Apollo Alliance and BlueGreen Alliance have joined forces to renew the call for good jobs and clean energy in the 21st Century economy. On Wednesday, September 21, 2011 we will host The Right Stuff Awards Dinner at the W Hotel in San Francisco. The event will honor awardees whose work furthers our mission of creating the new clean energy economy. See our past awardees.

The Right Stuff Awards Dinner
W Hotel, San Francisco
7:00 Reception
7:30 Dinner and Awards Ceremony

The Right Stuff Awards 2011 Honorees

Denise Fairchild, President, Emerald Cities Collaborative

Under Fairchild’s leadership, the Emerald Cities Collaborative works in 10 cities across the country to tackle the challenge of greening American cities while advancing social equity. Through projects like her work with Ohio BlueGreen Apollo Alliance, she is implementing substantive energy efficiency and sustainable development programs that also improve job quality and job access for Americans.

Applied Materials

Using their guiding principles of energy efficiency, scale, design for the environment, and community involvement, Applied Materials is catalyzing change in electricity use. They are working to lower the cost of thin film solar photovoltaic (PV) to make solar energy more economically accessible and are the leading equipment supplier to the PV industry. Applied Materials’ solar arrays have already generated over 8600 MWh and reduced over 11 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions.

Green Jobs Legacy Award

In addition to The Right Stuff Awards, this year we will recognize the following individuals for their visionary leadership in building the clean energy economy with a
special Green Jobs Legacy Award:

• Phil Angelides, Chairman, Apollo Alliance Advisory Board
• Leo Gerard, International President, United Steelworkers
• Carl Pope, Chairman, Sierra Club

The Right Stuff Awards Dinner, which raises awareness and financial support for Apollo Alliance’s work, is essential to realizing this vision. Join business, labor and environmental leaders, philanthropists and community activists at The Right Stuff Awards Dinner as we affirm our shared goals of creating a secure energy future and rebuilding the American middle class. Please make your commitment to share the evening with us and our sponsors now.

To learn more, please contact Apollo: Pamela Chalmers, 415 371 1700 ext. 206 or pamelac@bluegreenalliance.org.

Sponsorships and Tickets

Tickets:

• $300 – Single Ticket to The Right Stuff Awards Dinner
• $1,200 – Two tickets to The Right Stuff Awards Dinner and the 6:00 pm Sponsor Reception, plus other benefits.

Sponsorships Opportunities:

This is a partial list of levels and benefits. For a complete list of sponsorship levels and associated benefits, please contact Pamela Chalmers at (415) 371-1700 ext. 206 or pamelac@bluegreenalliance.org

The Right Stuff Awards Dinner Sponsors

Clean Energy Catalyst
$50,000 to $99,999
United Steelworkers

Clean Energy Innovator
$25,000 to $49,999
IUOE Stationary Engineers, Local 39
Pacific Gas and Electric Company

Clean Energy Pioneer
$10,000 to $24,999
American Federation of Teachers
Applied Materials
California/Nevada State Association of Electrical Workers
United Food and Commercial Workers 8-Golden State
Western States Council of Sheet Metal Workers’ International Association – Joint Committee on Energy and Environmental Policy

Clean Energy Commander
$5,000 to $9,999
California Teachers Association
Laborers’ International Union of North America
Musk Foundation
Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 447
Sheet Metal Workers’ International Association
SunPower
United Steelworkers District 9
Walkup, Melodia, Kelly & Schoenberger

Clean Energy Sponsor
$3,000 to $4,999
Environmental Defense Fund
Operating Engineers Local 3
Southern California Pipe Trades District Council 16
United Steelworkers District 11

Clean Energy Benefactor
$1,000 to $2,999
Robert and Sara Adler
BAE Systems
California Federation of Teachers
California Nurses Association/National Nurses United
Cement Masons Local 400
CleanPath
DivcoWest
Growth²
Heat & Frost Insulators & Allied Workers, Local 16
Elizabeth M. Higashi
IAFF Local 1230
IBEW Local 58
IBEW Local 595
Michael and Jena King
Multi-Employer Property Trust
Professional Engineers in California Government
Ed Smeloff
Tides
United Steelworkers District 2
United Steelworkers District 3
United Steelworkers District 4
United Steelworkers District 8
United Steelworkers District 12
United Steelworkers District 13

To learn more, please contact Apollo: Pamela Chalmers, 415 371 1700 ext. 206 or pamelac@bluegreenalliance.org.

