Emission Free Cities

EXPERIENCE EXCELLENCE

What are Emission-Free Cities?

Emission-free cities are attainable through the integration of continuous efficiency improvements in all energy, water and resource using devices, along with solar and wind power. Modest amounts of other renewables (water, geothermal, biowastes) will provide remaining sums to attain 100% emission-free energy system.

Emission-Free Cities: Case Studies

Efficiency

The past half-century has been witness to an explosion of knowledge generation, scientific breakthrough, technical advances, engineering progress, and accumulated evidence from applied innovations in markets and governance that offer promising prospects for addressing the seemingly intractable perils confronting humanity and the planet.

LIFECYCLE LEAST-COST-AND-RISK (LCR) DELIVERED UTILITY SERVICES

Among a dozen states leading the USA in efficiency gains, California has been the exemplary model. Since the 1980s, California has been a world leader in developing a utility regulatory process that aligns the financial interests of the utility with those of their customers to capture end-use efficiency opportunities.

Zeroing In on Zero-Emission Supply Options

In less than a decade, China has rapidly become the world’s biggest manufacturer of wind turbines and solar PV panels. The country established a feed-in tariff for wind in 2009 and for solar PV in 2011.

FEED-IN TARIFFS - FIT POLICY FOR DRIVING ZERO EMISSION OPTIONS

Feed-In Tariffs (FIT) are proving essential for spurring zero and near-zero emission power options — solar, wind, geothermal, biowastes, small-scale hydro.

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Efficiency

The past half-century has been witness to an explosion of knowledge generation, scientific breakthrough, technical advances, engineering progress, and accumulated evidence from applied innovations in markets and governance that offer promising prospects for addressing the seemingly intractable perils confronting humanity and the planet.

Empirical evidence accumulated over the past four decades clearly and unequivocally point to improving the efficiency in the way utility (electricity, natural gas, water), mobility and industrial services are delivered to the point of use as the largest pool of least-cost-and-risk opportunities for achieving immediate, ongoing, and deep reductions in global CO2 emissions.

This amounts to a paradigm shift from the industrial smokestack era of economic growth which achieved economy-of-scales constructing larger factories powered by bigger centralized power plants. The scientific revolution in solid-state electronics and space-age materials have led to new economy-of-scales through the delivery of distributed services at the point of use. Services are delivered while dramatically reducing the amount of upstream natural resources and downstream wastes and pollution, as well as lifecycle costs, as extensively detailed regarding utility services in, Small is Profitable: the Hidden Economic Benefits of Making Electrical Resources the Right Size.

Without faster, smarter, more efficient ways of delivering energy services, energy consumption in the US would have risen 225 percent from 1973 to 2005. Instead, energy consumption in 2005 increased only 30 percent. The difference (75 exajoules, EJ) also avoided $700 billion per year in higher energy bills.

How much is 75 EJ? Envision a freight train annually hauling nearly 18,000,000 railcars of coal, which would wrap around the world seven times. As world energy expert Amory Lovins calculated, the nearly 40% drop in energy required per unit of GDP from 1975 to 2000 represented, by 2000, “an effective energy ‘source’ 1.7 times as big as US oil consumption, [and] five times domestic oil output.”

The U.S. has displaced the equivalent of 25 million barrels of oil per day. Yet, the U.S. still remains so inefficient, and the pool of energy efficiency opportunities continues to greatly expand, that massive savings remain to be tapped. In the recent assessment, Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era, Lovins and his colleagues detail another 25 million barrels of oil per day equivalent savings the U.S. can achieve at an average cost below $20 per barrel. By comparison, the average price of world crude oil since 2006 has ranged between $60 and $120 per barrel.

A stellar example is how to cool down urban heat islands. A staggering sum of between 25 and 150 billion tons of CO2 emissions could be prevented through this urban retrofit process, while accruing multi-trillion dollar savings through avoided power plants and air condition equipment. It involves painting flat roofs white, and replacing low-albedo roof shingles with high-reflecting ones, so the sun’s heat is not absorbed. It also involves resurfacing black asphalt pavements with white cementitious finishes which also reflect away the sun’s heat. The rooftop efficiency measure is so cost-effective it has now been integrated into California’s world-leading Title 24 building standards. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Heat Island Group, pioneered by University of California at Berkeley Professor Arthur Rosenfeld, Dr. Hashem Akbari and their colleagues, has generated a wealth of knowledge on cooling down heat islands. The following images all come from LBNL’s Heat Island Group web site

LIFECYCLE LEAST-COST-AND-RISK (LCR) DELIVERED UTILITY SERVICES

Among a dozen states leading the USA in efficiency gains, California has been the exemplary model. Since the 1980s, California has been a world leader in developing a utility regulatory process that aligns the financial interests of the utility with those of their customers to capture end-use efficiency opportunities. This holds true for private-owned and public-operated utilities. California achieved this alignment by decoupling utility earnings from revenues to eliminate the perverse incentive of expanding supplies that are five times more costly than end-use efficiency gains.

