Photo: John AlbrechtToday, Chicago is overflowing with architects who know the ins and outs of the LEED rating system, but just a few years ago John Albrecht was one of the first. He worked on the Center for Green Technology — the city building that started it all -– as well as several green building projects that followed. He’s now in private practice, with the firm NELSON. He shared his thoughts on Chicago’s success.

Q. Describe how Chicago got started with its green building initiative.

A. It was a confluence of events stated in the late ‘80s. It was a landscaping and beautification proposition that [Mayor Richard M. Daley] undertook. Over the course of those 10, 15 years, there was gradually more aggressive beautification and greening of the city with, literally, plants. We’re talking planters. We’re talking parkways. We’re talking baskets on buildings, on light poles. The city was transforming, and good things were being said about the city, and I think that altered his mind to taking it one step further when somebody mentioned green buildings.

At about that same time, there was a ComEd catastrophe where the city lost a significant number of elderly due to a heat wave. ComEd’s facilities failed in a number of locations. They settled the matter out of court for a large sum of money, which then went on to fund green buildings. It gave the city a pot from which to advance that cause. And the city had an advocate for green building in the mayor, and in the commissioner of the Department of the Environment. So they had the opportunity, and they had the interest.

And they had LEED come along. The LEED rating system was just arriving on the scene in pilot form. The mayor [was approached by the AIA] and agreed to try it out on a building on the West Side, and the building has come to be a showcase for LEED in the region.

That was about the time I came on the scene. I volunteered to be the architect test pilot, and got heavily involved. That building on the west side was a success in many regards, so the mayor decided to take it further with four more LEED buildings. I was involved in that, and in one of those buildings, I was the project manager.

Q. Was the primary motivation environmental protection, or did Chicago see this as smart for business development, and smart for the long term growth of the city?

A. The mayor’s looking out, ultimately, for the city. If this were a perfect world, everybody would be looking out for everybody at the same time. But in fact it’s a little territorial, and he’s looking out for the citizens of Chicago. What he found out was that the greener the city got, the more popular the city became, and the better the PR, and the more visitors, the more people want to move to the city — these are all good things. I would say it had a political, and an economic, and an environmental benefit. It’s created a legend that is unparalleled. What’s happened in the city of Chicago is phenomenal, and I give him full credit for that. Was it all about the environment? No, it’s all about the environment plus what does that do for my town.

Budget has been the big issue. That’s the Achilles heel of green buildings, right? There are additional costs involved. There are design costs in getting a green person on the team, and making sure the project’s as green as it can be. It takes some additional effort. Firms are doing that now, but back when the mayor started pushing it, it wasn’t commonly done.

Q. In terms of numbers, what do you mean? How much more expensive would a project be if you were taking a green approach?

A view of downtown from the solar-panel-covered roof of Chicago Center for Green Technology.Photo courtesy of vyzl via FlickrA. It depends on how green the project is. The [Chicago Center for Green Technology], which is a showplace project for every green technology that can be stuffed into four walls, I honestly don’t know but I would guess that building was probably 50 percent [more expensive]. But on the other hand, how much payback has there been? They have several thousand people coming to see that building, in a neighborhood which wouldn’t see this otherwise. There’s buzz there, and they’re people put to work there in several programs. If you did a cost-benefit analysis, I say it would pan out.

The same could be said of the green roof on City Hall. A million and a half dollars is a lot of money that didn’t need to be spent. You could have patched the roof. But I would argue, in hindsight, that you could not afford the good PR — if you to pay [a PR firm] for it in the marketplace — that project has brought the city. People come to the city and that’s on their list of things to do, and they’re disappointed they can’t get up there. There are prizes around the city and those are two of them.

How much more does a building cost, green versus traditional, is really the fair question, right? I would say anywhere from 2 to 5 percent, depending on how many green features it has.  

Q. Were there zoning or code changes the city had to make?

A. They did make them. They didn’t have to, but they saw the benefits. That happened about the time Sadhu [Johnston, chief environmental officer for the city] arrived. That was one of the first things he did. He called a meeting on barriers in city code and zoning for green buildings. And as a result of a full-day, 50-person session, a long list was developed and it was filtered and crystallized over the course of a year. And subsequently the city launched its Green Permit Program, which found a way to reward green buildings both with quicker permits and some savings on the review end. As far as zoning goes, and planning goes, the city strongly encourages green building and rewards green building projects that come along with zoning approvals that are a little prompter, and maybe a little more beneficial to the developers. So the message is time and money. If I’m a developer, even if I’m not interested in saving the universe or the planet, I may do this just for the sake of time and money. The mission is to make it so tempting that it happens with or without good motives, and that’s okay with me, actually. I don’t have a problem with that.

Q. Is it easier to build from the ground up when you’re trying to be environmentally friendly? Wouldn’t it be better to make use of existing buildings?

A. Good question. If you’re demolishing a building and you do it thoughtfully and you recycle as much as possible, you might break even in terms of what’s better, one or the other. Generally, most of the demolition that occurs before a new building goes into the ground is kind of sad. But LEED encourages and rewards thoughtful deconstruction, recycling of product, reusing ground-up concrete, etc. I’d rather see us reusing our old [building] stock. That being said, it’s tough sometimes to make a building work to what you need it to work for
. Say, if you have a two-story police station that just isn’t big enough, you might spend more time and money than you would if you just demoed it thoughtfully — recycling and reusing, and doing it according to the program.

