Image Credit: defencetalk.com

On Wednesday I have an interview at the Pentagon with Jackalyne Pfannenstiel, who is in charge of a hugely ambitious program to green the Navy. What should I ask her?

Though I have my own questions, I’d like to know yours. Reply by either sending me an email or, even better, making a comment on this post.

I first saw Ms. Pfannenstiel (pronounced “fan-in-steel”) when she gave a presentation at a 25×25 conference last month. She spoke about the Navy’s  plans to transform its relationship to energy and fuel — especially ambitious considering the Navy’s vast size and reach. The U.S. Navy is bigger than the next 13 navies combined, and is the second-largest consumer of energy in the U.S. government.  Any organization that uses 30 million barrels of oil a year has the chance to exert enormous influence over its contractors, suppliers and competitors.

The stakes are high: 30 military installations are at risk from rising sea levels, and the Navy risks lives and spends vast resources protecting the flow of oil from volatile countries to the U.S., and to supply the military’s planes, ships and bases around the world. Also, higher-ups have realized that renewable energy and efficiency can save the Navy a boatload of money.

Pfannenstiel didn’t rise through the ranks, but won her appointment in March after a long career with Pacific Gas & Electric in California. Her boss, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, is one of the most zealous advocates in the armed forces for reducing energy use and deploying renewable energy.

The Navy's ambitious energy-reduction goals.

His marching orders for the Navy are detailed in this slide below from Pfannenstiel’s presentation. To recap, Mabus wants to have a green strike group in local operations by the end of this year and deployed by 2016; reduce use of petroleum in vehicles by 50 percent by 2015; have half of all shore-based operations powered from renewable sources by 2020, and in that same year have 50 percent of the Navy’s installations be carbon neutral.

To emphasize just how Herculean this task is, compare the Navy’s goals to those of California, where Pfannenstiel served as chair of the state Energy Commission. California’s legislature is struggling to agree on a goal for utilities to gather just 33 percent of their electricity from renewable energy by 2020.

Laughable or laudable? What more do you want to know? Hit me back.

Help Me Interview the Navy’s Energy Czar is a post from: The Ferris Files

Meanwhile, eight feet below ground, my basement is suffering the opposite problem. A deep, dank moisture greets my nostrils every time I open the basement door  — a smell somewhere between musty and moldy and if not quite evil then full of foreboding. I pick up a piece of paper on the floor and it is wet to the touch just from existing in the basement. A little leather stool in the corner is dotted with mold. The wetness creeps into everything. By August , I imagine it will rot my guitar case, rust my bike chain, and wrap its mossy tentacles around everything until the journals turn to goo and all my photos stick together.

I lament this situation to my lady Anjali. “This city is supposed to have been built on a swamp. Doesn’t grass grow in a swamp? The front lawn is dry as a pizza oven, but the air in the basement is wet as a — as a — ” I search for the right metaphor for really, really wet.

“Isn’t that what a dehumidifier is for?”  she says.

I paused. Anjali has a way of getting to the point.  “Uh…right!” I say.

I get online and buy a DeLonghi dehumidifier that is ENERGY STAR rated and plug it into the outlet in the basement. I program it to 60 percent humidity, which is an approximate 40 percent reduction from the existing basement atmosphere. Less than a day later it shuts itself off; it has already sucked up a bellyful of water.

Now the basement smells a little less Gollum-like. I carry the tank upstairs and pour it in the sink. Eighteen hours later the reservoir fills up again. I picture little water molecules levitating out of my surfing wetsuit, being free-thrown off of my old AYSO participation ribbons.

Much as I enjoy this little swamp reclamation project, something still feels off. I can’t put my finger on it. When I pour all that water down the sink, I feel a twinge of regret.

Then, as I reluctantly water the lawn one night, aiming the hose at the biggest swatches of brown, I realize what is wrong with my disposal system:

I can take the water from my basement and pour it on the lawn!

So now I regularly visit my little basement friend, pull out its collection basin and wrestle it up the stairs, through the front door and into the soupy D.C. heat. I shake all 45 pints on the deadest patches of grass. This is ridiculously satisfying.

That I can attack the source of the gnawing evil in my basement — snatch it right from the air! — and redistribute it, Robin-Hood-like, onto my starving lawn — well, it feels noble, heroic even. It is so 21st Century to be engaged in this kind of re-using. Or is it reducing?

