Lighting the Big Apple with L.E.D. S

Association of Energy Engineers New York Chapter www.aeeny.org

September 2008 Newsletter Part 1

Lighting the Big Apple With L.E.D.’s By Eric A. Taub, The New York Times, Aug 20 08 When a small city, like Calabasas, Calif., does something innovative, like banning outdoor smoking, that’s interesting. But when a big city like New York tries something new, it’s probably time to sit up and take notice.

(Credit: Illustration and photography by dbox) Which is what makes an announcement scheduled for Wednesday so interesting. The city’s Department of Transportation has contracted with the Office for Visual Interaction, a lighting design group, to install and test L.E.D. street lighting. If the tests are successful, the city’s entire stock of 300,000 street lamps could one day be replaced with L.E.D. versions. As I discussed in a Times article last month, L.E.D. lighting has become all the rage, for a number of good reasons: power consumption is much lower than for standard bulbs; unlike compact fluorescents, no harmful chemicals are emitted when the bulbs are discarded; and L.E.D.’s can last more than 50,000 hours, obviating the need to have workers change the lights. (Insert your own bulb-changing joke here.) The OVI contract is not just to switch the city’s current crop of high-pressure sodium lamps for L.E.D.’s, but to introduce a completely redesigned lamp pole as well. Today’s poles have become a designer’s nightmare, with signs, traffic lights, control boxes and other accessories hung willy-nilly from them. The OSI approach envisions a sleek design that includes dedicated channels to hang the various accoutrements of city life. In addition, up to four adjacent L.E.D. light sources and multiple lenses will direct the pole’s light to different places; one unit may illuminate the street while an adjoining one will shine upon the sidewalk. The bulbs themselves for this $1.175 million contract are being designed by Lighting Science Group and the company expects that for each pole and light source that is replaced, the payback period for the city will be two to three years. Not only will the city reduce its power usage 25 to 30 percent, but the bulbs will last 50,000 to 70,000 hours. Today’s sodium lamps are rated at 24,000 hours, which means at that point half of them are dead. The L.E.D. life rating actually means that the bulb will drop below 70 percent of its original brightness after 50,000 hours or so. But don’t get too excited yet. This demonstration project will replace just six street lamp posts. The city has not decided which boroughs they’ll be placed in, and there’s no guarantee that it will decide to go with L.E.D.’s after the end of the testing period, which is expected to finish in the fall of next year. Even if New York decides that L.E.D. lighting is the cat’s pajamas, don’t look for light bulb changing of every pole in town. Most likely, it will happen slowly, with a new L.E.D. pole put in place when an existing one fails, for example, because a motorist has plowed into one.

Current NY Chapter AEE Sponsors: Association for Energy Affordability Con Ed Solutions Energy Curtailment Specialists EME Group Con Edison M-Core Credit Corporation PB Power Syska Hennessy Group Trystate Mechanical Inc.

Air Storage Is Explored for Energy By Ken Belson, The NY Times, Aug 26 08

WHEN MAYOR MICHAEL R. BLOOMBERG dreamed out loud last week about a New York skyline filled with wind turbines, one of the most serious issues raised by the naysayers was that the wind does not always blow when you need it. But a New Jersey company plans to announce on Tuesday that it is working on a solution to this perennial problem with wind power: using wind turbines to produce compressed air that can be stored underground or in tanks and released later to power generators during peak hours. The company, Public Service Enterprise Group Global LLC, a subsidiary of P.S.E.G. Energy Holdings, is forming a joint venture with Michael Nakhamkin, a leader in the development of energy storage technology. The new company, Energy Storage and Power, will promote the use of compressed air storage technology to utilities and other power producers. (P.S.E.G. Global is the sister company of Public Service Electric and Gas Company, New Jersey’s largest power distributor, which has 2.2 million customers.) The technology has been around for decades, though the only major plant in the United States opened in Alabama in 1991. Another plant was built in Germany in the 1970s. But compressed air storage is getting a fresh look because so many windmills have been built across the country in recent years, and energy producers are increasingly looking for ways to avoid building power plants that rely on expensive oil and natural gas. Dr. Nakhamkin, who worked on the plant in Alabama, has developed new technology that reduces the startup time for generators powered by compressed air and cuts the amount of emissions they produce. The new facilities would also use more standard components, which would make the plants cheaper to build, depending on how much mining is required to create an underground reservoir. “This is a game-changing technology,” said Stephen C. Byrd, the president of P.S.E.G. Energy Holdings, which will invest $20 million over three years. “There is a desire for energy independence, and this will reduce the need for oil and natural gas.”