Apollo Alliance is a project of the BlueGreen Alliance Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization. Donations to the BlueGreen Alliance Foundation are tax-deductible to the full extent allowed by law. Federal tax identification number: 20-3477309.

Contributions may be made payable to “BlueGreen Alliance Foundation” with “Apollo Alliance” in the memo section.

Apollo Alliance Project
c/o BlueGreen Alliance Foundation
330 Townsend Street, Suite 205
San Francisco, CA 94107

Throughout Jobs21!, the BlueGreen Alliance’s blueprint to solve the jobs crisis, we call for the revitalization of domestic manufacturing in clean energy, green technology, transportation, infrastructure, and other sectors of our economy. A policy key to revitalizing American manufacturing is Buy America. There are a number of myths based on bad data, faulty legal reasoning, and a general failure to comprehend the reality facing U.S. producers and workers that surround the concept of Buy America. Not only do we need to expose those myths, but we need to explain and provide some perspective on what Buy America is, the context in which it is applied, and what could be done to make it more effective. Mostly importantly, we conclude with observations on why it makes sense in economic and job creation terms.

What is Buy America?

Buy America provisions apply when tax payer money is being used for purchases. In policy speak, Buy America applies to public procurement. These policies exist in law to ensure that when the federal government provides U.S. taxpayer dollars to state and local authorities to fund projects, that those projects are produced using domestically sourced American-made products.

What are the benefits of Buy America?

Buy America policies create jobs in the U.S. manufacturing sector, serve to protect against unfair competition from foreign firms that result from foreign government subsidies and allow the U.S. to maintain national security interests through the continued use and development of certain industries within the U.S. economy, like the iron and steel industries.

The economic rationale underlying Buy America

Buy America boosts wages and employment in the U.S. In addition to these direct benefits, there are equally important indirect benefits. These include tax revenue on those wages, which can fund investments, including crucial infrastructure investments, and also the jobs created from the re-spending of the income from those directly employed as a result.

Economists have established that manufacturing jobs have among the highest indirect job creation benefits. On average, each manufacturing job supports 2.5 jobs in other sectors, and, at the upper end, each high-tech manufacturing job supports 16 jobs. These jobs pay 21 percent more in wages and benefits than the average for the entire economy, and they more often provide health, pension, and other benefits.

Does Buy America raise the cost of projects?

First, it is important to recognize that there are provisions in Buy America laws to protect American taxpayers. Further, there are quality benefits as well. American-made materials and products are the highest quality in the world. Finally, if there are any costs differences due to the policy, these are more than offset by the macroeconomic boost generated by the increase in American demand.

Supporting domestic manufacturing by purchasing American-made products has the benefit of boosting investment at home. The benefit of avoiding the in the “leakage” of U.S. funds overseas has been cited by such mainstream economists as BusinessWeek’s Michael Mandel. A concerted domestic buying program could actually increase U.S. manufacturing job creation by 33 percent  while ensuring that taxpayer dollars actually go directly to job creation.

Finally, there are innovation and productivity benefits to Buy America. Manufacturing is responsible for 70 percent of all private-sector research and development spending and 90 percent of all American patents. Manufacturing is also a productivity powerhouse and major driver of economic growth. Between 1997 and 2005, labor productivity in manufacturing grew 60 percent more than in the economy as a whole. Every dollar in final sales of manufactured products supports $1.37 in other sectors of the economy, compared to about 50 cents for every dollar of activity in the financial services sector. If we fail to restore our manufacturing base, our innovation edge and research and development capacity will also falter.

