​Back in the early part of the lifetime that this pandemic has surely lasted, I posted about working from home. What if you want to do that outside, and take advantage of this global emergency to conference call in the fresh air? 

Plenty of people I know are asking a similar question about spaces for their kids to do school work outside, at home. Good news: it’s a pretty similar set of requirements, regardless of the size or age of the worker. So what do you need?

A good school/office workspace outside needs:

Freedom from distraction, especially noise.
Don’t face traffic. Think about where the air conditioner is and don’t sit right next to it. If you’re going to be on the phone or talking via Zoom, put yourself somewhere you don’t feel like you’re constantly being overheard. Consider investing in a speaker or two to boost your computer’s sound, in case of neighboring lawnmowers or other loud phenomena. 

Comfortable place to sit.
Better yet, a selection of comfortable places to sit, each suited to a different task or time of day. Maybe a chair for using a laptop, a soft seat for watching videos or interacting via Zoom, and a lounge or hammock for reading. The material of these seats makes all the difference in how comfortable they are in different conditions: metal is cold yet also hot; plastic is neutral (though not as durable); cushions are far more comfortable in cooler weather (but take them in when it rains).

Table or other stable, flat surface for laptop, books, writing, and so on.
The right height for this is essential, and the relative height of chair and table is also essential. It’s the difference between fatigue and hours of comfortable use.

Good light.
That means no glare in the direction you are looking, no baking in the sun, but also enough focused light to read and do other non-screen tasks. Even during the day, a comfortably shady spot can be a bit dim to read in. Outdoor lamps exist, but lanterns or even headlamps can be fun alternatives that will be easy to repurpose when all this is over (or light your way through the zombie apocalypse, whichever).

Not too windy, not too stuffy and still.
Since this is personal taste and can vary with the day’s weather, the best way to handle this is to let the worker customize shelter to suit his/her tastes at the moment. Freestanding screens can work. Making the various chairs and seating themselves mobile will work, too, since it lets them be shifted to a warmer or cooler spot. 

Electric outlet(s) and solid wifi + cell service.
Providing an outlet can be as easy as plugging in an outdoor-grade extension cord. If you do, take the time to route it where it won’t be easy to trip over and/or tape it down. Fun additional resource: a solar bank charger, probably useful even on cloudy days, and another way to sneak a bit of science into the home-school day. (Also handy the next time the power goes out. Ask me how I know.)

Last bit of advice: ergonomics matter outside, too. No one wants carpal tunnel as a souvenir of the pandemic.

More tips coming soon in Part 2!

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Stop. Listen. Wherever you are right now, can you hear traffic noise? 

While we wait for science to save us from COVID-19, I’m killing some time walking (alone) on a quiet street. All the streets are quiet now, especially in the 38 states (and rising) like this one with “stay at home” orders in place.

COVID-19 has quieted highways across the country, if not the world - temporarily. Fewer cars and more bikes and pedestrians are a sudden glimpse of a future predicted to arrive as soon as 2022, with twice the number of bike commuters in major cities worldwide, and therefore fewer cars on the road. 

Like everything else disrupted by the virus, traffic will be back, at some point. The noise of internal combustion engines is part of daily life, affecting you more than you realize. Today’s silent highways are another preview of a world coming soon, when quiet e-vehicles take over. In my lifetime, silence will fall on the interstates and other major roads, and it will affect all of us.

People don’t like to be next to multi-lane highways, a statement so obvious it’s embarrassing to say out loud. Sometimes the obvious is easy to overlook, though, in its power to shape the world around us. It's too obvious to consider so it doesn’t get considered at all. 

With highways, it’s the noise and the pollution and the trash and the way these massive transportation edifices make it difficult for those immediately adjacent to them to get anywhere, ironically. Don’t underestimate the noise. The US Department of Transportation says, “levels of highway traffic noise typically range from 70 to 80 dB(A) at a distance of 15 meters (50 feet) from the highway. These levels affect a majority of people, interrupting concentration, increasing heart rates, or limiting the ability to carry on a conversation.” Researchers have found links between noise and cardiovascular disease and Type II diabetes, as well as sleep disturbance and depression.

Our aversion to traffic noise and other highway impacts shapes land use and property values around busy roads. We’ve grown used to this, so we see it as natural and neutral, as though it’s always been that way and couldn’t be any other way. Neither of those things are true.

In cities, freeways were often sited as a deliberate strategy to “clear” neighborhoods seen as undesirable by those in the positions of power that mattered. After obliterating those often-Black, sometimes-other-marginalized-group neighborhoods, the highways made it easy for white residents with means to move to the suburbs, further hollowing out the city. There’s a sinister feedback loop that starts here, where the highway is built through the poor/black neighborhood because racism/NIMBYism/inability to resist, and then effects of the highway makes what remains of that same neighborhood have to struggle much harder. Just the presence of a limited access highway next door to a home will depress its property value. That doesn’t count the deleterious effects of disinvestment in neighboring properties as their values decline and as people with options are driven away by the noise and inconvenience. The worse it is, the worse it gets. 