2 The venture has met with utilities that might buy the storage technology. Compressed air can be produced by a variety of fuels. But the new venture hopes to put wind power generated during off-peak hours to use during peak hours — typically 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. — and especially on hot days. One of the main challenges to using wind power is that the wind, in general, is unpredictable, which makes it harder for utilities to rely exclusively on it since they prefer to buy energy a day or more in advance. In New York, that unpredictability is compounded by the fact that the city is at its windiest on winter nights, while power use peaks on sticky — and still — summer days. P.S.E.G. Global is trying to win a contract to build 95 windmills that would produce a maximum of 350 megawatts of electricity off the New Jersey coast. If the company is chosen, it would consider linking the windmills to a compressed air storage plant, Mr. Byrd said, and then feeding it into the power grid. If a storage plant were to be built in New Jersey, it would most likely use above-ground tanks or abandoned gas pipelines because so much of the state is on solid rock, which would be expensive to excavate, Mr. Byrd said. More favorable locations, he said, include upstate New York, where there are depleted salt mines as well as wind farms. Old coal mines and tapped-out natural gas fields can also be converted into underground reservoirs. Roy Daniel, the chief executive of Energy Storage and Power, said that an underground reservoir the size of Giants Stadium could hold enough compressed air to power three 300-megawatt plants. (One megawatt hour can power a large hospital for an hour.) The reservoirs, which are typically more than 1,500 feet below ground, could take eight hours to fill at night. The compressed air would be released to run generators for eight hours during the day. Though the former Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island has been deemed suitable for a wind farm, and the mayor has envisioned a future in which the city’s bridges and skyscrapers are topped with turbines, a compressed air storage plant is unlikely to be built in New York City because of the rocky underground and the lack of free space above ground. But New York utilities could buy power stored and produced anywhere. Advocates of wind power support the use of compressed air storage facilities, but say that almost all of the wind power produced nationally is fed straight into the grid without having to be stored. “Different sectors like to associate with wind power, and if compressed air will truly help wind, then fine,” said Robert E. Gramlich, the policy director at the American Wind Energy Association. “But we don’t want to give anyone the impression that storage is needed to integrate wind. Even growing 20-fold, storage isn’t needed.” Mr. Gramlich pointed to a federal Department of Energy report that showed wind power could meet 20 percent of electricity needs in the United States by 2030 without the need for storage facilities. Still, storage facilities could help reduce the need to build new gas and coal plants, or to use current plants, powered by fossil fuels. “In the next couple of years, we want to install a couple of them so it becomes a tool in the toolbox to meet needs,” said Arshad Mansoor, the vice president of power delivery and utilization at the Electric Power Research Institute. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Wind Energy Bumps Into Power Grid’s Limits By Matthew L. Wald, The NY Times, Aug 27 08

3 WHEN the builders of the Maple Ridge Wind farm spent $320 million to put nearly 200 wind turbines in upstate New York, the idea was to get paid for producing electricity. But at times, regional electric lines have been so congested that Maple Ridge has been forced to shut down even with a brisk wind blowing. That is a symptom of a broad national problem. Expansive dreams about renewable energy, like Al Gore’s hope of replacing all fossil fuels in a decade, are bumping up against the reality of a power grid that cannot handle the new demands. The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not. The grid today, according to experts, is a system conceived 100 years ago to let utilities prop each other up, reducing blackouts and sharing power in small regions. It resembles a network of streets, avenues and country roads. “We need an interstate transmission superhighway system,” said Suedeen G. Kelly, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. While the United States today gets barely 1 percent of its electricity from wind turbines, many experts are starting to think that figure could hit 20 percent. Achieving that would require moving large amounts of power over long distances, from the windy, lightly populated plains in the middle of the country to the coasts where many people live. Builders are also contemplating immense solar-power stations in the nation’s deserts that would pose the same transmission problems. The grid’s limitations are putting a damper on such projects already. Gabriel Alonso, chief development officer of Horizon Wind Energy, the company that operates Maple Ridge, said that in parts of Wyoming, a turbine could make 50 percent more electricity than the identical model built in New York or Texas. “The windiest sites have not been built, because there is no way to move that electricity from there to the load centers,” he said. The basic problem is that many transmission lines, and the connections between them, are simply too small for the amount of power companies would like to squeeze through them. The difficulty is most acute for long-distance transmission, but shows up at times even over distances of a few hundred miles. Transmission lines carrying power away from the Maple Ridge farm, near Lowville, N.Y., have sometimes become so congested that the company’s only choice is to shut down — or pay fees for the privilege of continuing to pump power into the lines. Politicians in Washington have long known about the grid’s limitations but have made scant headway in solving them. They are reluctant to trample the prerogatives of state governments, which have traditionally exercised authority over the grid and have little incentive to push improvements that would benefit neighboring states. In Texas, T. Boone Pickens, the oilman building the world’s largest wind farm, plans to tackle the grid problem by using a right of way he is developing for water pipelines for a 250-mile transmission line from the Panhandle to the Dallas market. He has testified in Congress that Texas policy is especially favorable for such a project and that other wind developers cannot be expected to match his efforts. “If you want to do it on a national scale, where the transmission line distances will be much longer, and utility regulations are different, Congress must act,” he said on Capitol Hill. Enthusiasm for wind energy is running at fever pitch these days, with bold plans on the drawing boards, like Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s notion of dotting New York City with turbines. Companies are even reviving ideas of storing wind-generated energy using compressed air or spinning flywheels. Yet experts say that without a solution to the grid problem, effective use of wind power on a wide scale is likely to remain a dream.