Or — wait a minute — is it recycling … down into the earth and back into my basement?

The Swamp Reclamation Project is a post from: The Ferris Files

The Oil Spill’s Unlikely Victim:

More Electric Cars Roll to the Starting Line: You’ve heard that the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt are on the way, but how about the Think and the Wheego? Wheego, a maker of electric putt-putt vehicles based in Atlanta, hopes that 200 highway-ready copies of its Whip Life will roll off the assembly line by August, months ahead of the well-publicized launch of the Leaf.  Meanwhile, the Norwegian carmaker Think raised $40 million this week and plans to start assembly of the tiny Think City in Elkhart, Indiana in early 2011.

How Is an Electric Car Like an iPad? The CEO of Coda Automotive announced a novel approach to manufacturing and selling his company’s electric car — less a come-on-down dealership blitzkrieg and more like a visit to Apple’s Genius Bar. “We are looking at this not as a new-car-model introduction, but as a new-technology introduction,” CEO Kevin Czinger told a transportation conference in Ohio. But that’s just one way Coda is creating an auto company on the cheap. Models will be partially assembled at a factory in China, shipped to the U.S. as “parts” to avoid import fees, and finished near company headquarters in California. Coda will have just one dealership in Los Angeles but seven satellite stores where the curious can come for a test drive — kind of how Steve Jobs warmed people up to the iPhone and the iPad. Models are due in 2011 for $30,000 to $40,000.

Toyota Bets on Hydrogen: Toyota surprised everyone by announcing it would debut a somewhat affordable, hydrogen-powered sedan by 2015. By whittling down the use of expensive materials like platinum, the company’s engineers dropped the cost of production by a factor of ten, and said they could offer the car for $50,000 and get within striking distance of a profit after launch.

How Does Power from Nantucket Sound? Less than two weeks after winning its hard fight for approval, the Cape Wind windfarm off Nantucket Sound closed a deal to sell half of its electricity. National Grid, the utility for a chunk of the Eastern Seaboard from New York to New Hampshire, will buy power at 20.7 cents per kilowatt-hour — a rate that will increase the average homeowner’s bill by about $1.59 a month. The $1 billion project is expected to start feeding power in 2013.

China: Winds of Change. U.S.: Pocket Change. The Department of Energy announced some nice grants for renewable energy projects this week. Investments include $13 million in seed money for projects that will help make industry emit less CO2, $62 million to develop concentrated solar power, and another $33 million on the way for innovations in biomass-to-fuel. That’s $108 million. Not bad!

Then China Longyuan Power Group, one of the largest wind-energy concerns in China, announced its own investment to become the world’s leader in installing wind turbines in five years. The amount? $13 billion.

Innovation Watch: Australia works on the world’s first biofuel helicopter; MIT grads invent a shock absorber that generates electricity; and Dell wonders if it could prosper without ever building another data center.

The Weekly: The Gulf Threatens a New Victim, China Throws Money Into Wind is a post from: The Ferris Files

A giant oil cap is lowered into the Gulf of Mexico. Photo courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

Are Offshore Oil Rigs a Threatened Species? Is the Deepwater Horizon spill the beginning of the end for offshore oil drilling, or just another Exxon Valdez? Today, as BP attempted to place a 100-ton cap over the broken well gushing under the Gulf of Mexico, it was uncertain if they’d be able to stanch the spreading damage at sea or in Washington, D.C.

The spill has muddied the prospects for a climate bill as one of its pillars — a new round of offshore oil drilling — founders in unstable political soil, as Mackinnon Lawrence reports. Meanwhile, environmental groups are hustling to make the case, as in this Sierra Club video, that offshore oil is dirty and unsafe.  Perhaps it’s not only brown pelicans and terns who will have trouble flying after all this is over, and the black tide might yet turn against its maker.

Efficiency Experts To America: Stop Dreamin’ and Pick Up Yer Caulkin’ Gun. At a symposium of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy — what, you missed it? — experts concluded that weatherstripping beats windfarms as the fastest way to save the US economy, and released some numbers to prove it. First, America is not as efficient as it thinks: the domestic economy is only 13 percent efficient, compared to 20 percent efficiency in Japan and some European countries. We were left pondering if it’s more efficient, percentage-wise, to order a veggie pizza from Papa John’s or gnaw on a frozen one from Trader Joe’s.

