California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

Climate Change is Threatening the World's Food Supply

by John Lawrence, August 17, 2019

A new United Nations report details how climate change is making it more difficult for people to be able to feed themselves especially in poorer parts of the world. As diets tend towards more beef, beef cows are replacing land previously used for growing crops. Raising beef uses ten times more resources than poultry, dairy, eggs or pork. Besides that cows belch and fart methane. According to a New York Times article: "Since 1961 methane emissions from ruminant livestock, which includes cows as well as sheep, buffalo and goats, have significantly increased, according to the report. And each year, the amount of forested land that is cleared — much of that propelled by demand for pasture land for cattle — releases the emissions equivalent of driving 600 million cars."

Fortunately, there are now some alternatives to the beef cow which deliver the same meaty product sans cow - Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat. Some smart people have figured out how to create a burger which tastes like a hamburger without running a lot of fodder through a cow. Both are plant based products which look, taste and feel like the real thing. If these products become widespread, the beef cow could be eliminated from the planet, and this would reduce carbon emissions. It would also free up many acres of land on which crops could be raised that would more efficiently feed people.

Both burgers are vegan, halal and kosher. It's unclear at this time whether or not the ingredients are organic and non-GMO. Soy is one of the main agricultural products that is genetically modified so that it can be sprayed with glyphosate (Monsanto's Roundup). cnet reports: "The Impossible Burger contains mostly organic ingredients, while the Beyond Burger doesn't. The Beyond Burger is strictly non-GMO, whereas Impossible Foods recently faced backlash about using genetically modified ingredients that contain the pesticide glyphosate." Well then, how can it be mostly organic, and how can the Beyond Burger that's non-GMO not be?

The New York Times article continues: "Barring action on a sweeping scale, the report said, climate change will accelerate the danger of severe food shortages. As a warming atmosphere intensifies the world’s droughts, flooding, heat waves, wildfires and other weather patterns, it is speeding up the rate of soil loss and land degradation, the report concludes." Already people are migrating all over the world as they face food shortages and eventual starvation.

“You’re sort of reaching a breaking point with land itself and its ability to grow food and sustain us,” said Aditi Sen, a senior policy adviser on climate change at Oxfam America, an antipoverty advocacy organization.

The report said that activities such as draining wetlands — as has happened in Indonesia and Malaysia to create palm oil plantations, for example — is particularly damaging. When drained, peatlands, which store between 530 and 694 billion tons of carbon dioxide globally, release that carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a major greenhouse gas, trapping the sun’s heat and warming the planet. Every 2.5 acres of peatlands release the carbon dioxide equivalent of burning 6,000 gallons of gasoline.

And the emission of carbon dioxide continues long after the peatlands are drained. Of the five gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions that are released each year from deforestation and other land-use changes, “One gigaton comes from the ongoing degradation of peatlands that are already drained,” said Tim Searchinger, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank, who is familiar with the report. (By comparison, the fossil fuel industry emitted about 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide last year, according to the institute.)

Citizens of planet earth take notice. Unless you change the ways you're conducting business, planet earth is not going to be able to sustain you. Consumer oriented lifestyles must be replaced by lifestyles that are more sustainable. Plant based alternatives to beef are a step in the right direction. More birth control would be another to reduce the population. Conversion to renewable energy on a large scale would be the third. Airplanes and the military are large greenhouse gas emitters. All these steps and more must be undertaken if humanity is to survive on planet earth. Humanity is under threat of extinction from just 120 years of industrialization and fossil fuel development. It is time to change course or the earth will cease to be habitable. Whoever thought that the automobile and the airplane were good things?

Can China Save the Planet?

Published on Thursday, December 13, 2018 by Resilience.org

It now appears that China—while still leading the world in both coal consumption and carbon emissions—is also leading the way forward to the clean energy future

by Craig K. Comstock

 

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China already has the world's largest installation of wind turbines. (Photo: Sandia Labs/flickr/cc)

Lack of foresight isn’t new in politics. As John F. Kennedy wrote in Why England Slept (1940), that country had snoozed through the rise of, and German rearmament under, Adolf Hitler. Until the European war began, the British government, ill prepared to fight, hoped desperately for peace. (Kennedy’s father was U.S. ambassador there.) Following the Nazi blitz against London, the United Kingdom was rescued after the U.S. got into the war, prompted by the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

The illusions entertained by the British government after Munich were minor compared with the behavior of leaders today, leaders who are neglecting and even denying the warning of climate scientists.  So far, the fossil fuel purveyors and their allies in government have prevailed with propaganda about a claimed lack of scientific consensus and about such irrelevancies as cold weather in winter.