Q. What can other cities do to replicate what Chicago has done?

A. As a matter of fact, there has been a lot of replication done by other cities, including Boston. In 2005, 2006, the city of Boston sent a squadron to see what we were doing and how we were doing it. That is very common. Visitors come from all over the world to ring the mayor’s doorbell and want to find out how we did it.

ICLEI is an organization that’s all about local governments and it develops template-type approaches to sustainable this, that, and the other — templates that other cities can use — and they based a lot of what they developed on what happened her.

It’s had a big ripple effect already. The Green Building Council is very proud of Chicago. They’re coming here again for GreenBuild 2010. Nobody else has had two GreenBuilds. GreenBuild is a huge plum that the city is going to have had twice now. It speaks to the city, and what’s going on here, and the importance of it.

Q. Are people surprised that it’s Chicago — not Portland, say, or Berkeley?

A. That’s part of the charm. Chicago has the old square shoulders, kind of rough and tough, we’re going to figure this one out, we’ll solve this problem and we’ll do it with sweat and tears. And for this city to be thought of as more green than some of the softer shoulder cities, I think that’s a good thing. Compared to other cities that are — I don’t want to use the word flaky — a little further out, this city is grounded in how it does business, and thank you, it will stay grounded. For this city to be thought of as green paradise, as a mecca, that’s a dream come true.

Reno replaced the lightbulbs in its famed Reno Arch with LED lights to conserve energy.Photo courtesy of davegriffiths via FlickrWhen cities are struggling to keep cops on the street and teachers in the classroom, giant solar arrays or towering wind turbines might not be the most attractive line items in the budget. But several cities around the country are finding ways to get smart about energy, and at the same time saving money and pumping up their eco cred.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, as part of its ongoing Smarter Cities initiative, recently identified 22 U.S. cities as the cream of the crop for their investments in renewable energy, promotion of energy efficiency, or conservation of energy.

The NRDC will select other cities according to 11 additional sustainability factors — including transportation, water, and urban planning — in future reports. (Also read about the cities Grist views as sustainability stars in our Cities of the Future series.)

“We wanted to start with energy, given the links between our energy production and consumption patterns and harm to health and the environment,” says Paul McRandle, research project director. According to the NRDC:

Half of all the electricity produced in the U.S. is derived from coal, the burning of which releases heat-trapping pollutants, mercury, sulfur dioxide, particulates and other health-threatening smog pollutants. While climate change is a worldwide issue, 75 percent of all heat-trapping emissions are generated in the world’s urban areas. Reducing energy use and emissions in cities is therefore fundamental to any effort to reverse the trajectory of global warming.

A few happy stories from the new report:

• Reno, Nev., replaced 2,076 light bulbs on its famous Reno Arch with LED bulbs. Reno also installed wind turbines on the roof of its City Hall.
• Long Beach, Calif., has solar-powered pay stations at three downtown parking lots, and its city trash cans come with solar-powered trash compacters and recycling bins.
• Springfield, Ill., is testing the power of peer pressure by sending residents power bills that compare their household energy usage either to their neighbors or to the city average. Lower energy users get smiley faces; higher-than-average users get a frowny face.
• In Boston, the Massachusetts Port Authority put 20 small-scale wind turbines at Logan Airport.
• Dallas, Texas, purchases a whopping 40 percent of its power from renewable sources, mostly wind.

The NRDC selected its 22 cities based on responses to the survey it sent to 655 U.S. cities with populations higher than 50,000. The Smarter Cities team also identified high-performing cities by crunching numbers previously collected by federal agencies and private institutes.

Just as Portland, Ore., became a smart city role model in 1993 when it became the first to adopt its own climate action plan, these 22 cities may put a little friendly peer pressure on others. Because nobody wants to get a frowny face on their report card.

As former planning director for Salt Lake City, and as an artist wanting to create live/work spaces for other artists, Stephen Goldsmith has played a key role in bringing mixed-use development to the downtown core of his city. He now teaches at the University of Utah’s College of Architecture and Planning. He also founded the Temporary Museum of Permanent Change, a virtual museum that frames the city’s massive downtown construction efforts as an ongoing exhibit of cultural and social ideas.

Q. Describe your early meetings with the developers of City Creek.

A. They weren’t looking at developing City Creek. They were looking at doing a facelift on two malls. What I went to them with was, don’t do a facelift on the two malls — consider taking these two malls down and reconstruct them as mixed-use residential.

The mayor thought I was nuts for going to do this, that there was no way in hell they were ever going to take down one mall, let alone two malls. But unbeknownst to them, I used the church’s architectural firm to do the drawings. They had to do this secretly at the time. They were already in the design/development phase for the facelift on one of the malls. And they were just going to do a similar project for the other mall [Crossroads] as a way to insure that Nordstrom would not leave the city.

