St. Petersburg may sit next to the blue Gulf of Mexico, but the city has turned green. Its breadth of eco-initiatives and sustainable development planning have earned it the title of Florida’s first official “Green City.”

The Florida Green Building Coalition (FGBC) developed the criteria that deems a city "green." The FGBC examines a city’s performance and planning in the areas of energy, water, air, land, and waste. Some of St. Pete’s initiatives include:

• A city fleet that includes biodiesel and hybrid vehicles
• One of the nation’s largest reclaimed water systems
• Land conservation
• Environmental education events
• Popular recycling and yard waste-to-mulch programs
• Extensive bike trail system
• Energy efficiency measures

Ken Shapiro, a FGBC Board member, explained:

"St. Petersburg has emerged as a leader in the state in developing sound programs to ensure the sustainability of its community in the near and long-term future. Especially considering St. Petersburg's location in the state's most densely populated county, the strides the city continues to make in enhancing the environment are admirable and a great example for other cities in the state to follow."

The Green City designation is yet another feather in the city’s green cap. The St. Pete Vision 2020 is an extensive plan, developed by citizens, that identifies values like sustainability, healthy families, education, and transportation, and gives the city a set of goals and objectives to reach these ideals. This long-term vision, combined with real, measureable initiatives, has set a high bar for cities across the nation.

Cross posted at Maria Energia

City of St. Petersburg
Florida Green Building Council

Ogden, Utah has joined the growing number of American cities buying clean, renewable energy to power their community. Mayor Matthew Godfrey announced that Ogden will buy enough renewable energy through Rocky Mountain Power’s Blue Sky program to cover about 19 percent of city buildings’ electricity use.

The Mayor also urged residents and businesses to participate in the Blue Sky program, which gets its electricity from six wind power facilities and is one of the most popular green power programs in the nation. Mayor Godfrey’s Blue Sky Community Challenge aims to get 5 percent of businesses and households signed up for renewable energy by the end of October.

Increasing investment in renewable energy is an important economic move for Ogden, a city of about 78,000 people. It has been attracting several outdoor recreation companies, and Mayor Godfrey explained that having clean air is “critical” to attracting these businesses.

The Sustainable Ogden Committee developed the challenge, and has other initiatives in the works. A Fresh Air Friday program will encourage the use of public transportation, converting city vehicle fleets to renewable fuels, and a downtown bicycle program.

Ogden’s purchase of wind power will cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions – a main contributor to global warming – by 900 tons each year. That’s equivalent to planting about 354 acres of trees, according to a statement from the Mayor. If Ogden residents meet the Blue Sky Community Challenge, it would cut CO2 emissions by about 5,900 tons each year. A typical household could get 100 percent of its energy from renewable power for an extra $11.70 per month.

Rocky Mountain Power
Salt Lake Tribune, via Headwaters News

There’s a lot of talk about China’s staggering amount of planned coal plants, and the narrowing gap between it and the U.S. for the title of Planet’s Biggest Carbon Dioxide Emitter. But China is examining at least one unique way to develop more sustainably.

Welcome to Dongtan, the world’s first CO2-free city. Developers are building this $1.3 billion eco-city just outside of Shanghai. Renewable energy will be used extensively, the layout of the city maximizes walking and biking rather than cars, and transport vehicles will run on batteries or hydrogen fuel cells. Other plans include recycling organic waste, green roofs, and rainwater capture.

Dongtan will cover an area about three-quarters the size of Manhattan on wetlands at the mouth of the Yangtze River. However, Peter Head of Arup, the London-based firm heading the planning, said the wetlands are not at risk from the development. From the Architectural Record:

“‘First of all, water usually discharged into the river will be collected, treated, and recycled within the city boundaries,” he says. ‘There will be a 2-mile buffer zone of eco-farm between city development and the wetlands.’ While farming is water intensive, relatively small amounts of water reach the plants themselves. Head says Dongtan ‘will capture and recycle water in the city and use recycled water to grow green vegetables hydroponically. This makes the whole water cycle much more efficient.’”