This was combined with a comprehensive Integrated Resource Planning (IRP) methodology that calculated the levelized lifecycle cost-and-risk of delivering utility services from all supply and all end-use efficiency options. All options are priority ranked in order of least-cost-and-risk (LCR). End-use efficiency options have consistently and persistently ranked as the LCR. Ongoing assessments by McKinsey Global indicate LCR end-use options could provide half to three-fourths of all new utility services worldwide, based on utilities’10 to 12 percent fixed earnings on capital.

California’s highly innovative regulatory framework is so effective because it is based on allowing utility companies to recoup lost earnings from reduced sales in return for assisting customers to reduce their utility bills through capture of cost-effective end-use and locally distributed efficiency gains in buildings, factories, appliances and devices. The result is delivery of more services with less energy or water resources.

The powerful paradigm shift refocuses the utility’s attention and motivation, because their earnings remain robust even when revenues decline, while customers enjoy lower utility bills through smarter use even though the underlying rate increases (to recoup the utility’s lost earnings). Most importantly, the utility’s capital investment, previously limited to large power plants operating over 30 to 50 year time horizons, is diversified by focusing on a larger pool of lower cost end-use efficiency services.

When combined with California’s world leadership in setting continuously stronger appliance and building efficiency standards, these efforts have allowed the state to save customers an average of $165 per capita per year on electric and water utility bills, and the utility sector has CO2 emissions 50 percent below the national average. If all U.S. states had followed California’s end-use efficiency model, the U.S. national energy bill would be several hundred billion dollars less per year. The country also would have surpassed the CO2 reduction targets of the Kyoto Protocol at essentially zero cost to ratepayers and taxpayers.

One among many 30% solutions: High-Performance Electric Motor Drive Systems

A clear example of how important comprehensive IRP utility regulatory reform is needed to capture end-use efficiency services involves the persistence and ubiquity of obsolete and inefficient electric motor drive systems around the world. Half of the world’s electricity is consumed by industrial electric drive systems — electric motors, pumps, compressors and fans (60 percent in China).

Fifty percent savings are achievable in new motor systems if high-efficiency electric motor industrial drive system components are implemented by users. However, the conventional practice is to procure technologies that require the lowest capital cost, while ignoring how inefficient they perform in terms of energy consumption, lifecycle costs and emissions. In some instances, these inefficient devices will consume up to 20 times more in electricity costs when compared to the motor’s purchase price.

IRP-based utility efficiency incentive programs have been instrumental for decades in overcoming this distortion; utility financed efficiency upgrades to existing systems can achieve 30 percent savings at five to ten times less cost per kWh when compared to building new generation facilities to power the inefficient devices that dominate the current market.

Worldwide, an initiative for transforming the efficiency of electric motor systems would deliver the services equivalent to 2 trillion kWh per year, equal in services to one-fourth of all power plants planned for construction through 2030. A successful market transformation would reduce global energy bills by ~$1.6 trillion per decade.

The ancillary benefits for a world confronting droughts and water shortages would be significant, as the following illustrates. If motor efficiency gains were used to displace thermal power plants, the savings in water use would range between two and 200 billion m3 per year — equivalent to the water use of one to 10 Colorado Rivers.

SOURCE: (Left) Amory Lovins, Reinventing Fire, 2012, Rocky Mountain Institute; (right) Chris James, Co-Control of Air Pollutants, Integrated Planning for Environment and Energy BAQ 2012 – Hong Kong, December 2012, Regulatory Assistance Project.

China End-Use Efficiency Example

In China, the potential energy savings from efficiency gains from electric motor drive systems are worth several hundred billion dollars per decade, displacing the need for 63,000 MW of planned power plants. Jiangsu province is leading the effort, identifying 10,000 MW of motor efficiency gains that can be delivered at a cost of US$0.01 per kWh. By comparison, the Jiangsu electricity price delivered to the industrial sector in 2012 was US$0.14 per kWh (0.87 Yuan).

Hypothetically, applied comprehensively to all power-consuming uses throughout China’s residential, commercial, institutional, industrial and agricultural sectors, end-use efficiency and decoupling methodologies could help in avoiding half of an estimated US$10 trillion in utility expenditures incurred from the power plants to be built by 2030.

China has been a world leader in pursuing ambitious energy efficiency targets. From 1980 to 2002, China experienced a 5% average annual reduction in energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product (GDP). There was a dramatic reversal of this historic relationship between 2002 and 2005, when efficiency options were largely ignored and energy intensity increased 5% per year. However, China‘s 11th Five Year Plan (FYP) set a target of reducing energy intensity by 20% by 2010, followed by the 12th FYP target for a 16 percent reduction in energy intensity between 2011 and 2015.

According to a recent assessment by LBNL, selected policies and programs that China has instituted to fulfill the national goal have made substantial progress. Many of the energy-efficiency programs appear to be on track to meet – or in some cases exceed – their energy-saving targets. Most of the Ten Key Projects, the Top-1000 Program (1000 largest companies, consuming about one-third of the China’s energy), and the Small Plant Closure Program (a total of 80,000 MW of inefficient thermal plants and industries were shut down) met or surpassed the 11th FYP savings goals. In the 12th FYP China extended the Top-1000 program to the Top-10,000 program.