A Yard & A Half Landscaping/Waltham, MA (Boston area)
Selected as one of Inc. Magazine's "Winning Workplaces" for our open-book management and innovative employee development, A Yard & A Half Landscaping is a landscape design-build company committed to sustainable and organic practices.
If you love building beautiful landscapes, take pride in your work and looking for a company you can grow with, give us a call. We are looking for individuals who are enthusiastic, fun-loving, enjoy a challenge, and want to advance in this industry.
Responsibilities include:
•Supervising crew through encouragement, enthusiasm and humor.
•Ensuring customer satisfaction with job performed.
•Completing assigned work in estimated time.
•Keeping truck equipment and garage supplies organized.
•Communicating ideas and details to project manager.
•Performing work in accordance with high quality industry standards.
Minimum Qualifications:
Valid MA driver's license and good driving record.
2-3 years of landscape construction experience required.
Some supervisory experience helpful.
Ability to work in all weather and lift 50 lbs.
Spanish-English bilingual preferred.
Compensation:
$14+ depending on years of experience.
Competitive wages, overtime, performance-based bonuses, and opportunity to become part-owner of a worker-cooperative. Paid holidays and vacation, medical and dental benefits, and Simple-IRA retirement plan. Tuition reimbursement for approved courses. Safe work environment with excellent growth potential.
The collapse of an Interstate 5 bridge in Washington state Thursday night offered a wake-up call about the sorry state of disrepair in which we’ve left our country’s auto-centric transportation system. But all the talk about aging bridges and infrastructure drowns out a few larger questions — about how we plan to fund the massive road system we’ve built, and why, with existing roads crumbling, we keep dropping money on more.
WSDOTNo one was killed when an I-5 bridge over the Skagit River in Washington collapsed.
The bridge that collapsed in Washington was built, like many major bridges in the U.S., during the rise of the interstate highway system, circa 1955. That means it had already exceeded by several years the 50-year lifespan typical of American bridges.
Ironically, the bridge in Washington, unlike nearly 70,000 bridges across the country, wasn’t rated “structurally deficient.” It had been inspected as recently as November 2012. But after a half a century, a bridge is likely to need major upgrades of some kind, and with the average bridge in this country now 43 years old, we’re looking at a huge roster of bridges due for repairs. According to the Federal Highway Administration, as of 2009, the backlog of deficient bridges required $70.9 billion to address — and that number has likely increased since then.
So what are states doing to tackle the problem? They’re funneling money to shiny new construction projects instead, natch. According to Transportation for America, a national coalition for transportation policy reform:
In recent years, most transportation agencies have delayed needed repairs and maintenance while focusing their energy on new construction. In 2008, all states combined spent more than $18 billion, or 30 percent of the federal transportation funds they received, to build new roads or add capacity to existing roads. In that same year, states spent $8.1 billion of federal funds on repair and rehabilitation of bridges, or about 13 percent of total funds. States currently have the ability to “flex” or transfer out up to 50 percent of their bridge repair money into other projects or programs. [emphasis theirs]
“The new stuff, the ribbon-cutting, always competes with maintenance,” says David Goldberg, communications director at Transportation for America, noting that Washington state’s most recent transportation package allocated surprisingly little money to repair and replace existing structures.
“Some [new] projects have merit and are important for economic development,” Goldberg adds. “But a lot of them have strong political backing. [Departments of Transportation] across the country know that bridges [like the one in Washington] need to be replaced [eventually]. But are they going to spend the money to replace a bridge that is still technically OK when they’re being tapped on the shoulder by politicians saying, ‘Hey, we really want you to spend the money on this shiny new mega-project?’”
Politicians advocating for such mega-projects get to throw around the magic word — jobs. But Transportation for America reports that “Repair work on roads and bridges generates 16 percent more jobs than construction of new bridges and roads,” and that over 25 years, deferring maintenance can end up costing three times as much as preventive repairs. And with public transit ridership at record highs despite constant fare hikes and service cuts, does pouring money into increased road capacity really make sense?
Larry Hanley, international president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, doesn’t think so. “There’s no better example of being penny-wise and pound-foolish than the way Congress is refusing to adequately fund our transportation infrastructure,” he said in a statement. “Their legislative intransigence will lead to much greater expense down the road when too many people find it impossible to get to work or to shop, or to do any one of the many things people do that keep our economy moving.”
As Goldberg puts it: “If [a new project] shaves two minutes off a typical commute, and probably only for 10 years, is this a worthwhile project? With dwindling resources, it becomes more and more important to really prioritize. We need to make sure we’re doing key repairs first.”
In the past, much of the transportation system has been paid for using federal and state gas taxes … But cars are becoming more efficient, meaning we’re burning less fuel and paying less in gas taxes, and while the cost of maintaining our roads has risen steadily, the federal gas tax [rate] has remained the same since 1993. To make matters worse, thanks to a drowsy economy, Americans are driving less and buying less stuff that needs to be shipped cross-country.
Gas taxes go into the Highway Trust Fund, which is quickly running dry, despite emergency refills from the general fund. Governing magazine reports that Congress would have to either cut transportation funding by 92 percent (!) or raise the gas tax by at least 50 percent in order to save the fund.
Raising the gas tax is a politically touchy subject, especially when gas prices are already high. But a report from last year found that 58 percent of Americans would support a 10-cent increase in the gas tax, if they knew it would go toward maintenance of existing roads and highways. Incidents like this latest bridge collapse — to say nothing of the tragic 2007 collapse of a Minneapolis bridge that killed 13 people — could certainly bolster that support.
