State Energy Law Gets Lukewarm Review

State energy law gets lukewarm review

Utilities slow to meet standards toward goal of reducing reliance on coal, researchers say.

September 17, 2010 

By Dan Gearino

Signed in 2008 by Gov. Ted Strickland, Senate Bill 221 requires investor-owned electric companies such as American Electric Power to generate 25 percent of their electricity from advanced or renewable sources by 2025.

Two years after it was enacted, a state energy law has led to more jobs and cleaner air.

But the law is too easy to flout and isn't ambitious enough in its goals, according to a report from Policy Matters Ohio, a nonprofit research group.

"This is a great law, and we have to make sure to enforce it," said Amanda Woodrum, a researcher in the group's Cleveland office. "It's critical to make sure utility companies follow through."

Signed in 2008 by Gov. Ted Strickland, Senate Bill 221 requires investor-owned electric companies such as American Electric Power to generate 25 percent of their electricity from advanced or renewable sources by 2025.

Of that total, 12.5 percent must come from renewable sources, such as wind and solar. The companies have rising benchmarks each year for renewable and solar energy.

Supporters of the law hoped to reduce the state's reliance on coal and attract jobs related to renewable energy. In exchange for meeting the requirements, utilities gained greater freedom to raise prices.

Policy Matters lists statistics from other sources about the reduction in pollution and the likelihood of new jobs.

For example, the authors cite a 2008 study by the Center for American Progress that predicted the creation of 3,600 direct and indirect jobs this year related to the law. The report also cites several examples of job growth, such as DuPont's continuing expansion in Circleville to make solar-power components, leading to 70 new jobs.

For all the enthusiasm tied to the law, its supporters have had their share of disappointments.

One of the greatest is the failure of any utility to meet last year's solar standard, the first annual benchmark. The companies faced no penalty because they convinced regulators that they didn't have enough time to meet the standard and that Ohio didn't have enough solar power available.

Since then, AEP has come on line with the state's largest solar farm, a 12 megawatt installation in Wyandot County. The company is now poised to meet benchmarks for the next few years.

"I think we are making strides, and that's what you need to look at - the total picture," said Terri Flora, spokeswoman for AEP Ohio. At the same time, AEP continues to rely heavily on coal.

Other utilities have not been as decisive with solar power, and Policy Matters wants regulators to take a firm hand when deciding whether to issue fines, which is the penalty allowed by the law.

Among the other recommendations:

• Expand the energy standards to require greater efficiency by natural gas utilities.

• Convene a state panel to study biomass power and determine whether that source of energy, from burning plant matter, is truly renewable and efficient.

• Simplify the utilities' reporting of compliance, requiring each company to issue a five-page summary about the programs, costs and results.

Flora said Policy Matters' recommendations might have merit, but they also likely will lead to higher costs for customers. "When you're looking at anything, you need to have a balance between the rate impact and the requirements," she said.

CertainTeed® Corp Recycling 100% Manufacturing Waste

CertainTeed's Shreveport Roofing Plant Paves the Way to Greener Operations, Recycling Nearly 100 Percent of Manufacturing Waste

Valley Forge, PA
August 9, 2010
By: Miller Brooks

CertainTeed Corporation's roofing plant in Shreveport, La., is teaming up with a Texas paving company to recycle nearly 100 percent of manufacturing waste. Paving the way with greener operations, CertainTeed® is helping to divert approximately 15,000 tons of material from landfills each year. The waste is used by RK Hall of Texarkana to produce asphalt pavement used for highways and bridges.

"By finding an eco-friendly solution for disposing of scrap materials, the Shreveport plant is significantly reducing its environmental impact," says John Hardy, operational excellence leader for CertainTeed® Roofing. "As a result of the partnership with RK Hall of Texarkana, the plant has also reduced transportation costs; a testament that going green has both environmental and economic benefits."

A part of the community since 1930, the roofing plant has 73 employees and produces several asphalt shingle product lines including XT(TM) 25, XT(TM) 30 and CT 20 as well as the popular Landmark(TM) Series shingles. In 2009, the plant received an award for Excellence in Energy Efficiency for reducing its annual energy consumption by more than 10 percent. The plant is also an active participant in the Saint-Gobain International Environment, Health and Safety Day, an annual event dedicated to environmental awareness, emergency preparedness, healthy living and workplace safety.

Using sustainable manufacturing practices, CertainTeed® roofing offers a portfolio of 50 ENERGY STAR® rated products, many of which contribute to LEED certification and are eligible for energy efficiency tax credits through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. CertainTeed® is a member of the U.S. Green Building Council, plays an active role in the green building movement. For the second consecutive year, CertainTeed® has been named ENERGY STAR® partner of the year.

For more information on CertainTeed's environmentally friendly products and sustainable operations, visit www.certainteed.com.

About CertainTeed

Through the responsible development of innovative and sustainable building products, CertainTeed® has helped shape the building products industry for more than 100 years. Founded in 1904 as General Roofing Manufacturing Company, the firm's slogan "Quality Made Certain, Satisfaction Guaranteed," quickly inspired the name CertainTeed®. Today, CertainTeed® is North America's leading brand of exterior and interior building products, including roofing, siding, windows, fence, decking, railing, trim, foundations, pipe, insulation, gypsum, ceilings and access covers.

