage patterns on a neighborhood scale. The goal is to help boost California’s clean technology industries and reduce costs for ratepayers, while ensuring that the state can more cost-effectively meet its climate and energy goals.
WHEN: Tuesday, February 24th, 11:45am to 1:15pm (registration begins at 11:30am)
Lunch will be served, followed by the keynote address at noon
WHERE: Room 125, California State Capitol Building, Sacramento, CA 95814
Keynote Address:
The Honorable Andrew McAllister, Commissioner, California Energy Commission
Panel presentation:
Michael Murray, Chief Technology Strategist, Mission:data & President, Lucid
Lisa Schmidt, President and CEO, Home Energy Analytics
RSVP by Friday, February 20th at this link. Space is limited to the first 40 people who register, due to the size of the room.
This event is presented by the UC Berkeley and UCLA Schools of Law Climate Change and Business Research Initiative to develop policies that help businesses prosper in an era of climate change. Funding for this initiative is provided by Bank of America.
Forget AB 32, now it’s all about SB 32. With the state well on its way to achieving our greenhouse gas reduction goals by 2020, California legislators unveiled yesterday new 2030 goals, with the one letter change in the main bill’s title understating the significance:
On Monday, Democratic lawmakers in the state unveiled a package of four bills that aim to tackle climate change in the state. One of the bills, SB 350, calls for a 50 percent reduction in petroleum use in cars and trucks, a 50 percent increase in energy efficiency in buildings, and a goal of 50 percent of state utilities’ power coming from renewable energy, all by 2030. Current California law requires utilities get 33 percent of their energy from renewable sources, such as wind and solar, by 2050. SB 350’s goals are virtually the same as the ones called for by California Gov. Jerry Brown in his inaugural address in January.
The legislation, if passed (as seems likely given the strong Democratic majorities in both houses), would have significant immediate effects. First, it would help boost the renewables market, which has been stalled of late due to its present trajectory being on course to meet or exceed the 2020 33% goals. With so many projects in the pipeline, utilities have little incentive to keep procuring unless a new target is legislated.
Second, it will help lawsuits like the one against SANDAG in San Diego, with its weak transportation plan that shows emissions increases out to 2050. The lawsuit hinges on the plan (and its environmental review documentation) not complying with the state’s 2050 goals. But those goals are only an executive order from Governor Schwarzenegger. With legislation underfoot, the challenge to the case has a much stronger chance of surviving state supreme court review.
Finally, it will provide more certainty to all the climate change efforts underway, particularly the cap-and-trade program, which would otherwise expire in 2020. With legislation, industry will know what to expect going forward, and revenue for things like affordable housing near transit, energy efficiency upgrades, and high speed rail, will be dependable for years to come.
Let’s hope the legislation can face a clear path to adoption, without getting watered down by special interest giveaways.
Naomi Klein, not your typical gun-toting Canadian.
I haven’t read her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, but I finally caught her interview with Bill Maher back in September (I can’t embed the video but it’s available at that link). I certainly like her focus on climate change and critique of what endless resource exploitation has done to the planet. But I can’t help but feel that climate change for her just presents more evidence in support of her agenda for wholesale economic reform — namely, rolling back capitalism in some undefined way to punish big businesses and allow the rest of us to live more collectively.
And as a result, you get interviews like this one, where she spends over eight minutes talking in vague generalities about the limits of capitalism but not offering any constructive solutions — perhaps other than encouraging Harvard to divest from coal and polluters to pay (for what spending purposes she doesn’t say). Instead, she attacks a “liberal” strawman for claiming that we can solve the environmental problems of our day by simply changing light bulbs and driving hybrids.
As someone who works closely with dedicated policy makers in California and beyond who are quite serious and focused on reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, I don’t recognize her caricature at all. No climate change fighters that I know of would argue that we can reduce our emissions sufficiently just by making easy fixes. Certainly switching to LED light bulbs and driving efficient cars can make an important difference, but we need fundamental changes in our energy system, including massive deployment of renewables, smart grid/demand response technologies, electric vehicles and energy storage, as well as much more housing and jobs located near robust transit systems, with greater energy efficiency throughout our economy.
But maybe Klein doesn’t want to talk about these wholesale, technology-based solutions because they rely very much on our capitalist system. Indeed, California incentives have sparked a competitive, capitalist gold rush to deploy renewables at a rapid scale, as well as electric vehicles and more recently energy storage. We’re trying to do the same for sustainable real estate developers but are limited by local control over land use, which too often are determined by the loudest NIMBYs in any community.
To be sure, California’s program involves some sticks that Klein might like — regulations on the carbon content of fuel, limits (if not de facto bans) on heavy emitters like cement manufacturers, and a cap-and-trade program that adds costs to carbon polluters like fuel providers and other manufacturers.