All of this is sad but familiar, a story repeated through cities across the country. A new and different story is being written in Boston and Seattle, among others, where  freeways have been removed from the cityscape, buried or rerouted. In their place are open space and/or new lower-speed smaller surface roads. This realigns land use, property values, and in time, the perceived status of the whole neighborhood. That spiral reverses and suddenly the old neighborhood is a much more desirable place to live. 

We can’t get rid of all the interstates (can we?). Traffic has to go somewhere, plus interstates arguably serve national defense preparedness. But consider: We walk these pandemic-quieted roads in the twilight of the internal combustion engine, with climate change bearing down on us. Lot of plans around for climate action, with a commonality of the strategy of electrifying transportation, because we know how to generate electricity with renewable resources and because transportation and electricity generation are two of the big dogs in US GHG emissions. Solve those, and you’ve solved a lot of our climate issue. And so, EVs are on their way, probably with more mass transit and more getting around under our own power and more micro-mobility. All these modes have in common that they are so much quieter than the traffic roaring by on I-95, and so much cleaner. 

When the big silence falls on the highways near you, how will it change where you live? How will your life be better?

Will you remember the quiet roads of these pandemic days?






 

​Now that America’s great again, the Clean Power Plan  is in limbo, we’ve got a brand-new tariff on solar panels, and clean coal will save us all. Or something like that. When policy and regulation aren’t your friend, there’s still the market, erstwhile darling of conservatives. The story goes like this: If your product is any good, people should want to buy it, and government should get out of the way of that. 

Since unfettered capitalism also produced child labor and sweatshops, the market is less panacea and more unreliable ally. Nonetheless, plenty of people are discovering that resilient power - renewables and distributed systems - can in fact outcompete conventional systems, in US markets and elsewhere. 

The market is supposed to be rational decisions based on cost and benefits, but I bet you can look around your house and see things you bought even though they weren’t the most benefit for the least money. Why do we buy these things? Two big reasons are status and style, to look good or to impress the cool kids. We don’t outgrow this. We just buy bigger cool things.

In research terms, this involves peer effect. In terms of resilient energy, peer effect means that the more exposure a person has to renewable generation, the more likely s/he is to install his/her own system, specifically with photovoltaic (PV) systems. This produces clusters of PV installations. Peer effect can be one of the most influential factors in deciding to install a PV system. You think it’s weird, until you see it enough. You see it some more, and you start to want it. 

This implies a tipping point: eventually enough people live near solar panels to change the average perception of solar generation from oddball to normal. Same with home standby generators, seen and marketed as desirable in higher-end homes. This presents on-site power generation not just as normal, but  desirable. Higher-end homes that feature generators (or PV) make resilient power an aspirational home feature, advancing even farther from normal to trendy, a feature to covet. 

Fashions tend to start at the top of the income scale and spread downward; tastemaking trickles down. Fashion has the power to really increase adoption of energy systems. Only environmentalists (who can afford it) want eco-friendly systems, but everybody wants the next hot trend. Once it stops being weird, it can start being desirable, and once it’s cool, it’s a whole new landscape, energy-wise. 

Speaking of landscape, do these dynamics work just anywhere, or can the location stack the deck? I recently moved from upstate New York to Connecticut, one renewable-loving, overburdened grid blue state to another. Upstate New York is famously gloomy, but solar is still worthwhile there, and New York does a good job of making it worth your while with incentives and policies. You wouldn’t expect a difference, and yet there is: Connecticut loves rooftop PV. Property listings include an index of solar energy potential, with “Good!” in the description where appropriate. Connecticut home listings also feature home standby generators. Generator-ready homes are not at the bottom of the price range, either - this is a selling point to buyers with means.

Why? It could be Superstorm Sandy (2012) or her predecessor Irene (2011) or Connecticut’s pioneering Green Bank (also 2011). Power is no bargain in Connecticut, which makes alternatives appealing. But Connecticut also is ideal for peer effect’s effect. It’s dense, in number of people per square mile. It’s also dense with people with means, or enough means to be in the market for rooftop solar, whole house generators, and the like. It’s in constant competition with New York City and Boston for people and businesses. This tiny state with all the people and the coastal storms could be poised to cross the threshold into resilient power being… cool. 

Style has a price tag for places. A few years ago, every city wanted to lure the Creative Class. These days, that’s evolved into places for innovation. Amazon’s HQ2 competition is a new iteration of this same idea, with the criterion “potential to attract and retain strong technical talent.” Could resilient power belong on the list of magic factors that make a place cool? Obviously, it does a lot for your business to keep the lights on, but it’s much more than that for some energy-intensive businesses, like data centers. For them, the extra assurance of a microgrid can make the decision about where to locate.  