A subsidiary of Saint-Gobain, the world's largest building products company, CertainTeed® and its affiliates have more than 6,000 employees and more than 65 manufacturing facilities throughout the United States and Canada. In 2009 and 2010, CertainTeed®, which is headquartered in Valley Forge, Pa., was named ENERGY STAR® Partner of the Year by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, a national award that recognizes environmentally responsible corporations. The group had total sales of approximately $3 billion in 2009.

International Data Bank Forecasting?

This Week UK Climate Change Meeting To Ask Google & Galaxy Zoo For Help

Sept. 6, 2010
Justmeans.com


An exciting gathering of leading climate scientists will meet this week in the UK to finalize plans for a planet changing initiative that will transform their ability to predict world meteorological disasters. They want to create an international databank that would generate forecasts of exceptional precision and we need only think of recent global disasters this year - Russia's blanket of smog; Pakistan's floods and over the weekend New Zealand's earth-quake, that this data would have made a difference to. Scientists believe that as climate change continues to affect the planet, we will need to learn how to predict these potential disasters and will need to take a different approach to tackle this. This is where digital comes in - Google and Galaxy Zoo will play a key part in helping meteorologists to forecast long term weather and climate pattern.

Recent developments on the web will help in the decoding and digitizing of old sea logs from some of Britain's renowned sea voyages. Daily weather information recorded in Britain's navy sea logs during 19th and 20th will reveal climate patterns for these decades. The problem is that the data is stored in old logbooks and it will be a long process to turn this data into a digital format, but this is where Galaxy Zoo and Google will play a role.

Galaxy Zoo is a website set up three years ago by Chris Lintott, an Oxford physicist. It's a site that engages with the public, asking them to help classify photographs of a million galaxies and it has been an outstanding success and one of the biggest citizen-science experiments on the web. Members of the public log on and classify galaxies, and occasionally their classifications have been better than, professional astronomers! There's a hope that Galaxy Zoo will be able to provide a model that will now engage the public to help in the huge task of digitising the weather logs left by sailors. Information from major Antarctic expeditions is being digitised by the Met Office.

The other plans for this week's meeting are - persuading the many countries that currently refuse to provide meteorological information to the rest of the world to do so, as to make accurate forecasts scientists need daily temperature readings; and creating a global network of weather stations that would provide daily temperature readings for any spot on the planet. Currently, only monthly readings are generated for the US and Europe. There is virtually no data for much of Africa, the Amazon and Antarctica.

Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the UK Met Office, says, "It is now very clear that humanity is changing the climate through the greenhouse gases we are pumping into the atmosphere. We need to answer key questions such as whether the onset of the monsoon in India will be delayed, how the frequency of droughts in the Horn of Africa is changing, or whether Europe will experience more severe heat-waves in future."

Wind-powered Parking Garage

First Wind-Powered Parking Garage Opens In Chicago

August 31, 2010
By: Crisp Green




“Windy City” lives up to its name as Chicago’s newest parking garage becomes the first to generate it’s own energy with spinning vertical wind turbines.

You might generally associate parking garages with the stark cement-colored monotony that most people despise about urban life. Thanks to a new design by the architects of HOK however, parking garages are being viewed in a whole new green light.

Dubbed the 'Greenway Self Park', this eco-friendly parking garage offers far more than just a column of dizzying vertical turbines up it’s outer wall. The structures array of sustainable practices also includes:


* Local and sustainable building materials

* A green roof and rainwater cisterns for irrigation

* High-efficiency glass

* Recycling programs

* Energy-efficient lighting

* Programs to encourage the use of energy efficient vehicles

* Electric car charging stations

* Air quality initiatives

* Tips for Greener Living in the lobbies

* Zipcar and I-Go car sharing vehicles

For the sake of public education, a “way-finding system” has also been incorporated at each elevator lobby to educate users on how to live more sustainably and protect the environment. A reversible meter has also been included to measure the amount of energy generated by the turbines and and piped back into the grid of the city each year. HOK is currently pursing LEED certification for the building.

Top 10 Energy Efficient States

Best States for Energy Efficiency

Sept. 3, 2010
By: Elisa Wood

If you live in Connecticut, California, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, Texas, North Carolina, New Jersey or Ohio your state is doing something right – a lot right – when it comes to energy efficiency.

The ten states deserve kudos, in that order, for policies that encourage energy efficiency, according to a report issued this week by the Center for American Progress and Energy Resource Management Corp.

If other states achieve similar market dynamics, the US construction industry may pull out of its current slump, says the report, “Efficiency Works: Creating Good Jobs and New Markets through Energy Efficiency.”

The US could add 625,000 full-time sustained jobs over the next decade if it retrofits 40 percent of the nation’s homes and commercial buildings, according to the report. Such an effort would bring $500 billion in new investments to upgrade 50 million homes and office buildings and generate as much as $64 billion a year in cost savings for U.S. electric ratepayers.

Why is this especially important now? Because the economic downturn cost more than one in three construction workers their jobs, leaving unemployment in the industry “at Depression-era levels,” the report said.

