The program is expected to greatly boost solar installations.

According to Vice President Joe Biden, the solar financing plan that sprouted in Berkeley in 2007 will become a national model. The program, called Recovery Through Retrofit, creates a framework for cities, counties and states to set up tax districts that allow residential and business property owners to install solar panels and make other energy efficiency improvements. The investment will be paid off over a 20-year property tax assessment.

Since Berkeley adopted its financing plan, cities around the nation have adopted similar models, and California, New York, Texas and 11 other states have passed legislation making it easier for municipalities to create their own financing plans. The federal plan and those adopted in most other cities allow property owners to make other energy-efficiency upgrades as well, including installing new windows, insulation and weather stripping.

Berkeley’s plan aims to eliminate the up-front cost of solar installation and to attach the debt to the home and not to the property owner (the assessment stays with the property, not the person). Property owners pay no money up front but pay about $180 a month on their property tax bill, an amount that is offset by the energy saved from generating solar power. The plan, along with federal, state and utility rebates, allows property owners to nearly break even on their investment. According to the city’s energy department, of the 40 original Berkeley participants, 38 have completed or nearly completed solar panel installation.

Denver is notorious for its urban sprawl.

At the G20, President Obama said he would phase out fossil fuel subsidies as a way to combat climate change.  Recent reports from the International Energy Agency and other institutions point out the scale of those largely hidden subsidies and how they contribute to global warming.

According to Steve Kretzman’s of the Institute for Policy Studies, on an annual basis, globally, there are at least $250 billion dollars in global fossil fuel subsides, and some people think that number is closer to $400 billion. Kretzman believes the discontinuation of such subsidies will be quite profound for climate change mitigation.  He points to a study from OECD earlier this year that showed that if the $300 billion dollars in subsidies identified in the study were taken away, you would get a 10% – 12% reduction in global greenhouse gases.

Kretzman says that on the production side, a recent study shows $70 billion dollars going to the fossil fuel industry on an annual basis, while solar, wind, and energy efficiency get about $12 billion. That’s a massive market distortion.

Not surprisingly, politicians from oil-producing states immediately began defending such payouts to the fossil fuel industry as “tax incentives,” not subsidies.  However, upon examining the massive infrastructure required for automobiles running on gas, there can be no denying both the fiscal and environmental cost of a society based on the conventional automobile. Below are some statistics for consideration:

From the 2008 BP Statistical Review of World Energy: Americans consumed 6.5 billion barrels of oil in 2008, or 22.5% of world oil consumption.  China was second with 9.6%.

While some may argue that cleaner cars are coming down the pipe, the Umweltund Prognose-Institute in Heidelberg, Germany claims a car causes more pollution before it’s ever driven than in its entire lifetime of driving.

According to Runzheimer International, the environmental cost of one car breaks down as follows:

• Extracting Raw Materials: Produces 26.5 tons of waste and 922 cubic meters of polluted air.
• Transporting Raw Materials: Causes the release of 12 liters of crude oil in the ocean and 425 million cubic meters of polluted air.
• Producing the Car: Produces 1.5 tons of waste and 74 million cubic meters of polluted air.
• Driving the Car: Produces 18.4 kilos of abrasive waste and 1,016 million cubic meters of polluted air.
• Disposing of the Car: Produces 102 million cubic meters of polluted air.

Paved surfaces present another hidden cost of the car-based system.  Concrete or asphalt in roads and sidewalks create water pollution and require drilling, mining and transporting of gravel, cement and asphalt. Forty single-family dwellings require 40 times as much concrete in roads and sidewalks as a 40-unit apartment building on a single lot. Moreover, water, sewer, electrical, phone, cable and other services lie under the street and branch off into each lot, so sprawl housing uses much more of these materials.  If you consider that on

Consider that 233,333 square yards of roads and sidewalks per household are required when housing density is three households per acre.  However, only 7,000 square yards of roads and sidewalks per household are required when housing density is 100 households per acre.  That’s only 3% of what’s required for the less densely built scenario – a huge difference in needed materials and resulting costs.