Goldberg predicts a gas-tax hike could be a feasible short-term solution to bolster the fund’s revenue. But, he said, “we need to be looking longer-term and planning for a transition to other sources. … so that [the fund] incorporates other sources of energy that fuel the next generation of vehicles.”
Goldberg also argues we need a “true comprehensive transportation trust fund, not just a highway trust fund,” and I would agree. Our transportation policy ought to look beyond cars and roads and consider all the diverse and creative ways in which we’re now getting around. And with more money directed to public transit, rail, and bike and pedestrian infrastructure, we wouldn’t be so dependent on ever-growing roads in the first place.
This looks like Cousin Itt’s house, but it’s actually a proposal from Swedish architecture firm Belatchew, which wants to outfit this Stockholm building with an energy-collecting piezoelectric toupee. Could you start seeing hairy buildings in your neighborhood? Will you someday live in a hairy house?
Well, probably not — the technology is still pretty new. The idea is that these millions of piezoelectric “straws” blow in the wind, collecting energy out of thin air to power the building. But, says Treehugger, there are still a few challenges:
[H]ow do you clean all those piezo-strands? How much noise might they make on a windy day? In addition, most piezo-electric generators are sheets or plates installed where people move about, and underneath the collectors is wiring to bring the generated energy to where it can be used.
Last but not least, piezo-electricity isn’t very efficient. Not yet, at least.
Yeah, that last part’s a bit of a buzzkill. But at least this theoretical skyscraper would look sweet as hell, and not suffer the undermining of confidence that comes from building pattern baldness.
Position Summary
This position exists to aid and advise the Associate Vice President of Facility Services to further develop the University’s sustainability program and assist in fulfilling the University’s mission related to the creation of a vibrant sustainable community.
Under the general direction of the Associate Vice President for Facility Services, this position is responsible for strategic development and operational management of the university Office of Sustainability. The Office of Sustainability is charged with the responsibility to catalyze, coordinate and implement campus sustainability initiatives; coordinate and mentor student sustainability activities and operations; and carry out the President’s Climate Commitment for carbon neutrality via the University’s Climate Action Plan and Campus Sustainability Plan. This responsibility includes taking the primary lead in reporting the campus progress using the AASHE Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating Systemâ„¢ (STARS).
The Office of Sustainability works collaboratively with local, national and international partners to develop sound initiatives that support the university’s sustainability mission to improve the social, ecological and economic vitality of our communities. This position represents the Office of Sustainability and the Facility Services department on several university, community and regional committees.
The Office of Sustainability Manager also works closely with the other Facility Services department leaders including: the Director of Utility Services and Facilities Sustainability, the Director of Facility Operations, the Director of Planning Design and Construction, the Director of Facility Engineering and Inspection Services, and the Director of Facility Services Administration.
Minimum Qualifications
A Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies, Environmental Science, Sustainability, Engineering, Business or directly related fields. Minimum of three to five years of progressive work experience and leadership in the area of sustainability in a large and complex environment.
Annual Salary: $ 48,000 – 57,000 DOE
Application Deadline: Open until further notice.
Please see www.nau.jobs for full job descriptions and details on how to apply on-line! NAU is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Institution. Women, minorities, veterans and individuals with disabilities are encouraged to apply.
Joachim S. MüllerThe fennec fox will be your adorable guide for part 2.
Electric utilities! They are to me what sideboobs are to Huffington Post — I just can’t stop writing about them.
A couple of days ago I posted a brief introduction to utilities and the way they currently work. The take-home lesson is that current regulations give utilities every incentive to build more infrastructure and sell more power, but very little incentive to cut costs or innovate.
The situation is no longer working for us. We need rapid, large-scale innovation in low-carbon electricity systems, and we need it now. It’s time to fundamentally rethink the utility business model.
I hope you’ll indulge me just one more scene-setting post before I finally get to the long-awaited post on solutions. Today we’re going to take a look at the way electricity has typically gotten from generator to customer, the electricity “value chain,” so we can better understand which parts need to change. This is a complicated topic, to say the least, but I’ll do my best to break it down in the simplest terms I can, with the proviso that I’m glossing over lots and lots of important details.
The electricity value chain
OK. Think of the electricity value chain as having three basic links:
Generation: These are the power plants that generate (most of) the electricity.
Transmission and distribution (T&D): These are the poles and lines that carry electricity to customers, both high-voltage long-distance transmission lines and lower-voltage local distribution lines, along with all the substations and transformers that help the power along its way.
The distribution edge: This one takes a little explaining. The point where the grid meets the customer is the power meter, which tracks the customer’s electricity consumption for billing purposes. Most of the time that meter is on a house or building, though sometimes, in the case of “microgrids,” there is one meter for a whole collection of buildings. Everything that goes on in the building(s), before net consumption is tallied up by the meter (think rooftop solar panels, smart appliances, electric cars, energy storage, energy management software, etc.), happens “behind the meter.” Everything at and behind the meter is known as the “distribution edge.”
In the beginning, most utilities, especially investor-owned utilities, were “vertically integrated,” meaning they owned and operated the entire value chain, from the power plant to the meter. At the time, electricity was viewed purely as a commodity; the utility’s sole job was to get as much of it as possible to customers as cheaply as possible. What customers did with it on their side of the meter was of little concern, as long as they kept using more of it.
