Own a Piece of the Sun

Tensions are rising in the Middle East as oil-powered dictatorships unravel. Gas prices at the pump are the highest they have ever been this time of year. The new coal-fired Edwardsport power plant may drive up electric rates by double digits over the next five years. Extraction, refining, shipping and combustion of fossil fuels degrade our health and the regenerative capacity of the natural systems that keep us alive. If only we had an alternative to our deadly addiction to fossil fuels.

Enter the sun, a fusion nuclear reactor safely parked 93 million miles away that each hour bathes the earth in enough free energy to equal all the energy used by man in a year. The amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet each year is about twice as much as will ever be obtained from all of the Earth’s non-renewable resources of coal, oil, natural gas and mined uranium combined.

You can grab your piece of this free energy bonanza with off-the-shelf hardware to power your home and electric automobile. For about the cost of an in-ground pool or cinema room or speedboat bobbing at the marina, your home and car can become your own power plant and vehicle fueling station.

Solar photovoltaic panels convert sunlight into electricity with no moving parts and they are typically guaranteed for at least 25 years. Electricity from a solar array can be used in the home and any excess can be sold back to the utility company at the same price you pay for it. Your utility provides a credit for excess power you produce that can be applied to months when the meter is spinning in their favor. Lincoln Heritage Public Library’s 2400-square-foot Chrisney branch library, in Spencer County, is completely powered by the sun and it produces about 1800 kilowatt-hours more electricity than it uses each year with its 8.9-kilowatt solar array. They have never paid an electric bill. The all-electric building is heated and cooled using a ground-source heat pump with two vertical wells.

A well-insulated, energy efficient three-bedroom home with ground-source heat pump can be designed in Bloomington to be net-zero-energy with an 8.5-kilowatt solar array with enough extra juice to charge an electric vehicle, like the Nissan Leaf, for 12,000 miles per year.

The electric car would require about three 200-watt panels, which would add about $2000 to the system. Compare this investment to the cost of fuel for a conventional compact car driven an average 12,000 miles per year getting 30 miles-per-gallon at $3-per-gallon and you get an annual fuel cost of $1200 for a conventional vehicle, not including oil changes. In other words, sometime during the second year, you would break even and your fuel is free for the next 23 plus years of the guaranteed life of the solar panels. If gas stays at $3 per gallon for the next 25 years, you would realize $30,000 in fuels savings and smile past the gas pump over 1000 times.

Net cost for a net-zero-energy home and car solar power system described above would be about $47,600 after the 30% federal tax credit. This example would allow you to sell approximately $2200 worth of solar renewable energy certificates and keep about 14,500 pounds of CO2 out of the atmosphere each year.

Solar panels may not be as sexy as that swimming pool, cinema room or speedboat, but the payback on investment is much greater and the peace of mind you will experience for the next 25 years of energy independence will be priceless.

One Million Electric Vehicles by 2015: Good News or Bad?

More than twenty manufacturers are poised to offer plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, like the Chevy Volt, and plug-in battery-electric vehicles, like the Nissan Leaf, in 2011 or 2012. A few of these cars are beginning to roll off dealer lots into the electrified garages of early adopters, assisted by tax incentives of up to $7,500. The race is on to see which country will dominate this new transportation frontier. The Obama administration set a goal of one million plug-in electric vehicles on U.S. highways by 2015.

This may be good news for energy security if electric cars can ease our dependence on imported fuel, which currently accounts for about two-thirds of the U.S. supply. If the U.S. takes a leading role in the development of electric vehicles, Indiana could see a rejuvenation of its manufacturing sector, which includes a number of electric vehicle assembly and component manufacturers. In concert with a smarter grid and cleaner sources of electricity, electric vehicles hold the promise of significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Most electric vehicles chargers are designed to delay charging to coincide with off-peak hours and many utility companies offer lower off-peak rates to encourage this behavior. Smart grid technology combined with smart vehicle and smart home technology may make it possible to utilize this extra nighttime capacity and may also provide the option for vehicle-to-grid flow of electricity during peak times. Used vehicle batteries, which retain about 80% of their capacity, may also provide storage for alternative energy systems like wind and solar power to further level the peaks and reduce the need for new power plants.

Battery-only electric vehicles have zero emissions at the bumper. The emissions occur at the point of electricity generation. Charged by electricity generated with the average national fuel mix for electric power generation, which is slightly less than half coal, these cars have significantly less overall emissions than gasoline combustion vehicles and even conventional hybrids like the Prius.