But ultimately, unless we want to deindustrialize and shiver in the dark, it’s going to take a new, focused capitalism to rescue us from the excesses of the old. And that’s a reality that Klein should acknowledge, unless she has a better plan she wants to unveil.
California is raking in the bucks from its cap-and-trade program. Sales from auctioning off permits to pollute will net the state close to $900 million in this budget year, and it could go to $8 billion a year by 2020, now that transportation fuels are firmly under the cap. Of that amount, about half is dedicated to transportation and infill development that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Here is the breakdown on that piece of it:
Transit Capital: $25 million (10% of total auction revenue)
Transit Operations: $25 million (5% of total revenue)
Housing & Sustainable Communities: $130 million (20%)
High Speed Rail: $250 million (25%)
The rest will go to wetland restoration, energy efficiency upgrades for public buildings, and recycling efforts.
But it’s that $130 million piece that’s been in the news recently (it’s actually $120 million, due to an additional $10 million set-aside for agricultural projects). Called the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities (AHSC) Program, state agencies have been trying to adopt the guidelines for disbursing these funds for meritorious land use and transportation projects for over a year. That process was finalized a few weeks ago by the Strategic Growth Council, which issued a complicated set of criteria for project proponents to be eligible to apply.
According to the new guidelines [PDF], half of the funded projects must provide affordable housing near transit, while the other half must provide benefits for “disadvantaged communities,” per this map.
But the problem is (at least for this first round), $120 million won’t get you very far. Affordable housing projects have a minimum grant award of $1 million and maximum of $15 million, while transit projects in disadvantaged communities have a minimum $500 thousand and maximum $8 million. You can see how that money will go quickly with only $120 million to disburse. As Streetsblog LA reported, Strategic Growth Council staff “expect to be able to fund between 15 and 25 projects in the first round.”
15 to 25 projects is, frankly, not much. And not much to get excited about in this first round. Fortunately, more money will be available later this year in the second round, and an expanding pot of auction funds could mean almost 10 times this amount in a few years, if the $8 billion-by-2020 projection comes true.
But even at 10 times this amount (over $1 billion a year), that’s just a couple hundred projects per year — not enough to make up for the loss of redevelopment funds. These funds were a primary source of infill financing, and the program netted about $5 billion annually statewide until it self-immolated in a 2011 California Supreme Court case.
I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but California will need to do better than this given the extreme housing needs in the state. It’s hard not to look jealously at the high speed rail set-aside and wonder why more of that money is not flowing to transit-oriented housing. After all, high speed rail was sold as a viable public-private investment that would essentially pay for itself. But after voter approval, the route was politically gerrymandered to accommodate powerful political interests. The politically motivated route changes to Palmdale and the eastern San Joaquin Valley drove up the price tag due to more complicated construction, reduced travel speeds between the major population centers, and made the project less attractive to private investors.
Perhaps as more constituents get a taste of cap-and-trade dollars, it will put political pressure on Sacramento leaders to retool the formulas to give more money to transit-oriented housing. It won’t happen while Governor Brown is in office, given his attachment to high speed rail as a legacy project, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens before 2020.
Yesterday’s Superbowl featured two car commercials that couldn’t have been from more opposite ends of the spectrum. The first was from BMW, promoting its new all-electric i3. The spot features Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric, circa 1994, discussing the internet like they were from a cave. Then they end up in 2015 discussing the all-electric BMW like they still live in a cave — making the point that new, transformative technologies take getting used to at first.
I like the spot because it makes that technology connection to EVs, although I think BMW could have played up the performance of the car rather than focus so much on the wind-powered BMW factory (who hasn’t heard of wind turbines? That’s an old technology). But it’s nice to see all-electrics get Superbowl attention (you may recall the plug-in hybrid Cadillac ELR ran a controversial spot last year). Here’s the BMW ad:
But then Jeep aired an ad for its Renegade SUV that was ultimately galling. Over a pensive rendition of “This Land Is Your Land,” it featured shots of beautiful spots around the world, including Southeast Asian waterways, redwood forests, and North African deserts. At the end, the message is: “The world is a gift. Play responsibly.” And then: “America’s smallest, lightest SUV.”
Only a car company would ask people to celebrate our natural world as a gift while it simultaneously burns the gases that are destroying it. Keep in mind that just 90 companies may ultimately be responsible for two-thirds of the greenhouse gases emitted since the dawning of the industrial age, and the big contributors are oil companies that exist in large part to fuel vehicles like the Renegade.