In the electricity-as-commodity model, it’s all about economies of scale. The bigger you make the power plants, the cheaper the power. That’s why utilities were monopolies: so they could maximize the benefits of scale.
The physical expression of the commodity model is the “hub and spoke” electricity grid, with large centralized power plants sending power out long distances to surrounding customers. It helps to think of it as a hydrological system. Electricity springs from power plants and flows down great rivers of transmission cables into the smaller canals and streams of a distribution system. In this system, power flows only one way, from hubs outward. It’s like gravity pulling water downhill.
Since there is no way to store the power, there must always be enough flowing into the streams to sate customer thirst. When demand surges in certain areas at certain times, grid operators fire up more power plants to supply the extra need. The plants that are always running are “baseload,” usually coal, nuclear, or hydro. The ones that get fired up for the busy daytime hours, the “mid-merit” plants, are typically natural gas combined-cycle plants. And then when demand “peaks” for a few hours, usually in the afternoon and again when people come home in the evening, they fire up the more expensive oil or gas “peaker plants.” There must always be enough power plants online — enough “generation capacity” — to supply well in excess of any expected peak, establishing “reserve margins” of 15 to 20 percent. That’s how reliability is assured: The canals and streams are kept full at all times.
Previous utility reforms
yvonne nPrevious utility reforms!? This fennec fox is all ears.
In 1978, seeking to open up the generation side of things to smaller and cleaner power plants, Congress passed the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act, or PURPA. (There’s some talk that it could be used to drive a new wave of distributed renewables, but the details are complicated and not essential to the story I’m telling.)
More significantly, in the 1990s, there was a wave of regulatory restructuring that “unbundled” generation from transmission and distribution. These changes created competitive wholesale and retail power markets on the generation side, but left transmission and distribution — getting power to customers and billing them for it — to regulated utilities.
(This is often referred to as “deregulation,” but I think that’s a misleading term; the whole industry remains regulated from top to bottom.)
Restructuring was proceeding at a brisk clip until California happened in 2000-2001. Remember that? Enron? Maximum fubar? More or less overnight, “deregulation” and “consumers get f*cked” became synonymous in the public mind and restructuring of the utility industry froze in place.
The top map shows all the states that were investigating or implementing restructuring in 2001. On the bottom you see the situation in 2010 — only Texas and the Northeast have stuck with restructuring. (Arizona is apparently looking into it.)
So we’re left with a mix of public and investor-owned utilities, some vertically integrated and some with only T&D, and just for fun, some have undergone decoupling (which we’ll talk about in a later post) and some haven’t. All these categories overlap. Oh, and some holding companies own both independent power producers and regulated utilities. It becomes very difficult to make generalizations or simplifying assumptions about utilities — and it also becomes super-boring.
I think I speak for all Americans when I say that contemplating the post-partial-quasi-halfway-restructured U.S. electricity industry gives me an intense, nagging pain just above my left eye socket. This is what happens when you bang into the force field of tedium.
What has changed in electricity
So let’s take a few steps back and think about what’s changed in electricity. The traditional utility model made sense in the context of rapidly rising demand, economies of scale, and blissful climate ignorance. But today, two big counter-trends loom large.
First, climate change has become an urgent priority. U.S. policy may look stuck right now, but action on climate is inevitable, and utilities know it. Doing what really needs to be done on climate would involve an immediate and rapid scaling up of low-carbon power along with aggressive, system-wide pursuit of conservation, energy efficiency, and demand response.
Second, electricity is beginning to behave less like a commodity and more like information. It’s no longer a one-way affair, from generator to meter. Now it’s hundreds of thousands of small, distributed generators (think rooftop solar panels) sharing with each other on local distribution networks. Electricity is increasingly managed: monitored, fine-tuned, time-shifted. Big customers, and increasingly small ones too, want energy services rather than raw kilowatt-hours. They want to know how to tie together solar panels, microturbines, energy management software, smart appliances, electric cars, batteries and other storage, and energy-effective design into smart systems. They want to know how to create microgrids that incorporate electricity generation and management and can “island” off the larger grid in case of emergency or attack. They want all the pieces of the electricity puzzle to fit together in a way that reduces consumption, minimizes waste, and maximizes resilience. Or if they don’t want it yet, they’ll want it soon.
That’s where things are headed: an electricity grid, particularly on the distribution side, that is infused with information technology and looks a lot like the internet. (This is usually referred to as the “smart grid,” though it extends beyond just the grid. Al Gore tried to make “enernet” catch on, but it never really took.)
So, two changes: the low-carbon imperative and the shift from a dumb one-way system to a smart, multi-directional network. Both point above all to the need for innovation, not just in technology but in business practices, financing models, and investment strategies.
The best tool we currently know of for producing rapid innovation, product development, and jobs is a competitive market. That’s what’s missing.
Now, I mentioned before that some markets have restructured to provide for competition on the generation side. I think that’s all to the good, and it should continue. But what’s really needed today is competitive markets on the distribution edge. It makes no sense to have utilities hostile to distributed energy and local energy management. We need entrepreneurs thinking about how to package energy services in new ways for customers, and we need utilities not just to stop impeding them or to get out of their way, but to actively empower them.
But we still need the reliability and stability with which regulated utilities have traditionally been charged. How can utilities provide that, make sure the grid keeps humming, while also structuring competitive markets on both the generation side and the distribution edge? That’s that knotty subject that we will (finally) tackle in my next post.