If you want to add cachet to practicality, installations have to be visible and recognizable, not just to the trained eye of an electrical engineer, but to the public - the  property-buying, disposable-income-spending public. People who don’t know a watt from an amp have to recognize resilient power installations to know they want one - peer effect can’t work if you can’t see what to want. Rooftop PV has the edge here, because it’s readily seen and recognized by the non-expert. Rooftop PV and on-site wind are like driving a Prius, an immediately recognizable statement of eco-consciousness, and the affluence that goes along with being able to spend to make that statement. Contrast that with geothermal, microgrids, or weatherization, all of which are legit green, but invisible to the layperson passing by. These are like driving a Hybrid Civic. Only you, your pocketbook, and your carbon footprint know for sure.

Other resilient power components need visual signatures as distinctive and universal as rooftop solar. As long as no one sees your geothermal, only environmentalists (and engineers) will buy it. Once everyone can see it, and see it as something the richer neighbors have, in the house, the subdivision, or the city next door, everyone who wants to impress someone will want one. And that’s all of us.


 

There’s an absurdity to releasing a report on community microgrids the day before Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2016 presidential election. Nonetheless, Neighborhood Microgrids: Replicability and Revitalization, presenting the findings of a year-long study on the potential of community microgrids for urban neighborhood revitalization, hit the inboxes of all those who contributed expertise or interest to the project on that day. The days since have been, shall we say, less encouraging about clean energy and climate action. A sampling: 
"catastrophic...polluter-controlled government", " no way to overstate the disaster", "After this election, can we still save the planet?"

Every new technology depends on research funding, government incentives, and the like until it reaches the point of viability through economic forces alone. Has the US transition to clean energy reached that point? What stands between that point and where we are now, and how can those necessary developments and supports happen in a suddenly hostile environment? 

Consider: 

Infrastructure investment:
The most obvious idea is to link clean/innovative energy systems to the handful of statements about federal investment in infrastructure that’s come out of the Trump camp. Some see this as poised to become a give-away to a few friends, yet as perhaps the only mainstream bipartisan idea to arise from Trump, infrastructure investment deserves a little more confidence. It’s easy to dismiss this, as some are, as investment only in fossil fuel infrastructure, and thus backward progress on climate change. Is it possible to do large-scale investment in infrastructure that can only serve fossil fuels? Roads can't refuse to carry electric cars or bicycles. Can electric lines refuse to carry power generated through renewables?  

Flexibility could be key for whatever infrastructure actually gets built: flexibility in terms of fossil vs renewable fuel. Infrastructure has a long lifespan, so regardless of political viewpoint, flexibility is smart investment, good design, and responsible stewardship of public funds. Community microgrids are a good example of this kind of flexible infrastructure, because they aren’t dependent on fuel source. They could be constructed as a neutral groundwork, then gain the addition of renewable power generation later on. 

Bi-coastal coordination:
Eban Goodstein's "The Post Election Climate for Climate Action" webinar on Nov. 16 raised the possibility of coordination of climate change action between California and New York. These two states together form 21% of the national economy; 36% with the rest of the West Coast and the reliably blue states of the Northeast. Can multi-state standards and policies drive adoption of clean energy technologies nationwide through sheer economic dominance? This is not so different from emission standards for cars and their impact on vehicles nationwide. New York’s REV and California’s Renewable Energy programs as well as the climate change action plans for New York City and Los Angeles provide a ready foundation for such coordination.

Sub-federal action:
Everybody’s saying it: local, state, and regional government can do a lot. Legal hassles, impeachment, internecine Republican quarrels, sheer inexperience or ineptitude - all of these spell increased dysfunction in DC, not a federal government actively pulling the country back into the 20th century. The void created by dysfunction could be filled by greater local and state action, making clean energy development at a local scale more important. How do you fix The Grid at a local scale? With microgrids. 

Creative class competition:
States that went Trump have a new PR problem in the 
old competition for creative class professionals and the industries that need them.  For confirmation of that, see everything about the disconnect between the coasts and the interior, and the shock of realizing that disconnect exists. As Silicon Valley tech leaders call for California’s secession, we’ve yet to grasp the impact of 2016’s acrimony on demographic shifts among people with the power to choose. Want to tell the creative class your city is open for business?  Clean energy systems and rock solid infrastructure ready for additional load are assets - but only if they are readily visible. What does a clean energy-friendly community look like?

It’s a new day, but the keys to tech success, innovation and resourcefulness, are as valuable as ever. The task now is to apply them to finding ways to move forward. 

