“Earl Haynes, of CGE Solutions, installed a blower door, left, in the front door of the columnist David Leonhardt’s home while conducting an energy audit. A blower door depressurizes a home, allowing a rater to measure air flow through a pressure ring in the fan and determine the amount of air leak.”Promise in a “Cash for Caulkers” home weatherization program
The one highly visible success of the stimulus program has been the cash-for-clunkers program. It induced a boom in vehicle sales this summer that clearly would not have happened otherwise.
The rest of the stimulus has created a lot of jobs “” 700,000 to 1.5 million, according to economists’ estimates. But it has done so in thousands of little ways: scattered construction projects, plugged-up school budgets and the like. Politically, these measures are not popular enough to create a groundswell for more of them.
And the economy still needs help. So White House officials are looking at creating a new version of cash for clunkers “” this time for home weatherization.
John Doerr, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and former President Bill Clinton have separately suggested versions of the idea to the White House. Mr. Doerr calls his proposal, which would give households money to pay for weatherization projects, “cash for caulkers.” Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, told me, “It’s one of the top things he’s looking at.”
The idea has a lot to recommend it. The housing bust has idled contractors and construction workers, who could be put to work insulating homes and caulking air leaks. Many households, meanwhile, would save substantial money “” not to mention help the climate “” by weatherizing their homes, research by McKinsey & Company has shown. All in all, a cash-for-caulkers program seems like a promising part of the jobs program for 2010 that Mr. Obama has suggested he is planning.
But I would also mention one point of caution: the details of any caulkers plan will matter enormously. Weatherizing a home, as I recently discovered, turns out to be a lot more complicated than buying a car.
For background, see “Energy Secretary Steven Chu on home weatherization: Saving money by saving energy.” The story continues:
This year, my wife and I had an energy audit done on our home. We were interested in finding out if we could save money and, given the attention that weatherizing was starting to get, I figured it could also make for good column fodder. For $400, an auditor spent hours scouring our house, with the help of a big fan he set up in our front door and an infrared camera. He produced a full-color, 13-page detailed report, informing us of the leaks in our house, and he was also willing to tell us which changes were usually a waste of money (new windows).
Even so, we are still trying to figure out which weatherization projects we should do. The whole package would probably cost $4,500 and save us something like $400 a year. We may not stay in the house nearly long enough to justify the investment.
Such concerns are typical. How do you find an auditor? How do you know whether you should seal a few ducts or pay $2,000 for new insulation? Which of the existing subsidies “” state and federal “” might you qualify for?
Mr. Doerr and Mr. Clinton are well aware of these problems. Mr. Clinton has sent the White House a memorandum written by his foundation staff that lays out the reasons people don’t weatherize their homes. Mr. Doerr, who sits on a board of outside economic advisers to Mr. Obama that is working on a formal cash-for-caulkers proposal, told me that his goal was to “keep it really simple so we can do it really fast.”
The Doerr plan would cost $23 billion over two years. Most of the money would go for incentive payments, generally $2,000 to $4,000, for weatherization projects. The homeowner would always have to pay at least 50 percent of the project’s total cost. About $3 billion would be set aside for retailers and contractors in the hope that they would promote the program, much as car dealerships promoted cash for clunkers. (Mr. Doerr says he owns no stake in any weatherization companies.)
The Clinton plan depends on the reallocation of clean energy money from the stimulus bill that has not yet been spent. It covers not just houses and apartments but also commercial and industrial buildings.
Perhaps most intriguing is its proposal to help homeowners and building owners who are nervous they will end up selling their property before a weatherization project has paid for itself. Under the Clinton plan, they could add the project’s cost to their long-term property tax bill, effectively splitting the cost with the next owner. The New York State Legislature approved such a program on Monday.
All these efforts would lead to more weatherization. But I would be surprised if they were enough to create a program as successful as cash for clunkers. Remember: Many homeowners could already save money by weatherizing their homes. And they are not doing so.
Obama: Copenhagen will “rally world” for climate change push
President Barack Obama touted the importance of next month’s climate change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, in spite of the event’s downgraded objectives.
Obama over the weekend acknowledged the meeting won’t produce a legally binding deal to cut emissions, but on Tuesday he insisted a political agreement in Copenhagen, the new goal of the summit, will have an “immediate” effect.
“Our aim there, in support of what Prime Minister [Lars Lokke] Rasmussen of Denmark is trying to achieve, is not a partial accord or a political declaration, but rather an accord that covers all of the issues in the negotiations, and one that has immediate operational effect,” Obama said in Beijing following a meeting with China’s president.