Unfortunately, that math doesn’t work in Indiana where approximately 94 percent of electricity is generated by coal. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, nearly half of Indiana power plant coal is imported from other states, mostly Wyoming, relying on diesel fuel for mining, processing, disposal and transport. Both of these high-carbon fuels are subject to rising global supply and demand concerns, rapidly rising costs, increasing risk of carbon legislation, and detrimental health and environmental consequences.

According to a recent study by an expert panel commissioned by Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs and a 2007 joint study by the Electric Power Research Institute and the National Resources Defense Council, a conventional Prius gas hybrid would currently trump an all-electric Leaf in terms of greenhouse gas emissions in Indiana and a handful of other coal-dependent states.

To realize the full promise of electric vehicles and the smart grid, and to secure its future, Indiana must move aggressively to diversify its renewable energy portfolio. Major wind installations are a good start, but Indiana will need legislative incentives, at least as robust as surrounding states, to encourage renewable energy development and reduce its exposure to the significant health, environmental, economic, and compliance risks associated with having all of its energy eggs in one coal bucket.

While we await progress on this legislative imperative, it is currently possible to have a home in Indiana powered completely by renewable energy, with the extra capacity to charge an electric vehicle. See my next column to learn how to supply your power, heating and cooling, and transport needs at home with current technology.

+++

Sidebar: An expert panel, commissioned by the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs, spent the last year surveying the electric vehicle horizon. Their timely 80-page report, Plug-in Electric Vehicles: A Practical Plan for Progress, released earlier this month, addresses the barriers to the million electric vehicle goal and associated interrelated strategies that would contribute to success. http://www.indiana.edu/~spea/news/tep_press_release.shtml

Ten Strategies to Beat High Gas Prices

Some experts, including AAA and the US Department of Energy, warn of a potential summer rerun of July 2008 gas prices, when the national average reached $4.11 per gallon. Remember outraged citizens demanding suspension of gas taxes, prosecution of oil companies, and the call to “drill here, drill now?” SUV sales plummeted along with the stock value of their manufacturers. Toyota Priuses were snapped up with long waiting lists, while Hummers became white elephants and eventually were discontinued. Rural housing demand dropped as shorter commutes became popular.

Many have apparently already forgotten 2008. The Washington Post reported that sales of mid-size sport utility vehicles jumped 41 percent in the first 11 months of 2010, led by vehicles like the Jeep Grand Cherokee, which average about 18 miles per gallon.

A number of signs indicate, however, that the days of cheap gasoline may be over. In 2010, Chinese auto sales rose nearly 50% to 13.6 million vehicles and China became the world's biggest auto market by units sold and the second largest importer of oil, behind us. The 2010 IEA World Energy Outlook noted that global conventional oil production peaked in 2006. Generally speaking, when demand exceeds supply, prices trend upward.

Consider these ten actions you can take now to reduce your risks of higher fuel costs while also reducing environmental impact, improving your quality of life, and enhancing national energy security:

1. Trade for a fuel-efficient, alternative-fuel or electric vehicle. Surviving manufacturers have ramped up their offerings of vehicles that get more than 30 miles per gallon. Check out fueleconomy.gov.
   
2. Move closer to your work, school, and essential services. Evaluate potential locations using walkscore.com, transit maps, and bike route maps.
   
3. Carpool. If you can’t move or you don’t want to trade your Yukon Denali, carpool with friends. If you attend or work for a university or a large corporation, they may have a carpool program with perks like special parking spots and free rides home for family emergencies. For students, faculty and staff at Indiana University, carpools get a discounted parking pass and a marked spot near the door, and you can find a carpool match with zimride.com.
4. Drive less. Consolidate trips. Plan ahead.
5. Let your fingers do the driving via your computer keyboard or cell phone. Sign up for online bill paying and banking.
   
6. Slow down - each 5 mph you drive over 60 mph is like paying an additional $0.24 per gallon for gas.
7. Service your vehicle regularly. Keep your engine tuned, your filters clean, your tires properly inflated and use the recommended grade of oil. This could save you 10% of your fuel bill.
   
8. Enjoy the bus or shuttle. Text or read safely while somebody else drives. IU students, faculty and staff can get a pass for the entire campus/city bus system. K-12 students get a free ride in those cool yellow buses. Teach your children how to ride the bus or walk or bike to school. Bloomington Shuttle buses operate on a regular schedule between Bloomington and Indianapolis International Airport.
   