Full text of Neighborhood Microgrids: Replicability and Revitalization

​A post in response to The World in 2050: Creating/Imagining Just Climate Futures, an online conference organized by the University of California- Santa Barbara Environmental Humanities Initiative 

I am inundated with climate change talk this week, the sea-level of information rising past my ears. An online conference, the brilliant idea and no doubt laborious undertaking of UCSB’s EHI program, can be described, with misleading simplicity, as a collection of YouTube-like videos and online discussion forums. In no way do I wish to downplay the work involved or the sophistication of the organization of this event, but for those fresh to the idea with this post, that’s a pocket description good enough to go on with. For the real thing, see here or my earlier post about the conference here.

New perspectives beget more new perspectives. Naomi Klein's “this changes everything” implies that climate change and its impacts are too big to affect only the usual suspects in environmental issues. Participation in climate change is not voluntary. Its impact is coming for you, even if you don’t believe in it or if you’ve elected to do something with your life that has nothing to do with climate change - or so you thought.  

If this changes everything, it changes your field, your career, your day-to-day. How will it change environmental design fields? Bill McKibben’s conference keynote gave me his idea of “changing the zeitgeist,” as he says that’s what movements do - they spur this change in spirit and that makes their impact much bigger than it would be otherwise.

What would it mean to change the zeitgeist of architecture and related fields?

It would mean changes in the technical, practical craft that lies at the heart of these professions; changes to the daily grind of practice and course curricula of degree programs; shifts in the skill sets we own as our core, regardless of where we as individuals stand politically or geographically.

It would mean changes like: 

The rise of reuse
Dig very far into conversation about climate change impacts, mitigation, and adaptation, and you find population decline or shifts. This ranges from the radical and apocalyptic - massive population declines due to disaster or choice - to the moderate and incremental - people moving back to the city core from suburbs. These scenarios share the image of a built environment grown too large for its current residents, the footprint of a former age profligate with square feet and asphalt. What will happen to these redundant buildings and parking lots and sidewalks and so on? A large part of what we do as architects and what we learn in degree programs is about construction - how to build, how to detail, how to communicate to others how we want these things done. That emphasis should shift from use to reuse, flipping the script of new construction as the norm and adaptive and material reuse as the specialty. New construction and manufacture of materials takes energy and resources, as does demolition. What’s needed is greater thrift with materials and  existing conditions.
​
Transportation after cars
You saw this coming when you saw the huge carbon footprint of transportation in this earlier post: that’s 25% in transportation alone. Others have noted that this is a promising place to cut; Erik Assadourian's conference keynote goes farther and calls for essentially no private cars, part of the One Planet Lifestyle. “No private cars” is a tangible goal, and it’s also a firm foothold to imagining the design implications of the coming world. We know how to do this; it’s how cities used to be, and how many of our older city cores still are, really, imperfectly adapted to the age of the automobile. Without cars, does your city look like the 19th century, or is it something different - an update or a new creation? We’ve spent a long time and a lot of ink mourning the passing of a host of other characteristics of that 19th century pre-car city, the collateral damage of our love affair with combustion: the front porch, the walkable city, street life, neighborhood social ties, etc. We could put those pieces back together with our 21st century necessities and preferences. What’s your neighborhood without the car? Your subdivision? Your house? (That’s a great studio project - someone make a note.)

Infrastructure off the coast
McKibben also noted the spatial correlation between the location of a majority of US infrastructure and coastal areas that will be inundated as sea levels rise. Even without the private car, that still leaves energy, utilities, water, wastewater, and other transportation - and remember, that’s more important without that car. Interconnection is a basic characteristic of infrastructure, so if you lose a large proportion of it, no guarantee that what’s left will work on its own. Decentralization is the way of the moment (the zeitgeist?) because of calls for greater resilience to events like Superstorm Sandy, but we need to push that further. The bottom line seems to be that the center of the country will need infrastructure to serve more people (one of those population shifts), and it will need to be more modular and decentralized, and of course, we need to accomplish this with a minimum of GHG production. Meanwhile, in the developing world, improvement in services in some places has come through a kind of leapfrogging approach that skips development of large centralized 20th century installations (eg the interstate highway system, the electrical grid) in favor of the direct adoption of current decentralized technologies (eg: cell phones, portable solar chargers for devices, water sterilization pens). This kind of lighthanded, individual service provision is a new model for us here in the US, but we’re tiptoeing toward it as smartphones replace land lines. Maybe it’s time to borrow back some of that technology and mindset for our own country.

Whether these are the right new emphases or not, we environmental designers need to lead our own change in this, because the world is changing and we need to change with it if we’re going to keep shaping it. We are, by nature, doers more than dreamers, people who chose the practical route over art school (or after art school). People like us, who aren’t professional advocates or activists for the environment, are exactly what the fight to grapple with climate change needs. This is your problem, not just someone else’s, because…this changes everything, and everything includes you.