4 The power grid is balkanized, with about 200,000 miles of power lines divided among 500 owners. Big transmission upgrades often involve multiple companies, many state governments and numerous permits. Every addition to the grid provokes fights with property owners. These barriers mean that electrical generation is growing four times faster than transmission, according to federal figures. In a 2005 energy law, Congress gave the Energy Department the authority to step in to approve transmission if states refused to act. The department designated two areas, one in the Middle Atlantic States and one in the Southwest, as national priorities where it might do so; 14 United States senators then signed a letter saying the department was being too aggressive. Energy Department leaders say that, however understandable the local concerns, they are getting in the way. “Modernizing the electric infrastructure is an urgent national problem, and one we all share,” said Kevin M. Kolevar, assistant secretary for electricity delivery and energy reliability, in a speech last year. Unlike answers to many of the nation’s energy problems, improvements to the grid would require no new technology. An Energy Department plan to source 20 percent of the nation’s electricity from wind calls for a high-voltage backbone spanning the country that would be similar to 2,100 miles of lines already operated by a company called American Electric Power. The cost would be high, $60 billion or more, but in theory could be spread across many years and tens of millions of electrical customers. However, in most states, rules used by public service commissions to evaluate transmission investments discourage multistate projects of this sort. In some states with low electric rates, elected officials fear that new lines will simply export their cheap power and drive rates up. Without a clear way of recovering the costs and earning a profit, and with little leadership on the issue from the federal government, no company or organization has offered to fight the political battles necessary to get such a transmission backbone built. Texas and California have recently made some progress in building transmission lines for wind power, but nationally, the problem seems likely to get worse. Today, New York State has about 1,500 megawatts of wind capacity. A megawatt is an instantaneous measure of power. A large Wal-Mart draws about one megawatt. The state is planning for an additional 8,000 megawatts of capacity. But those turbines will need to go in remote, windy areas that are far off the beaten path, electrically speaking, and it is not clear enough transmission capacity will be developed. Save for two underwater connections to Long Island, New York State has not built a major new power line in 20 years. A handful of states like California that have set aggressive goals for renewable energy are being forced to deal with the issue, since the goals cannot be met without additional power lines. But Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico and a former energy secretary under President Bill Clinton, contends that these piecemeal efforts are not enough to tap the nation’s potential for renewable energy. Wind advocates say that just two of the windiest states, North Dakota and South Dakota, could in principle generate half the nation’s electricity from turbines. But the way the national grid is configured, half the country would have to move to the Dakotas in order to use the power. “We still have a third-world grid,” Mr. Richardson said, repeating a comment he has made several times. “With the federal government not investing, not setting good regulatory mechanisms, and basically taking a back seat on everything except drilling and fossil fuels, the grid has not been modernized, especially for wind energy.” Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

"Green-collar" Jobs on the Rise (from ASPE Pipeline) A new report from the American Solar Energy Society shows that as many as one out of four workers in the United States will be working in the renewable energy or energy-efficiency industries by 2030. This green-

5 collar job report shows that these industries already generate 8.5 million jobs in the United States, and with appropriate public policy, could grow to as many as 40 million jobs by 2030. The report is available for free download at www.ases.org. According to Yahoo HotJobs, sustainable architects, energy systems managers, and environmental engineers are three of the five hottest green-collar fields. Just the Tip of the Bloomberg Mayor has big clean-energy goals for NYC

Grist, Aug 20 08

NEW YORK CITY MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG touted clean energy Tuesday at, aptly, the National Clean Energy Summit. He said his city has issued a formal request to companies for ideas on how to source electricity from the wind, sun, and waves. "Perhaps companies will want to put wind farms atop our bridges and skyscrapers, or use the enormous potential of powerful offshore winds miles out in the Atlantic Ocean," Bloomberg said, adding, "I think it would be a thing of beauty if, when Lady Liberty looks out on the horizon, she not only welcomes new immigrants but lights their way with a torch powered by an ocean wind farm." He also touted less-sexy smart power grids, increased transmission capacity, and carbon taxation. Bloomberg can't, of course, snap his fingers and create a Green Apple; plenty of obstacles remain, including potential expense, resident resistance, permitting, and the fact that less than 18 months remain in his mayoral term. Unfazed, Bloomberg declared, "When it comes to producing clean power, we're determined to make New York the No. 1 city in the nation." ©2007. Grist Magazine, Inc.

Surge in Natural Gas Has Utah Driving Cheaply By Clifford Krauss, The NY Times, Aug 30 08

Bret Oliphant stopping to fill up in Salt Lake City.