9. Telecommute. Ask your employer about their policy. Utilize online virtual meeting software or conference calls to cancel some of your road trips.
10. Use muscle power. Bike, walk, jog or skate and enjoy the great outdoors in better health. Get your workout and your commute done at the same time, for free. Progressive employers provide perks like secure bike storage, showers and changing rooms.
    

Learn to thrive within your means, while others curse forces they deem beyond their control.

The Impossible Library - Revisited

Four years ago, a majority of the 540 residents of Chrisney, Indiana decided they wanted their own public library branch their kids could walk to after school. They had no money to build a library, no viable existing buildings or partnerships for a shared storefront library, their public library district refused to support capital or operating costs for a new branch and the town had no money or bonding capacity for the project. The local school district cited legal risks in sharing the Chrisney Elementary Library media center with the public. If the folks in Chrisney wanted library service, they had to drive about 25 miles round trip. Andrew Carnegie would be appalled, but this is becoming common throughout rural America as consolidation of public schools and libraries is the norm to save property tax money.

But this was clearly a town that was not willing to give up on an idea they deemed critical to their civic identity and the quality of their children’s future. I was repeatedly amazed to see a quarter of their population show up for planning meetings. As the architect performing their feasibility study, my brain said “this is impossible, walk away” while my heart said “there’s got to be a way to pull this off.” The way was clear - build a new library with virtually no operating costs.

After months of consideration, the North Spencer County School Corporation agreed to donate an ideal one-acre site with street frontage that also backed up to Chrisney Elementary School’s wooded outdoor learning lab. The town sweetened the deal by offering to provide free sewer and water service and site maintenance for the life of the building. Over 100 local residents signed up to volunteer at the service desk of the new library. This was a deal too good for the Lincoln Heritage Public Library to refuse and they agreed to accept a new net-zero-energy library branch from the Town of Chrisney, should they succeed in finding capital funding for such a facility, without relying on the bonding capacity of the LHPL. And, oh yeah, there’s that net-zero-energy thing.

All that remained was coming up with an affordable design for a solar-powered public library, funding it, bidding it, and building it. No precedent existed.

Undaunted, my team at my former employer, Browning Day Mullins Dierdorf Architects, designed a net-zero-energy library and the Town of Chrisney applied for an Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs grant that provided the bulk of the funding for this $478,000 project. The community raised $66,000 for their local match in an incredible six weeks. This illustrates, I think, a little-known fact – community buildings that push the clean technology envelope in the pursuit of education are grant magnets.



An 8.9-kilowatt grid-tied photovoltaic system (just under Indiana’s worst in the nation net metering limit of 10 kilowatts) was designed to produce more than enough power for this all-electric building that employs geothermal heating and cooling and old-fashioned passive solar design. Transparent solar panels roof the Learning Power Pavilion that provides an outdoor classroom for the elementary school’s outdoor learning lab.

Did it live up to the hype? Does this little library really produce as much electricity at it uses?

A year has passed since the library opened and I was anxious to see how it had performed in its first full year with real people, real plug loads and real weather, which included a brutally cold winter. I asked for the first year’s utility bills.

Every electric bill for the full year came up with $0 due and all had a net credit! They actually generated over 1800 kilowatt hours more than they used. No gas bill. No water bill. No sewer bill. The town maintains the site. The library district provides a librarian. The elementary school students stroll across school property to get there. Everybody wins.



Sometimes it pays for small towns to dream big. Sometimes that is the only feasible way. Just ask the parents reading with their kids in Chrisney Branch Library.

Why Conserve Water?