You can watch the Jeep spot here:
California is poised for a major energy transformation in the coming decades, with Governor Brown pledging to put the state on a path to 50% renewables and 50% less petroleum usage by 2030. Achieving this transformation will require a robust and thriving clean technology sector, including renewable energy and energy storage developers, energy efficiency contractors, smart grid hardware and software purveyors, and electric vehicle automakers, among others.
But to ensure the success of these industries, as well as a cost-effective energy transition for consumers, California must expand access to energy information. This information ranges from customer access to their long-term usage patterns in an easily-readable, standardized format, to utility statistics on distribution grid needs and pricing, to anonymized, aggregated energy usage patterns on a neighborhood scale. Customers can harness this information to use energy more efficiently, while clean technology companies can use it to improve their services, customer acquisition efforts, and competitiveness with traditional energy providers. Policy makers and nonprofit advocates could also use this information to target energy incentives to the customer groups and regions that would make the best use of them — thereby deploying limited public funds more cost-effectively.
To offer solutions for improved access to energy information, UC Berkeley and UCLA Schools of Law are today releasing the report Knowledge is Power: How Improved Energy Data Access Can Bolster Clean Energy Technologies & Save Money. The report resulted from a one-day gathering of clean technology leaders (including renewable energy developers, battery experts, smart grid suppliers, energy efficiency contractors, and electric vehicle automakers) and public officials. It is the fourteenth in the law schools’ Climate Change and Business Research Initiative, sponsored by Bank of America, which develops policies that help businesses prosper in an era of climate change.
The group identified barriers to expanded information access, from a lack of incentives and funding for utilities to collect and share data to concerns about compromising customer privacy and cybersecurity breaches. The report identifies information that would be most valuable to the clean technology sector and recommends that policy makers:
- Establish customers’ right to improved access to their own usage information through an easily organized, standardized format, including the disclosure of historic building energy audits;
- Develop cost-recovery mechanisms for utilities to collect and share aggregated, anonymized energy and market statistics to researchers and the private sector; and
- Fund the development and maintenance of secure energy information centers.
Most of these and other recommendations in the report will require action from state legislators and regulators, including via existing regulatory efforts at both the California Public Utilities Commission and California Energy Commission. Ultimately, by implementing steps like these, California can ensure a smoother and more cost-effective transition to a clean, efficient, and localized energy and transportation system.
Remember when oil companies cried last year about transportation fuels going under California’s cap-and-trade program in 2015? They tried to scare everyone about the “hidden gas tax” and how prices would rise 76 cents a gallon. As Bruce Maiman in the Sacramento Bee reminisces:
For months, the warnings were endless: Come January, gas prices would jump as much as 76 cents a gallon. “Put the brakes on the Hidden Gas Tax!” implored countless Facebook ads.
Anyone seeing pump prices skyrocketing?
Never mind that oil prices plummeted last year as a gallon of regular dropped in California from $4.13 last summer to $2.59 now – $2.48 in the Sacramento region. I’m sure most of the many thousands who hit the Facebook “like” button didn’t bother to investigate the California Drivers Alliance, or 15 other groups harping the same sky-is-falling message. A casual observer likely believed their claims of being a grass-roots group rising up against devious bureaucrats trying to sneak another tax past you.
In truth, what was hidden was the real identity of these front groups, all funded by the oil industry – the Western States Petroleum Association and the California Independent Oil Marketers Association, longtime opponents of Assembly Bill 32, California’s 2006 landmark legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The cap-and-trade system expanded this year to cover vehicle fuels.
Luckily for environmental advocates, the global oil glut has kept the political pressure off this issue, allowing California to greatly expand the cap-and-trade system.
Now let’s hope that advocates can use these big price drops to finally end the subsidies for oil and gas around the country, as the Economist called for today:
The most straightforward piece of reform, pretty much everywhere, is simply to remove all the subsidies for producing or consuming fossil fuels. Last year governments around the world threw $550 billion down that rathole—on everything from holding down the price of petrol in poor countries to encouraging companies to search for oil. By one count, such handouts led to extra consumption that was responsible for 36% of global carbon emissions in 1980-2010.
Falling prices provide an opportunity to rethink this nonsense.
To paraphrase Rahm Emanuel, never let a period of cheap oil go to waste.
With a name straight out of a WALL-E future, it’s ARPA-E, also known as the “U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy” (don’t confuse them with DARPA-E, its cousin that focuses on defense).