Joachim S. MüllerThe fennec fox will be your adorable guide for part 2.
Electric utilities! They are to me what sideboobs are to Huffington Post — I just can’t stop writing about them.
A couple of days ago I posted a brief introduction to utilities and the way they currently work. The take-home lesson is that current regulations give utilities every incentive to build more infrastructure and sell more power, but very little incentive to cut costs or innovate.
The situation is no longer working for us. We need rapid, large-scale innovation in low-carbon electricity systems, and we need it now. It’s time to fundamentally rethink the utility business model.
I hope you’ll indulge me just one more scene-setting post before I finally get to the long-awaited post on solutions. Today we’re going to take a look at the way electricity has typically gotten from generator to customer, the electricity “value chain,” so we can better understand which parts need to change. This is a complicated topic, to say the least, but I’ll do my best to break it down in the simplest terms I can, with the proviso that I’m glossing over lots and lots of important details.
The electricity value chain
OK. Think of the electricity value chain as having three basic links:
Generation: These are the power plants that generate (most of) the electricity.
Transmission and distribution (T&D): These are the poles and lines that carry electricity to customers, both high-voltage long-distance transmission lines and lower-voltage local distribution lines, along with all the substations and transformers that help the power along its way.
The distribution edge: This one takes a little explaining. The point where the grid meets the customer is the power meter, which tracks the customer’s electricity consumption for billing purposes. Most of the time that meter is on a house or building, though sometimes, in the case of “microgrids,” there is one meter for a whole collection of buildings. Everything that goes on in the building(s), before net consumption is tallied up by the meter (think rooftop solar panels, smart appliances, electric cars, energy storage, energy management software, etc.), happens “behind the meter.” Everything at and behind the meter is known as the “distribution edge.”
In the beginning, most utilities, especially investor-owned utilities, were “vertically integrated,” meaning they owned and operated the entire value chain, from the power plant to the meter. At the time, electricity was viewed purely as a commodity; the utility’s sole job was to get as much of it as possible to customers as cheaply as possible. What customers did with it on their side of the meter was of little concern, as long as they kept using more of it.
In the electricity-as-commodity model, it’s all about economies of scale. The bigger you make the power plants, the cheaper the power. That’s why utilities were monopolies: so they could maximize the benefits of scale.
The physical expression of the commodity model is the “hub and spoke” electricity grid, with large centralized power plants sending power out long distances to surrounding customers. It helps to think of it as a hydrological system. Electricity springs from power plants and flows down great rivers of transmission cables into the smaller canals and streams of a distribution system. In this system, power flows only one way, from hubs outward. It’s like gravity pulling water downhill.
Since there is no way to store the power, there must always be enough flowing into the streams to sate customer thirst. When demand surges in certain areas at certain times, grid operators fire up more power plants to supply the extra need. The plants that are always running are “baseload,” usually coal, nuclear, or hydro. The ones that get fired up for the busy daytime hours, the “mid-merit” plants, are typically natural gas combined-cycle plants. And then when demand “peaks” for a few hours, usually in the afternoon and again when people come home in the evening, they fire up the more expensive oil or gas “peaker plants.” There must always be enough power plants online — enough “generation capacity” — to supply well in excess of any expected peak, establishing “reserve margins” of 15 to 20 percent. That’s how reliability is assured: The canals and streams are kept full at all times.
Previous utility reforms
yvonne nPrevious utility reforms!? This fennec fox is all ears.
In 1978, seeking to open up the generation side of things to smaller and cleaner power plants, Congress passed the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act, or PURPA. (There’s some talk that it could be used to drive a new wave of distributed renewables, but the details are complicated and not essential to the story I’m telling.)
More significantly, in the 1990s, there was a wave of regulatory restructuring that “unbundled” generation from transmission and distribution. These changes created competitive wholesale and retail power markets on the generation side, but left transmission and distribution — getting power to customers and billing them for it — to regulated utilities.
(This is often referred to as “deregulation,” but I think that’s a misleading term; the whole industry remains regulated from top to bottom.)
Restructuring was proceeding at a brisk clip until California happened in 2000-2001. Remember that? Enron? Maximum fubar? More or less overnight, “deregulation” and “consumers get f*cked” became synonymous in the public mind and restructuring of the utility industry froze in place.
The top map shows all the states that were investigating or implementing restructuring in 2001. On the bottom you see the situation in 2010 — only Texas and the Northeast have stuck with restructuring. (Arizona is apparently looking into it.)
So we’re left with a mix of public and investor-owned utilities, some vertically integrated and some with only T&D, and just for fun, some have undergone decoupling (which we’ll talk about in a later post) and some haven’t. All these categories overlap. Oh, and some holding companies own both independent power producers and regulated utilities. It becomes very difficult to make generalizations or simplifying assumptions about utilities — and it also becomes super-boring.
I think I speak for all Americans when I say that contemplating the post-partial-quasi-halfway-restructured U.S. electricity industry gives me an intense, nagging pain just above my left eye socket. This is what happens when you bang into the force field of tedium.
What has changed in electricity
So let’s take a few steps back and think about what’s changed in electricity. The traditional utility model made sense in the context of rapidly rising demand, economies of scale, and blissful climate ignorance. But today, two big counter-trends loom large.