Even worse, the ACEEE noted, Americans seem to be ignoring efficiency even as they embrace the idea of electric cars, photovoltaic solar panels and Bloom Boxes as solutions to both the energy crunch and our economic revival. The US economy has tripled in size since 1970, and three-quarters of those gains have come from leaps in energy efficiency. The Council’s conclusion: The American economy will recover by caulking its cracks, not by putting giant windmills at sea, slathering our houses in solar paint, or beaming sunlight from space.

Raining on the Electric-Car Parade: Observers warned against the auto industry’s growing adoption of electric cars as the platform of the future when not a single customer has yet taken delivery of one. The German magazine Der Spiegel declared  electric cars an “e-llusion” for two reasons: they’re not zero-emissions, as all those electrons have to come from somewhere, and the industry would die in infancy without massive and expensive state subsidies. A few days later, John Mendel, an executive VP at Honda, warned against “a rush to select a winner that could lead us in the wrong direction.” And yesterday, the site Hybrid Cars said Hey! What about hybrid cars? And noted that Toyota is doubling its output of hybrid Priuses and that carmakers from Hyundai to Ford to Mercedes are planning models or entire series around the gas-electric engine.

Build Whose Dreams? In other auto news, Chinese electric carmaker BYD announced that it would stage its conquest of the United States from a new headquarters in Los Angeles. L.A. politicians applauded. BYD (“Build Your Dreams”) has an acronym in English and a logo that, um, reminds us of the symbol of a certain German automaker. What else does BYD plan to appropriate?

Sanyo Makes Giant Battery Bet: Korean conglomerate Sanyo announced it would invest $2 billion into electric-battery research in hopes of capturing 40 percent of the world market. The company’s expenditure is more than the entire U.S. government’s investment in domestic battery research.

Also Lotus says mainstream carmakers could spend just three percent more money and make their cars 38 percent lighter, if only they were more like Lotus.

Why Is Google Investing in North Dakota Wind? On Monday, Google announced it had invested almost $40 million in a NextEra windfarm in the North Dakota plains, without explaining exactly what it planned to do with the 170 MW of electricity. This isn’t one of the companies’ well-publicized seed investments in new technology. Neither will Google use the juice to power its own data centers, as more and more Silicon Valley companies are doing, as described in this illuminating article in Yale Environment 360. Rather, according to Google’s green-biz manager Rick Needham said, they “expect to earn an attractive return as well as free up capital to enable future wind projects.” Investors take note.

American Superconductor Goes to Sea: Massachusetts-based American Superconductor revealed plans to use its formidable talents in high-capacity electrical cables to make an offshore wind turbine 40 percent more powerful than any that now exist. The SeaTitan will pump out 10 megawatts, enough to power 300 to 400 homes, and is due for unveiling by the end of 2010.

Micro Power, Mega Visibility: Sam’s Club installed micro wind turbines atop the light poles in its store in Palmdale, California, producing 3-5 percent of the facility’s power but engendering 97 percent of its good media coverage. Also, 1,370 of the most heavily-viewed billboards on Florida highways will be outfitted with solar panels or small wind turbines.

Gadget Watch: This week, Pirelli works on a tire that talks to the car; Solar Aero toils on a wind turbine with no blades; and MIT researchers explore how a coating on ferns could make boats move faster.

The Weekly: Oil Rigs, Electric Cars, and Google’s Curious Investment is a post from: The Ferris Files

The standard has been in the works for years and more than 200 test sites are already built or underway, including the Olympic village that opened in Vancouver this winter.  Now any neighborhood or large development is eligible to apply.

Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards have been widely adopted because they don’t dictate how to build, but assign points for every smart step a project takes. The U.S. Green Building Council, sponsor of LEED, took the same flexible approach in creating the new ND (Neighborhood Development) benchmarks. Certain actions, like avoiding floodplains and cutting energy use, are required, but a builder garners other points by developing walkable streets and bike paths, locating near public transit and schools, orienting buildings to make use of the sun’s heat, or managing wastewater and re-using historic buildings.