The mall was going into receivership. They wanted to keep this as quiet as possible. So when I said to the mayor, “Look, I want to raise the bar as high as we can for redesigning the downtown. Let me do this,” he thought I was crazy. By the time I got the drawings over to the presiding bishop, who was in charge of all development in the city, he was very curious about what I was presenting. He was very courteous. I met with him in his private office, and he said that this was quite interesting. He and I had known each other for some time because of work on previous urban design issues. He had always questioned whether mixed use was the right thing to do in the downtown. But I could tell that he was intrigued. It was about a month later that I left my position as planning director. Then, about six or eight months later I got a call from a city council member saying they were more interested in this than I might have imagined, and what developers did I recommend. I suggested that local developers should be the first ones approached with this concept, for obvious reasons.

When I heard that they were moving forward and saw their first schematics, and they uncannily resembled the drawings we had done, I was very pleased. Although there are many parts of the City Creek project that I wish were different, the fact is we’re probably getting 70 to 80 percent of what we had hoped for because we’re getting mixed-use residential in the urban core. That’s a good thing.

Q. What has happened in Salt Lake City over the years? How was it built initially?

A. Building the city around the grid — these 10-acre blocks, these mega blocks — certainly creates problems and opportunities. The mega blocks were created as part of [Mormon leader and city founder] Brigham Young’s design and were basically self-sufficient live/work spaces, if you will, where people had a plot of ground to grow their food and maintain self-sufficiency.

But now, there’s a fine grain that’s lost in the city. We don’t have short blocks. Eight of our blocks is a mile. One of our blocks is the same as nine blocks in Portland, Ore. So yes, it’s set up in a unique way, but it creates all sorts of problems as well as opportunities.

Q. Was Gateway the first major mixed-use development in Salt Lake City?

A. I want to emphasize the fact that mixed-use parts of our city did exist before. One could argue that mom and pop stores were mixed use. Back in the day, proprietors would work downstairs and live upstairs. I think the original plat design, where people lived and worked in the same block, in terms of growing their fields, that that was a form of mixed use.

But in terms of major investment in mixed-use projects, the first projects where we had to change the zoning were part of the Artspace projects that I created here in downtown Salt Lake City. These were live/work spaces for artists and others, where we adaptively reused historic warehouses to create affordable housing and work space. So we had to create mixed-use ordinances to permit those. Those were the first, and those are what jumpstarted the opportunity for Gateway, which is a block away from our Artspace projects, to actually take hold.

So, as is often the case in many cities, the artists come in, begin to convert underutilized, often industrial, parts of cities and then from there the gentrification begins. Gateway is the logical consequence of that behavior here.

Q. How has Gateway been doing, in terms of promoting the benefits of mixed use?

A. I think it has been incrementally helpful. In fact, I think to a large extent, the City Creek Center project has learned from the mistakes of Gateway. Certainly the city has. They’re still cataclysmic developments — that means that one developer comes in and develops a large area and they never have the kind of diversity that we want. There’s nothing organic about them. They’re really controlled environments. The same is true of the City Creek project. But I think we’ve learned a little bit more about the porosity of what these projects need to be, in order to contribute with helpful spillover to other parts of the surrounding neighborhoods.

If a mall has just four doors going in, people get in there and they’re stuck. They do everything there. They eat there, they go to the food court, they go to the theater, they do all those kinds of things. Then there’s no spillover to the surrounding area. But if you have three dozen doors going in and out that lead to the surrounding blocks, where people can spill out of one and spill into the other, that kind of porosity is vital if you want to create places that can actually contribute to the long-term development of the city, as opposed to the isolated, cataclysmic [effect]. They’re sort of like gated communities, right?

When the developers come in with their formula to do these things, they specifically try to avoid the spillover effect. They don’t want that. They want to keep people there. They know that there may be housing that goes up around them, or that businesses feel better around them, and one can argue that that too is a spillover, but in terms of the kind of spillover that happens when places happen organically — small pieces that aggregate over time — those are the places that provide long-term richness. And I think people do get bored of the Gateways of the world because they’re so predictable. No matter where you go, you’re always going to find the same ingredients, the same stores. The only thing that changes is the color of the stucco.

Q. What is the city’s role in projects like this? How can the city influence development in a way that makes it environmentally sustainable?

A. One of the things I recommend is to make sure the public transit goes in first, or simultaneously — not as an afterthought. The other thing would be to not allow for the kind of cataclysmic investment, where you have large plats of land — in this case we’re looking at more than 20 acres — to a single developer, which creates these homogenous places. So it’s better for a city to create ordinances that say single owners can’t amass that much land for mixed-use development. That would be a preference on my part.

Another thing is to make sure there’s a requirement of not only inclusionary zoning for housing — so you’re hitting the needs of a range of incomes — but also inclusionary zoning for business. In other words, they have to provide affordable space or ownership for local business, so there’s no uprooting of local business for chain stores.

Another thing to do is to make sure they’re building in adequate green space — not only to manage urban heat island effect issues, but also to make sure that the social space and the people with dogs and other outdoor needs can be met.

There’s also a host of other high-performance green building elements — harvesting rainwater, a certain percentage of daylighting spaces — but also high-performance infrastructure. Such things like permeable asphalt, so any time a developer goes in and builds these things, they’re helping to recharge the aquifer.