First, climate change has become an urgent priority. U.S. policy may look stuck right now, but action on climate is inevitable, and utilities know it. Doing what really needs to be done on climate would involve an immediate and rapid scaling up of low-carbon power along with aggressive, system-wide pursuit of conservation, energy efficiency, and demand response.
Second, electricity is beginning to behave less like a commodity and more like information. It’s no longer a one-way affair, from generator to meter. Now it’s hundreds of thousands of small, distributed generators (think rooftop solar panels) sharing with each other on local distribution networks. Electricity is increasingly managed: monitored, fine-tuned, time-shifted. Big customers, and increasingly small ones too, want energy services rather than raw kilowatt-hours. They want to know how to tie together solar panels, microturbines, energy management software, smart appliances, electric cars, batteries and other storage, and energy-effective design into smart systems. They want to know how to create microgrids that incorporate electricity generation and management and can “island” off the larger grid in case of emergency or attack. They want all the pieces of the electricity puzzle to fit together in a way that reduces consumption, minimizes waste, and maximizes resilience. Or if they don’t want it yet, they’ll want it soon.
That’s where things are headed: an electricity grid, particularly on the distribution side, that is infused with information technology and looks a lot like the internet. (This is usually referred to as the “smart grid,” though it extends beyond just the grid. Al Gore tried to make “enernet” catch on, but it never really took.)
So, two changes: the low-carbon imperative and the shift from a dumb one-way system to a smart, multi-directional network. Both point above all to the need for innovation, not just in technology but in business practices, financing models, and investment strategies.
The best tool we currently know of for producing rapid innovation, product development, and jobs is a competitive market. That’s what’s missing.
Now, I mentioned before that some markets have restructured to provide for competition on the generation side. I think that’s all to the good, and it should continue. But what’s really needed today is competitive markets on the distribution edge. It makes no sense to have utilities hostile to distributed energy and local energy management. We need entrepreneurs thinking about how to package energy services in new ways for customers, and we need utilities not just to stop impeding them or to get out of their way, but to actively empower them.
But we still need the reliability and stability with which regulated utilities have traditionally been charged. How can utilities provide that, make sure the grid keeps humming, while also structuring competitive markets on both the generation side and the distribution edge? That’s that knotty subject that we will (finally) tackle in my next post.
Joachim S. MüllerThe fennec fox will be your adorable guide for part 2.
Electric utilities! They are to me what sideboobs are to Huffington Post — I just can’t stop writing about them.
A couple of days ago I posted a brief introduction to utilities and the way they currently work. The take-home lesson is that current regulations give utilities every incentive to build more infrastructure and sell more power, but very little incentive to cut costs or innovate.
The situation is no longer working for us. We need rapid, large-scale innovation in low-carbon electricity systems, and we need it now. It’s time to fundamentally rethink the utility business model.
I hope you’ll indulge me just one more scene-setting post before I finally get to the long-awaited post on solutions. Today we’re going to take a look at the way electricity has typically gotten from generator to customer, the electricity “value chain,” so we can better understand which parts need to change. This is a complicated topic, to say the least, but I’ll do my best to break it down in the simplest terms I can, with the proviso that I’m glossing over lots and lots of important details.
The electricity value chain
OK. Think of the electricity value chain as having three basic links:
Generation: These are the power plants that generate (most of) the electricity.
Transmission and distribution (T&D): These are the poles and lines that carry electricity to customers, both high-voltage long-distance transmission lines and lower-voltage local distribution lines, along with all the substations and transformers that help the power along its way.
The distribution edge: This one takes a little explaining. The point where the grid meets the customer is the power meter, which tracks the customer’s electricity consumption for billing purposes. Most of the time that meter is on a house or building, though sometimes, in the case of “microgrids,” there is one meter for a whole collection of buildings. Everything that goes on in the building(s), before net consumption is tallied up by the meter (think rooftop solar panels, smart appliances, electric cars, energy storage, energy management software, etc.), happens “behind the meter.” Everything at and behind the meter is known as the “distribution edge.”
In the beginning, most utilities, especially investor-owned utilities, were “vertically integrated,” meaning they owned and operated the entire value chain, from the power plant to the meter. At the time, electricity was viewed purely as a commodity; the utility’s sole job was to get as much of it as possible to customers as cheaply as possible. What customers did with it on their side of the meter was of little concern, as long as they kept using more of it.
In the electricity-as-commodity model, it’s all about economies of scale. The bigger you make the power plants, the cheaper the power. That’s why utilities were monopolies: so they could maximize the benefits of scale.
The physical expression of the commodity model is the “hub and spoke” electricity grid, with large centralized power plants sending power out long distances to surrounding customers. It helps to think of it as a hydrological system. Electricity springs from power plants and flows down great rivers of transmission cables into the smaller canals and streams of a distribution system. In this system, power flows only one way, from hubs outward. It’s like gravity pulling water downhill.
Since there is no way to store the power, there must always be enough flowing into the streams to sate customer thirst. When demand surges in certain areas at certain times, grid operators fire up more power plants to supply the extra need. The plants that are always running are “baseload,” usually coal, nuclear, or hydro. The ones that get fired up for the busy daytime hours, the “mid-merit” plants, are typically natural gas combined-cycle plants. And then when demand “peaks” for a few hours, usually in the afternoon and again when people come home in the evening, they fire up the more expensive oil or gas “peaker plants.” There must always be enough power plants online — enough “generation capacity” — to supply well in excess of any expected peak, establishing “reserve margins” of 15 to 20 percent. That’s how reliability is assured: The canals and streams are kept full at all times.