At a launch party, the creators of LEED-ND said they hope that the standard gives building developers, not just guidance, but recognition and even profit for doing the right thing. They hoped to close the chapter on sprawl in the world’s suburbs, and develop neighborhoods that are more compact, with work, play and shopping all right nearby.

“We in the environmental movement have been very good at identifying the problem, as with the problems of sprawl. We environmentalists have not been so adept…at identifying solutions. This LEED-ND closes that gap,” said Kaid Benfield, director of smart growth for the Natural Resources Defense Council and co-creator of LEED-ND.

The announcement was made at The Alaire, a LEED-ND project underway in surburban Maryland off Rockville Pike, “a sprawling and segregated office corridor,” as developer Tony Greenberg described it.

The Alaire is an example of what LEED-ND is trying to accomplish. Rising from 26 acres of former parking lots instead of from virgin land, the complex has taken many uncommon measures to reduce its impact and earn more LEED points.

It uses 30 percent less water than other projects of its size, assisted by a stormwater management vault and low-flush toilets in all of its common bathrooms. From a top-floor unit, with its energy-efficient appliances, one looks down on the saline swimming pool and a rooftop garden with three-foot-tall grasses planted in a matrix made from recycled plastic bottles.

But some of the most important innovations are at street level. Every street is connected to every other street – no cul-de-sacs here – which will make the entire two-million-square-foot complex walkable.

On one corner, right next to the curbside solar-powered trash compactor,  four storefronts are under construction. They include a nail salon, a Chevy Chase bank, a Subway sandwich joint and a sushi restaurant.

Most important of all, the apartments are adjacent to the Twinbrook commuter rail station. The access to public transit, combined with storefronts and offices dotted throughout, means that people may someday be able to live in the Alaire without ever needing to suffer the congestion of Rockville Pike.

LEED Takes It to the Neighborhood is a post from: The Ferris Files

As I walk around to its stores and restaurants,  I ask myself: Could I see living in a big city, not as a lark, but forever?

The concentric squares and cul-de-sacs surrounding my childhood home in Sunnyvale, California.

The rectangular and diagonal grid around my apartment in Washington, D.C.

This is an unsettling question for a guy who grew up in the suburbs and just kind of assumed that, like it or not, back to the suburbs he would eventually return.

At the same time I’ve been reading about how to make suburbs a “greener” place to live. One way is to get people out of their cars. When city dwellers emigrated to the suburbs in the second half of the 20^th Century, they gained a lawn but lost the ability to shop or worship or play without driving long distances. Now that we have all these suburbs, how can they be modified so the carbon-spewing car stays in the driveway, and the people walk to schools and shops?

One of the writers I came across was F. Kaid Benfield, who explores how a neighborhood’s design influences whether people walk or drive. It’s not just a matter of exercise or personal virtue. Benfield did schematics of a cul-de-sac neighborhood and a traditional street grid.

Which do you think encourages a person to walk?

This got me thinking: How does the design of my neighborhood change the way I move through it? And if it’s important to me to be able to walk my community, how do the city and the suburb stack up?

I turned to Google Maps to find out. I asked for the route from my home to local landmarks, and set it to “Walking” rather than “By Car.” Of course Google doesn’t find a route as well as a local person might, but at least it gives a common reference point.

Here’s the route to the nearest high school:

The route from my childhood home to Fremont High School. Distance: 0.8 mile. Walk time: 15 minutes.

The route from my D.C. apartment to Cardozo High School. Distance: 0.5 mile. Walk time: Nine minutes.

Check out how many cul-de-sacs the suburban route has to go around!

Here’s the walking distance to the closest supermarket:

Distance: 0.9 mile. Walk time: 18 minutes.

Distance: 0.1 mile. Walk time: 2 minutes.

Everyone knows that in the suburbs, the store and the school are farther away. The surprising part is that those destinations are made even farther away by the suburbs’ design. No wonder the suburban streets are full of cars but empty of people!

Of course, walkability is only one part of the decision about where to spend my life. But I imagine a lot of people would like to have the spaciousness of the suburbs while still being able to walk to get a quart of milk. Doing so would involve some novel changes to the suburban landscape. We’d have to punch walking routes through the cul-de-sacs and change zoning laws so a subdivision could have its own mini-downtown, with a hardware store and market, and maybe a restaurant or two.

Surburb or City? A Shoe-Leather Perspective is a post from: The Ferris Files