Why We Need Buy America

Buy America makes economic sense and will help create good jobs, plain and simple.

For nearly 60 years, the needs and interests of American manufacturers took a back seat to the country’s geopolitical interests and the interests of the U.S. financial sector. The book “Manufacturing a Better Future for America” argues the U.S. manufacturing sector can be rebuilt with the help of sustained and decisive public policies that promote innovation and encourage investments to flow into new productive capacities. Buy America is one of those public policies.

After World War II, the victors re-established financial order via the creation of the International Monetary Fund, which subsequently created a world dollar-gold standard. This now meant that in order for world trade to recover, there now had to be a steady supply of dollars. In this context the Marshall Plan created a strong U.S. government emphasis on buying abroad and opening the U.S. market in order to increase the supply of dollars circulating in the world.

In the post war era, with the evolution of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), most favored nation status, and the concept of “national treatment”, U.S. policymakers assumed that the U.S. industrial and technological dominance would continue on into the future. The “trade not aid” mentality that dominated at the time did not see the “aid packages” going to Europe and Japan as part of trade agreements providing an unfair advantage, but as strategic consolidations of a post war that could stand up to the Communist bloc and help rebuild the war ravaged economies of Europe and Asia.

Unfortunately, these trade agreements made the economies of scale of the U.S. market available to overseas producers while the U.S. obtained no reciprocal market access. Essentially U.S. negotiators created a structure that increasingly put U.S. manufacturers at a disadvantage.

The United States saw a rapid increase in imports, and cheap foreign imports had an adverse effect on domestic industries. Meanwhile, our international competitors realized they could receive all the benefits of a trade agreement without paying any of the costs, and as a result, the U.S. remains exposed to a flood of inexpensive imported goods.

During this time the United States lacked any overarching economic strategy. Public policies designed to support U.S. industry were random in their application, ill-conceived and usually ineffective at helping domestic manufacturing become more competitive in the global market.  Policies designed to promote consumption-based growth combined with asymmetric trade relations led to massive imbalances in global trade. As a result the United States has accumulated a colossal trade deficit with nearly every major trade partner dating back to about 1970. Our trade deficit in manufactured goods rose to over $440 billion in 2009, a consequence of U.S. firms steadily switching from domestic to overseas production. This trend accounts for almost 60 percent of the reduction in manufacturing employment.

In the past 10 years, more than 56,000 U.S. factories have closed or moved overseas and an additional 90,000 manufacturing firms are now at risk of going out of business. There are currently more than 12 unemployed workers for every U.S. manufacturing job opening, an unemployment rate two times higher than the overall economy. Yet, despite its decline, manufacturing still represents nearly 8 percent of national employment and about 12 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.

Buy America is one of the sustained and decisive public policies that can promote innovation, encourage investments to flow into new productive capacities, revitalize U.S.-based manufacturing, create jobs, additional wages and tax revenue — all of which would also address the trade deficit.

Do other countries have similar policies?

Many of the world’s largest economies, including China, Canada, and Europe, attach minimum domestic content standards to their investments to support local industry and leverage national investments into greater employment gains. In fact, annual reports by the United States Trade Representative reveal that trading partners currently use the flexibility they have under international agreements to maintain a variety of procurement restrictions that exclude American products and services. A number of Canadian provinces maintain “Buy Canada” and other policies that give preference to Canadian goods. In Europe goods with majority EU content receive preferences over U.S. goods in certain water, transportation, energy, and postal services contracts. China’s 2002 Government Procurement Law requires government entities at the central and sub-central level to give priority to local goods and services in contracting decisions, with some exceptions. China also uses technical procurement standards to favor domestic suppliers in certain sectors, such as high technology and electronics.

Is Buy America consistent with the United States’ obligations under international treaties?

