Infrastructure News
July 14th | Ottawa Citizen
OTTAWA — A unanimous city council voted for the revised light-rail plan Thursday afternoon, moving ahead with the $2.1-billion plan to run a 12.5-kilometre line between Tunney’s Pasture and Blair Road via a downtown tunnel along Queen Street.
City staff put some meat on the bones of the announcement by Mayor Jim Watson last week that they’d found a way to keep the price tag of the line to $2.1 billion despite four years of inflation, largely by digging a shallower tunnel under downtown, following Queen Street rather than going “cross-country.” City treasurer Marian Simulik assured councillors that if light rail is treated as the city’s No. 1 transportation project, the City of Ottawa has the fiscal capacity to pay for it and numerous other transit improvements until 2048, as far as their projections went.
The presentations had the feel of a victory lap from staffers expecting council’s endorsement — which they got, on a vote of 20-0 (four councillors weren’t at the table to vote: Barrhaven’s Jan Harder, who has been fighting illness, plus Peter Clark, Steve Desroches and Doug Thompson).
Ordinarily, citizens don’t get to make presentations to full city council, but the meeting was structured to allow it this time. Before the 10 a.m. meeting, about a dozen people had signed up to speak. The only substantial criticism of the plan was in the details, from Transport Action representative David Jeanes.
“The devil is in the details and you’ve seen a lot of interesting details today,” he told councillors. He rhymed off a list, from whether to “overbuild” a station at Tunney’s Pasture to serve as a western terminal — but only temporarily, until a planned expansion of the system takes place — to whether the tunnel can be made even shallower under the Rideau Canal by moving a sewer. As it is, there’s a steep grade in the tunnel to get under the canal.
“The cost to do this could be less than the permanent cost of ongoing wear and tear” on brakes and wheels and engines, Jeanes said. “It’s the kind of LRT construction you would wish to avoid.”
Councillors also heard from Cadillac Fairview, the owners of the Rideau Centre, whose vice-president Ivan Boulva said he looked forward to working with the city to make the mall as integral a part of the rail system as it is a part of the current bus system. He hedged on whether the Rideau Centre would contribute financially to the plan or help extend stores into the planned connecting tunnel between the mall and the Rideau station, saying only that he’d be pleased to talk about it further as the plans are refined.
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July 14th | Sustainable Business News
2.7 million people work in the green economy nationwide, according to a new Brookings Institution analysis that claims to be the first comprehensive report on the subject.
The "green" or "clean" or low-carbon economy - defined as the sector of the economy that produces goods and services with an environmental benefit - remains at once a compelling aspiration and an enigma.
As a matter of aspiration, no swath of the economy has been more widely celebrated as a source of economic renewal and potential job creation. Yet, the clean economy remains hard to assess - a problem that is proving tricky for the Obama administration going into an election year.
"Green" or "clean" activities and jobs pervade all sectors of the U.S. economy and are thus difficult to define and count.
In the absence of standard definitions and data, strikingly little is known about the green economy and its nature, size, and growth at the critical regional level.
Seeking to help address these problems, the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings worked with Battelle's Technology Partnership Practice to develop, analyze, and comment on a detailed database of establishment-level employment statistics pertaining to a "sensibly defined" assemblage of clean economy industries in the United States and its metropolitan areas.
"Sizing the Clean Economy: A National and Regional Green Jobs Assessment" concludes that:
The clean economy, which employs some 2.7 million workers, encompasses a significant number of jobs in establishments spread across a diverse group of industries. Though modest in size, the clean economy employs more workers than the fossil fuel industry and bioscience, but remains smaller than the IT-producing sectors. Most clean economy jobs reside in mature segments that cover a wide swath of activities including manufacturing and the provision of public services such as wastewater and mass transit. A smaller portion of the clean economy encompasses newer segments that respond to energy-related challenges. These include the solar photovoltaic (PV), wind, fuel cell, smart grid, biofuel, and battery industries.
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July 14th | Greentech Media
Arizona’s renewables standard requires 15 percent of the state’s power to come from renewable sources by 2025 and 30 percent of that must come from distributed sources like rooftop solar.
To meet the standard’s annually escalating requirements, Arizona’s utilities offer one-time, ratepayer-funded per-watt payments in addition to the 30 percent federal tax credit and $1,000 state incentive. The utility-regulating Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) sets those per-watt amounts yearly, according to anticipated market dynamics.
As a result, demand has skyrocketed. Arizona Public Service (APS), Arizona’s biggest utility, is about to exhaust its incentive fund. Smaller utilities such Salt River Project (SRP) and Tucson Electric Power (TEP) still have incentive money to allot but industry watchers expect those funds to be used quickly.