SALT LAKE CITY — The best deal on fuel in the country right now might be here in Utah, where people are waiting in lines to pay the equivalent of

6 87 cents a gallon. Demand is so strong at rush hour that fuel runs low, and some days people can pump only half a tank. It is not gasoline they are buying for their cars, but natural gas. By an odd confluence of public policy and private initiative, Utah has become the first state in the country to experience broad consumer interest in the idea of running cars on clean natural gas. Utahans are hunting the Internet and traveling the country to pick up used natural gas cars at auctions. They are spending thousands of dollars to transform their trucks and sport utility vehicles to run on compressed gas. Some fueling stations that sell it to the public are so busy they frequently run low on pressure, forcing drivers to return before dawn when demand is down. It all began when unleaded gasoline rose above $3.25 a gallon last year, and has spiraled into a frenzy in the last few months. Ron Brown, Honda’s salesman here for the Civic GX, the only car powered by natural gas made by a major automaker in the country, has sold one out of every four of the 800 cars Honda has made so far this year, and he has a pile of 330 deposit slips in his office, each designating a customer waiting months for a new car. “It’s nuts,” Mr. Brown said. “People are buying these cars from me and turning around and selling them as if they were flipping real estate.” Advocates for these cars see Mr. Brown’s brisk sales as a sign that natural gas could become the transport fuel of the future, replacing much of the oil the nation imports. While that remains a distant dream, big increases recently in the country’s production of natural gas do raise the possibility of making wider use of the fuel. To a degree, it is already starting to happen in Utah, where the cost savings have gotten the public’s attention. Natural gas is especially cheap here, so that people spend about 87 cents for a quantity of gas sufficient to propel a car approximately the same distance as a $3.95 gallon of gasoline. The word about natural gas cars has been spreading in news reports and by word of mouth, and so many Utahans are now trying to get their hands on used natural gas vehicles that they are drying up the national supply. Used car lots are stocking up, and beginning to look like county government parking lots with multiple lines of identical white Civic GXs once used in out-of-state fleets. Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. got into the act last year, spending $12,000 out of his own pocket to convert his state sport utility vehicle to run on natural gas. “We can create a model that others can look to,” Mr. Huntsman said in an interview. “Every state in America can make this a reality.” In fact, some unique factors apply in Utah. Natural gas prices at the pump here are controlled and are the cheapest in the country, while the price of conventional gasoline is one of the highest. Questar Gas, the public utility, has compressed-gas pumps around the state open to the public, a fueling infrastructure that few states can match. Special factors or not, the sudden popularity of natural gas vehicles here demonstrates their potential, according to advocates like T. Boone Pickens, the Texas oil billionaire who is financing a national campaign promoting wind power and natural gas to replace imported oil. “Utah shows that the technology is here and the fuel works and the fuel is better than foreign oil,” Mr. Pickens said. Natural gas cars produce at least 20 percent less greenhouse gas per mile than regular cars, according to a California study. No official figures are available on how many natural gas vehicles Utah has, in part because so many people go to garages that install conversion kits that are not certified by the Environmental Protection Agency and are therefore illegal.

7 (Governor Huntsman has expressed concern, and some in the installation business have requested that the E.P.A. close down the unauthorized operations; the agency says it does not comment on possible investigations.) But Questar estimates the number at 6,000 and growing by several hundred a month. That is small compared with the 2.7 million vehicles registered in the state, but natural gas executives and state government officials say it makes Utah the fastest-growing market in the country for such cars. Cars fueled by compressed natural gas have been available intermittently in the United States for decades, and have found wide use in fleets, but have never attracted much consumer interest. The situation is markedly different abroad. Of the eight million natural gas vehicles operating worldwide, only about 116,000 were in the United States, mostly as fleet vans, buses and cars, according to a 2006 Energy Department estimate. Congress mandated the use of fleets capable of using alternative fuel cars for governments and some energy companies in the early 1990s, but public interest petered out as gasoline prices plummeted. Over the years, all the major car companies except Honda dropped their production in the United States. The cars have two major disadvantages — a shortage of fueling stations and limited range. (A typical natural gas car goes half as far on a full tank as a gasoline car.) Utah is one of the few states where a driver can travel across the state without being out of range of a station. The situation is a Catch-22: Carmakers do not want to make natural gas cars when few filling stations are set up for them, and few stations want to install expensive equipment to compress gas with so few cars on the road. Hundreds of stations supply compressed gas in a few states like California, New York and Arizona, but most are either closed to the public or charge only modestly less than regular gasoline prices. Retail natural gas prices in some states are triple the price in Utah. The only state that comes close to Utah’s low gas prices is Oklahoma, and a surge of natural gas car buying is going on there, too. The natural gas industry and some politicians are pushing to open up the market to gas-powered vehicles across the country. Even in states without fueling stations, a few drivers have switched by spending several thousand dollars to install a home gas compressor. A proposal on the ballot in California this fall would allow the state to sell $5 billion in bonds to finance rebates of $2,000 and more to buyers of natural gas vehicles. Legislation has been introduced in Congress to offer more tax credits to producers and consumers and mandate the installation of gas pumps in certain service stations, with the goal of making natural gas cars 10 percent of the nation’s vehicle fleet over the next decade. “If the incentives are right and the fuel and cars are available, natural gas can work,” said Gordon Larsen, supervisor for natural gas vehicle operations at Questar Gas. But he said that any drop in gasoline prices douses enthusiasm among drivers considering the switch. With gasoline hovering just below $4 a gallon for unleaded regular here, interest in the Salt Lake City area is strong. Questar reports that the volume of natural gas pumped at its 21 filling stations is up 240 percent this year from last, after a 50 percent rise in 2007. Demand has grown so fast that the compressors at many of Questar’s stations run low during the day, forcing drivers to settle for half a tank or fill up during off-peak hours. The natural gas car surge in Utah is because of several factors. Questar has had filling pumps around the state to fuel its own fleet of service vehicles since the 1980s, and because it had excess capacity, it opened those stations to the public. Natural gas prices are cheap because under Utah regulations, the utility is obliged to offer about half of the gas that it sells to its retail customers at the cost of production. The state and a few municipalities are preparing to open more filling stations. If the trend continues, it could eventually lower the environmental impact of driving in Utah. For now, demand for compressed-gas cars is outstripping supply.