Previous utility reforms
yvonne nPrevious utility reforms!? This fennec fox is all ears.
In 1978, seeking to open up the generation side of things to smaller and cleaner power plants, Congress passed the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act, or PURPA. (There’s some talk that it could be used to drive a new wave of distributed renewables, but the details are complicated and not essential to the story I’m telling.)
More significantly, in the 1990s, there was a wave of regulatory restructuring that “unbundled” generation from transmission and distribution. These changes created competitive wholesale and retail power markets on the generation side, but left transmission and distribution — getting power to customers and billing them for it — to regulated utilities.
(This is often referred to as “deregulation,” but I think that’s a misleading term; the whole industry remains regulated from top to bottom.)
Restructuring was proceeding at a brisk clip until California happened in 2000-2001. Remember that? Enron? Maximum fubar? More or less overnight, “deregulation” and “consumers get f*cked” became synonymous in the public mind and restructuring of the utility industry froze in place.
The top map shows all the states that were investigating or implementing restructuring in 2001. On the bottom you see the situation in 2010 — only Texas and the Northeast have stuck with restructuring. (Arizona is apparently looking into it.)
So we’re left with a mix of public and investor-owned utilities, some vertically integrated and some with only T&D, and just for fun, some have undergone decoupling (which we’ll talk about in a later post) and some haven’t. All these categories overlap. Oh, and some holding companies own both independent power producers and regulated utilities. It becomes very difficult to make generalizations or simplifying assumptions about utilities — and it also becomes super-boring.
I think I speak for all Americans when I say that contemplating the post-partial-quasi-halfway-restructured U.S. electricity industry gives me an intense, nagging pain just above my left eye socket. This is what happens when you bang into the force field of tedium.
What has changed in electricity
So let’s take a few steps back and think about what’s changed in electricity. The traditional utility model made sense in the context of rapidly rising demand, economies of scale, and blissful climate ignorance. But today, two big counter-trends loom large.
First, climate change has become an urgent priority. U.S. policy may look stuck right now, but action on climate is inevitable, and utilities know it. Doing what really needs to be done on climate would involve an immediate and rapid scaling up of low-carbon power along with aggressive, system-wide pursuit of conservation, energy efficiency, and demand response.
Second, electricity is beginning to behave less like a commodity and more like information. It’s no longer a one-way affair, from generator to meter. Now it’s hundreds of thousands of small, distributed generators (think rooftop solar panels) sharing with each other on local distribution networks. Electricity is increasingly managed: monitored, fine-tuned, time-shifted. Big customers, and increasingly small ones too, want energy services rather than raw kilowatt-hours. They want to know how to tie together solar panels, microturbines, energy management software, smart appliances, electric cars, batteries and other storage, and energy-effective design into smart systems. They want to know how to create microgrids that incorporate electricity generation and management and can “island” off the larger grid in case of emergency or attack. They want all the pieces of the electricity puzzle to fit together in a way that reduces consumption, minimizes waste, and maximizes resilience. Or if they don’t want it yet, they’ll want it soon.
That’s where things are headed: an electricity grid, particularly on the distribution side, that is infused with information technology and looks a lot like the internet. (This is usually referred to as the “smart grid,” though it extends beyond just the grid. Al Gore tried to make “enernet” catch on, but it never really took.)
So, two changes: the low-carbon imperative and the shift from a dumb one-way system to a smart, multi-directional network. Both point above all to the need for innovation, not just in technology but in business practices, financing models, and investment strategies.
The best tool we currently know of for producing rapid innovation, product development, and jobs is a competitive market. That’s what’s missing.
Now, I mentioned before that some markets have restructured to provide for competition on the generation side. I think that’s all to the good, and it should continue. But what’s really needed today is competitive markets on the distribution edge. It makes no sense to have utilities hostile to distributed energy and local energy management. We need entrepreneurs thinking about how to package energy services in new ways for customers, and we need utilities not just to stop impeding them or to get out of their way, but to actively empower them.
But we still need the reliability and stability with which regulated utilities have traditionally been charged. How can utilities provide that, make sure the grid keeps humming, while also structuring competitive markets on both the generation side and the distribution edge? That’s that knotty subject that we will (finally) tackle in my next post.
Joachim S. MüllerThe fennec fox will be your adorable guide for part 2.
Electric utilities! They are to me what sideboobs are to Huffington Post — I just can’t stop writing about them.
A couple of days ago I posted a brief introduction to utilities and the way they currently work. The take-home lesson is that current regulations give utilities every incentive to build more infrastructure and sell more power, but very little incentive to cut costs or innovate.
The situation is no longer working for us. We need rapid, large-scale innovation in low-carbon electricity systems, and we need it now. It’s time to fundamentally rethink the utility business model.
I hope you’ll indulge me just one more scene-setting post before I finally get to the long-awaited post on solutions. Today we’re going to take a look at the way electricity has typically gotten from generator to customer, the electricity “value chain,” so we can better understand which parts need to change. This is a complicated topic, to say the least, but I’ll do my best to break it down in the simplest terms I can, with the proviso that I’m glossing over lots and lots of important details.
The electricity value chain
OK. Think of the electricity value chain as having three basic links:
Generation: These are the power plants that generate (most of) the electricity.