Why is ARPA-E so important? Because this Department of Energy group is searching out and funding those moonshot — or sunshot — technologies that will give us the energy breakthroughs we need to fight climate change. If we’re going to find the better battery to finally wean us off oil and into electric drives, or build the cheap energy storage device to capture surplus renewables and truly decarbonize the grid, or make our solar panels even more efficient and cheap, chances are ARPA-E will be involved in making that happen. From its website:
Since 2009, ARPA-E has funded over 360 potentially transformational energy technology projects. Many of these projects have already demonstrated early indicators of technical success. For example, ARPA-E awardees have:
- Developed a 1 megawatt silicon carbide transistor the size of a fingernail
- Engineered microbes that use hydrogen and carbon dioxide to make liquid transportation fuel
- Pioneered a near-isothermal compressed air energy storage system
Technical achievements like these have spurred millions of dollars in follow-on private-sector funding to a number of ARPA-E projects. In addition, many ARPA-E awardees have formed start-up or spin-off companies or partnered with other parts of the government and industry to advance their technologies.
If I were in charge of the federal budget, I would fund this agency to the brim. So I’m pleased to see ARPA-E announcing another round of funding, this time for $125 million for “renewable and non-renewable electricity generation, transmission, storage and distribution, as well as energy efficiency technologies.” The funds can also go to transportation-oriented projects, including those focused on fuels, electrification, and energy efficiency. You can read more here.
While I know it’s a huge stretch to imagine happening, I hope this new congress supports the agency in the budget process. It just may be the best hope we have for finding and developing the technologies needed to truly solve climate change.
After Tuesday’s groundbreaking, Eric Holthaus of Mother Jones now decides high speed rail isn’t worth it anymore:
That $68 billion California plans to spend on its high-speed rail system could buy 82,000 state-of-the-art electric buses, 55 times Greyhound’s entire nationwide fleet. And they could start operating immediately. Dedicated bus lanes and congestion pricing have done wonders for reducing commute-hell in many cities, like London. There are ways to make intercity bus travel more appealing, too, as evidenced by the expansion of carriers like wifi-enabled MegaBus in recent years. Similar “curbside” buses are the fastest growing mode of intercity transport and are the most carbon-friendly way to travel medium to long distances in the United States.
He also recommends funding self-driving cars and regulating airplane emissions. He’s motivated by the urgency of climate change:
Given the incredible pressure that global warming is inflicting, we can’t waste precious resources on high-speed rail. It’s impractical to hope that truly high-speed rail—the kind that will compete with air travel—will arrive in time to do much good.
I appreciate Holthaus’s concern for time running out on the Earth’s climate and his willingness to search for low-cost, immediate transportation solutions. But his piece is misguided in slamming the decision to go forth with high speed rail.
First, these aren’t “limited public transportation” funds that are being used. They are funds that were raised and dedicated solely for high speed rail. California voters in 2008 didn’t vote on a $10 billion bond initiative for 82,000 electric buses — they voted for high speed rail. Based on that political will, politicians in Washington specifically set aside stimulus funds for high speed rail (as well as electric vehicles) to help fund the system. And state politicians followed suit with cap-and-trade funds.
We can debate the wisdom of the voters and our leaders, but there’s no doubt that high speed rail is what they wanted, and they raised the funds to make it happen. In other words, high speed rail attracted its own constituency that found the funds for it. It’s not politically or legally feasible at this point to redirect those monies to other transportation forms, as Holthaus desires.
Second, there’s no reason why we can’t do what Holthaus recommends and still go forward with high speed rail. High speed rail doesn’t stop congestion pricing from happening, or more bus-only lanes, or regulation of airlines. California has an aggressive set of policies to encourage more electric vehicles, including buses. True, the cap-and-trade money that goes to high speed rail could have been used for other things. But it’s a relatively small amount of money, and a majority of those dollars go to other important greenhouse gas-reducing options. Even the stimulus, which is helping to support high speed rail, is also funding huge advancements in battery technology — which is critical for deploying more electric buses, cars, and grid storage.
Finally, Holthaus doesn’t engage with the potential greenhouse gas upsides for high speed rail. Most significantly, the system will divert the most polluting airplane trips as well as car traffic for a growing population that is already hemmed in by congestion and crowded airports. It will also entail a large investment in renewable energy to power the trains. Perhaps even more importantly, high speed rail could stimulate much more transit-oriented development in the Central Valley, which is otherwise susceptible to the same sprawl over its flat, agricultural-rich landscape that paved over the Los Angeles basin. The benefits of reducing per capita vehicle miles traveled in the Central Valley by providing an organizing infrastructure for more pedestrian and transit-friendly growth could be immense.
So while I’m sympathetic to the sentiment behind Holthaus’s arguments, I don’t think it’s fair to come out now and slam high speed rail. It’s going to happen, the money is there for it at this point, and we need to be thinking about a range of solutions to limit transportation emissions and not pit one technology against others. High speed rail is one important piece of the puzzle, and we should focus our efforts on making sure it gets built as efficiently for the taxpayers and climate as possible.
