Sustainable Development Focus
Energy Collective - Aug 13 Freddie Mac announced last week their Multifamily Green Advantage program, a suite of offerings rewarding borrowers who improve their properties to save energy and water with discounted loan pricing. A major component of Green Advantage recognizes green-certified properties, such as LEED, which makes them eligible for discounted loan pricing. Tipping the scales for financing upgrades to multifamily housing toward sustainability, this new program from Freddie Mac has the potential to unleash large amounts of capital for green building improvements.
Greentech Media - Aug 10 The federal government operates a vast network of office buildings, and they could soon become a massive new client for energy storage. The General Services Administration (GSA), which oversees 10,000 workspaces for more than 1 million federal employees, announced at a White House summit in June that it would investigate the potential for storage on its buildings. That request for information will go out by mid-September and could lead to projects starting next year. There were 33 U.S. non-residential storage deployments in the first quarter of 2016, according to GTM Research. If one-third of 1 percent of the GSA’s portfolio deployed storage in a three-month period, they could match that market segment’s performance.
San Diego Union-Tribune - Aug 14 Lauded as a leader in plugging homes and businesses into solar and wind farms, California requires utility companies to get at least a third of their energy from renewable sources by 2020 and half by 2030. But for a growing number of elected leaders from Southern California to Humboldt County, that timeline isn’t nearly aggressive enough. Cities and counties in California are now widely pursuing or exploring community choice aggregations, or CCAs, a public energy program that allows elected officials to take the authority to buy and sell power away from investor-owned utilities and offer ratepayers up to 100 percent renewable energy. All but two coastal counties have adopted or are exploring the government program, which has routinely delivered electricity using more renewable energy at slightly lower rates than investor-owned utilities in California.
Microgrid Knowledge - Aug 14 The California Energy Commission last week granted $1.5 million for the planning and design of an advanced microgrid in Santa Monica. The funding comes from the state’s Electric Program Investment Charge (EPIC) program, created to bring innovative clean energy ideas to market. Santa Monica won the money from an EPIC competition earlier this year, which drew 13 teams made up of government and private industry applicants. The Santa Monica project is being designed as a 25-acre advanced energy community, where multiple buildings on contiguous properties are integrated into a microgrid that uses renewables, energy storage, and EV charging and controls.
The Guardian - Aug 14 From the remains of an abandoned steel mill in Newark, New Jersey, the creators of AeroFarms are building what they say will be the largest vertical farm, producing two million pounds of leafy greens a year. The greens will be manufactured using aeroponics, a technique in which crops are grown in vertical stacks of plant beds, without soil, sunlight, or water. The farm, built in the economically depressed New Jersey city promises new jobs, millions of dollars in public-private investment, and an array of locally grown leafy greens for sale. The company has spent some $30 million to bring to reality a new breed of “green agriculture” that seeks to produce more crops in less space while minimizing environmental damage, even if it means completely divorcing food production from the natural ecosystem.
Orange County Breeze - Aug 12 As the California Coastal Commission is set to vote on the proposed Huntington Beach Desalination Plant’s Coastal Development Permit (CDP) in September, Poseidon announced its commitment to carbon neutrality by putting forth a plan to offset 100 percent of the direct and indirect emissions from the construction and operation of the plant. While the reverse osmosis process to be used by Poseidon’s seawater desalination facility does not emit greenhouse gases, the company’s Energy Minimization and Greenhouse Gas Reduction Plan commits to offsetting 100 percent of the facility’s direct emissions from construction prior to the plant’s commercial operation, and then on a yearly basis Poseidon will zero out the indirect emissions associated with the purchase of electricity to operate the plant.