Transmission and distribution (T&D): These are the poles and lines that carry electricity to customers, both high-voltage long-distance transmission lines and lower-voltage local distribution lines, along with all the substations and transformers that help the power along its way.
The distribution edge: This one takes a little explaining. The point where the grid meets the customer is the power meter, which tracks the customer’s electricity consumption for billing purposes. Most of the time that meter is on a house or building, though sometimes, in the case of “microgrids,” there is one meter for a whole collection of buildings. Everything that goes on in the building(s), before net consumption is tallied up by the meter (think rooftop solar panels, smart appliances, electric cars, energy storage, energy management software, etc.), happens “behind the meter.” Everything at and behind the meter is known as the “distribution edge.”
In the beginning, most utilities, especially investor-owned utilities, were “vertically integrated,” meaning they owned and operated the entire value chain, from the power plant to the meter. At the time, electricity was viewed purely as a commodity; the utility’s sole job was to get as much of it as possible to customers as cheaply as possible. What customers did with it on their side of the meter was of little concern, as long as they kept using more of it.
In the electricity-as-commodity model, it’s all about economies of scale. The bigger you make the power plants, the cheaper the power. That’s why utilities were monopolies: so they could maximize the benefits of scale.
The physical expression of the commodity model is the “hub and spoke” electricity grid, with large centralized power plants sending power out long distances to surrounding customers. It helps to think of it as a hydrological system. Electricity springs from power plants and flows down great rivers of transmission cables into the smaller canals and streams of a distribution system. In this system, power flows only one way, from hubs outward. It’s like gravity pulling water downhill.
Since there is no way to store the power, there must always be enough flowing into the streams to sate customer thirst. When demand surges in certain areas at certain times, grid operators fire up more power plants to supply the extra need. The plants that are always running are “baseload,” usually coal, nuclear, or hydro. The ones that get fired up for the busy daytime hours, the “mid-merit” plants, are typically natural gas combined-cycle plants. And then when demand “peaks” for a few hours, usually in the afternoon and again when people come home in the evening, they fire up the more expensive oil or gas “peaker plants.” There must always be enough power plants online — enough “generation capacity” — to supply well in excess of any expected peak, establishing “reserve margins” of 15 to 20 percent. That’s how reliability is assured: The canals and streams are kept full at all times.
Previous utility reforms
yvonne nPrevious utility reforms!? This fennec fox is all ears.
In 1978, seeking to open up the generation side of things to smaller and cleaner power plants, Congress passed the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act, or PURPA. (There’s some talk that it could be used to drive a new wave of distributed renewables, but the details are complicated and not essential to the story I’m telling.)
More significantly, in the 1990s, there was a wave of regulatory restructuring that “unbundled” generation from transmission and distribution. These changes created competitive wholesale and retail power markets on the generation side, but left transmission and distribution — getting power to customers and billing them for it — to regulated utilities.
(This is often referred to as “deregulation,” but I think that’s a misleading term; the whole industry remains regulated from top to bottom.)
Restructuring was proceeding at a brisk clip until California happened in 2000-2001. Remember that? Enron? Maximum fubar? More or less overnight, “deregulation” and “consumers get f*cked” became synonymous in the public mind and restructuring of the utility industry froze in place.
The top map shows all the states that were investigating or implementing restructuring in 2001. On the bottom you see the situation in 2010 — only Texas and the Northeast have stuck with restructuring. (Arizona is apparently looking into it.)
So we’re left with a mix of public and investor-owned utilities, some vertically integrated and some with only T&D, and just for fun, some have undergone decoupling (which we’ll talk about in a later post) and some haven’t. All these categories overlap. Oh, and some holding companies own both independent power producers and regulated utilities. It becomes very difficult to make generalizations or simplifying assumptions about utilities — and it also becomes super-boring.
I think I speak for all Americans when I say that contemplating the post-partial-quasi-halfway-restructured U.S. electricity industry gives me an intense, nagging pain just above my left eye socket. This is what happens when you bang into the force field of tedium.
What has changed in electricity
So let’s take a few steps back and think about what’s changed in electricity. The traditional utility model made sense in the context of rapidly rising demand, economies of scale, and blissful climate ignorance. But today, two big counter-trends loom large.
First, climate change has become an urgent priority. U.S. policy may look stuck right now, but action on climate is inevitable, and utilities know it. Doing what really needs to be done on climate would involve an immediate and rapid scaling up of low-carbon power along with aggressive, system-wide pursuit of conservation, energy efficiency, and demand response.
Second, electricity is beginning to behave less like a commodity and more like information. It’s no longer a one-way affair, from generator to meter. Now it’s hundreds of thousands of small, distributed generators (think rooftop solar panels) sharing with each other on local distribution networks. Electricity is increasingly managed: monitored, fine-tuned, time-shifted. Big customers, and increasingly small ones too, want energy services rather than raw kilowatt-hours. They want to know how to tie together solar panels, microturbines, energy management software, smart appliances, electric cars, batteries and other storage, and energy-effective design into smart systems. They want to know how to create microgrids that incorporate electricity generation and management and can “island” off the larger grid in case of emergency or attack. They want all the pieces of the electricity puzzle to fit together in a way that reduces consumption, minimizes waste, and maximizes resilience. Or if they don’t want it yet, they’ll want it soon.
That’s where things are headed: an electricity grid, particularly on the distribution side, that is infused with information technology and looks a lot like the internet. (This is usually referred to as the “smart grid,” though it extends beyond just the grid. Al Gore tried to make “enernet” catch on, but it never really took.)