But what will the habitants do in this eco-utopia? City officials and consultants expect jobs in education like at the planned Institute for Sustainable Cities, and they anticipate attracting companies pursuing clean technologies, food research and production, and health care. Dongtan is also expected to rely heavily on ecotourism.

Designers hope CO2-free city will serve as a model for the rest of the urbanized world. Its first phase includes a marina village of 20,000 habitants that will be unveiled at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai. Nearly 80,000 people are expected to live in the city by 2020, and eventually designers hope to see 500,000 citizens living the good, green life there.

Architectural Record
Jetson Green

Gary Reysa and his wife cut their energy use in half with their self-designed “Half Plan.” A retired airplane product development engineer from Boeing, Gary continues to satisfy his mechanical and creative curiosity with an array of efficiency and renewable energy projects at his home near Bozeman, MT.

I spoke with Gary by phone on April 5th.

Green Options: Why did you decide to cut your energy use in half?

Gary Reysa: I’m very concerned about global warming, and now that that I have a new grandchild, I see the impact it could have on future generations. It’s easy to get the feeling that there’s not much an individual can do, so my wife and I thought: What can we do? Could we make a significant cut in our energy use and global warming emissions? Could we cut it in half?

GO: How did you begin?

GR: The Half Plan seemed really ambitious to us at first. For one thing, we had no access to special technology. But I had begun some projects back around 2000 when we moved into our house and I started keeping track of our energy bills. When we officially began the Half Plan, we decided to do the projects that offered the most energy saving per dollar spent for our climate, house, skills, and habits.

GO: Wouldn’t it have been a lot easier to just buy carbon offsets?

GR: I have mixed feelings about carbon offsets. I wouldn’t criticize anyone for doing it, but it’s just not for me. I do believe there are a lot of places in the world where you can spend a few bucks and get carbon reductions. But I feel like some people use them to get out of doing real action.

I feel better about doing something directly that reduces my carbon footprint. But even with the Half Plan, we still have to buy green power from Northwest Energy to make up for what we use. We’re not completely independent of the power grid.

GO: You said you didn’t have access to any special technology for cutting your energy use. Did that affect the execution of your plan?

GR: Not at all – once we started researching it, we found out that almost all the equipment we needed was actually available locally.

We did a lot of different projects to cut our energy in half. We bought a Toyota Prius, installed a solar water heater, energy-efficient light bulbs, better insulation in our attic, sealed up the windows, put our computers on power strips (shutting off the power strips stops the computer from continuing to “sip” electricity, even when it’s supposedly off) and installed dryer venting. And those are just a few of the projects.

GO: Has the Half Plan been very expensive?

GR: So far we’ve spent $8800. The single biggest expense has been the Toyota Prius - but it’s also been the single biggest energy savings and biggest cut to our global warming emissions. It cut our transportation energy use by about 60 percent! We thought we’d be making a sacrifice by buying a smaller car, but it’s been great and we use it for 85 percent of our driving. We do live in the snowy mountains, so we need bigger car with 4-wheel drive part of the time.

I factored in a $4000 cost for the Prius into the overall $8800 cost of the Half Plan, because $4000 is the premium we paid for the hybrid features. We were due to replace our old Outback vehicle anyway (it had 205,000 miles on it), so the decision was whether to buy a conventional or a hybrid car.

Our other big expenses included the solar projects. In fact, I just finished another big solar project, but I haven’t factored that into the cost yet. It's a solar space heating project that uses solar water heating collectors to provide space heating for the house. The collectors are on the south wall of our new garden shed. They heat water in a 500 gallon tank behind the shed which gets pumped to the house.

Solar collectors for space heating

GO: Have the savings outweighed the initial investments?