Buy America policies are consistent with the US trade agreements.* The U.S. is party to a number of such agreements that contain procurement obligations, including the World Trade Organization Agreement on Government Procurement (the GPA, which covers 39 countries in addition to the United States), NAFTA, and various bilateral and regional free trade agreements. Parties to these agreements have negotiated over the extent of their obligations, including which government entities are subject to the agreement, what goods and services are covered, and monetary thresholds for covered contracts. The U.S., for example, did not subject any state level procurement actions to NAFTA, including state procurement financed with federal funds, and it has specifically excluded federal funds for mass transit and highway projects from all agreements to which it is a party.** Thus, the United States has already negotiated with trading partners to maintain the right to attach domestic sourcing restrictions to funds for many public projects.

Conclusion

The facts about Buy America reveal that targeting government spending to domestic production creates good jobs for American workers and ensures effective use of taxpayer dollars. Moreover, application of Buy American requirements is fully consistent with the international obligations of the U.S., and will not lead to retaliation or dangerous “trade wars.” At a time when jobs are hemorrhaging and industrial production is at historic lows, Buy America provides critical support for domestic and foreign-owned companies that manufacture products in the United States.

**See U.S. Appendix to the GPA at Annex 2, note 5. The U.S. has also excluded federal funds for highway and transit projects from all other FTAs to which it is a party that would otherwise cover such funds. The U.S.-Jordan FTA does not contain any procurement commitments on behalf of the United States. In the U.S.-Israel FTA and U.S.-Singapore FTA, the U.S. made procurement commitments only to the extent already undertaken in the GPA, including the exception for highway and transit funding in Note 5 to Annex 2 of the U.S. Appendix to the GPA. In NAFTA and the U.S.-Bahrain FTA, the U.S. did not make specific commitments on behalf of states, thus state procurement of goods with federal funds is not. In all other FTAs signed on to by the U.S., the U.S. noted in its FTA procurement schedule the same exception with regard to transit and highway funds included in the GPA. See U.S.-Chile FTA, Annex 9.1, Section B, Schedule of the United States, Note 4; U.S.-Australia FTA, Annex 15-A, Section 2, Schedule of the United States, Note 5; U.S.-Morocco FTA, Annex 9-A-2, Schedule of the United States, Note 5; U.S.-Peru FTA, Annex 9, Section B, Schedule of the United States, Note 5; CAFTA-DR, Annex 9.1.2(b)(i), Section B, Schedule of the United States, Note 5.

John Bradburn, Started Landfill Free Program Photo Credit: GM

Since 2007, GM has earned an additional $2.5 billion in revenue from selling reprocessed by-products from GM facilities and has created new recycling jobs in American GM plants. GM uses a “significant amount” of by-products for their internal reuse, and recycles 2.5 million tons of by-products annually. If loaded into Chevy Silverado pickup trucks, this recycled material would wrap around the globe. The Landfill-Free program instructs GM employees to recycle by-products with the lowest possible impact and encourages internal repurposing and recycling.

While GM’s manufacturing activities often create by-products that can be reprocessed and sourced back to a GM supplier, such as metals, some waste is more difficult to recycle and may be repurposed locally.  Mr. Bradburn describes the repurposing of byproducts as “redeploying materials for uses other than what were initially intended. We need to apply innovation, so we can visualize by-products supplying another use.”

For example, plastic Chevy Volt battery covers are now home to hundreds of waterfowl, ducks, and bats in the Flint, Michigan area. GM provides these plastic casings to Boy Scout troops, who then offset challenges of habitat fragmentation by creating birdhouses.  Mr. Bradburn comments, “Conservation groups love the birdhouses, and these nests have stimulated a positive community response to this care for wildlife.” He further explains that when compared to recycling, “repurposing allows reuse with minimal alteration and environmental impact.”