8 “People get into a frenzy and they just have to buy,” said Rick Oliver, owner of a company that converts vehicles. He said that in a recent online auction, a Utah buyer paid $19,000 for a 2001 Civic GX with 50,000 miles — the price a buyer of a new GX would pay after state and federal tax credits. Gary Frederickson, a 48-year-old computer technician, has bought six natural gas vehicles on Craigslist over the last year, flying as far as Portland and Oakland to pick up the cars. One 1998 Ford Contour he bought for $3,000 in effect cost him nothing because he will receive a $3,000 state tax credit for buying an alternative fuel car. “It’s crazy to be in Utah and have access to 85-cent-a-gallon fuel and not take advantage of it,” he said before a recent 2-cent increase. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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Old Sewer Mapping System Undergoes a Welcome Update By Ken Belson, The New York Times, Aug 19 08

IN THE CHAOS OF SEPT. 11, 2001, rescue workers in Lower Manhattan frantically tried to shut off damaged water mains. Just to locate the valves, they had to call the city’s Department of Environmental Protection’s offices in Rego Park, Queens, where James Roberts spent hours directing the workers by scouring dozens of maps of the city’s water grid. “I remember sitting here at 2 a.m. on Sept. 12,” said Mr. Roberts, now the deputy commissioner of the department’s Bureau of Water and Sewer Operations, pointing to a seat in a conference room on the third floor of the department’s headquarters. “I was sitting here with the maps and radios telling people, ‘It’s 27 feet from there.’ ” For decades, city workers and contractors who want to make any change to New York’s vast water and sewer networks have had to retrieve browning maps, drawn by draftsmen and stored away in each borough hall and the department offices in Queens. To help them find the sewer and water main maps — some dating back to the Civil War — city clerks have had to consult indexes, created by each borough before the city was unified in 1898. The maps were cataloged on 3-by-5-inch cards. In the coming months, though, visiting the department or borough halls to get maps, or calling to get the information on them, will become unnecessary. For nearly a decade, the department has been scanning, reformatting and piecing together the tens of thousands of linen, Mylar and vellum maps of the city’s water mains and sewers. More than just digital replicas, these maps are linked to millions of bits of information, or attributes — the size of the pipes, the dates they were built and repaired, what they were made of — that can be called up and sorted with the click of a mouse. The maps can be updated instantly when water mains and sewers are installed, removed or repaired.

10 “This is a real live snapshot of what we have in the ground,” Mr. Roberts said. “These maps can now see in one spot what was on five or six drawings before.” Thanks to global satellite positioning technology, the maps are accurate to within 18 inches. And because they are on a central database, a growing number of department workers will have access to them not just on office computers, but outdoors on laptops using the city’s new wireless data network, NYCWiN. Given the chronic shortage of money to maintain and expand infrastructure, city officials expect the maps to make department workers more efficient by cutting down the time spent retrieving them. By feeding customer complaints, repair records and other information into the map database, the city hopes that planners and engineers can spot trends and anticipate problems. “They are going to make people a lot more productive because they are not going to have to climb down in the sewer and not have to drive back to the office,” said Emily Lloyd, the commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection. “Having to move people around to collect information is very time-consuming.” A consolidated database may also break down walls between city agencies by making it easier for, say, the Department of Transportation engineers to figure out where sewer mains are before they start building roads. “Cities have been organized by departments, historically, and they managed records in their own ways,” said John Wilson, a professor of geography and civil and environmental engineering at the University of Southern California. With municipal interactive maps, “you have one big database, and people can pick what’s important to them,” he said. “This is a whole different way of thinking about your assets.” The foundation for the online water and sewer maps was laid in the 1990s. Planners recognized that they needed a map of the city above ground that could serve as a precise geographic anchor for the underground maps. So the D.E.P. helped create NYCityMap, an interactive database linked to a quilt of aerial photographs of the entire city. The map, which was made available to the public in 2001, divides the city into 1,873 2,500- square-foot “tiles.” It includes the exact locations of every manhole cover, sewer and fire hydrant the department maintains. Those points of reference became the framework for the water and sewer maps. The maps of the city’s water mains had been scanned in the 1990s, but only in the last few years have they been reformatted and linked to a database of attributes. In 2002, Baker Engineering NY won a $10.4 million contract to scan all the sewer maps, which took nearly a year, and to digitally stitch them together so the more than 6,000 miles of sewers would form a seamless map. Fusing the maps was challenging because each borough uses its own measurement systems. The boroughs, for instance, have different starting elevations that engineers have to account for when building, for example, between Brooklyn and Queens. “The complexity of this boggles the mind,” said Sean C. Ahearn, at the Center for the Analysis and Research of Spatial Information at Hunter College, which the department hired for an additional $5 million to double-check the maps for accuracy. “You’re talking about over 10 million attributable values, from the pipe size to the materials. You think of sewer mains as simple pipes, but it’s very complex.” Unlike NYCityMap, which New Yorkers can use at gis.nyc.gov/doitt/cm/CityMap.htm, some of the information on the sewer and water maps will be kept from the public because of security concerns. For the time being, contractors and developers will continue to rely on copies of the old maps kept at the department offices when making repairs and additions to the water and sewer maps. But over time, the old maps, with all their charming quirks, will fade into obsolescence.