“To confront this crisis, the U.S. jobs market needs sustained new demand for the skills of construction workers that is grounded in providing real value to the economy through enhanced productivity, greater efficiency, and improved asset value for real estate,” said the report. “Such a solution is readily available. Our country needs a national program to retrofit America’s homes, offices, and factories for energy efficiency—a program that can provide an important answer to the jobs crisis facing our country.”

As is often the case with US energy policy, it is states, not the federal government, leading the way in fostering energy efficiency markets. The report identifies ten strategies employed by top states. They are:


•Energy efficiency measures in Renewable Portfolio Standards—policies that not only require utility companies to meet a set portion of demand from renewable energy but also include energy efficiency as a qualifying form of clean energy.


•Energy efficiency measures in Renewable Energy Credits—policies that establish markets for tradable clean energy credits and include energy efficiency as a qualifying clean energy resource.


•Energy efficiency specific standards that require utilities to plan for meeting a percentage of future growth in demand through energy efficiency instead of increasing supply. These policy tools include Energy Efficiency Resource Standards and Energy Efficiency Portfolio Standards.


•Unbundled utility structures in which energy transmission and distribution utilities are separate from power generation companies that own power plants, encouraging least costs strategies for meeting energy demand through conservation.


•Decoupled utility rate structures, where utilities’ rates are adjusted to compensate for changes in the volume of energy sold, removing the structural disincentive to conserve energy.


•Aligning efficiency with utility companies’ shareholder benefits, such as bonus rates of return, reimbursing program costs, or other incentives that help transform efficiency from a special program into a core business practice.


•Penalties for noncompliance with energy efficiency standards, to ensure that well-intentioned programs are effectively implemented, monitored, and improved upon over time. Effective policies must have real consequences.


•Regulatory cost-benefit tests that focus on utilities’ real costs, in order to isolate the specific value offered by energy efficiency investments.


•Property-assessed financing structures that link the benefits of installed efficiency to a building, rather than the owner of the building, allowing repayment of financed investments to transfer automatically to new owners.


•Service assessment delivery structures, which allow government jurisdictions to directly facilitate financing of upfront capital costs, assuring repayment through municipal or other service assessment mechanisms.


The top states do not use all of these measures, but they have “developed important pieces of the puzzle,” the report said. Still others are moving in the right direction, among them Virginia, Hawaii, Michigan, Maine, Nevada, Delaware, New Mexico, Florida, Illinois and Utah.

U.S. Energy Use Declines, Renewables Increase

U.S. Energy Use Declines, Renewables Increase
August 26, 2010

California- A new government study shows that Americans are using less energy overall and making more use of renewable energy resources.

The United States used significantly less coal and petroleum in 2009 than in 2008, and significantly more wind power. There also was a decline in natural gas use and increases in solar, hydro and geothermal power according to the most recent energy flow charts released by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

“Energy use tends to follow the level of economic activity, and that level declined last year. At the same time, higher efficiency appliances and vehicles reduced energy use even further,” said A.J. Simon, an LLNL energy systems analyst who develops the energy flow charts using data provided by the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration. “As a result, people and businesses are using less energy in general.”

The estimated U.S. energy use in 2009 equaled 94.6 quadrillion BTUs (“quads”), down from 99.2 quadrillion BTUs in 2008. (A BTU or British Thermal Unit is a unit of measurement for energy, and is equivalent to about 1.055 kilojoules). The average American household uses about 95 million BTU per year.

Energy use in the residential, commercial, industrial and transportation arenas all declined by .22, .09, 2.16 and .88 quads, respectively.

Wind power increased dramatically in 2009 to .70 quads of primary energy compared to .51 in 2008. Most of that energy is tied directly to electricity generation and thus helps decrease the use of coal for electricity production.

“The increase in renewables is a really good story, especially in the wind arena”, Simon said. “It’s a result of very good incentives and technological advancements. In 2009, the technology got better and the incentives remained relatively stable. The investments put in place for wind in previous years came online in 2009. Even better, there are more projects in the pipeline for 2010 and beyond.”

The significant decrease in coal used to produce electricity can be attributed to three factors:

•  overall lower electricity demand
•  a fuel shift to natural gas
•  and an offset created by more wind power production

Nuclear energy use remained relatively flat in 2009. No new plants were added or taken offline in this interval, and the existing fleet operated slightly less than in 2008.

Of the 94.6 quads consumed, only 39.97 ended up as energy services. Energy services, such as lighting and machinery output, are harder to estimate than fuel consumption, Simon said.

The ratio of energy services to the total amount of energy used is a measure of the country’s energy efficiency.

Carbon emissions data are expected to be released later this year, but Simon suspects they will tell a similar story.

“The reduction in the use of natural gas, coal and petroleum is commensurate with a reduction in carbon emissions,” he said. “Simply said, people are doing less stuff. Therefore, they’re burning less fuel.”

Where Does Your Power Come From?: Game Displays How Much of Each Fuel Powers Your State :: Shedding a Light

Where Does Your Power Come From?: Game Displays How Much of Each Fuel Powers Your State :: Shedding a Light