During the 2009 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, GM saw coastal oil pollution as an opportunity to repurpose an environmentally harmful externality. GM sent a team of suppliers and engineers to clean up 227 miles of Gulf coast with oil absorbent boom—the material used to protect the shores from the spill. GM then processed that material with a supplier on the Gulf, who extracted the crude oil absorbed in the boom. A second supplier then compounded this oil to make resin, which GM’s Detroit Chevrolet plant used to make parts for the Chevrolet Volt. “Every baffle from a Chevy Volt is made of 25% oil boom, and that same part contains 25% used test tires from a Michigan test facility. Another 25% of the Chevy Volt’s baffle is made from post-consumer plastics,” Mr. Bradburn elaborates. Additionally, all by-products of the battery plant south of Detroit are landfill-free, and these by-products are used to build the Chevy Volt battery. “The Chevy Volt’s assembly is a an example of how innovation and science can be applied to utilize natural resources to address environmental concerns in a better way, as opposed to landfilling.”

Mr. Bradburn sees his Landfill-Free program’s success as an opportunity for other corporations to realize that managing waste, rather than sending it to a landfill, is a lucrative business. Even a non-manufacturing operation of GM, the Customer After-Sales division, earns close to $20,000 each month just from recycled cardboard sales. The promise of additional revenue, as well as Mr. Bradburn’s mentoring program, has other businesses seeking tips from GM. The Landfill-Free Initiative has been recognized by Fortune Magazine and CNN, and GM is the only automotives manufacturer in the EPA Waste-Wise Hall of Fame; John Bradburn has personally received four Society of Automotive Engineers Environmental Excellence in Transportation Awards, in recognition of the Landfill-Free program. Along with GM’s leadership in eliminating waste from their product streams, the corporation seeks new innovations in reducing the need to reprocess recycled material. “There are a lot of opportunities for green chemistry principles and chemical substitutions,” explains Mr. Bradburn. GM hopes to substitute new innovations for chemical compounds that are difficult to recycle. They have started exchanging ideas with other corporations in order to share methods of waste elimination and to seek advancements in green technologies and engineering production materials. Some chemical compounds used in production are difficult to break down and reuse, and provide a limited range of use. GM is working to develop substitutes for these kinds of waste that are easier to repurpose and recycle.

To further eliminate waste, GM has begun to incorporate renewable sources of energy into its electric cars, the Chevy Volt and Cruze, and engineering cleaner-burning gas engines in other vehicles, designed to promote engine longevity. Dealerships of GM cars have started to set up charging stations for electric vehicles, powered by solar arrays. GM’s accomplishments to minimize waste should be a model for all companies, not just other automobile manufacturers. From Mr. Bradburn’s perspective, the Landfill-Free program “is about making our world a better place, applying science and innovation, and demonstrating that minimizing landfill waste by 100% is possible.”

The student-labor pre-conference will kick off the activities on July 4, where participants can learn about how to battle state cuts to higher education and the public sector workforce.  Other topics will include a tutorial on building coalitions, defining the rights of migrant workers in the twenty-first century, and connecting student activists with labor activists.

On July 5, the schedule includes topics about the “new economy” and the importance of providing care for workers across generations.  Then, participants will learn about social and economic justice in the District of Columbia, including WalMart’s plan to build four new stores in the city.  In the evening, there will be a rally at Walmart’s D.C. headquarters with the Organization United for Respect at Walmart to demand decent, living-wage jobs.

There will be several workshops to choose from on July 6, including

• Pro‐Active State Strategies to Advance Workers’ Rights
• Combating the Threat of Deportation as Employer Retaliation: Turning the Tide to Protect the Right to Organize
• Defending Democracy, Defending the Public Sector
• Taking On Corporate Power Part II: Going Up Against Multi‐national Corporations
• Winning Strategies in the Student Movement

The day will begin with a keynote address from U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis and will end with a banquet and dance party to celebrate 25 years of Jobs with Justice.

The last day of the conference will feature an interfaith service to celebrate the shared future of workers and the religious community.  Participants can choose several clinics to attend, including lessons in organizing, social media, and legal compliance for nonprofits.  In addition there will be several “Self-Organized Spaces” where participants can form their own discussion groups on topics of their choosing.

Jobs with Justice will be live-streaming many of the sessions and followers can monitor #jwj11 on Twitter for real-time updates.  There will also be childcare on-site for participants; youth attendees will travel to the National Zoo, take part in a “play protest,” perform a skit, and create fun arts and crafts.