11 The 24-by-30-inch maps of the networks in Queens are rolled over skinny wooden rods. At the end of each of rod is a set of numbers linked to the map’s location. Mr. Roberts showed one that read 77-2, for the second ward in the 77th district. In the top left corner of another map were notations in dark blue ink showing when a portion of the grid in Washington Heights was updated, starting in 1964. There were notations for hydrants and lines representing water mains of varying diameter, from 6 inches to 84 inches. Huge file cabinets on the 12th floor of the department’s headquarters include thousands of index cards, each numbered to designate its location. Field card number 44409, for instance, included information about water mains on part of Grand Avenue in Queens. “Forget sorting the data,” Mr. Roberts said. “Just keeping track of it was a challenge.” In the years to come, as more and more people have access to the digitized maps, the hassles of maintaining the old versions — not unlike library card catalogs — will become a quaint memory. “Our long- term goal is, the more we can get them off of paper and allow them to use them on the computer, the better it is for all of us,” Ms. Lloyd said. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Green Roofs Offer More Than Color for the Skyline By Ken Belsen, The NY Times, Aug 28 08

The roof of a Con Edison training center in Long Island City is covered with sedum, an absorbent plant typically found in deserts THE thousands of recently planted green and purple shrub-like sedum lining the roof of Con Edison’s training center in Long Island City look a bit out of place in the shadow of Manhattan’s skyline. But the tiny absorbent leaves and modest but hardy roots of the sedum — typically found in desert climates — are at the center of a growing effort to reduce greenhouse gases, rainwater runoff and electricity demand in New York. This month, Gov. David A. Paterson approved tax abatements to developers and building owners who install green roofs, or a layer of vegetation and rock that absorbs rainwater, insulates buildings and extends the lives of roofs. Sedum, which soaks up water quickly and releases it slowly, is an ideal plant for the job.

12 Europe has had green roofs for decades, and cities like Chicago and Seattle have added many of them in recent years. But there are fewer in New York because of the cost of installing them compared with the benefits, which can be hard to quantify. The new one-year abatements, though, can cut as much as $100,000 a year from a building’s taxes, and are expected to turn what has largely been a hidden luxury into a standard feature of a little-seen part of the city’s landscape. “This is just the beginning,” said Kari Elwell Katzander, a partner in Mingo Design, a landscape design firm in Manhattan that works on green roofs. “It’s not just about the green roof. This transcends into various ways to make buildings more green.” There are few accurate reckonings of how much of the 944 million square feet of rooftops across New York City — 11.5 percent of the total building area — has gone green, or how much more could be cultivated. But clearly there is plenty of space available. Just in Long Island City, there are 667 acres of empty, flat roofs suitable for vegetation, according to Balmori Associates, an urban design company. That is the equivalent of 80 percent of Central Park. The best locations for green roofs are buildings with large, flat tops well exposed to the sun. That is why many of the city’s green roofs are in industrial neighborhoods in the Bronx and Queens. One of the largest installations was completed in 2005 at Silvercup Studios in Long Island City, where parts of the HBO series “The Sopranos” were filmed. About 1,500 plants, in 20 different species of red, yellow and green, cover 35,000 square feet. Because of high labor and transportation prices in New York, green roofs can cost as much as $30 a square foot to install in the city, up to three times more than in other places. While the environmental benefits of green roofs are real, builders have had a hard time justifying the extra cost when it is unclear how it will affect their bottom line. Green roofs, for instance, absorb as much as 70 percent of the rain that might otherwise overwhelm the city’s sewage system during heavy downfalls and run directly in the East River, the Hudson River and New York Harbor. By diverting the runoff, the city could prevent millions of gallons of polluted water from reaching waterways. But while runoff is a big problem for the city, it is a negligible one for individual building owners. Lawmakers and environmental activists, though, say that the new financial credits — worth $4.50 per square foot of vegetation — should prompt building owners to install green roofs that, over time, will help the city grapple with the growing problem of runoff. “Essentially, cities are going to benefit more than any individuals will benefit because it will save with infrastructure costs,” said Diana Balmori of Balmori Associates, which helped install the green roof at Silvercup Studios. “It’s a modest help, what individuals receive, but it changes the way we think about infrastructure.” When sunshine hits a blacktop roof, it heats the building beneath it as well as the area nearby. When it hits plants on a roof, in contrast, the plants not only absorb the sunshine, but cool the air when the water in their leaves evaporates. Temperatures on buildings with green roofs are up to 30 percent lower during the daytime in the summer than they are on those with conventional roofs, which means that tenants on the floors below do not have to run their air-conditioning as much. The savings can vary, though, depending on how well the windows are insulated and other variables. And the average life of a typical roof can be doubled when a layer of plants rests on top. Con Ed’s 10,000-square-foot green roof, which was installed in July and is the first at one of its buildings, is more advanced than most projects. The company spent $200,000 to install 1,350 trays filled with 21,000 plants, including 15 varieties of sedum. The plants, which were cultivated at a nursery in Connecticut, sit in a mixture of volcanic rock, sandstone and other light stone capable of absorbing water.