A local journalist recently asked me, “Why conserve water here in South Central Indiana when we have an unlimited supply?”
It is indeed comforting to have a 10,750-acre reservoir in our back yard and 44 inches of annual rainfall. Water conservation was not a consideration in Atlanta, either, prior to their historic drought in 2008. When the water level of their 38,000-acre Lake Lanier dropped 21 feet, revealing the foundations of houses that had been torn down in the 1950s to make way for the reservoir, water conservation suddenly became an issue. Even if we manage to dodge the drought bullet, wasting water does come at an increasing cost, including some costs we rarely consider.
One hidden cost associated with water use is the amount of energy we use to pump, filter, heat, cool and retreat water before putting it back into the water cycle. When the City of Indianapolis began investigating their energy use and their greenhouse gas emissions, they were surprised to discover that their second largest electrical energy cost was for pumping water. Heating hot water can account for as much as a third of home energy bills. Chlorine and other chemicals required to filter and treat potable water and sewage constitute another hidden cost.
For Indiana University Bloomington, where 11,000 students reside on campus, water use is a $3.4 million annual cost (combined water, sewer, and storm water), not counting the substantial energy cost of pumping and heating water. Although campus building area increased by 480,000 square feet since 2004, water use has been reduced by over 24% through simple but effective conservation programs initiated by IU Physical Plant, saving millions of dollars that can be spent on educating students.
The greatest associated cost of wasted water may well be the environmental and health costs of pollution associated with fossil fuel combustion, which provides the energy to pump, process, and heat our water. We all pay these costs indirectly. Air and water pollution already impact the quality of our water supply. Climate change, population growth, and increasing consumption will provide increasing stress to our water quality and quantity and make it necessary for all of us to work together to conserve this critical life-supporting resource.
“When oil runs out, motors stop. When water runs out, life stops.”
Turkish official

Linchpin Driven to Switch

I enjoyed Spring Break in exotic, sunny Bloomington where I decided to catch up on my reading. So what does a professional change agent who leads and teaches organizational change read for fun? Uh, books about change management? Yes! And I have three current bestsellers you must read if you want to boost your horsepower as a catalyst for change, even if the target of that change is yourself.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard – Chip Heath and Dan Heath

You have probably already read the Heath brothers’ first bestseller, Made to Stick. If not, you may want to grab that to find out why some great ideas stick and others don’t. Their new book surpasses that essential first hit. In Switch, they use an analogy for our brain function that says we all have an emotional component, the Elephant, and a rational component, the Rider. They argue convincingly, referring to research and anecdotes, that both have to be reached to affect real change. They suggest techniques to direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant, and shape the Path using examples of successful change efforts around the world. This book is essential if you are trying to change your own behavior or perhaps that of a major university.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us – Daniel H. Pink

Pink returns! No . . . not her. I’m talking about Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind and now another bestseller, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. So, you think external rewards are the best way to motivate ourselves and others? Pink says that’s a mistake and he has plenty of research to back up his assertion that the secret to high performance and satisfaction is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. Intrinsic motivation trumps extrinsic motivation. In his words, “we know that the richest experiences in our lives aren’t when we’re clamoring for validation from others, but when we’re listening to our own voice – doing something that matters, doing it well, and doing it in the service of a cause larger than ourselves.” He examines three elements of true motivation – autonomy, mastery and purpose (AMP) and offers a practical toolbox of techniques to put these into action.

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? – Seth Godin

Seth Godin’s previous bestsellers, like Purple Cow, The Dip and Tribes are among the most dog-eared books on my shelf but this one is a level of magnitude more important than those previous jolts of inspiration. This book is about finding one’s unique value in a rapidly changing world where none of the old rules seem to apply. If you are just showing up for work, you are replaceable. He argues that we all need to become artists that do “emotional labor” whether we are waiting tables or bagging groceries or working for a major university. We need to be creative, passionate and personal, and we need to “bring our gifts to work” no matter what our job description. Godin finds indispensability at the intersection of dignity, generosity and humanity and he believes we all have an artist within. He suggests that our resistance from expressing our artist within is coming from our “lizard brain” which is full of fear of risk (the Heath’s Elephant) and he provides strategies for overcoming that resistance.

These three have considerable overlap and, especially when read together, they make a great Swiss Army knife for personal and organizational change management and an elephantine motivational kick to the lizard brain. Read them and become driven to switch to indispensability.

Back to the Future

You may have noticed less frequent postings to this blog lately. Allow me to explain. My spare time has been focused over the past few months on a quest to become the first Director of Sustainability at Indiana University and making the transition from one career to another. I start that new career on Monday.

For me this is a return to the beautiful Bloomington campus where I first learned about the foundational ecological concepts that guided my career as an architect and led me to focus on the sustainable design of buildings and communities. The Indiana University Task Force on Sustainability has been busy the past two years formulating a road map for a more sustainable campus and I am anxious to catalyze the implementation of that exciting strategic plan in collaboration with a cast of thousands. This is also an opportunity for me to teach, learn, lead, research and write in a career where my personal mission and what I get paid to do are in complete alignment. That is a my definition of a dream job.

Stay tuned as I head back to the future and attempt to have as much positive impact on my alma mater as it has had on me.