If you would like to join the conference, register ASAP at https://afl.salsalabs.com/o/4023/c/33/p/salsa/event/common/public/?event_KEY=1412.

Yesterday, the Senate received a strong message: investments in transportation are good for workers, good for the economy, and good for our environment. Our nation needs cleaner, safer, more efficient transportation to create a 21st century transporta­tion system that assures America remains the world’s leading global competitive economy, reduces pollution and our dependence on foreign oil, and creates new jobs and opportunity for workers across the nation.

Terry O’Sullivan, General President of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, emphasizing that “infrastructure investment can help employers compete, grow, and hire more workers…. [T]he payback for taxpayers and future generations is solid, while the failure to invest will stall economic growth and result in more deficits in the future.”

President O’Sullivan went on to tell senators from both parties that “nations such as China are out-investing us three or four to one when it comes to critical infrastructure. We’re concerned that other nations are building super-highways and bullet trains while we’re struggling to figure out how to patch potholes. Meanwhile there are 1.3 million men and women who are ready, willing and trained to build America’s crumbling transportation systems but through no fault of their own are jobless….  Investing in transportation infrastructure can directly create millions of desperately needed jobs — and 90 percent of those jobs are middle-class jobs….We can invest in critical needs now, cut our debt, put people back to work, spur economic growth and create real assets for taxpayers and future generations.”

Joining President O’Sullivan was Deron Lovaas, Federal Transportation Policy Director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, who illustrated the economic benefit to federal infrastructure programs put forth in the BGA Apollo Transportation Manufacturing Action Plan (TMAP).  “Annual investments of $30 billion in America’s public transit systems and $10 billion in intercity and high-speed rail would create 3.7 million jobs overall and more than 600,000 jobs in manufacturing over six years.  In addition, these investments will generate $60 billion in net annual gross domestic product, nearly $45 billion in additional worker income, and $14 billion in annual tax revenue, spurring additional growth throughout the economy.  Such investments also have a ripple effect, benefitting, for example, small towns where buses are manufactured, or farms that rely on port cities for access to the global marketplace.”

During today’s hearing diverse national stakeholders echoed many of the points addressed in the BlueGreen Alliance’s National Policy on Transportation. An overhaul of our nation’s transportation system is long overdue. The system is broken, and broke — in addition to improving our infrastructure, we also need to create sustainable revenue sources to fund needed investments.

The BlueGreen Alliance and our partners support investments to build cleaner, modern transporta­tion systems to give Americans more mobility, make our economy more productive, create jobs, increase our energy independence, and reduce pollution.  Now, the question is: will members of Congress act on this advice?

“Bring Solar Home” is an initiative to introduce homeowners to solar installation businesses and provide consumers with information and advice to help them make decisions about installing home solar units. Solar San Antonio’s Bring Solar Home campaign connects a homeowner’s application for home installation to a number of installers, and narrows down the bid to three companies. There are three requirements of the installation companies contracted for residential installations. First, the company must be pre-approved by the city’s municipal utility, CPS Energy. Second, the installer must be a member of Solar San Antonio. Third, it must sign an agreement outlining the company’s involvement with the larger Bring Solar Home campaign. Once an installation is complete, it is inspected by the city and the utility. “We also monitor each project and how it’s doing to make sure it’s a good experience for the customer,” Mr. Sinkin explains.

Home solar installation presents a high up-front cost, and this barrier is one of the main challenges to Bring Solar Home’s goals for San Antonio’s homes. The average installation costs $25,000-$27,000. “Solar PV pays for itself in 8-10 years and last for about 25-30 years,” explains Sinkin. Solar photovoltaic panels are just one method of capturing solar energy. Mr. Sinkin notes, “solar hot water costs much less than an electric water heater, and it pays for itself in fewer than three years.”