Pat McCrory, former mayor of Charlotte, speaking at a transportation summit in 2009.Photo courtesy Willamor Media via FlickrPat McCrory, elected mayor of Charlotte in 1995 at the age of 39, had no idea transit would be the defining issue of his tenure as leader of the city. “I did not run on the issue of transit whatsoever,” he says. But when he took office, he came across a land use plan that showed Charlotte was in dire need of different ways for people to get around the city. He took the parts of the plan that seemed viable and turned the project into a national role model for transit-oriented development.

Q. What are some examples of things you saw in the plan that you thought could definitely work in Charlotte, and things you thought would never work?

A.There were five transit corridors on the 25-year transportation plan. We needed to pick one of the corridors. Now I had a bias for one of the corridors going toward the airport. But I also wanted to pick the one that would work, not the one that was politically of interest to me or other board politicians. I wanted the experts to pick the one that would work the best and have the best chance to get federal and state and local funding. So I consulted with my transportation experts, and they picked one line where there was an existing railroad track that would have the sufficient density to support a light rail line.

I had to be a role model, along with others, to say we’re going to pick the rail line that works the best and not the one that the politicians necessarily want. Which was a major lesson learned, because other cities had not done that.

I also went and started visiting other cities to see what worked and what didn’t work. One of the lessons learned was that some cities implemented transit in the wrong places. They felt political pressure or community pressure.

Q. Where did you visit?

A. I mainly targeted Sun Belt cities that had similar growth patterns as Charlotte. I went to Atlanta, Miami, Denver, Dallas, Portland. Later on during the process Salt Lake City, San Diego.  I mainly avoided the northeastern cities because their density — there was no comparison. And their growth patterns were so much different. So I tried to visit cities with similar growth patterns that Charlotte would encounter during the next 20, 25 years.

Q. How did you put together your group of experts?

A. The first thing I did was put together 10 community leaders. I called them the Committee of 10. This was what I did in the first year that we started this process. They were community leaders in business and neighborhoods. I wanted a good cross-section of people but I wanted the committee to be rather small and functional so it could have some sway.

Q. What did Charlotte have in place at the time?

A. Nothing. We had a dilapidated bus system — a very dilapidated, poorly funded bus system that was incurring increasing future debt and low ridership. And again, part of the goal was not just to put light rail in but to get a total transportation plan and a major portion of that was buses. The media concentrated only on the light rail but frankly, about 60 to 70 percent of the funding in the first five years went to improving our bus system, which wasn’t sexy but it was desperately needed.

Q. Why was it needed? Were there problems with traffic congestion?

A. Well, I started reading the report and looking at the next 25 years and realized we had certain corridors in our city that current road infrastructure could not support the future growth, even with widening of those roads. First of all, we were running out of space to widen the roads. There was only so much room for the impervious space. And second, the road engineers told me that after we add a lane or two, that’s it for the next 25 to 50 years and that we’d need to look for other choices for transportation. And it made sense to me.

Q. Do you think that would have been politically viable if it had been physically possible? Would people have rather added more roads, wider roads?

A. Oh, absolutely. There was not a strong clamoring for transit whatsoever. It was very low on the agenda.

Q. How did you get over that?

A. We sold it. We sold the merits. We sold the future, and that this would be something that would prepare our city for the future. This wasn’t for today but it was for tomorrow. And I got the business community. The business community was an important partner in this process, including the development community. They were right at the table with me and others the whole time.

Q. Describe how transit helps them.

A. We had many corporations that had moved from the north down to the south that understood that there was going to be a need for transit. Many of them had ridden transit in their past homes. Many, many people were from the Northeast, the West, and the Midwest who had experience with transit and knew that sooner or later the road capacity would be filled. They clearly understood that because they were not all from Charlotte. They were transplants. That helped. These were the top business leaders who got it, more than the public, actually, at the time. And they also recognized that if they can’t get people to and from work in a reasonable amount of time, they move, because it impacts their productivity.

From the development standpoint, I think the developers recognized they could make money, which is something I’m all in favor of. If that increases the value of property, that means I get more taxes to pay for police and fire and other roads. The development community was divided, but we got a good coalition of developers to go, “You know what? Long term, this could make sense.”

Solar power nerds are fond of an estimate that 100 square miles of Nevada desert — filled with solar panels — could provide enough electricity for the entire United States. But right now, solar supplies just 1 percent of the country’s energy. Cost is one reason that figure is so low. Unless you’re an independently wealthy solar hobbyist, chances are you can’t afford the $30,000 or so it takes to install panels at home.  That’s why Gary Nystedt, as resource manager for Ellensburg, came up with a way to bring solar power to all the people in this smallish city in eastern Washington State. The city asked its residents to pitch in what they could — the minimum contribution was $250 — and built the country’s first community solar project, or “solar garden,” in 2006. Ellensburg now pumps an average of 102,000 kilowatt-hours of solar power into its grid each year. That’s enough to completely power about 10 average U.S. homes.