13 The bottoms of the trays look like egg cartons; they allow a small amount of water to pool beneath the plants. The trays can easily be moved to provide access to the roof if there are leaks that have to be plugged. Con Ed chose sedum not only because it can absorb rainwater quickly, but also because it is not indigenous to New York, making it unlikely to attract potential pests. The plants also require very little maintenance. Con Ed has teamed up with Columbia University’s Center for Climate Systems Research to evaluate the benefits, using rooftop sensors to measure the temperature, wind and water runoff. Con Edison said it hoped to use the findings to encourage customers to install green roofs themselves. David Westman, the resource conservation coordinator at Con Edison, said, “It’s not only the right thing to do, but it can make economic sense.” Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

In Rural New York, Windmills Can Bring Whiff of Corruption By Nicholas Confessore, The New York Times, Aug 18 08

Christinne Muschi for The New York Times Kathy Laclair of Churubusco, N.Y., dislikes the noise from the wind turbine blades and says their shadows give her vertigo

BURKE, N.Y. — Everywhere that Janet and Ken Tacy looked, the wind companies had been there first. Dozens of people in their small town had already signed lease options that would allow wind towers on their properties. Two Burke Town Board members had signed private leases even as they negotiated with the companies to establish a zoning law to permit the towers. A third board member, the Tacys said, bragged about the commissions he would earn by selling concrete to build tower bases. And, the Tacys said, when they showed up at a Town Board meeting to complain, they were told to get lost. “There were a couple of times when they told us to just shut up,” recalled Mr. Tacy, sitting in his kitchen on a recent evening. Lured by state subsidies and buoyed by high oil prices, the wind industry has arrived in force in upstate New York, promising to bring jobs, tax revenue and cutting-edge energy to the long-struggling region. But in

14 town after town, some residents say, the companies have delivered something else: an epidemic of corruption and intimidation, as they rush to acquire enough land to make the wind farms a reality. “It really is renewable energy gone wrong,” said the Franklin County district attorney, Derek P. Champagne, who began a criminal inquiry into the Burke Town Board last spring and was quickly inundated with complaints from all over the state about the wind companies. Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo agreed this year to take over the investigation. “It’s a modern-day gold rush,” Mr. Champagne said. Mr. Cuomo is investigating whether wind companies improperly influenced local officials to get permission to build wind towers, as well as whether different companies colluded to divide up territory and avoid bidding against one another for the same land. The industry appears to be shying away from trying to erect the wind farms in more affluent areas downstate, even where the wind is plentiful, like Long Island. But in the small towns near the Canadian border, families and friendships have been riven by feuds over the lease options, which can be worth tens of thousands of dollars a year in towns where the median household income may hover around $30,000. Rumors circulate about neighbors who can suddenly afford new tractors or trucks. Opponents of the wind towers even say they have received threats; one local activist said that on two occasions, she had found her windshield bashed in. “My sisters and brothers won’t even talk to me anymore,” said Mr. Tacy, who with his wife has become active in recent years in a network of people who oppose the wind companies. “They tear communities apart.” Opponents of the farms say their scenic views are being marred by the hundreds of wind towers already in place, some of which stand nearly 400 feet tall. They also complain of the irritating hum of spinning turbines and what they say are wasteful public subsidies to wind companies. But corruption is a major concern. In at least 12 counties, Mr. Champagne said, evidence has surfaced about possible conflicts of interest or improper influence. In Plattsburgh, N.Y., a Finger Lakes community, the town supervisor cast the deciding vote allowing private land to be condemned to make way for a wind farm there, even after acknowledging that he had accepted real estate commissions on at least one land deal involving the farm’s developer. A town official in Bellmont, near Burke, took a job with a wind company after helping shepherd through a zoning law to permit and regulate the towers, according to local residents. And in Brandon, N.Y., nearby, the town supervisor told Mr. Champagne that after a meeting during which he proposed a moratorium on wind towers, he had been invited to pick up a gift from the back seat of a wind company representative’s car. When the supervisor, Michael R. Lawrence, looked inside, according to his complaint to Mr. Champagne, he saw two company polo shirts and a leather pouch that he suspected contained cash. When Mr. Lawrence asked whether the pouch was part of the gift, the representative replied, “That’s up to you,” according to the complaint. Last month, Mr. Cuomo subpoenaed two wind companies, Noble Environmental Power, based in Connecticut, and First Wind, based in Massachusetts, seeking a broad range of documents. Both companies say they are cooperating with the attorney general. “We have no comment on specifics, but we want to be clear: Noble supports open and transparent development of wind projects in accordance with the highest ethical standards,” said Walt Howard, Noble’s chief executive. The industry’s interest in New York’s North Country is driven by several factors. The area is mostly rural, with thousands of acres of farmland near existing energy transmission lines. Moreover, under a program begun in 2004, the state is entering into contracts to buy renewable energy credits, effectively subsidizing wind power until it can compete against power produced more cheaply from coal or natural gas.