Additionally, homeowners who install solar panels will receive a rebate from CPS Energy, and then a federal tax credit. Solar San Antonio worked with the San Antonio Credit Union, as well as two local banks and national lending institutions, which now offer lending products that help finance home solar installations. Mr. Sinkin elaborates, “they are willing to have the customer borrow the total amount, give them the rebate, tax credit, and then to lower the loan. Part of what attracted them is that we pointed out that there are 600,000 rooftops in Baer County. If only half got involved in solar, there’s a $3 billion industry waiting to happen.”

When Solar San Antonio launched Bring Solar Home, they weren’t sure how many applications would be submitted. Over 550 applications were turned in during the trial run alone. About 75 homes have had solar panels installed thus far, bringing a total of 0.5 megawatts to San Antonio homes through solar energy, San Antonio installation companies have earned a total of $2-$3 million in revenue from Bring Solar Home projects, compared to the $60,000 Solar San Antonio spent in advertising the campaign. Mr. Sinkin sees this high return on Solar San Antonio’s investment as a signal that there is a market for residential clean energy generation which was previously restricted by challenges to financing such projects, accessing information about home solar units, and a partnership between the installers and municipal utility.

Happy owners of solar energy units can testify to the ease of Solar San Antonio’s program. Mr. Sinkin tells me about one enthusiastic customer: “We have a local weatherman who installed solar on his house and fell in love with it. He frequently will interrupt his forecast to tell people to go solar. He recently put his CPS Energy bill on the screen and showed five months where his bill was zero, and put Solar San Antonio’s number of the screen. In the next few days, we had 150 calls for solar installation.”

Solar San Antonio is funded, in part, by the city. San Antonio’s “Mission Verde Sustainability Plan” aims to phase out fossil fuels, improve energy efficiency, and construct a robust, green economy in San Antonio. In June 2011, the city’s municipal utility, CPS Energy, announced that San Antonio’s coal-fired power plant would go offline in 2018. The plant will be retired earlier than any other coal-fired utility in Texas, as CPS Energy aims to meet its goal of a 20% renewable energy portfolio. Because of city emissions restrictions, CPS Energy’s alternative to retiring the coal plant would have been to finance a $550 million retrofitting. Solar San Antonio believes that solar energy is a cost-effective and secure energy source, for private homes, as well as on the municipal? utility-level. For this city, incorporating solar energy is the best option.

July 4, 2011

Slithering into the 2012 elections, American politics are all about class warfare but on the scariest scale.   In the space of seven years the needle has moved from Thomas Frank’s 2004 haunting query on why our working class chooses against its natural economic interests (‘What’s the Matter with Kansas?”), to pre-purchased revisionists like George Will (“Burning Down the House” – July 1^st, 2011, Washington Post) blaming the ongoing economic recession on Fannie Mae and government policies without including Wall Street’s insider trading, client betraying financial punks front and center.

In this context, the 2012 Romney presidential campaign slogan, “Obama Isn’t Working”, highlights how relative truth has become manipulated caricature in America as the nation grinds to a self-inflicted halt.  Instead of liberating Lady Gaga’s “Little Monsters”, our body politic has morphed into a deadlocked “Frankensteinian” monster-mashed, existential dilemma over “what’s not the matter with all of us”?, that is disfiguring our lives and warping any further reason to believe.

When in power, both principal political parties have shown a marked preference for scoring hard core ideological points on the backs of those who didn’t vote their way instead of reaching to the middle to create community sustaining jobs.  As a result, the American working class is on life support while we still debate the unalienable right to equal healthcare for every tax-paying resident, or whether cleaning up our environment through lower carbon energy independence is a national security priority, or whether those who have too much should give more as opposed to taking more from those who don’t have enough to begin with, or whether we should blame those who choose public service for our greed-induced societal foibles.  Like a dysfunctional national gyroscope or radar, we’ve lost the ability to right ourselves and come back to our identity and location in the middle of the universe we used to inhabit in the dreams of our founders.