The Beginning

Ellensburg, population 15,000, lies just east of the Cascade Range. Unlike drizzly Seattle, 93 miles to the west, the sun-drenched town gets more than 300 days of rays a year. (But note: Solar power can work anywhere the sun shines.) Residents would often call the city, wanting to know how to install solar panels. “But there was always a problem,” says Nystedt. “It was too expensive, or the wife didn’t want ugly panels on the house, or there was too much shade from trees.”

Brainstorming with colleagues at a solar conference in 2003, Nystedt came up with an innovative solution — a city-owned solar installation that could feed right into the city’s grid, but would be financed like a cooperative, open to anyone who wanted to invest. The city council liked the idea, but wanted pledges of at least $53,000 from residents before moving forward. Nystedt put the word out, and got $103,000 in response.

Ellensburg already owned a sunny spot of land next to a major highway, which had the added advantage of advertising the awesomeness of solar power to 15,000 drivers every day. The two-acre site is now home to 10 huge solar arrays and there are plans to add six more arrays, 10 concentrating solar collectors (which look like TV satellite dishes), and eight small wind turbines.

“The thing I love is that it requires almost no maintenance,” says Nystedt, who goes out on rainy days with his scrub brushes to clean dirt and bird poop off the panels. “There are no moving parts, other than electrons. You build them and they just sit out there and generate energy.”

The Dreamers

Gary NystedtGary Nystedt, 58, is a 20-year Ellensburg resident who originally hails from Nebraska. His vision brought the solar project to life, but he’s just as passionate about other forms of clean energy — including not using energy in the first place. As resource manager for the city, he also oversees Ellensburg’s conservation programs, such as home weatherization. His interest in solar energy dates back to his days in architecture school in the late ‘70s, when he studied passive solar design.   

Recent law school graduate Gary Shaver was working as a consultant for the state energy program when he was called in to help Ellensburg plan its solar system. Since Ellensburg was the first-ever community solar project, Shaver was flying blind. “There were no models to follow, no incentives, really, to speak of,” he says. “It was very much uncharted territory.” (See related Q&A with Gary Shaver.)

Stanley DudleyStanley Dudley, 91, is one of the city’s 90 resident investors whose donations fund the project. As a retired engineering professor, he likes the idea of clean energy, but would rather come visit solar panels in the park than install them at home. His house is too far away to get any electricity generated by the solar park, but he doesn’t mind. “My panel sends electricity into the grid. What do I care if I don’t get the electricity?” he says. “Somebody gets it. It’s the same environmental benefit.”

Walt Kaminski, before he passed away in 2004, brought the local university on board, which turned out to be an invaluable source of free labor. As dean of the Department of Engineering Technology at Central Washington University, based just a few miles away from the solar site, Kaminski got students to write grants, design the adjustable racks that hold up the solar panels, and create the project’s logo — the letters ESC for Ellensburg Solar Community, with rays of sun shooting out from the curve of the C.

The Outcome

In the years since Ellensburg’s project stirred its first few electrons, the arrays have generated more than 217,000 kilowatt-hours of energy — enough to power 4,800 homes for one day, and keep more than 304,000 pounds of greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere.

The project launched with 120, 300-watt photovoltaic panels, the sparkly, blue-tinted panels composed of semiconductors (in this case, crystals) that convert sunshine directly into electricity. The second phase added more panels and 21.6 more kilowatts of energy in 2009.  The third phase, underway now, will diversify the project, adding more panels, as well as solar concentrators and small wind turbines, all for an additional 24 kilowatts.

Still, Nystedt concedes that the solar panels contribute just a “tiny speck” of the city’s overall power needs — 0.05 percent, to be exact — the rest of which Ellensburg purchases from the Bonneville Power Administration. The BPA operates several hydropower dams along the Columbia River and one nuclear power plant about 80 miles away.

Only the 25 homes closest to the solar arrays are actually getting the energy generated there. (All solar power gets channeled into the grid through the nearest transformer, which only serves a certain part of the city.) But 90 of the town’s 9,000 homes are investing in the project. “If you extrapolate that percentage out to a big city, like Seattle, that could be significant,” Nystedt says.

The Money

So far, the solar community project has cost roughly $500,000 — $264,800 from residents, $53,000 in a grant from the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, and $184,400 from the city.  

Ellensburg pays roughly $6,100, total, back to its citizen investors each year. The amount per person depends on how much they invested. For example, if someone’s contribution was one percent of the total cost, they get a credit for the value of one percent of the total energy produced by the solar park. In a quarter when the solar park generated 13,000 kilowatts of energy, the individual credit would be $6.55. (The value for each kilowatt-hour is based on BPA’s wholesale rate.) The credit continues for 20 years.

“Pretty much all of our initial investors were doing it because it’s the right thing to do,” Nystedt says. “The more we promote, and design, and manufacture [solar energy] the more the price will come down.”

The Copycats

City officials have hosted curious guests from at least a dozen states and two countries (South Korea and Ghana). The success of Ellensburg’s project was instrumental in recent passage of landmark state legislation that provides tax incentives to community solar investors, homes and businesses that produce renewable energy, and manufacturers of renewable energy components such as solar panels or wind turbines.