“They’ve basically burned through all four quarters of the 2011 standard allotment for the residential incentives even though it’s only July,” said 10-year solar industry veteran Mark Holohan, Solar Division Manager for Wilson Electric, Arizona’s biggest commercial electrical contractor.
APS “started the year paying $1.75 per watt,” Holohan said. “Those funds were exhausted by January 16. Then it dropped to $1.60 per watt. That was exhausted by March 25. On March 25, it dropped to $1.45 per watt. That was exhausted on June 10. By that point, it had exhausted a total budget for the year of $27.9 million.” Barely two million dollars remain. “What’s left is only the budget for rapid reservations and only a dollar per watt,” Holohan said.
Some solar insiders say demand is now compromised. And solar installers, Holohan said, “have an interruption of their ability to sell and an interruption to their cash flow. And they will have idle people. That’s a difficult position for them to recover from.”
SolarCity is one of the biggest solar providers in Arizona. Though the situation is "not ideal," said Director of Communications Jonathan Bass, his company has been able to “manage around” the quarter-to-quarter starting and stopping. A lower incentive “makes a purchase more expensive,” Bass said, but SolarCity can still provide “affordable solar options” in Arizona, where “a solar system generates more electricity than almost anyplace else in the U.S.”
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July 13th | Bulk Transporter
The Coalition for Responsible Transportation (CRT), Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), and US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have launched the EPA SmartWay Drayage Program, yet another program targeting drayage operators at US ports.
The new SmartWay Drayage Program claims to build a partnership between a numerous goods movement stakeholders including major national retailers, trucking companies, port communities, environmental groups and the EPA to solve a critical health and environmental challenge: how to reduce harmful air emissions from port drayage trucks.
Rick Gabrielson, who serves as CRT president and Target's director of import operations, said the partnership will seek to generate private sector investment in clean technology, improve the environmental quality of our nation's port communities and demonstrate the commitment made by the shipping industry to reduce emissions.
The SmartWay Drayage Program mirrors the SmartWay Transport Partnership. Drayage trucks, typically older and allegedly more polluting than longhaul trucks, operate in and around port areas and represent one of the largest sources of diesel emissions associated with ports. This program was designed to specifically address the unique environmental issues associated with port trucking, to incentivize the deployment of newer, cleaner port trucks across the nation, and to recognize SmartWay Drayage Partners for reducing diesel emissions from those trucks.
"US ports generate jobs and are critical to our nation's economy," says Gina McCarthy, assistant administrator for EPA's Office of Air and Radiation. "EPA's SmartWay dray truck initiative will help ports contribute to their local economies --while protecting the air quality, environment, and public health of nearby communities."
Through the SmartWay Drayage program, port trucking companies and independent owner-operators sign a partnership agreement and commit to track diesel emissions, replace older dirtier trucks with cleaner, newer ones, and achieve at least a 50% reduction in particulate matter (PM) and 25% reduction in nitrous oxide (NOx), below the national industry average, within three years.
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July 1st | Sustainable Business News
The US Department of energy is offering conditional commitments for loan guarantees of approximately $4.5 billion to support three enormous solar farms sponsored by First Solar (Nasdaq: FSLR) in the Southwest.
It's the largest amount offered to a single US cleantech company to date.
The three projects combined have a planned capacity of 1,330 megawatts (MW) and are expected to create more than 1,400 solar energy jobs during peak construction.
The projects will employ more than 20 million of First Solar's Cadmium Telluride (Cd-Te) thin film photovoltaic (PV) modules.
First Solar, Inc., which is headquartered in Tempe, Arizona, will make the modules in a new manufacturing plant that has begun construction in Mesa, Arizona, as well as in its recently expanded manufacturing plant in Perrysburg, Ohio.
The offerings break down as follows:
A conditional commitment for a $680 million loan guarantee to support the Antelope Valley Solar Ranch 1 project
Conditional commitments for partial loan guarantees of $1.88 billion in loans to support the Desert Sunlight project
Conditional commitments for partial loan guarantees of $1.93 billion in loans to support the Topaz Solar project Antelope Valley Solar Ranch 1 is a 230 MW project in the Western Mojave Desert, approximately 80 miles north of Los Angeles, California. Power from the project will be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric Company.
Desert Sunlight is a 550 MW project located on land managed by the Bureau of Land Management in eastern Riverside County, California. Project construction will take place in two phases; Phase I will generate 300MW of power, which will be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric Company, while Phase II will generate 250 MW of power, which will be sold to Southern California Edison.
The $1.88 billion in loans that are partially guaranteed by DOE will be funded by a syndicate of institutional investors and commercial banks led by lead lender and lender-applicant, Goldman Sachs Lending Partners LLC, which submitted the project under the Financial Institution Partnership Program (FIPP), and Citibank N.A. as co-lead arranger.
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