Part of the problem is that nearly all of the public doesn’t understand the difference between the usual exaggeration of politicians and the normal professional caution of scientists. Part is that many adults assume climate change will be tolerable in their own lifetime, not understanding the 25-50 year lag between emission of greenhouse gas and its full effects. And part is the widespread investment by individuals in petroleum-powered vehicles, furnaces, and the fossil-fuel-powered electricity reliably supplied to appliances in homes, offices, factories, schools, and stores.

However understandable the lack of foresight is, however, the consequences are unprecedented: never in recorded history has the entire planet been threatened as it is now by the accumulating blanket of invisible greenhouse gases.

It’s hard to think of another disconnect as grave as the one between warnings by scientists and familiar courses of behavior, in this case the continued use of fossil fuels, other sources of dangerous gases, and deforestation.

 

It’s hard to think of another disconnect as grave as the one between warnings by scientists and familiar courses of behavior, in this case the continued use of fossil fuels, other sources of dangerous gases, and deforestation. What can be done to heal the disconnect?

A current book asks Will China Save the Plamet? The author, Barbara Finamore, served as the China representative of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Her story gives first-hand material less for answering this question than for showing how a big country can  move from defensive nationalism to global leadership in starting the transition to a green economy.

A skeptic could say that China was just far-sighted enough to seize a commercial opportunity to become the world-leader in manufacturing objects needed for the transition to a green economy. These objects include solar panels, wind turbines, large batteries, and electric vehicles.

But that country, itself heavily reliant on coal, emitting more carbon than any other, is at least talking about the danger of human-caused climate change instead of denying it, and taking certain initiatives to reduce its emissions. Finamore shows how China made a change between the Copenhagen climate-change conference of 2009 and the Paris accord of 2015. Defensive assertions of national sovereignty were replaced by a recognition of a global challenge.

This change may have been prompted in part  by a desire to escape the international opprobrium of being the world’s  largest emitter of carbon. (The U.S. is in second place in terms of the absolute amount, and in first place only in per capita emissions.)

Since China’s rate of economic growth has become less manic, it has an opportunity to ramp up its transition to green energy and meanwhile to relieve its many large cities of at least some of the air pollution that has been epic. Nonetheless, even if China doesn’t “dig” coal, its coal industry remains huge, with many workers who will need new jobs. Meanwhile, it is exporting some of its coal, which improves the air pollution in China but continues to worsen the global greenhouse effect.

“It now appears that China—while still leading the world in both coal consumption and carbon emissions—is also leading the way forward to the clean energy future."

 

On the skeptical side, Finamore writes “it now appears that China – while still leading the world in both coal consumption and carbon emissions – is also leading the way forward to the clean energy future. That said, it also faces major challenges that some believe may be insurmountable.” However, she then deftly tells the stories of several persistent and ingenious Chinese leaders of the energy transition.

For example, she tells about taking a delegation from  Stanford to meet Huang Mung, who started by making solar water heaters and then projected a $740 million center for the manufacture of solar energy deices of many kinds. She tells about Wan Gang who established at his university the Clean Vehicles Technology Center, championed the production of electric cars, and served as national Minister of Science and Technology. She tells about Ma Jun, who worked out an entire program for the financial support of green technology.

Most of all, she reports on what she calls the government’s “war on coal.”  China is fortunate that the fossil fuels that invisibly produce global warming, mainly coal, also quite visibly foul the air of its cities and other industrial regions. Lucky because while people can easily remain unaware of the invisible, the choking result of coal burning is as close as one’s surgical mask on the streets of Beijing and hundreds of places in China. (Well, really much of the country, as two of my siblings witnessed when they toured the Yangtze region, and learned the local euphemism about “heavy fog.”)

Useful as Finamore’s book is as an account of what is going on in China, it also suggests what could be done elsewhere. Our own country is now going in the wrong direction, dismissing as a “hoax” the scientific consensus on global warming, making it easier to produce and burn fossil fuels, and slapping huge tariffs on solar energy devices manufactured abroad.  These policy choices are not criminal, merely tragic.

Finamore’s valuable book offers hope, not the false hope of the British leader after the 1938 Munich conference with Herr Hitler, but the realistic hope of a U.S. environmental lawyer, the author, egging on China to accomplish what her own country is so far failing to do.

© 2014 Resilience.org

New Study Shows Urgently Needed 100% Renewable Transition More Feasible Than Ever

Published on Thursday, November 09, 2017 by Common Dreams

A complete transition from fossil fuels would create millions of jobs and save money while protecting planet from harmful emissions

by Julia Conley, staff writer

 

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At the COP23 summit in Bonn, Germany on Thursday, German and Finnish researchers presented a study showing that 100 percent renewable energy is possible by 2050. (Photo: Report cover detail/Energy Watch Group/Lappeenranta University of Technology)

A transition to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050—or even sooner—is not only possible, but would also cost less and create millions of new jobs, according to new research presented in Bonn, Germany on Thursday.

The German non-profit Energy Watch Group (EWG) teamed up with Finland's Lappeenranta University of Technology to present a study at the COP23 climate summit.

"If we have any hope of preventing absolute civilization challenge and catastrophe, then we need to be bringing down carbon emissions with incredible rapidity, far faster than it can happen just via normal economic transition."
—Bill McKibben

The results of the study, according to a forward written by EWG's president Hans-Josef Fell, show "that a 100% renewable electricity system is an effective and urgently needed climate protection measure. A global zero emission power system is feasible and more cost-effective than the existing system based on nuclear and fossil fuel energy."

To achieve the Paris Agreement's goal of limiting the warming of the earth to well below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the report argued that "we need a two-fold strategy: to reduce greenhouse gas emissions down to zero and to remove surplus carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. A key aspect of this strategy should be a transition to an emission-free global economy, based on 100 percent renewable energy."

Moving to this system through the use of solar and wind power, combined with establishing energy storage systems, would bring the total cost of energy from more than 80 dollars to about 60 dollars per MWh.

Thirty-six million jobs would also be created by 2050 through the transition, compared with 19 million energy jobs in the current economy, according to the research.

In an interview with Deutsche Welle published Thursday, author and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben agreed with the study's assertion that a complete shift from fossil fuels is necessary to avoid even more dangerous effects of global warming than those the planet is already experiencing.

"If we have any hope of preventing absolute civilization challenge and catastrophe, then we need to be bringing down carbon emissions with incredible rapidity, far faster than it can happen just via normal economic transition," McKibben said.

While entirely possible from an economic standpoint as the new research shows, the political feasibility of the transition is another story. "That depends entirely on whether we can build movements large enough to break the power of the fossil fuel industry that holds us where we are," said McKibben. "To go further what we need are many people in the streets demanding action and pushing governments to move much, much faster than they're currently contemplating."

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Power to the People (Solar Power, That Is)

From the San Diego Free Press, August 24, 2017

(Source: Sullivan Solar Power)

By Mark Hughes

You may have heard the news: San Diego leads the country in kilowatts of solar panels installed, beating out LA and Honolulu — and by a lot. What’s going on? It’s like cell phones all over again. At first, just a few wealthy cranks have them, but before you know it, everyone and their kid has one. Was there a memo?

Maybe this is you now: driving home from work, you can’t resist flicking a glance at the solar panel array on your neighbor’s roof and wonder yet again if they pay SDG&E anything. Or, you’re out for a walk and see that trim, shipshape house you’ve always admired now sports the increasingly fashionable blue/black panels. You put on a brave face, but it’s starting to eat at you: panel envy. The good news is that it’s nothing to be ashamed of and you’re far from alone. Pull up a seat, lie back, and let’s talk.

Sure, you know all the valiant reasons for putting panels on your roof: a heroic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, doing your part to make America energy-independent, and that little thing about helping save the world from the worst ravages of climate change. Yeah, yada, yada, yada. Let’s get real here. After years of paying the highest rates in California — heck, higher than almost anywhere in the country — you long for payback time!

Good. Now that you’ve spit those words out, how about we really let our guard down? Is this thought stirring inside you too: there’s maybe nothing quite so uplifting and airy as that pious feeling you’d get from admiring your very own solar panel array? You’re pulling your weight now, buddy, a CO₂ footprint no bigger than a ballerina’s toe-point.

Let that sink in, relax into it like a warm bath on a winter’s afternoon. Don’t let that pesky voice, for a minute at least, kill the joy. Picture getting a bill from SDG&E just once a year—and smiling because they owe you money. Oh yeah, that’s payback.

Okay, drift down from the fantasy and let that other voice have its say now. The one that says you can’t have your own array because 1) it costs too much; 2) you live in an association with a common roof; 3) your roof faces the wrong way/or you’re an apartment dweller; 4) the project is complicated and daunting; 5) you’re probably not going to live in the house for more than 3 or 4 years; 6) your electric bill is small, meaning long or no payback; 7) other objections here.

Whew, what a list! How many wet blankets does it take to smother a warm, happy feeling? But maybe, just maybe, there are ways to dry those blankets out, fold them nicely, and put them on the shelf. Let’s go through them one by one.

Conversion to Renewable Energy is Going Too Slow to Avoid Catastrophe - Part 4

by Frank Thomas and John Lawrence

Part 3 can be found here

Extremely Slow Progress Converting to Renewables In Face of Huge Increase in CO₂ Emissions: What Are the Trends?

Parts 1 and 2 address the psychological denial mechanisms and economics behind the world’s ingrained obsession with increasing GDP rates, despite their environmentally cancerous impact. Naturally, developing countries want the same material benefits from boundless GDP growth and unlimited resource development that advanced countries have long been exploiting. This abets the idea that, as long as people make money from despoiling the atmosphere and climate, the Market should have its free reins forever. The Market is assumed to be the best arbiter of our planet’s ecological stability, but that is patently false. In reality the Market exploits the environment and now it is becoming clear that increasing population and economic growth fueled by fossil fuels do so as well.

Problem is we humans are collectively so busy polluting and proliferating Earth’s air, land and oceans at a speed and scale unheard of even in geological time frames that we can’t imagine or we are simply ignoring the oncoming train of environmental destruction.

While many positive advances in renewables are being made, rising coal, natural gas and energy demand outweigh any reductions from recent strong growth in renewables in a few countries. Renewables and hydro are still a TINY 9% of primary energy consumption today (Table 5) (9% for China, 7% for India – Table 6). They are forecast to be a TINY 20% of energy consumption in 2030 and no more than 25% in 2040. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecasts the same weak growth in renewable electrical generation shares reaching a miniscule 22% in 2015 and 25% in 2040.These weak shares explain why EIA and others expect CO₂ emissions to soar ahead from 36 billion tons today to over 50 billion tons in 2050 (Part 2: Table 1).

Part 4 addresses how FAR we have to go to reach a hydro-renewables mix of 70% of global energy consumption by 2050 (Table 8). Cataclysmic global warming can only be stemmed by considerably speeding up practical community-based and disruptive technically-based solutions for sustainable fuels, energy efficiency and lifestyle adaptations (that reduce energy demand) like Scandinavia, Germany, and California are remarkably doing in their own way – without disturbing economic growth.

Tables 7a/7b show Scandinavia already gets 41% of its primary energy use and 65% of its electricity generation from hydro-renewables. When including nuclear, Scandinavia’s primary energy was 56% decarbonized and its electricity generation 88% decarbonized in 2013. Many countries would be pleased to be in this position in 2050! Germany’s electricity was 35% decarbonized in 2013 rising to 44% in 2014. California’s electricity was a promising 35% decarbonized in 2013 … thanks to wind energy. This share can be increased significantly by accelerating solar PV (photovoltaic) applications.

With strong industrial economies, they are showing it’s possible to succeed in uncoupling economic growth from dependence on carbon-intensive fuels. Over past years, these regions have been experiencing growing economic activity, falling greenhouse gases and electricity prices. In 2014, Germany’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and electric power usage declined and wholesale electricity prices fell to a record low while the economy grew 1.4%. Germany’s CO₂ emissions are a small 3% of global emissions vs. 28% for China and 15% for the U.S.

Scandinavia, Germany and California have resisted the temptation to consider renewable energy sources as merely modest and not dominant contributors to energy supplies and energy security. Barring a quick way to bury carbon safely and effectively – a path Germany and Scandinavia feel is reprehensibly risky, if not a geologically impossible solution – these countries have accepted that coal reserves must be drawn down slowly during the 2015-2050 conversion phase to renewables and hydro. Researchers at the University College London have calculated that 88% of coal reserves must stay buried after 2030. This means oil usage must be cut 16% and coal 60%.

Response by the fossil fuel giants? In NO WAY is this ever going to happen.

Recent oil industry commentary summarily dismisses as ‘unrealistic’ any idea hydro-renewables can largely replace 70% of fossil fuels by 2050  and avoid a CO₂ earth-warming spiral and mega environmental disaster. Oil firms are one voice in reassuring investors that fossil fuel reserves will be the dominant energy source throughout the 21^st century. 

• BP’s sustainable report says the concept of unburnable carbon ‘overstates’ the potential financial impact on the value of its oil reserves. In brief, fossil fuels are a necessity and will still be supplying 80% of global energy consumption in 2030 and after.

• Shell’s CEO Ben V. Beurden also asserts that rising energy demand - especially in China and India - will preserve the value of its assets. In his view, “At most, renewables (^i.e. sun, wind, biomass) will be supplying 15-20% of global total energy consumption in 2035.  After all, less than 1% of total primary energy comes from sun and wind sources today.”

• This of course ignores the fact that sun, wind and biomass (excluding hydro) provided 17% of Germany’s primary energy consumption and 21% of its electricity generation in 2013 (Table7b) rising to 27% in 2014; wind provided 39% of Denmark’s electricity in 2014;  California and a few states are generating 10-24% of their electricity from wind and 2-6% from solar energy. Shell’s CEO sees low-carbon natural gas as vital to CO₂ reduction when it begins to replace dirty coal – although gas-fracking does produce very toxic methane leaks. BUT, most forecasts show coal’s 40% share of global electrical generation barely changing in the next 35 years. Thus, Shell’s CEO supports a high carbon tax on CO₂ emissions to make natural gas competitive with coal and speed up technical development of carbon capture and storage.           

• Chevron’s CEO John Watson has recently remarked, “We are going to be in fossil fuels for a long time.”

• Exxon has told investors, “We are now confident none of our fossil fuel reserves are in danger of being stranded”

In short, the oil industry is saying the world cannot survive without a heavy dependence on fossil fuels …  despite worsening climate change taking place as cumulative atmospheric CO₂ levels trend dangerously above IPCC’s 2050 budget of 1.9 trillion tons (Part 2: Table 1).

Coal and oil are about 75% of global CO₂ emissions and 65% of global primary energy consumption. Over 2 billion people in developing countries, many using polluting, unsustainable traditional biomass, will get electricity for the first time in coming decades – electricity produced mainly from burning dirty coal. And these people have contributed the least to causing climate change. This is just another reason why renewables and energy efficiency solutions must be globally shared and installed rapidly on a grand scale – especially in China and India that combined account for 34% of global CO₂ emissions. More than 80% of global energy increase by 2035 will come from non-OECD countries like China and India that are heavily dependent on dirty coal.

When examining Table 8, be aware it took 16 years for renewables to go from 0.5% of primary energy use to a tiny 1.1% in 2006; 7 years to double to a tiny 2.2% in 2013. Now renewables have just 35 years to rise 40 times the 2013 level to 60% of primary energy use in 2050 – as Table 8 dramatically illustrates. The speed and scope of this transformation to renewables are critical in light of the extraordinarily short geological time frame and scale in which human-generated CO₂ emissions and destructive change are occurring. The world is in a stair-step race to convert to 70% hydro-renewables to avoid irreversibility of disastrous climate change and + 4°C temperature rises by 2050.

The obstacles to implementing renewables at this rate seem insurmountable what with oil companies and politicians supported by oil companies bound and determined to exploit to the full measure all the fossil fuel resources in the ground today. As long as GDP becomes the sine qua non of economic development, it's hard to see how oil companies can be persuaded to "keep it in the ground" when so doing would seemingly decrease GDP. However, as Germany and Scandinavia have shown, decreasing fossil fuel usage can actually lead to an increase in GDP. Economic conventional wisdom is on a collision course with the long term survival of Mother Earth particularly a planet that humans could survive on.

Can the Climate Withstand the Onslaught of Capitalism?