In the years since Ellensburg figured out how to make solar power affordable, other communities have followed suit. Though inspired by the Ellensburg approach, each city has made slight modifications to the plan. For example, in Sacramento, Calif., residents subscribe to the one-megawatt Solar Shares program for a year at a time, rather than owning shares, which allows for a shorter commitment. A grass-roots group on Bainbridge Island, west of Seattle, built a community-funded solar installation on the roof of Sakai Intermediate School, channeling the resulting energy to the school. St. George, Utah, has a program similar to Ellensburg’s, in which residents invest in a 100-kilowatt project called SunSmart. The Utah project went online in January 2009.

It all goes to show, says Nystedt, that a community solar power project is possible anywhere there are passionate advocates of renewable energy, a forward-thinking utility company, and people who want to buy in. “Germany is the largest user of solar power in the world,” he says. “And their weather is less sunny than Seattle.” 

Photo courtesy of Gary ShaverWhen the city of Ellensburg asked the Washington State University energy program for help designing a community solar project, the state folks weren’t sure the city folks were serious. At the time, just a few years ago, solar projects were few and far between. But WSU energy consultant Gary Shaver jumped on board, helping with everything from financing to choosing the right solar panels. Now he’s president of Silicon Energy, which manufactures solar energy panels and inverters in Marysville, Wash.

Q. Did the city know right away how they wanted to design the project, or was there a lot of brainstorming?

A. There was a lot of brainstorming. This was back in 2005, and at that time, there was really no incentive to do solar, so it was pretty exciting that Ellensburg wanted to do this. In fact, myself and the Washington State University energy program thought, “Wow, is the city really serious about doing this?” because you hear a lot of people talking about wanting to do solar, but at that time, it was very rare for anybody to do anything.

Q. Why was that?

A. When you’re looking at the cost effectiveness of solar, people weren’t valuing solar, so they would compare it up against the cost of, say, coal-fired generated electricity.  It was just a really hard one. There were no incentives to speak of. The state had no solar incentive, other than it had net metering.

What was impressive was that [Ellensburg resources manager] Gary Nystedt was really committed to it, and as I soon learned, there was just a lot of backing in the city. As a community, they wanted to do this. It wasn’t the economics as much as it was community development, the community spirit. That’s what really impressed me so much about the project. It has a real community feel to it.

Q. How did you figure out the solar technology — what type of panels to use, how many, and how to tie it into the grid?

A. That was part of the research at the time — what technologies were out there. It was pretty well-established even then that a crystalline module technology was good. And the city of Ellensburg wanted something very durable. You could narrow down pretty quickly the modules to use. Design, the racking for the system — again, that was something that had been done for many, many years.  So that wasn’t a difficult one.  But at the time, for this project, of its size, there weren’t a lot of inverter choices. [Solar panels generate direct current energy (DC). Inverters change that to alternating current (AC).] Even in 2005, a lot of people had questions about the durability, the longevity of solar — even though the industry had shown by that time that a lot of these products were already well-established and good. When you’re trying to reach out to the mainstream, people have to learn this stuff all over again.

Ellensburg went through that. Gary Nystedt was really good with that. The city — they were just very supportive. It was really surprising — I mean, a very pleasant surprise. It’s one of those situations where people know what they want to do. They know what’s right. And they’re going to overcome obstacles — in this case, maybe it was the financing part of it — and make it happen. That’s what’s really exciting. That’s what really drives innovation. Instead of sitting back and wringing your hands about how much it’s going to cost. That’s innovation.

Q. Ellensburg was the first community solar project. Was it difficult not to have any other models for what you wanted to do?

A. Absolutely. There were no models to follow, there were no incentives, really, to speak of. It was very much uncharted territory.

Q. Did you know at the time that it would take off the way it has?

A. You can never know these things. Originally, I was asking that when we market it, that it be done conservatively, be careful, make sure it was succeeding. It was a great surprise to me to see that the city really responded well beyond what I had hoped.

You can become jaded. Even though you know a technology is something that should be used — even though you know that if it’s properly valued, it should be used — when you’re up against entrenched institutional ideas on valuing something, it kind of jades you. It was a pleasant surprise to see Ellensburg overcome those typical barriers.

Q. What were some of the toughest nuts to crack during the project?

A. When you’re bringing in a technology like solar, it’s a disruptive technology. It’s disruptive to organizations as well. An organization can be bureaucratic and solidified into a certain path. And [that path] has an efficiency to it. When you inject something new — even though, again, it’s the right thing to do, or it’s a highly efficient thing to do — institutionalized thinking can kill lots of great ideas just because they’re new and different. Ellensburg, thankfully, was pretty much embracing throughout. But there were challenges in figuring out how to make it work and every once in a while you’d hit obstacles like, “We’ve never done this before.” Those are the challenges. It’s mostly us overcoming our experiences to allow for new things to be implemented. So there was a little bit of that. And then the challenge of financing. How do you reduce the cost of this for people to feel that they can access it and feel comfortable with making the investment?

Q. What role do you think a project like Ellensburg has in the future of solar energy? Is the future more community projects like this, or is it households having their own panels?