“This kind of comprehensive agreement would be an important step forward in the effort to rally the world around a solution to our climate challenge,” he added.
In Singapore over the weekend, Obama and other heads of state said the objective for Copenhagen would be a political agreement on climate change. Lower-level administration officials had already been downgrading expectations for a final binding agreement on cutting emissions.
Obama made the remarks after he and Chinese President Hu Jintao announced a series of joint “clean energy” agreements that Obama cast as a sign of progress on climate change. China and the U.S. are the world’s two largest emitters of greenhouse gas emissions.
The two nations have reached several specific agreements on low-emissions power and vehicles, the White House said. This includes establishment of a joint clean energy research center, building on an agreement Energy Secretary Steven Chu reached with Chinese officials in July. Other joint measures are aimed at spurring use of electric vehicles, renewable power, low-emissions coal and other technologies.
Deputy National Security Adviser Mike Froman stressed that the U.S.-China deal would add momentum to international efforts in Copenhagen despite the absence from the agreement of specifics on emissions-curbing measures.
“I think the agreement today reflected in the joint statement does give momentum to the Copenhagen process,” Froman told reporters. He acknowledged that “further specifics” must be fleshed out by negotiators.
China is believed to back a reduction in its emissions intensity “” which means emissions relative to economic activity “” rather than an outright reduction target.
Blown away: Wing power keeps growing in Texas
Can the U.S. produce 20% of its electricity from wind? The U.S. Department of Energy thinks it can get there by 2030.
That doesn’t sound so far fetched anymore. A couple weeks ago — October 28th to be exact — wind turbines provided about 25% of Texas’ power consumption.
Of course, that could have been in the middle of the night when the good people of Flatonia, Amarillo and Gun Barrel City — not to mention Houston and Dallas — were asleep. (Update: It was in the middle of the night. Three a.m. to be exact.) Spain topped out at 53% of grid electricity from the wind earlier this month, but that occurred at about 5 a.m. while most Spaniards were asleep.
But back in Texas, a little before 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday October 28th, the Lone Star State got about 6,223 megawatts from the wind. That’s a record. At the time, the total load was about 35,000 megawatts. That’s 17.8% of its power from the wind. (That’s not sleepy-time power usage. Texas power consumption peaked in October at 49,100 megawatts.)
What does this mean for Texans electric bills? They could be headed down. A recent report finds that wind power is replacing more expensive forms of power generation.
Going green in China, case by case
This region of Inner Mongolia, home to one of the biggest deserts in China, is being transformed into the site of a pine forest that will stretch across its low hills as far as the eye can see.
The local government’s tree-planting program is part of a plan to “assume our green responsibilities and build a civilized way of life,” Du Zi, the local Communist Party secretary, told energy executives at a conference last month in Beijing.
Also on tap: the world’s biggest plant to convert sunlight to electricity, built by First Solar of Tempe, Arizona, part of a 12-gigawatt wind, solar and biomass power-generating zone. And General Electric is helping the land of Genghis Khan cut wastewater emissions into the Yellow River, which borders the region.
“This shows what local leadership can do in China these days,” said Kenneth Lieberthal, head of the Brookings Institution’s China Center in Washington, which played host to Mr. Du and other provincial officials at the Oct. 21–23 conference. “They’ve gone flat-out.”
Regions are vying to outdo one another in a race to develop alternative-energy sources and reduce pollution. Gansu Province in western China is building a wind farm equivalent to about 20 nuclear power facilities. In the east, Zhejiang Province is installing solar panels on roofs. Beijing bans motorcycles from the city center in favor of electric bikes.
Their efforts demonstrate that China, the world’s largest producer of the emissions blamed for global warming, will continue to accelerate development of energy from renewable sources, even as it resists binding targets for reducing carbon emissions ahead of a U.N. summit meeting in Copenhagen next month aimed at forging a new treaty to curb greenhouse gases.
Some regional officials now see environmental projects as a way to bolster their economies after decades when companies were allowed to poison the air and water without penalties while expanding output.
Earning a profit by ending energy waster
The Community Preservation Corporation, a 35-year-old nonprofit lender that specializes in issuing mortgages to landlords of small buildings and properties receiving public subsidies, is offering $1 billion in credit to New York State apartment building owners.
The group’s new “green financing initiative” offers mortgages or refinancing to landlords who fix wasteful energy and water systems in their buildings.
The initiative presumes that savings from such retrofitting will be large enough for an owner to cover a loan with profit to spare, said Sadie McKeown, a senior vice president with the organization. As Ms. McKeown told an online seminar of 70 potential borrowers on Nov. 10, “we want to empirically show upside after a retrofit.”