GR: The savings has been phenomenal. We’ve invested $8800 and I’ve calculated that we’ll save $4600 in energy costs and 20 tons in global warming pollution each year. The cost savings will continue to go up as electricity and fuel prices go up.

One really neat project has been making our computer use more energy efficient. Our two computers and related equipment use about 270 watts of power when turned on. We put all of it on power strips. At night, we hibernate the computers and then turn everything off with the power strip switch. During the day we have the computers set to hibernate if they are inactive for 15 minutes.

This saves a total of 1624 kilowatt hours of electricity per year, 3200 lbs of global warming emissions, and $162 per year! This just knocked me out.

GO: What was the Half Plan’s biggest surprise?

GR: The biggest surprise was that there were no surprises. It was pretty painless except for the money invested into the projects, but we’ve already earned a big chunk of it back in our first year of savings.

It was relatively easy to do these projects, too. We live pretty normally – as in we waste a lot of energy! – but we started paying more attention to how we use our energy. To me, it would be fall-off-the-log-easy for people to do this without sacrificing or paying much. It’s just a lack of focus that keeps it from happening.

GO: Now that you’ve found the Half Plan so easy to do, have you thought about cutting your energy even further?

GR: We plan to cut it in half again. This time we will have to use solar PV panels for our electricity, which has a higher cost and a slower return than our other projects. But I’m not doing this next phase for the financial return; I’m doing it to cut my carbon dioxide pollution that causes global warming.

GO: So the next half may not be so easy?

GR: We did the Half Plan without changing our lifestyle at all. But to cut our energy further, we’re going to have to make changes like drive less or bike more. That’s not a downfall for us, it just requires more work. There will certainly be lifestyle changes this time.

For example, we just got back from Hawaii. I felt guilty for spending 2500 lbs of CO2 to go! But I think if we’re going to get serious about making another 50 percent drop, then we will need to start thinking harder about trips like that.

GO: So how do you entertain yourself out in Big Sky country?

GR: I love the TV show Living with Ed. It's a reality show with Ed Begley Jr and it's about how he lives his green lifestyle with his wife in Studio City, CA. It makes technical sense, it’s very entertaining, and he really cares about the issue and lives his life accordingly.

For a good read, I’d recommend The Carbon Buster's Home Energy Handbook by Godo Stoyke. It gives a long list of projects that people can do to cut their CO2 emissions and save money. It details the equipment needed, cost, return, energy saving, and carbon saving. I like the book so much I bought a second copy for our local library.

GO: Your website is a fantastic resource; very easy-to-understand information, graphs, and calculations. Any specific tips on how folks can get started on the Half Plan?

GR: At my website, Build It Solar, I have a Half Plan for People Who Like Plans and a Half Plan for People Who Don’t Like Plans, so folks can choose what works best for them.

I’m an engineer, and I know that simplicity is everything. When you have trouble with a design, it’s almost always because it’s too complex. For example, I found that the solar thermal designs are really simple and that anyone should be able to build it.

The other thing folks have to realize is that we are the problem. When you get mad about global warming, you have to look at yourself in the mirror. I read stuff on the Internet and I get the feeling that people are pointing fingers but aren’t identifying the problem as themselves. Instead, they want a quick fix or someone else to come along with the technology that will allow us to not have to do anything. And they feel comfortable about the fact that they’re not doing anything.

We’re the ones generating this problem, but that also makes it easy for us to do something about it. We’re in the driver’s seat to make drastic reductions. It’s easy to do. For example, efficiency is something you can implement quickly, and we can get a significant drop in emissions right away and painlessly. If enough people do that, we’ll have really made a difference.

GO: Do you think this can all really make an impact?

GR: My actual CO2 reduction is about 20 tons each year. If 100 million families did the same thing, the energy we would save we be about 25 percent of all of the U.S. CO2 emissions. That's huge! And the best part is that we know this can be done – with no help from new technology or George Bush. We can do this ourselves, right away.

