During a recent conference in Detroit–the annual convening of NEWHAB/Energy Efficiency for All, a growing network of urban and environmental activists dedicated to creating energy-efficient affordable housing–I went on a tour that revealed new dimensions of this area’s ongoing struggle with racism and poverty. The highlight was our group’s visit to Avalon Village, in Highland Park, a city within Detroit, just a few miles from where Brewster-Douglass once stood. At first glance, you might say that it’s nothing much: a street with empty lots and rundown houses. But the “village” is a vision that started with one person and has become a collective grassroots effort; it’s an entrepreneurial start-up, not a government project. the person is Mama Shu (Shamayim Harris), a former school administrator in one of the nation’s poorest cities who, as she tells it. had a vision of what could become of a street she glimpsed on the way to work.

She bought the house on the corner for $3,000 and started to fix it up. She partnered with a nonprofit in the city, Soulardarity, that erected a solar street light next door; the area’s streetlights had been removed because the city didn’t pay its utility bills. With donations–cash, in-kind help–she began to buy lots at $300-500 apiece and a few of the houses. She turned the lot next door into a park for her infant son, killed by a car. She is turning the house next to that into a “homework house” for the neighborhood children–a safe place to meet, work, eat, and do school work. A Kickstarter campaign raised $243,000 in 30 days. She brought in a metal shipping container and turned it into a neat, well-decorated small shop–filled with incense, candles, and other goods for sale by women in the area. She and her allies have been at this for years.

When Mama Shu takes us on a walking tour of the neighborhood, more of the vision unfolds. Here will be a wellness center. There will be a park. This house will be torn down, that one will be fixed up. She points out a basket of flowers on a stand along the street. It covers the base of a removed streetlight–a small touch to bring beauty and caring where ugly loss occurred.

Yes, it’s a feel-good story. She’s been in People and on Ellen. On some days I might discount it as being at such a small scale and taking so long to get results–a drop in the bucket, hardly a “system change” effort. But two things captured me, beyond Mama Shu’s infectious can-do attitude and the tasty lunch she served us in her son’s park.

First, large changes almost always start with small changes, and small changes start with self-drive, the will to make a change. Self-drive in a person or a community can be suppressed and extinguished. But here it was, alive and well.

Second, Mama Shu’s vision for Avalon Village is quite different from the vision that built Brewster-Douglass. She wants a place that runs on renewable energy and is highly efficient in its use of energy and water, a place that is green, not just built up, and taps nature’s healthfulness, a place that is resilient, much like she has been. This vision–at the heart of what NEWHAB is about–is taking hold in cities around the world, especially the affluent cities and gentrified neighborhoods. Avalon Village says, in its small way, that this is a vision for everyone.

Mama Shu photo: Eclection Media

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In most cities, buildings are the main source of Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions. In dense cities, the building share of emissions can easily exceed 75%. These emissions typically come from three sources:

• The electricity consumed by buildings for lighting, HVAC, plug loads, etc. The fuel source of the emissions depends on the emissions factors in the regional electrical grid. In New England, this is mostly natural gas. In other regions, there will be more emissions from coal and fuel oil.
• Space and hot water heating. Most of these emissions are typically from natural gas, which is the dominant urban thermal fuel. Fuel oil is a larger factor in residential buildings with older oil furnaces.
• Cogeneration. Many larger buildings and campus-style operations (health care, higher education) use on-site combined heat and power (CHP) systems to provide a combination of cooling, steam heat, and electricity generation. Most of these systems are powered by natural gas.

There are several basic strategies for eliminating building-based carbon emissions.

• Reduce consumption – implement energy efficiency measures to radically reduce the amount of energy used.
• Clean the grid – take carbon out of the generation sources for the regional electricity grid by substituting renewable energy for coal, oil and natural gas. (Unless a city has its own utility, this process will take place through state-level policy and market changes.)
• Make or buy your own clean energy – generate renewable energy on-site or purchase it through Power Purchase Agreements.
• Renewable thermal – convert from fossil fuel heating sources to non-carbon sources of heating, such as heat pumps powered by renewables, or sustainable biogases.

When taken to their logical conclusion at scale in a “2 degree world,” these strategies sum to an elimination (or at least a radical downsizing) of the natural gas industry over the next three decades. (Yes – 2050 is not that far away!)

So far, though, there is no clear roadmap for this transition in the US, and it presents a set of “wicked” challenges.