When you note that citizens living in dense urban centers without a car are heavily subsidizing car users through taxes to pay for all of the required infrastructure, it becomes increasingly clear that such a market distortion bloats costs to the taxpayers and is taking a very large toll on the earth’s atmosphere.  Designing and building cities to be dense, pedestrian and bike-friendly locales with the necessary public transport for human mobility would seem the only way to adequately address climate change and the hidden subsidies of car-centric infrastructure.

Solar developers expect a reverse auction market to spur a large volume of PV projects in the state.

As California looks for strategies to meet its greenhouse gas reduction goals, finding ways to cost-effectively install renewable energy systems could be key. One creative approach recently proposed by the California Public Utilities Commission involves letting developers bid on contracts to install green energy projects in California. This “reverse auction market” feed-in tariff is designed to avoid scenarios like the one that developed in Spain when the booming solar market crashed due to the expiration of subsidies and the maxing out of a cap on renewable energy.

In the past, utilities have negotiated contracts for solar power plants that generate hundreds of millions of megawatts, typically located in the desert and taking years for big solar farms and transmission lines to be licensed and built. An auction in California would essentially let the market set electricity rates for photovoltaic projects that produce between one and 20 megawatts in California and can be built within 18 months.

Solar developers expect this proposal to spur a large volume of PV projects in the state. According to Adam Browning, the executive director of Vote Solar, a San Francisco advocacy group, the reverse auction proposal fills a big hole in California’s renewable energy program — photovoltaic projects that generate between one and 20 megawatts and can be built quickly and plugged into the existing transmission grid. Browning said that he think these photovoltaic systems will likely be built on otherwise unusable land, such as railroad rights-of-way or wastewater plants that have lots of roof space.

The proposal calls California’s three investor-owned utilities to hold a minimum of two auctions a year until projects generating 1,000 megawatts are installed. Solar, biomass, wind or geothermal energy projects up to 20 megawatts can be proposed. However, the utilities would not be required to accept bids for those greater than 10 megawatts.

Steven Chadima, vice president for external affairs for the Chinese solar giant Suntech America, said his firm favors the proposal. However, he hopes that the CPUC might consider a separate structure for smaller projects because he has concerns about the potential for a few large solar developers to dominate the auctions and skew the results toward big projects.

Read more: A ‘Reverse Auction Market’ Proposed
(New York Times, 8/28/09)

According to an initial list of partnered Indo-US cities that will participate in a joint training program on energy efficient and green cities, Mumbai (pictured) has been partnered with Los Angeles, Ahmedabad with Atlanta and Columbus; Bangalore with San Francisco; and Delhi with Chicago.

The US Department of Energy and the All India Institute of Local Self Government (AIILSG) have launched a joint training program on energy efficient and green cities in Goa, which will train Indian experts, universities, local governments and civic bodies on helping cities to move to solar powered energy.  According to Mark Ginberg, senior official with the US Department of Energy, twenty cities in India have already been lined up for this program and they will be partnered with cities in the US.  Ginberg notes that if India is able to generate 20,000 MW of solar energy by 2020, sixty Indian cities will be solar powered by that year.

According to an initial list of partnered Indo-US cities, Ahmedabad has been partnered with Atlanta and Columbus; Bangalore with San Francisco; Chennai with Denver, Delhi with Chicago, Mumbai with Los Angeles, Surat with Philadelphia and Vadodara (Baroda) with Edison, New Jersey.

Ginberg pointed out that Barack Obama has marked 60 billion dollars for energy efficiency and renewable energy, with five billion dollars set aside each for cities and states, federal buildings and low income families to migrate to renewable energy sources.

• Read more: 60 solar powered Indian cities by 2020: US energy official
  (The Times of India, 9/8/09)