Mike Strizki’s utility bill is zero, thanks to some creative thinking using renewable energy technologies. By using solar panels, a hydrogen fuel cell, storage tanks and an electrolyzer, he has enough electricity even on the cloudiest days. And Strizki isn’t a hermit living in the dark off of snails and rainwater, either. His 3,500 square foot house is located in central New Jersey on 12 acres, with amenities you’d see in any 21st century home, like a hot tub and big screen TV. His renewable energy system even creates hydrogen he uses to power his fuel-cell car.

So how does he produce zero emissions?

On a sunny day, Strizki can get more than enough of his electricity from the solar panels. The excess goes to an electrolyzer that then breaks down a tank of water into oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen is released into the atmosphere, but the hydrogen is stored in 10 1,000-gallon propane tanks. So when the solar panels aren’t producing enough energy, the hydrogen is piped to an air-conditioner-sized fuel cell that makes electricity.
The fuel-cell car in the garage is called “The New Jersey Genesis” and Strizki – a civil engineer – helped design the car and maintains it for the NJ Department of Transportation. He fills it up with the hydrogen made from his electrolyzer.

This sort of system isn’t going to be available commercially for the rest of us anytime soon. Strizki’s project is extremely expensive - $500,000, paid for in part with a $250,000 grant from the NJ Board of Public Utilities.

Strizki acknowledges that the enormous cost is a huge hurdle, but believes that, with mass production, the price of the system (not including solar panels) would be about $50,000 and the new solar system would be around $80,000 (some states like NJ offer rebates that cover up to 70 percent of the solar’s cost).

Then there’s the question of efficiency. Critics point out that electrolyzers are only 50 percent efficient. By the time the process is complete, the hydrogen that is converted back into electricity is only half of the energy with which the process started. Sending that power back to the grid, some say, would be more effective because it would displace other dirty energy sources.

Strizki has created a company called Renewable Energy International that engineers, installs, and supports renewable energy systems like his. Despite its costs and efficiency questions, he still believes that hydrogen is the best solution to our clean energy problems. “No one has said what I’m doing doesn’t work…Nothing is as wildly expensive as destroying the whole planet.”

Christian Science monitor, Via the Modesto Bee
Renewable Energy International

Image: Sports IllustratedThe guys and some gals may disagree with me on this one, but the cover for the hottest Sports Illustrated cover is…global warming.

Clearly, environmentalists aren’t the only ones talking about global warming anymore: it’s affecting ski resorts, insurance companies, and a host of cultural institutions like the wide world of sports: The Miami Dolphins have built a climate-controlled bubble to avoid the extreme Florida heat during practices, seven World Cup ski racing events in Europe have been cancelled this season because of warmer temperatures, and Alaska’s Iditarod dogsled race hasn’t started at its traditional location in five years because of lack of snow.

So what is the sport world’s part in fighting global warming? Make sure stadiums are easily accessible by mass transit and install renewable energy systems (solar or wind) on stadiums are a few ideas. But many professional organizations and athletes are taking action now:

• Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, MA has a water filtration and reuse system that collects and recirculates "black" and "gray water" to make the most of all that beer and all those flushes.

• Saints safety Steve Gleason runs his Dodge Ram pickup on biodiesel.

• The NFL planted 3,000 trees around Florida to try to offset Super Bowl XLI’s estimated one million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, a main contributor to global warming.

• NASCAR driver Ward Burton's foundation is pledged to habitat management, land conservation and environmental education in his home state of Virginia.

Ken Rakoz of Centralia, WA built the first biodiesel-powered dragster. He told Sports Illustrated:

"In the environmental movement there's way too much preaching to the choir. There are people sitting on the fence, and Joe Sixpack doesn't really know about [biodiesel] until we do something like racing."

As it impacts us all more and more, creative and meaningful action from all sectors of society will be critical to fighting it. There’s no wild card for the planet in the league of global warming.