15 Nine large-scale wind farms housing 451 towers, each with a turbine, are in operation in New York, with at least 840 more towers slated for construction, according to state officials. And in June, Iberdrola S.A., which is based in Spain and is one of the world’s largest energy producers, announced its proposal to invest $2 billion to build hundreds more towers here. Every day in the North Country during the warm months, trucks pulling giant flatbed trailers rumble down the highways, carrying tower sections and turbine blades. Some residents see the trucks not as a disturbance, but as an omen of jobs, money and cleaner air. “I feel as a mother, as a grandmother, that the country needs it — not just here,” said Susan Gerow, a Burke resident who has signed easements with Noble worth about $3,000 a year. Like others who have signed deals with the companies, Ms. Gerow and her family will also earn a portion of the revenue from the windmills if they are ever built. The North Country is a chronically distressed region, and farming is increasingly a profitless enterprise here. The General Motors plant in Massena, for years a reliable source of good jobs, is closing in mid-2009. One of the few bright spots in the local economy in recent decades has been the construction of state prisons, of which there are now five in Franklin County alone. “You’re talking about a poor farming community out here,” said Brent A. Trombly, a former town supervisor of Ellenburg, which approved a law to allow and establish regulations for the wind towers in 2003. “Our only natural resources are stone and wind.” For some farmers, he said, the wind leases were their last chance to hold onto land that had been in the family for generations. Supporters also say that the wind towers bring in badly needed tax revenue. “We see this industry coming, we see the payments coming in,” said William K. Wood, a former Burke Town Board member who also signed a lease option. The school board of Chateaugay, he pointed out, received $332,800 this year from Noble for payments in lieu of taxes, money that the district used to lower school taxes, upgrade its computers and provide a pre-kindergarten class for the first time. The local debates over wind power are driven in a part by a vacuum at the state level. There is no state law governing where wind turbines can be built or how big they can be. That leaves it up to town officials, working part time and on advice from outside lawyers, some of whom may have conflicts of their own. Two Franklin County towns, Brandon and Malone, have passed laws banning the wind turbines. But the issue remains unresolved in Burke, population 1,451, where two Town Board members recused themselves from the issue this year because they had leases with wind companies, leaving the board deadlocked. At a meeting last month at Burke’s Town Hall, opponents and supporters sat on opposite sides of the aisle, arms crossed. The mood, as it has often been at such meetings, was quietly bitter. “I’d like to hear what people think,” said Darrel Bushey, the town supervisor and a wind-tower opponent. “We’ve listened to the people for two years,” responded Timothy Crippen, who sits on the town’s zoning board, which favors permitting the turbines. “It’s time to make a move.” Some hands shot into the air from the audience, but were ignored. “There is no decision you are going to make that is going to make everyone happy,” said Craig Dumas, another zoning board member, almost pleading for action. But the meeting soon broke up, still with no decision made. “This is a problem for these communities,” Mr. Dumas said as the room emptied. “There’s a lot of emotion on both sides.” Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

16 NY Chapter AEE Board Members NEXT PAGE

NY Chapter AEE Board Members David Ahrens [email protected] 718- 677-9077x110 Michael Bobker [email protected] 646-660-6977 Timothy Daniels [email protected] 212- 312-3770 Jack Davidoff [email protected] 718- 963-2556 Fredric Goldner [email protected] 516- 481-1455 Placido Impollonia [email protected] 212-669-7628 Dick Koral [email protected] 718- 552-1161 (NEWSLETTER EDITOR) John Leffler [email protected] 212-868-4660x218 Robert Meier [email protected] 212-328-3360x502 Jeremy Metz [email protected] 212-338-6405 John Nettleton [email protected] 212-340-2937 Chris Young [email protected], and 917-685-5365 (Interim) Asit Patel [email protected] 718- 292-6733x205 Board Members Emeritus Paul Rivet [email protected] George Kritzler [email protected] Alfred Greenberg [email protected] 914-422-4387 George Birman Past Presidents Mike Bobker (2003-05), Asit Patel (2000-03), Thomas Matonti (1998-99), Jack Davidoff (1997-98), Fred Goldner (1993-96), Peter Kraljic (1991-92), George Kritzler (1989-90), Alfred Greenberg (1982-89), Murray Gross (1981-82), Herbert Kunstadt (1980-81), Sheldon Liebowitz (1978-80)

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