​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.

Data* is one of the big ideas of our time, or better said, it’s a big idea following on the heels of a mammoth established trend. This makes it much more powerful than if it were merely an idea, because it’s an idea resting on a foundation of facts. Those facts are that our lives and opinions and environments are documented to a completely unprecedented extent, and that documentation - that data - is available to third parties. Frequently it’s publicly available, or available to anyone with the skills and savvy to figure out how to get it, or it’s the property of some Big Authority somewhere. Regardless, it’s not really under your control, particularly because there’s so much data that tracking what you produce is a full time job. Social media, photo sharing, fitness trackers, web use, remote sensing, financial transactions…the list goes on and on. 

Besides being the plot of nearly every dystopian movie ever, the rise of Big Data is a mega-trend. That makes it a good candidate for the biggest influencer of the next 25 years, which concerns us in this course and anyone planning to work anytime before 2041. I imagine (hope) that includes most of us.

So what does data mean for urban environments and their residents? What does it mean for urban design?
That’s a question without a ready answer, which is a good reason to study it: any question worth asking doesn’t have a ready answer. So, how to go about answering an answer-less question? 

Look at what’s already been done around the edges of the question. In this case, that includes data-based plans for very large cities, performance landscapes, and citizen science. Green building, to a large extent, relies on data, particularly in the myriad rating systems required to achieve various certifications or credentials. These are based on checklists, and checklists, like surveys or quizzes on Facebook, are data. These certifications also strive to be objective and quantitative in their measurements, so they rely on thresholds and ranges - data again.   

At the outskirts of data + design, things get really weird, meaning futuristic and mind-blowing, with just a hint of sinister. Environments that respond to individuals via real-time data. Buildings joining the “internet of things.” This is all pretty hard to imagine, but there’s this thermostat already on the market. Research on office systems that adapt to individual users is going on right here right now, at the Syracuse Center of Excellence indoor environmental quality lab.  

Most of these projects differ in scale from our interests, with the metropolitan region plans at one end and that thermostat at the other end. What does data mean for the neighborhood or site scale?

If you’ll indulge me in a Gen X moment, I’ll observe that back in the day when I was doing my first degree in landscape architecture (ca. 1995), we made a lot of assumptions and generalizations about site functions and use because we had no data. You could talk to the client, visit the site in person, and collect your aerial photos - taken from a real plane about every five years and available only in hardcopy -  from the county offices. If the project went forward and the client hired you, you’d have a survey done - with actual instruments on the actual land - and then you’d know the topography and the dimensions of structures. You could sometimes get as-built drawings of buildings. It was nothing like the data glut we live in today. So design decisions often got made according to what we “knew,” not what we really knew, following, for example, the boss’s pronouncement that “no one plays tennis anymore.” Therefore: the park plan without a tennis court. 

My point, digital natives, is that the atmosphere or paradigm then was data scarcity, so we created ways of doing things that compensated for or disguised that lack. Tradition, culture, and convention have great influence in design; perhaps they do in every profession. Realize that much of “the way we do it” may/is/could be based on this data scarcity. A big part of earning a professional degree in any design field is learning “the way we do it,” so be wary.

How will urban design practice embrace the era of data?

Let’s find out.




WHAT DO I DO FOR CLASS? 

• Read this post and click on all the links within it. 
• Read the articles; review (that means look through, but don’t read every word) the websites.
• Think about what you agree with, what you disagree with, and what doesn’t make sense to you. 
• Come to class prepared to talk to your classmates about it.

*Yeah, I know it’s plural. In keeping with the informal tone and breezy feel of this blog and my classroom approach, I’m sticking with the common usage of “data” as singular.