I’ve been in New York since Monday for a short workshop on the finances of the coal industry and coal burning utilities. It was put together under the auspices of the NYU Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity. The audience was mostly grassroots campaigners from all over the country — people working to shut down coal mining and coal based power plants for environmental reasons, both climate related and more traditional pollution. The two day program included panels of utility specialists from rating agencies Moody’s and Fitch, Bruce Nilles from the Sierra Club’s Bloomberg funded Beyond Coal campaign, as well as financial analysts from UBS, Bloomberg New Energy and Jeffries. Tom Sanzillo, the former comptroller of the state of New York, gave us a run down on how to read a utility company’s 10-K. Several community leaders in successful fights to keep new coal plants from getting built told their stories too. All in all, it made for some strange bedfellows. It was great overall, and I think pretty much everyone learned something. Here’s what I remember learning.
Tag: policy
Between the Lines
Yet another article about the Shoupistas, this time in Los Angeles magazine. Have we reached some kind of cognitive tipping point? Will urban parking policy start changing? Will our downtown business districts be transformed? We can hope…
More Roads = More Traffic
A new study from the University of Toronto clearly shows that additional free road capacity — either from adding actual road, or shifting people from driving to transit — has no effect on congestion. Traffic expands to fill the available capacity, no matter how much you add, and the net public benefit from the investment in additional road capacity is negative.
The High Cost of Free Parking in Boulder
Over the last year or so, I’ve been involved with the planning and design of the public space which will accompany some of the first re-developments in the Transit Village/Boulder Junction, mostly Pearl Parkway between 30th St. and the railroad tracks. I’ve primarily given feedback as a cyclist and pedestrian — someone who uses our streets under my own power. Even in Boulder, those of us who don’t own, and only very rarely use private motor vehicles are still unusual. Nevertheless, the long term goal of the TVAP is to have 60% of all trips in the region done by foot, bike or transit — anything but the much loved and loathed single occupancy vehicle (SOV). I was particularly taken by something Tim Plass said in the PLAN Boulder election forum this fall when asked to envision Boulder 30 years in the future: Every once in a while you’ll see an electric car on the road, but mostly it’ll be bikes and pedestrians and transit. I agree with these goals; we should pursue them vigorously. But the city being described by Plass and the TVAP is very different from the status quo today, and it’s difficult to take the steps necessary to realize it. Sometimes I think of myself as a time-traveling constituent from this future city, describing what it is that we will want then, when the majority of people aren’t driving a private car everywhere they go. One thing that I’m confident we won’t want is so much “free” parking.
Counting Parking Spots, From Above
A couple of researchers inferred the rate of parking supply growth in New Haven, Cambridge and Hartford from aerial photographs, between 1950 and 2010. Both Connecticut cities had explosive parking growth, even while their populations were declining. Cambridge enacted parking maxima in 1985, and its shrinking population trend reversed. Thus parking is not required to facilitate growth. Felix Salmon comments on the paper as well:
Parking lots are — with only a handful of exceptions — the best possible way of destroying a city’s soul. They’re gruesome, lifeless places, and I’m constantly astonished by the way in which governments and developers are convinced that they’re a great idea.
Electoral gains for Pirate Party in Berlin
In Berlin, Pirates have won 9% of the vote, and now have 15 seats in the city-state’s legislature. This kind of gradual integration of supposedly “fringe” issues into mainstream politics is valuable, and also impossible in an electoral system like the US has.
Is an Energy Transformation Afoot?
Almost immediately after we empowered Boulder to form a utility, a spate of articles appeared in the national press talking about the relative costs of coal and renewables, and the trends in those costs. There was Krugman’s Here Comes Solar Energy Op-Ed in the NY Times, making the case that solar PV is already cheaper than coal-fired power once you remove all the subsidies we provide to both of them, and calling for the Feds to fix regulation to make that clear. Boulder’s own RMI had a bit of commentary on Krugman’s opinion: it’d be nice if Federal regulations were saner, but even without that fix, it makes sense to build this stuff now, and will only make more sense as time goes on and the balance of system costs (which currently make up 50% or more of the cost of a PV installation) are reduced through best practices, standardization and mass production.
From the industry side, GE’s Jeff Immelt also said that federal regulation was a little beside the point now… and that even without government support GE was going all-in, expecting something like 200GW of solar to be built in China and India by the end of the decade. That’d be a non-trivial amount of generation, on the order of 10 Three Gorges dams, or as much power as the entire US nuclear generation fleet. Meanwhile NRG Energy, a nationwide and largely traditional fossil-fuel based independent power producer is planning to spend the overwhelming majority of its capital investment funds over the next few years on solar, mostly small utility projects (20-100MW) and distributed rooftop generation.
In the same vein, Xcel Energy’s recently filed 2011 Electric Resource Plan foresees essentially no new generation facilities being built until close to the end of the decade. Some of this is attributable to the soft economy, but many people are saying it’s just as much a consequence of energy efficiency, demand side management, and increasing distributed (behind-the-meter) generation coming on line. Unfortunately, Xcel added a gigawatt of coal generation to its grid last year, and this lack of demand for more energy means the company is now walking away from the transmission lines that would have enabled large-scale solar-thermal with storage in the San Luis Valley. This means that the only way to shift Xcel’s power mix in the near future will be to accelerate the retirement of existing coal-fired generation, making room for more efficiency, wind, and solar.
The optimistic narrative that falls out of the articles above — that our energy systems are undergoing a transformation — seems plausible, and I hope that it’s true. Certainly it’s the one that the Boulder Light and Power effort is going to be built around. It’s comforting to see that we’re not alone on the world stage, and less daunting to imagine our job as facilitating an ongoing transformation, rather than starting one from scratch.
The Coming Decline and Fall of Big Coal
The Coming Decline and Fall of Big Coal. Appalachian mountaintop removal mining has taken off in recent years in no small part because there’s not much left worth mining underground. All the eastern coal fields are in declining production, despite these extreme techniques, and large increases in hiring. Yet somehow, these developments are being couched by the industry as resulting from the Obama administration and environmental regulations. Really it’s a geological special case of that Sagan quote: “The Universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.”
Bicycles and Fresh Bread
The NY Times points out that bicycles and the European penchant for fresh bread are more closely related than you might at first imagine. A writer in Amsterdam talks about how a slightly different conception of daily life enables cities without cars, and how that life is really more free than our slavish commitment to the car.
Across Europe, Irking Drivers is Urban Policy
The New York Times almost seems upset that in Europe the mobility of people, not motor vehicles, is the measure of an urban transportation system. With finite funding and urban space constraints, you sometimes have to choose which mode to prioritize. Pedestrians, bicycles, and mass transit all move more people in less space, with less GHG emissions, noise and pollution, more safely than cars. De-prioritizing automobiles also makes streets into vastly more livable public spaces. It’s not about making life bad for cars, it’s about making it good for people!