A. The discussion used to be, “Is it wind or is it solar?” And actually they complement each other. Wind typically blows at night. So in the day, solar works. And also on days when there’s no wind during the day, solar works. And on the days when there’s no sun, wind works. So they complement each other. It’s the same with community projects and households. There’s going to be a mix. There will be people that do not have access, for whatever reason, whether it’s financial or whether their rooftop isn’t the proper orientation. That’s where community solar is nice. But really the most efficient thing is to spread that solar out as widely as possible. So if every home, every building, was generating electricity, that would be a highly efficient, robust energy system.

To make another metaphor, it’s like a portfolio — although all portfolios right now aren’t doing so hot — you want to mix that risk, you want to have a mix of things. So there’s going to be community solar, there’s going to be individual solar. They go hand in hand.

Photo: BikePortland

These are some of the hidden costs of a car-centric society. The American Public Health Association, in a recent report, argues that these costs have been ignored for too long as decision-makers hash out transportation policies. Instead, transportation projects usually focus on construction costs, acquiring rights of way, expected revenues (such as tolls), and operation and maintenance.

Our dependence on automobiles and roadways has profound negative impacts on human health: decreased opportunities for physical activity, and increased exposure to air pollution, and the number of traffic crashes. The health costs associated with these impacts, including costs associated with loss of work days and wages, pain and suffering, and premature death, may be as high as several hundred billion dollars.

In some cases, says the APHA, finding numbers to estimate transportation-related health costs might be somewhat elusive — for example, the effect of transportation on mental health, stress, and social cohesion. But costs associated with obesity (from not walking or biking), respiratory illness (from air pollution), and injuries (from crashing) are supported by research and should be considered, the group says.

Health impacts and costs have typically not been considered in the transportation policy, planning, and funding decision-making process. There are few standards or models for estimating health costs. However, existing research can be used to estimate the population at risk, the magnitude of the health impact, and the health costs associated with those impacts. Growing recognition of the connection between transportation, land development and health has resulted in some studies and examples where health impacts and costs have been considered and assessed. These examples not only demonstrate that health costs should be a significant factor in decision-making, but also show that calculating such costs is indeed possible.

Factoring in health costs is possible because the work has been done. In San Francisco, public health officials calculated potential costs from increased car vs. pedestrian injuries — $3.4 million — as they planned for growth in five neighborhoods. At California State University in Fullerton, researchers estimated health care savings from meeting clean air standards — $6 billion in the San Joaquin Valley and $22 billion in the three-county region that includes Los Angeles.

Now, if only we could factor those costs into the per-gallon price of gasoline, we might really get a few cars off the road.

Walking in heelsPhoto courtesy loungerie via Flickr

In a weekend column for The Washington Post, architect Roger K. Lewis outlined various steps that cities can take to make their streets more inviting to pedestrians. (Get it? Steps!) Sure, streets should be safe and easy to navigate, but he also suggests trees, outdoor café seating, and stores with nice, big windows — not only to drum up business but also give walkers something to look at. Sidewalks should also be in good condition, he argues, lest a lady get her high heels caught in a crack.

But how far will people walk? Lewis says the current standard used by city planners is one quarter-mile, despite the fact that people regularly walk much farther than that in footastic cities like New York, Boston, and San Francisco.

In addition to changing terminology, we need to modify a pervasive American planning standard: the dogma of the one-quarter-mile walking radius. If you look at development plans, you’ll see circles drawn around transportation nodes to show the presumed limits of how far Americans are willing to walk. The Washington Post reported recently that some Tysons Corner property owners have complained that, because of assumed walking distance standards symbolized by such circles, planned [transit-oriented development] density allocations around Tysons’ four new Metro stations don’t extend far enough. Their complaints might be justified.

A quarter-mile is 1,320 feet, walkable in about five to six minutes. That’s twice the length of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, or the length of the Constitution Avenue frontage occupied by the east and west buildings of the National Gallery of Art. It’s really not very far. If walking is pleasurable, Americans will gladly walk more than a quarter-mile and longer than five or six minutes.

Would you be willing to walk for more than five or six minutes if that walk were safe and pleasant? Would you do it in high heels?

Picture a hot summer day in California farm country, say 112 degrees. In the tiny community of Tooleville, surrounded by olive trees and orange groves, there’s one thing you won’t see here that you’d see almost anywhere else in the sunny state — kids splashing in backyard pools.

“People don’t let their kids swim in pools here,” says resident Eunice Martinez. “They’re scared of what would happen if they accidentally swallow the water.”

Martinez, 44, and the other 350 people who live in Tooleville haven’t been able to drink their tap water since 2003, due to unsafe levels of nitrate contamination.

Nitrate — a compound of nitrogen and oxygen — is the most common chemical contaminant in groundwater. That isn’t surprising when you consider its many sources: sewage overflows, fertilizer runoff, animal waste, and decaying organic material in soil. Nitrate is also found in foods, notably processed, preserved meats like bacon and naturally in green, leafy vegetables like spinach and celery. The list of health afflictions possibly linked to nitrate overexposure includes infant death, miscarriage, birth defects, diabetes, thyroid disease, and cancer.

Martinez says she and her neighbors stopped drinking the water before any acute health troubles hit, but she still worries. “There are many times when I’m in the shower and I’m thinking, ‘Am I going to get sick 10, 20 years from now?’” she says. “You know, with cancer, sometimes it takes years.”