Naomi Klein author of "This Changes Everything, Capitalism vs the Climate," has placed her hope for fighting climate change in civil disobedience such as the efforts of the Rosebud Sioux who have called passage of legislation regarding the Keystone pipeline an act of war. In her book she calls this “Blockadia”:

Blockadia also stretches into multiple hot spots in Canada … For instance, in 2013 … a remarkable standoff was playing out in the province of New Brunswick, on land claimed by the Elsipogtog First Nation, a Mi’kmaq community whose roots in what is now eastern Canada go back some ten thousand years. The people of Elsipogtog were leading a blockade against SWN Resources, the Canadian subsidiary of a Texas-based company, as it tried to conduct seismic testing ahead of a possible fracking operation. The land in question has not been handed over by war or treaty and Canada’s highest court has upheld the Mi’kmaq’s right to continue to access the natural resources of those lands and waters – rights the protesters say would be rendered meaningless if the territory becomes poisoned by fracking toxins.

Celebrities such as Mark Ruffalo are also becoming part of Blockadia as fracking impacts on their beautiful estates. In a recent email, Ruffalo stated:

A ban on fracking in Maryland would set a strong example for elected officials around the country, one that promotes informed choices based on sound, independent science and places constituent safety and well-being first. What happens in Maryland impacts all of us.

The time to ban fracking is now.

Note that fracking has already been banned in New York state and there is a movement afoot to get it banned in California and other states as well.

Fossil fuels are not only causing damage by releasing CO₂ into the atmosphere. Oil trains transporting millions of gallons of oil are derailing and burning towns and polluting rivers and aquifers. Oil pipelines also are breaking and leaking their effluent into America's aquifers. Will the American people rise up and put an end to this insanity? Time will tell.

Some scientists believe that what happened on Easter Island will happen to life on earth as a whole. Eminent Australian scientist Professor Frank Fenner, who helped to wipe out smallpox, predicts humans will probably be extinct within 100 years, because of overpopulation, environmental destruction and climate change. Fenner said that climate change is likely to be the cause of our extinction. “We’ll undergo the same fate as the people on Easter Island,” he said. More people means fewer resources, and Fenner predicts “there will be a lot more wars over food.”

Polynesian people settled on pristine Easter Island around the middle of the first millennium AD. The population grew slowly at first and then exploded. As the population grew the forests were wiped out and all the tree animals became extinct with devastating consequences. Around 1600 the civilization began to collapse, and had virtually disappeared by the mid-19th century.

Evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond said the parallels between what happened on Easter Island and what is occurring today on the planet as a whole are “chillingly obvious.”

Frank Thomas' bio:

A graduate of Bowdoin and Dartmouth colleges, I was an independent management consultant and entrepreneur working with Dutch international shipbuilding and offshore oil/gas contracting firms for many years. In recent years, I have been a trainer for such firms as ING, DSM, Siemens, the Dutch Ministries of Foreign and Economic Affairs and the Ministry of Justice in The Hague and have been a teacher/lecturer at The Hague University and NTI University in Leiden. Training and lecture subjects covered have included: finance, legal writing, commercial law, report writing and presentations, advanced English writing and conversation.

I'm an independent-minded Mainer, a liberal-conservative. Over some time, I have come to loath the mind numbing indoctrination inherent in the "ideological-pure-money-talks" game poisoning our national dialogue and directions on extremely serious structural problems. Such times of striking change call for a fusion of the  "brightest and best" ideas/reforms for prudently balancing legitimate public interests, social concern for the common man's welfare with a thriving market-innovative capitalism.

San Diego Group Gets Award to Expand Solar Power Use at Condos and Apartments

by John Lawrence

Everywhere in San Diego you see solar panels being installed on single family homes and large businesses. But hardly anywhere do you see them going in on the large number of local apartment buildings and condos. Now the Department of Energy SunShot initiative has made a $712,000. grant to San Diego's Center for Sustainable Energy (CSE) to study the reasons and do a pilot project to implement solar in such projects. Condos and apartment buildings represent a huge amount of rooftop real estate which could be gathering in the sun's rays to provide energy to the occupants within.

For example, the condo project I live in, of which I'm President of the HOA, has three buildings each of which has approximately 6000 square feet of flat roof on which solar panels could easily be installed. There are 48 units here. In addition there is a smaller building which houses the rec room and laundry which has about 1000 square feet of flat roof. The only things currently up on the roofs are the individual AC units for the individual condos.  These buildings are located in El Cajon where the intensity of sunlight is high with very few cloudy days the whole year.

CSE will supposedly study the barriers to solar implementation by condos and apartments. I can tell you what they are right now since I have been on a quest to have solar installed at our complex to no avail. The way the laws are written, there is no way to pay the upfront costs that solar implementation would entail. It would require approval by every owner within the condo project and a special assessment to each of them to pay for it. This makes it for all intents and purposes impossible. Similarly, a loan from a bank or credit union is not practicable either.

Also, the cost of a solar installation cannot by law be added to the monthly HOA fees since it is a capital project, and monthly HOA fees can only go to certain types of maintenance such as painting, pool maintenance, janitorial costs etc. The state laws and local ordinances are very specific about how monies can be spent in a condominium project.

Most homeowners have a lease option. That means they lease the panels from the company that installs them. The beauty of this arrangement is that there are no upfront costs and the monthly payments on the lease are less than their monthly payments to SDGE. This makes it a no brainer for detached single family homes. Unfortunately, solar installation businesses don't seem to have a leasing option available for condo projects. We've contacted several installers and this is the case with all of them. I have urged them to make one available but so far without much success.

While California continues exponential growth in solar energy with rooftop system installations more than doubling in the past two years, condos and apartments are being left out of the progress in replacing fossil fuel energy with renewables. Originally, we were thinking of just enough solar installation to cover the electricity needed for common area needs such as lighting, laundry area, rec room HVAC, sprinkler system and vehicular gate. We didn't think it possible that we could implement solar for all the individual owners who are billed individually by SDGE. However, CSE is looking into just this possibility which would make solar installation that much more desirable as it would not only save the HOA money but it would save all the individual homeowners money.

This is from CSE's website:

The project’s goal is to expand use of a special utility billing arrangement, called virtual net metering, that allows the “virtual” sharing of energy generation credits from a single solar system among multiple tenant accounts with separate meters, such as apartment buildings, commercial offices and shopping malls. This ability to share the credits while bypassing the need to connect the solar power to every meter greatly improves the value proposition of installing solar for property owners as well as providing tenants with direct utility bill savings.

“Nearly all of the residential solar energy installations in California have been made on single-family housing, yet a third of the state’s residents live in multi-unit dwellings, and in addition, there are tens of thousands of multimeter commercial facilities,” said Ben Airth, a senior manager at CSE. “The regulations that permit virtual net energy metering were put into effect in California several years ago, but for a variety of reasons both solar contractors and property owners have not taken advantage of the potential for energy and cost savings.”

Airth said that CSE estimates there are more than quarter of a million properties in California that could take advantage of shared solar resources, yet less than 100 are doing so now within the service territories of the state’s three large investor-owned utilities.

If the lease option were widely available to condos and apartment buildings, solar energy implementation in California would surge to new heights. This would also provide many new jobs as demand for solar would skyrocket. I have emailed CSE to promote one of their pilot projects at my cond complex in El Cajon. In addition I could chronicle the project right here on the San Diego Free Press. This would help not only to disseminate information regarding solar implementation in multi-unit dwellings, but El Cajon is probably the most sun intensive locale in the whole state of Califiornia.

Currently, many communities are mandating that solar be a part of new developments. Cities like Tucson, AZ, Carbondale, CO and Chula Vista, CA have developed requirements or incentives for new homes to be “solar ready.” Since new apartment buildings and condo projects will probably be a large part of new developments as many college graduates these days are not in a position to buy detached single family homes as a result of the load of student loan debt they are carrying, it makes sense to install multiunit, multitenant shared metering.

CSE has also been active in advising local communities in how to streamline and simplify its permitting procedures for solar installation so as to speed up and reduce the costs of that part of a project. The California Solar Permitting Guidebook addresses provisions of the Solar Permitting Efficiency Act (Assembly Bill 2188) signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown. California cities and counties must adopt streamlined solar permitting processes by Sept. 30, 2015. California is the first state to mandate standardized solar permitting processes.

Incentivising solar installation by means of relevant financing plans for condos and apartment buildings is an important aspect of future solar development. Solar needs to become ubiquitous in San Diego and in California in general. Unlocking practical financing alternatives will help make it so. Let's hope that one of the pilot projects to make this happen occurs right here in San Diego. In particular did I mention that a particular condo project in El Cajon would be ideal?