Borough Proposal For NYC Public Schools To Use Rooftop Solar Power To Lower Energy Costs

Public school rooftops in New York City are a vast untapped resource for generating solar power that could be used to lower yearly city energy costs by millions of dollars, according to a new report by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer.                  

Tom’s River, N.J. regional school powered by solar energy. New Jersey government policies have created renewable energy credits that have spurred public-private partnerships for solar projects. These policies are being looked at by New York State legislators as possible models for similar future initiatives. Photo courtesy of Mathew Engle, Science and Technology Advocate.

Under the current system – using fossil fuel – the New York Department of City Administrative Services is expected to allocate $240 million, or 27.5 percent of the city’s municipal electricity budget to meet the electricity demands of buildings within the Department of Education for fiscal year 2012, said the report.

The borough president’s report estimates that with about 21 million square feet of usable public school rooftop space for solar panels, “the city could increase its solar energy by an estimated 2,507 percent.”

Using information from the City University of New York’s NYC Solar Map, the report also showed that even the solar installation on a partial number school rooftops in the city (1,094 public school buildings) could “host 169.46 megawatts of clean, renewable electricity and eliminate 76,696 tons of carbon from the air each year – the equivalent of planting over 400,000 trees.”

The NYC Solar Map is an interactive online tool that allows users to estimate the solar energy potential for every building in the city’s five boroughs by putting in an address.

The map also highlights existing solar installations; displays real-time solar energy production citywide; and allows users to estimate the costs, incentives, and payback period for an investment in solar power.

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Texas School for the Deaf Wins Grand Prize in Competition for Green School Makeover

Photo courtesy of DTK Austin.

The Texas School for the Deaf is the grand prize winner in the Global Green USA Green School Makeover Competition.

As part of the grand prize, the school will receive a ‘green makeover’ worth $130,000, according to the non-profit Global Green, which educates and raises funds for environmental initiatives.

The grand prize winner and four runners-up were selected by a panel of judges out of a pool of more than 200 public, private, and charter K-12 schools that submitted proposals for green renovations.

In announcing the results of the competition, Matt Petersen, president and CEO of Global Green, said, “Green schools improve student performance, increase average daily attendance, and reduce operating costs, energy, and water consumption.

“We are deeply excited to be able to bring those benefits to the students and teachers at the extraordinary Texas School for the Deaf.”

The school is the oldest continually operating, publicly funded school in Texas. Since 1857, over 10,000 students from grades K-12 have walked its halls.

Claire Bugen, the school’s superintendent said, “Unlike other public schools, we live on this campus 24 hours a day and we generate a lot of waste. This prize will help use take our fledgling recycling efforts to the next level and install some important tools – like automatic faucets – to help us become more sustainable.”

Actually, the school will do a lot more than just revamp its recycling and faucets. The school plans to make energy efficiency upgrades, implement large-scale water conservation initiatives, reduce paper waste, and provide education for the school community on recycling.

As part of its energy upgrades, the school plans to retrofit light fixtures to allow for energy efficient bulbs, as well as to install motion-activated lights to conserve energy.

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Federal/Private Sector Pooling Together Nearly $4 Billion For Energy Upgrades To Buildings

The Obama administration has just set a plan to partner with private industry to provide energy upgrades for buildings nationwide.

Graphic courtesy of Columbia Law School.

Nearly $4 billion in combined federal and private financing will go toward the initiative over the next two years. The investment will include a $2 billion federal commitment to make energy upgrades in federal buildings.

The energy upgrades to federal buildings are expected to be made under the government’s Energy Savings Performance Contracts (ESPC) program. Under the program, new energy efficient equipment will be installed in those buildings at no up-front costs to the government, said the administration during the announcement of the plan.

The costs of the improvements will be paid over time with the energy savings on utility bills, added the administration.

The plan was announced at a White House press event by President Barack Obama, who was joined by former President Bill Clinton, as well as about 60 CEOs, mayors, university presidents, and labor leaders from around the country.

The private sector participation is part of the Better Buildings Challenge, which is part of the Better Buildings Initiative that was launched by the president in February 2011.

The purpose of the Better Buildings Initiative is to support job creation in the private sector through investments in upgrades in commercial and industrial buildings, with the goal of making U.S. buildings 20 percent more efficient over the next 10 years.

The members of the private sector present at this event have committed to contributing the remaining $2 billion of the $4 billion investment.

The private sector financing is expected go toward energy upgrades in facilities including hospitals, universities, community colleges, school buildings, industrial buildings, and municipal buildings.

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New Kansas Biomass Facility To Make Ethanol from the Non-Edible Plant Parts of Staple Food

Image courtesy of http://solar.calfinder.com.

A long-held problem with biofuels has always been that making them requires displacing land use and resources that would otherwise go to making food crops.

Well now, Abengoa Bioenergy Biomass of Kansas, with a new finalized loan guarantee of about $132 million from the U.S. Department of Energy, may have found one viable solution to the land resource problem.

Construction has just begun on a new facility that’s expected - when operational – to produce yearly about 23 million gallons of ethanol fuel from plant fibers including: wheat straw, corn stover (leaves and stalks), switchgrass, and sorghum stubble.

The facility is expected to convert about 300,000 tons of this “crop residue” per year to generate the desired annual ethanol volumes.

“The plant will also utilize the same biomass feedstock to produce 20 megawatts of electricity, adequate to power the ethanol production operations, and help make the facility even more energy efficient and environmentally friendly,” added Abengoa.

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European Airlines Testing Increasing Biofuel Use In Commercial Flights

Iberia Airlines launched, last week, Spain’s first commercial flight using a biofuel. The Iberia Airbus A320 flew from Madrid to Barcelona, burning a mixture of conventional A-1 jet fuel and a biofuel synthesized with the use of a plant the Spanish call camelina sativa.

The Iberia Airbus A320. Photo courtesy of Airliners.net.

The airbus needed no modifications to burn the mixture of second-generation biofuel.

In other parts of the world, the plant is also known as linseed dodder, German sesame, and Siberian oilseed. It’s native to northern Europe and to central Asia, but has also been introduced to North America.

A lot of the camelina plant’s appeal as a biofuel is that it needs little water or nitrogen to flourish. It can be grown on marginal agricultural lands and does not compete with food crops.

Repsol, the Spanish oil company that provided the fuel, said that the fuel’s characteristics were identical to those of conventional aviation fuel, with a 25 percent content of biofuel made from the plant.

Repsol blended and distributed the fuel, which was produced by Honeywell-UOP. Iberia estimated that using the fuel mixture resulted in a reduction of nearly 1,500 kgs of CO2 emissions.

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