Sports Illustrated

The ears of the renewable energy industry were perked with the President’s State of the Union address last week. Among the notable nods include his utterance of “global climate change” and his proposals to cut gas consumption 20 percent by 2017, raise renewable fuel standards, and increase research for hybrid car batteries. Here are some reactions to those proposals, from Renewable Energy Access:

Scott Sklar, President, The Stella Group, Ltd.:

While the President actually mentioned the word "climate change" in his State of the Union speech, the environmental groups got none of what they directly wanted towards establishing some sort of mandatory emissions caps…The speech signifies the formal start of this process, and now the political theater and process begins.

Bill Prindle, Acting Executive Director, American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy:

While we need new clean fuels, energy efficiency is the first fuel in the race for energy security. Congress should set a stronger [Corporate Average Fuel Economy] standard that would save at least 12 billion gallons of gasoline in 2017 and 50 billion in 2030.

Brent Erickson, Executive Vice President, Biotechnology Industry Organization:

By proposing a new renewable energy standard that will require fuel blenders to use up to 35 billion gallons of renewable fuel by 2017, the President is sending a dramatically positive signal to the investment community, to farmers, to biotech companies and to gasoline refiners that our government will work with the private sector to make the biofuels sector a major contributor to our energy independence.

Carol Werner, Executive Director, Environmental and Energy Study Institute:

…we do have concerns about the President's proposal to broaden the Renewable Fuel Standard enacted by Congress to an Alternative Fuels Standard that would also encompass a broad range of other fuels including methanol, butanol, hydrogen and other alternative fuels — which may be derived from fossil energy, including coal, natural gas and other fossil fuels.

Scott Faber, Farm Policy Campaign Director, Environmental Defense:

Expanding the production of ethanol will help boost the profitability of our farmers and reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy…The next Farm Bill should expand [U.S. Department of Agriculture] grants and loan guarantees to develop renewable energy, and should for the first time link USDA investments in renewable energy to an index of environmental benefits.

The standard benchmark for certification of a building's efficiency and sustainability in design, construction, and operation is called LEED certification. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design and is administered by the U.S. Green Building Council. LEED-certified buildings – also called “green buildings” – are popping up and gaining momentum around the country.

Charles Lockwood highlights the burgeoning market surrounding green buildings in a recent Barron's magazine opinion piece. Hint: they aren’t just for environmentalists anymore. Companies like Goldman Sachs, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, Toyota , and Harley-Davidson have moved into LEED-certified buildings. The U.S. Green Building Council estimates that 5% of all new commercial construction in the U.S. was LEED-certified in 2006, and about 10% will be certified by 2010.

As the market shift gathers even greater momentum in coming years, standard buildings will become the real-estate industry’s version of the buggy whip…To prevent their properties from becoming passé, today’s real-estate owners should undertake renovations now…[These sorts of renovations] lower annual operating costs, generate workforce benefits like greater productivity and better employee attractions and retention, and meet the growing demand for green buildings…The marketplace shift to green is gathering force. Massive obsolescence is looming. Profits are there for the taking. It’s time to act.

Five key areas are considered in LEED certification: sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection, and indoor environmental quality. The higher number of points or “credits” a building earns in each of these categories, the higher the level of certification achieved: basic Certified, Silver, Gold, or Platinum.

Renovations of existing real estate space present significant profit potential and many investors are exploring real estate opportunities that allow for green renovations. The McGraw-Hill 2006 SmartMarket Report shows that green buildings get an average 3.5% higher occupancy rates than traditional buildings, 3% higher rent rates, and an average increase of 7.5% in building value. Costs to build or renovate a LEED-certified building vary by project, but achieving the basic LEED Certified level only increases construction costs a few percentage points. These costs can be recouped quickly with double-digit increases in water, gas, and electricity savings.

As Green as the Grass Outside (subscription required)
U.S Green Building Council
McGraw-Hill 2006 SmartMarket Report