So, two changes: the low-carbon imperative and the shift from a dumb one-way system to a smart, multi-directional network. Both point above all to the need for innovation, not just in technology but in business practices, financing models, and investment strategies.
The best tool we currently know of for producing rapid innovation, product development, and jobs is a competitive market. That’s what’s missing.
Now, I mentioned before that some markets have restructured to provide for competition on the generation side. I think that’s all to the good, and it should continue. But what’s really needed today is competitive markets on the distribution edge. It makes no sense to have utilities hostile to distributed energy and local energy management. We need entrepreneurs thinking about how to package energy services in new ways for customers, and we need utilities not just to stop impeding them or to get out of their way, but to actively empower them.
But we still need the reliability and stability with which regulated utilities have traditionally been charged. How can utilities provide that, make sure the grid keeps humming, while also structuring competitive markets on both the generation side and the distribution edge? That’s that knotty subject that we will (finally) tackle in my next post.
Monsanto’s Bt corn was supposed to reduce pesticide use. The Environmental Protection Agency said as much when the corn, which is genetically modified to resist the crop-ravaging rootworm, debuted in 2003. Sure enough, as more farmers sowed their fields with Bt corn, fewer of them needed to spray pesticides to protect their crops. The share of U.S. corn acreage treated with insecticides fell from 25 percent in 2005 to 9 percent in 2010.
Syngenta, one of the world’s largest pesticide makers, reported that sales of its major soil insecticide for corn, which is applied at planting time, more than doubled in 2012. Chief Financial Officer John Ramsay attributed the growth to “increased grower awareness” of rootworm resistance in the U.S. Insecticide sales in the first quarter climbed 5% to $480 million.
The frustrating part is that rootworms’ resistance to the Bt corn gene was entirely predictable — so predictable that some companies seized it as a financial opportunity:
American Vanguard bought a series of insecticide companies and technologies during the past decade, betting that insecticide demand would return as Bt corn started losing its effectiveness. In the past couple of years, that wager has paid off.
The Newport Beach, Calif., company reported that its soil-insecticide revenue jumped 50% in 2012, and company earnings climbed 70% as its stock price doubled. Its insecticide sales rose 41% in the first quarter to $79 million, with gains driven by corn insecticide.
Scientists say that so far, rootworms have only developed resistance to seeds engineered to include just one rootworm trait, and Monsanto says it plans to phase out that seed and replace it with a multiple-trait variety. But the EPA cautions that rootworms resistant to the first seed are more likely to develop resistance to other traits, too. And although Monsanto recommends crop rotation to “break the rootworm cycle,” historically high corn prices are driving more farmers to plant corn every year — and that has also increased the presence of other pests besides rootworm.
So let’s set aside, for the moment, the repetitious debates between pro- and anti-GMO contingents, and consider this simple fact: Bt corn’s success lasted all of seven or eight years before rootworm resistance popped up. The same cycle could easily repeat itself with other rootworm traits or with other pests altogether.
GMOs are supposed to make farmers’ volatile business a little more secure. But when their failure is so predictable that corporations like Vanguard can profitably bet on it, who’s really coming out on top?
Monsanto’s Bt corn was supposed to reduce pesticide use. The Environmental Protection Agency said as much when the corn, which is genetically modified to resist the crop-ravaging rootworm, debuted in 2003. Sure enough, as more farmers sowed their fields with Bt corn, fewer of them needed to spray pesticides to protect their crops. The share of U.S. corn acreage treated with insecticides fell from 25 percent in 2005 to 9 percent in 2010.
Syngenta, one of the world’s largest pesticide makers, reported that sales of its major soil insecticide for corn, which is applied at planting time, more than doubled in 2012. Chief Financial Officer John Ramsay attributed the growth to “increased grower awareness” of rootworm resistance in the U.S. Insecticide sales in the first quarter climbed 5% to $480 million.
The frustrating part is that rootworms’ resistance to the Bt corn gene was entirely predictable — so predictable that some companies seized it as a financial opportunity:
American Vanguard bought a series of insecticide companies and technologies during the past decade, betting that insecticide demand would return as Bt corn started losing its effectiveness. In the past couple of years, that wager has paid off.
The Newport Beach, Calif., company reported that its soil-insecticide revenue jumped 50% in 2012, and company earnings climbed 70% as its stock price doubled. Its insecticide sales rose 41% in the first quarter to $79 million, with gains driven by corn insecticide.
Scientists say that so far, rootworms have only developed resistance to seeds engineered to include just one rootworm trait, and Monsanto says it plans to phase out that seed and replace it with a multiple-trait variety. But the EPA cautions that rootworms resistant to the first seed are more likely to develop resistance to other traits, too. And although Monsanto recommends crop rotation to “break the rootworm cycle,” historically high corn prices are driving more farmers to plant corn every year — and that has also increased the presence of other pests besides rootworm.
So let’s set aside, for the moment, the repetitious debates between pro- and anti-GMO contingents, and consider this simple fact: Bt corn’s success lasted all of seven or eight years before rootworm resistance popped up. The same cycle could easily repeat itself with other rootworm traits or with other pests altogether.
GMOs are supposed to make farmers’ volatile business a little more secure. But when their failure is so predictable that corporations like Vanguard can profitably bet on it, who’s really coming out on top?