The backers of the initiative include the government-controlled mortgage agency Freddie Mac, New York City and State public employee pension funds and a consortium of banks. These investors have worked with the corporation over the decades to assemble financing for buildings with low-income tenants, and now some of these buildings need retrofits to become profitable or saleable.
Michael D. Lappin, the Community Preservation Corporation’s chief executive, said the new fund was an effort to induce owners and lenders “” including his organization “” to reap value from fixing buildings as they age. Mr. Lappin said the idea for the initiative came to him last summer, when he commissioned a study of the energy costs in the corporation’s portfolio and found extreme variations. Some buildings were spending seven times as much for heat and hot water as other comparable buildings, he said.
Andrew Padian, an energy expert who joined the Community Preservation Corporation’s senior staff in March, said common building flaws wasted many thousands of dollars a year. These problems are as simple as boilers that send constant heat to apartments, stairwells with lights on when nobody needs them and landlords who refuse to install dishwashers, letting water costs run wild.
Proposed regulations in New York City would require landlords of older buildings to conduct annual energy audits and meet benchmarks for energy efficiency, or pay fines. The corporation’s initiative could give owners of buildings with low-income tenants a head start in finding fuel savings. The organization’s loans carry an interest rate of about 6 percent.
Since the program began last month, owners of 10 buildings have received $18 million in financing to fix up 725 apartments. The buildings include a 375-unit complex on West 110th Street, a 17-unit walk-up co-op on East First Street and a low-income garden apartment complex in Bedford Hills in Westchester County.
Some owners are refinancing existing mortgages with the corporation, while others are creating new ones. Mr. Lappin said he expected the fund to commit the full $1 billion, across the state’s cities and inner suburbs, by 2013.
Will Houston become an electric car capital?
Gas-guzzling Houston, bete noire of environmentalists worldwide, is planting the seeds of an electric future.
On Tuesday, Mayor Bill White and local electricity retailer Reliant Energy launched a plug-in hybrid program that includes 10 vehicle-charging stations around the city. Seven of the stations will be available to the public, and electricity will be free the first year, Mayor White said.
The move comes amid a marketing and lobbying push by several electric providers and car maker Nissan-which has an all-electric vehicle due in late 2010-to quicken the pace of car electrification and the same day that General Motors said its electric Volt is on track for commercial production a year from now. At The Wall Street Journal CEO Council on Tuesday, Nissan Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn said that by 2020, 10% of all cars sold will be zero-emission vehicles.
The “Electrification Coalition” called for “electricity ecosystems,” or select cities where the electric-car revolution can take root. But who knew that would include Houston?
Last week, Reliant (a subsidiary of NRG Energy Inc. and a member of the carmaker’s “Electrification Coalition”) and Nissan announced that they’d make the Texas city a “launch city” for the all-electric LEAF, due in late 2010. Reliant promised to install public charging stations and provide equipment to charge cars at home. Talk about taunting the devil in its own lair.
At first blush, it’s hard to imagine a city less amenable to electrification of the transportation fleet than this sprawling metropolis, criss-crossed by tentacular highways. Many of Houston’s more than 5 million inhabitants appear to think nothing of driving 30 miles to work on tricked-out pick up trucks getting 12 miles a gallon.
And many owe their livelihoods to the same oil-derived fuels electric car makers hope to displace. Houston is not only a big refining center, but home to ConocoPhillips and significant operations for the likes of Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Shell and BP.
There are plenty of challenges. Houston’s public charging stations, 4-foot long cyliners, can take 8 to 10 hours to fully charge a car, for example. Leave the hazard lights on. And the SUV-loving market here may still find electric cars unpalatable””at least until all-electric Ford pickups hit dealer lots.
For all that, Houston actually makes a lot of sense. Unlike many places in the country, Texas’ electricity grid isn’t under stress, for starters. And from an environmental perspective, it’s fairly clean, with a lot of juice coming from wind farms and natural-gas fired plants.
Electricity-guzzling cars that up the demand for natural-gas for power generation could even make the region’s fossil fuels industry happy, says says Kenneth Medlock, an economist at Rice University. And since most cars would charge at night, Texas’ booming wind-energy industry would find new customers, too.
In the end, America’s fourth-largest city epitomizes the country’s love affair with the car. Unlike in green urbs like San Francisco or Seattle, it’s all but impossible to live here without wheels””so they might as well be electric. It will probably be cheaper and easier to electrify urban sprawl than rein it in altogether.