• Limited city control. Most cities have little or no control over natural gas supply systems. Decisions about building new pipelines are mostly made at the federal level through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The only thing cities control is the demand side. They can reduce/eliminate demand for natural gas, but they cannot affect its availability as a fuel source. How do cities support a natural gas transition strategy when they have so little influence on supply? In addition, cities have little control over the cleaning of the grid. But a building electrification strategy only makes sense if the buildings are using clean electricity. How do cities synchronize these two strategies to make sure that you get the desired GHG reductions?
• No clear incumbent business model. In most of the other sectors involved in deep decarbonization, there is some kind of successor business model that allows incumbents to adapt to the market and re-purpose their old assets in a new way. Distribution utilities can still make money by moving electrons, even if those electrons now come from renewable sources. Generators can plan a transition of their generation assets from fossil sources to renewables over successive asset replacement cycles, and still stay in the generation business. Automotive manufacturers can replace internal combustion engine powertrains with hybrid and battery powertrains. But natural gas is different. There is no obvious way to reuse natural gas production and distribution assets. Some very small portion of distribution pipelines might be re-purposed to move “green steam” or “green gas” but that will be a miniscule fraction of the existing market. What happens to these “stranded assets”? How do cities enforce their retirement and who pays for it?
• Long asset lifecycles. Natural gas distribution assets have very long useful lives – often in the 30-50 year time scales. So a pipeline that is built today will still be alive and well in 2050. How do we create short-term continuity of supply without locking ourselves into long-term carbon assets? And again, who pays for any stranded assets in the future? A similar dilemma exists for individual buildings – what is the asset replacement cycle of heating systems and how do you set up the economics so that it makes sense to replace a fossil-fuel based system with a renewable fuel-based system?
• Improve or transition? Some natural gas powered energy systems represent large improvements over legacy systems. Natural gas residential furnaces are far less polluting than oil furnaces. And CHP systems powered by natural gas can in the short term bring large efficiency improvements. But at some point in the asset replacement cycle, you are locking yourself into a carbon source that will be functioning well beyond your target date for carbon neutrality. When do you stop improving the old system and transition to new technologies?

Many of the world’s “climate innovation lab” cities are deep in the details of working out the answers to these dilemmas. But so far, there is no clear “pathway” for managing the natural gas transition that does not result in serious economic and political stress. Figuring this out is one of the big climate mitigation challenges.

The post The “Wicked Problem” of Transitioning Off of Natural Gas appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

To go beyond a city-by-city response to the new building challenge, Architecture 2030 has published a ZERO Code for new building construction, which integrates cost-effective energy efficiency standards with on-site and/or off-site renewable energy resulting in Zero-Net-Carbon (ZNC) buildings.

“The ZERO Code is a national and international building energy standard for new building construction that integrates cost-effective energy efficiency standards with on-site and/or off-site renewable energy resulting in zero-net-carbon buildings.” –Architecture 2030

This is a crucial new tool, as nations and cities worldwide face the largest urban growth in history. “While there have been worldwide improvements in building sector energy efficiency, as well as growth in renewable energy generating capacity,” Architecture 2030 noted, “these have not been nearly enough to offset the increase in emissions from new construction. As a result, building sector CO2 emissions have continued to rise by nearly 1% per year since 2010.”

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The city had to design the Shanghai Environment and Energy Exchange (SEEE) from scratch, looking at the experiences of the European Union’s market, which has had its ups and downs, and California’s trading market. It also had to figure out how to operate the market—which happens inside an unremarkable building on Shanghai’s North Zhongshan Road alongside one of the city’s elevated highways. In the quiet office I visited, as many as 60 employees work at computers or leave to visit with companies in the market. On one wall a gigantic computerized board displays trading prices. More real-time trading  information is available through a transaction partner.

Since opening in late 2013, the market has expanded coverage to 310 companies in 26 sectors. More than 50 percent of Shanghai’s carbon emissions are included in the market, explains Guo Jianli, vice director of the Resource Conservation and Environmental Protection Division of  the Shanghai Development and Reform Commission. The city’s industrial sectors account for more than a third of its GDP, and its population has been growing. Through July 2017, Exchange officials report, some 26.8 million tons of carbon-emissions allowances (SHEAs) have been traded at a total cost of more than 400 million yuan (about US$70 million). After a three-year start-up period, the market required companies to obtain emissions allowances annually, most of which is done in the first half of the year. The enterprises report on the previous year’s emissions, which are verified by a third party. The market has also been developing carbon-financing programs with several banks, a spot market for trading, and a forward or futures market.

A critical design element was a decision not to create a price floor or ceiling for the market, says Zang Ao Quan, supervisor of the Exchange’s Trading Department. At one point the trading price went down to 5 yuan, about three-quarters of a US$1. Compared to other carbon markets, the Shanghai price has been relatively low. [California’s price, for instance, has averaged between US$12-14 per ton during the past three years. The price in the European Union market has hovered around US$6 for the past 18 months.] And this of course can diminish the financial motivation of companies in the market to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions to avoid having to purchase allowances.  The overall level of emissions in the market is set by national policy, which aims to peak carbon emissions nationally in 2030, a less aggressive stance than government entities that have established other carbon markets. Shanghai and dozens of other Chinese cities have committed to reach their carbon emissions peak before then. In Shanghai’s case, the goal is to peak by 2025. For the short-term, constraining the growth of energy consumption is the focus of city efforts. 

For several years it has appeared that the Shanghai market might continue to operate in parallel with the national carbon market that China decided to establish. The national market launched in 2017 only covers a few industrial sectors. Considering the complexity and difficulty of establishing a carbon trading market, it seems likely that it will take several years to expand the national market substantially–and that city-based markets will stay in business.

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