The clear water from East Orosi, Calif., is more contaminated than the murky water on the right from Ducor. (Photo by Erin Lubin; courtesy of the Community Water Center.)

Feeling unwell

Once ingested, nitrate reacts with digestive bacteria to form nitrite. Nitrite changes hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in the blood, into methemoglobin, which can’t carry oxygen. In infants, whose bodies convert nitrate to nitrite more readily, this can cause methemoglobinemia or “blue-baby syndrome,” in which a child turns blue from the lack of oxygen and can die.

Nitrites can also react with other chemicals in the body to form what’s known as N-nitroso compounds, linked in animal studies to birth defects and cancer.

The scientific evidence linking environmental nitrate exposure to health problems is still murky. “There’s some smoke,” says Alan Townsend, assistant professor of ecology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “How big the fire is, I don’t know. But there’s something there.”

Between 10 and 20 percent of groundwater sources exceed the federal Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) of 10 parts per million for nitrate, Townsend says. The Safe Drinking Water Act requires public water supplies to test for nitrates and take action if they exceed the MCL. But small, private wells often aren’t regulated. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 16 percent of Americans get their drinking water from wells that are vulnerable to nitrate contamination.

Jean Brender, a professor in the School of Rural Public Health at Texas A&M, explains that the MCL for nitrate was set specifically to prevent blue baby syndrome. If an infant drinks formula mixed with highly contaminated water, symptoms can strike within days.

But she adds that research points to other potential health problems with chronic exposure to nitrates in drinking water, some at levels lower than the current MCL.

“Three studies have found an association between nitrate exposure during pregnancy and neural-tube defects such as spina bifida and anencephaly in newborns,” she says. “Two of those studies found that association with a contamination level lower than 10.”

Studies of cancer — particularly colon, rectal, kidney, or bladder cancer and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma — have been inconsistent. In colon and kidney cancer, Brender says, the nitrate connection was only found in people with a vitamin C deficiency.

“So the joke around our office is that if you’re going to have a slice of bacon, have a glass of orange juice with it,” she says.

Even blue-baby syndrome cannot be blamed on nitrates alone, says James VanDerslice, who studied rural water quality for nine years with the Washington State Department of Health and currently teaches public health at the University of Utah.

“There are so many factors that come into play,” he says. “A baby may have diarrhea, which causes an upset that can increase nitrite levels. Nitrate can be in the food an infant eats. It can even be in medication for teething. It’s no one factor.”

Run-off problems

A Tulare County resident with some of the risky water. (Photo by Erin Lubin; courtesy of the Community Water Center.)

Nitrate contamination of water supplies is particularly common in agricultural areas, where mountains of livestock manure and synthetic nitrogen-based fertilizer seep through the soil into groundwater.

“Half of the fertilizer you’re putting on your crops never makes it to the plants you’re growing,” says Townsend. “It washes out.”

A study published last summer in the journal Southwest Hydrology estimated that California farmers applied 740,000 tons of nitrogen to 6.7 million acres of irrigated farmland in 2007. Of that, 110 pounds per acre aren’t used by the plants. Some escapes into the air, but an estimated 80 pounds of nitrogen (as nitrate) per acre per year seeps into the groundwater. (For more on how this happens, and what it means for the environment, see “The dark side of nitrogen.”)

Kathy Mathers, vice president of public affairs for The Fertilizer Institute, says her industry is willing to do its share to combat the problem. “We’re working with the farmers to make sure best practices are in place,” she says. “It’s a very site-specific practice. Crops need different levels of fertilizer, and soil can vary from county to county.”

Environmental advocates have argued that the MCL should be lowered to 5 ppm, and that water utilities should be given greater authority to stop polluters. But unless ongoing research provides stronger evidence of harm at lower levels, the MCL is unlikely to change. And for now, efforts to prevent contamination are more carrot than stick — pilot projects on farms and education programs about optimal fertilizer use.

Low-income Latino farmworkers are often the hardest hit by problems with contaminated drinking water, according to the Community Water Center, an advocacy group based in Visalia, California. Tulare County in the San Joaquin Valley, for example, where Tooleville is located, is one of the poorest counties in the state and also home to the highest number of violations. The center estimates that 20 percent of small public water systems in the county have unsafe levels of nitrates and other contaminants.

Horacio Amezquita manages a farmworkers’ housing cooperative outside Salinas, California. What started out as a ramshackle labor camp is now home to 64 families and a child care center. For five years, residents there couldn’t drink or cook with their tap water because of nitrate and trichloropropane contamination.

“When people showered with the water, they got rashes all over their skin,” Amezquita says. “Their eyes would get red, and their hair would fall out.”

After years of community activism, the county eventually authorized an emergency filtration plant for the contaminated wells in October of 2006. But like Martinez, Amezquita has unanswered questions about future risk.

“Some people have died of cancer,” he says. “We think it’s related to the water, but we can’t prove it. We don’t have the resources.”

Related:

Reporter Jason Margolis from Public Radio International interviews Eunice Martinez about Tooleville’s water situation: