Linking spending decisions, greenhouse gases, and social games

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Via the inbox, I get word of a company trying to develop an app/website to make the greenhouse gas impacts of your spending decisions plain.  Of course, they’d like your support to get started.

Many frustrated Americans would like to take climate action
into their own hands, but it’s hard to know where to start. Enter Oroeco.com.

“The basic idea is that every dollar we spend on products or services impacts the environment and society for better or for worse,” says Oroeco’s CEO, Ian Monroe, who also teaches courses on climate change and renewable energy at Stanford University. “The problem is that these impacts aren’t apparent when we’re deciding what to buy, particularly now that global supply chains have shifted problems half a world away. We are building a tool that automatically connects purchase data from debit and credit cards (via Mint.com) to scientific climate impact data – so you can track the climate footprint of your groceries, gas, airfare, home energy, clothing, etc. You can also see how you compare to your friends and earn points and prizes.”

There are lots of services to track home energy usage/impacts, like Opower and the now defunct but awesome Microsoft Hohm.  I’m not familiar with others that go beyond energy use to purchasing decisions.

Some communities try to inventory consumption impacts, like King County and the City of Minneapolis, but an app/game will probably be a lot more effective at reaching residents and consumers.

2012 Nice Ride by the numbers

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Nice Ride has released all the numbers for their 2012 season, and things are looking good.
  • Total number of stations increased 24%
  • Total rentals increased 26%
  • Total duration of rentals increased 36%
  • Rentals by Nice Ride subscribers increased 14%
  • Rentals by casual users (non-subscribers) increased 50%
  • The 2012 season peaked in June with 52,000 rentals, while the 2011 season peaked later, in July with about 49,000 rentals.

Distribution of usage among stations looks similar to 2011, with the notable exception that many more St. Paul stations were online in 2012.  Heaviest stations usage is still in the diagonal Hennepin Ave corridor between SE 4th Street and Lake Street in Uptown.

Notable changes in the data include the fact that Nice Ride is no longer including the gender of each rental rider, which means we’ll have a harder time determining if we’re addressing the gender gap.  They are also not giving us a list of subscribers like they did in 2011, so we can’t analyze that.

I may map the fluxes flows like I did last year, but I think someone has the jump on me.

What is a carbon tax worth?

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California has begun a historic cap and trade market in carbon, completing the first auction, with permits going for $10.09 per metric ton.  I’m not sure cap and trade and the offsets it allows are the right way to go. But when I read this, I wanted to understand what such a program might mean for an average Minnesota energy consumer (after all, California is a distant and foreign land).

Xcel Energy, the electricity provider for most of the Twin Cities metro, produced 0.5266 metric tons of CO2e per MWh in 2011.  At $10 per mt, that’s about $5.31 per MWh, or roughly half a cent per kWh.  The EIA says the average Minnesota residential consumption is 813 kWh per month.  This seems awfully high, but we’ll go with it.  At that rate, the average residential customer would pay an extra $4 per month on their electricity bill.

Natural gas is trickier to estimate an average for, although some 2005 data says perhaps 650 therms per year, per household, using metro assumptions about people per household.  That seems low.  We used over 1,000 therms the last two years, but our house is old.  At 0.005 mt of CO2e per therm, the tax would increase the price of natural gas 5 cents per therm.  If you use 1,000 therms per year, that’s about $4.50 more per month.

So if something like $10 per metric ton was imposed in Minnesota, residential customers might see a utility bill increase of $8 per month, or $96 per year.  The California Public Utilities Commission has proposed a means to eliminate that cost.  Residential customers would actually be paid a dividend from the revenue generated by the auctions, which they say would more than offset the cost of the carbon tax.  Commercial and industrial users are a whole other ball of wax I haven’t touched here, and higher energy prices probably means higher product prices.

All this is not to say that a carbon tax or cap and trade system is appropriate for Minnesota (or the US).  $10 per ton is likely too low, their could be serious equity issues with offsets and increasing energy prices, and other tricky stuff.  But at $10/ton, direct energy costs to residents probably wouldn’t break the bank.

$20 billion to protect NYC from climate change

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From WNYC:

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn laid out a massive $20 billion proposal Tuesday to combat the effects of climate change on New York City’s infrastructure as the region continues to assess damage and plan clean-up after Hurricane Sandy…

The plan was framed around two key issues: how to prevent flooding and how to safeguard infrastructure. It includes studies to assess what solutions – from manmade sea walls to natural defenses like sand dunes – could best protect the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods.

LRT plans, past and present

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The Transportationist posts this 1988 LRT plan developed for Hennepin County.  Obviously, the SW LRT route has moved and the “south” alignment has become freeway BRT.  Also note the dotted line, which I assume means tunnel.

In this plan, Minneapolis, especially the most dense parts, is well served by high-quality transit, with the exception of North.  In real life, if Bottineau goes with the LPA, 3/5ths of the regions high-quality, “fixed” guideway transit improvements won’t really serve Minneapolis at all (I’m including freeway BRT in the count of 5 since it’s been “converted” from the planned LRT. I’m also not counting Northstar).

Thinking about backup power

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The New York Times reports that post-Sandy “a chimpanzee could sell generators by the truckload.” From their story on the disaster-preparedness economy:

Ms. Giangeruso, who notes that last year, after the “Snowtober storm” on Halloween, her house was powerless for six days. “If we are talking in the neighborhood of $6,000, it is worth every dollar. If I could get it right now, I’d write a check,” she says. “The wives in this area don’t want jewelry for Christmas. They want generators.”

I was curious why this article didn’t mention renewables as a backup at all. Unlike generators, they can be used in non-emergency times to offset some of your utility costs. They also don’t require you to have a large tank (or pipe) of fossil fuel on-site at all times in case of power outage.

On Amazon, you can know purchase a 255 watt solar panel for $334. A 75 ah heavy duty battery will cost you $200. If I’m doing my math correctly, two of these batteries could run an efficient refrigerator for almost two days. You’d never have to worry about your mobile phone (a modern lifeline) running dry.

Given my household’s usage, just four solar panels would offset 30% of our annual electricity usage. A very rough ballpark estimate puts the installed cost, with batteries, at $4,000. Using current electricity prices, that system would have a 23 year payback without rebates, and 8 years with Xcel and federal rebates. Peace of mind during extended outages (however rare) should also add some value.

Depending on your willingness to accept risk, $4,000 or so for such a system might make sense. Does it make sense for a utility? Many mobile data/phone providers are starting to back up their towers with batteries specifically in response to emergency outages. New Jersey also apparently has 200,000 solar panels installed on utility poles throughout the state. Certainly large installations like this could have a climate benefit, but do they make a dent when it comes to emergency power? It seems liked they would have to be paired with distributed battery storage and some way to curtail per-unit usage in an affected area (no plasma screens during emergencies).

An engineering problem

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While it’s ridiculous to claim that avoiding the impacts of climate change is merely an engineering problem, it looks increasingly likely some mega-projects could be essential soon.

Market Urbanism points me to this infrastructure seminar on storm surge barriers for NYC.

The seminar culminated in the presentation of four conceptual designs of the storm surge barriers:

  • Michael Abrahams of Parsons Brinckerhoff proposed a flap-type barrier for the upper East River with a series of panels across the river that normally rest on the bottom, but are raised when a surge is expected.
  • Larry Murphy of Camp Dresser & McKee showed a barrier across the Arthur Kill with tide gates, parallel navigation locks, and a pedestrian draw bridge.
  • Peter Jansen and Piet Dircke of Arcadis presented the design of a barrier across the Narrows, just north of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. The barrier would consist of a pair of rolling or sliding sector gates spanning an 870-foot opening in the center, adjoined by 16 lifting gates with a span of 130 feet, and two lifting gates with a span of 165 feet.
  • Dennis Padron and Graeme Forsythe of Halcrow introduced another concept. They proposed a New York–New Jersey Outer Harbor Gateway, a barrier extending from Sandy Hook to the Rockaways, a 5-mile long system of causeway and gates. A key consideration of the outer barrier system concept is that it would not be intended to completely prevent surge waters outflanking the flood defenses at the extreme ends of the barrier system, but rather it would deflect surge energy and mitigate water levels in the Upper and Lower Bay to manageable levels.

Preliminary estimates of the costs of the barriers by the designers were $1.5 billion for the upper East River site, $1.1 billion for the Arthur Kill, $6.5 billion for the Narrows barrier, and $5.9 billion for the Gateway barrier system.

It will be interesting to see how these cost estimates compare to damage estimates in the coming weeks.

Traffic Safety Administration preparing for robot cars

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David Strickland, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, told an industry gathering sponsored by Swedish automaker Volvo and the Swedish Embassy in Washington,

“Automated vehicles offer an important and challenging method for reducing crash risk that we believes holds great promise,” Strickland said. He noted that human error was a factor in about 90 percent of the over 33,000 traffic deaths recorded in 2010. “We have the chance of … saving thousands and thousands of lives as” cars in use today are replaced with automated vehicles, he said.

Another interesting bit:

He declined to say when the government might propose safety standards for automated cars. Setting such standards would require the government to fundamentally rethink the way it evaluates auto safety, he said.

“We may have to depend on modeling and simulation of detailed traffic interactions that lead to crashes as opposed to the typical crash-testing model that we’ve used … over the past 40 years,” Strickland said.

Key questions will be whether the software in automated cars will be able to handle complicated driving situations and whether there will always need to be a human driver paying attention and ready to step in.

Also check out this story about Nissan implementing semi-robot cars without drivers even knowing about it.  There will soon be a camera and computer controlling some motors in between the steering wheel you hold and the actual steering column.