We’ve reached a national tipping point between defending the participative democracy we were envisioned to be or solidifying the extended insider financial oligarchy we have become, between practicing and defending economic patriotism based on individual ownership of land, hearth, and manufacturing our own employment – to giving up and giving in to a new form of indentured servitude where personal sovereignty yields to renting our lives, leasing our time, and choosing between gas or food to assemble our outsourced way of life while others fly off to gated lives of multi-vacation homes and private aircraft paid for by taxpayer bail-outs.

Despite tangible bipartisan anger, we have informally sanctioned a national marketplace of abusive “casual corruption” (George Packer, The New Yorker, “A Dirty Business”, June 27^th, 2011) in high places while formally exacting retribution and tribute from victims.  The global financial class thunders from Davos-type summits that it’s time to let their masters of the universe out of post-tsunami-recession penalty boxes feebly erected to provide intermittent societal shelter from non-stop incoming rounds of documented systemic abuses paid off as “civil fines without admitting guilt”.  This is at least morally and hypocritically wrong even if outright criminality is frustratingly elusive to prove.

Bipartisan, predatory capitalism betting against America has resulted in 24 million under or unemployed of our fellow citizens and practically $9 trillion in “now you see it, now you don’t” vanished household wealth since 2007.  Meanwhile, the nation has spent countless human treasure in lost middle and working class lives defending our values and homeland sanctity in this decade’s two wars.  Not a pretty patriotic juxtaposition.

The epitaph for these first eleven years of this century in this country is that the system worked to steal our equity while the wars we were led into killed our sons and daughters and transformed us into national debtors and squatters in our own land. Betrayed by the hard-over ideological posturing of our leaders’ inability to put the people’s interests first, we’ve even lost our will to register shock while drowning in a morass of bait and switch political symbolism and endless mixed metaphor campaign messages that culminate to keep the monthly bills coming, the homes foreclosing, and the company store oligarchies humming.

Message confusion is bankable. That leading corporate bundler of political contributions, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, hangs flags outside their headquarters facing the White House across Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. spelling out “JOBS” in capital letters and underneath the site, “freeenterprise.com”, for pedestrians, lobbyists, tourists, and policymakers alike.  What the flags don’t state is whether these jobs are American jobs or not, and whether these jobs are in the United States or elsewhere.  Not surprising omissions when fronting for multinationals whose global interests are squarely focused on jobs anywhere and everywhere with each non command-and-control hosting country acting like dependent nodes in a worldwide matrix that can be activated or deactivated at will depending on how private profit flows are influenced and captured.  This Chamber should drop the “U.S.” from their name because it violates truth in advertizing.

Unless we transition in real time from the “Shareholder Economy” to the “Stakeholder Economy”, our own Little Monsters will show us organically how to eat our young.

-Michael A. Peck-

“Michael is the founder of MAPA Group (1994). His current advocacy board affiliations include the Blue-Green Alliance (Corporate Advisory), the Apollo Alliance (Advisory), the American Sustainable Business Council (Advisory), and the Wind Energy Foundation.”

Photo Credit: Pecan Street Project

Today, the Mueller (pronounced “miller”) Community is the testing ground for a state-of-the-art smart grid venture.  The Pecan Street Project, a nonprofit organization, is in charge of overseeing the installation of smart meters in up to 1,000 homes and 75 businesses.  The Project is a collaboration between the city of Austin; the University of Texas; the University’s energy lab; Austin Energy, the local utility; the Austin Chamber of Commerce; the Environmental Defense Fund; and Mueller residents.

The hallmark of a smart grid is the ability for communication and feedback between the utility and the electronics in a customer’s home.  To reduce peak demand and avoid the use of fossil fuel-burning backup generators, customers can opt to consume electricity when the price is low.  This may mean delaying a load of laundry or waiting to run the dishwasher until the smart meter inside the home shows that the demand for electricity is low.  Increasingly, homeowners and businesses are using the Internet to program their devices to function when prices are cheapest (although the customer could override this at any time).

The Pecan Street Project is an experiment.  According to the Project’s Communications Director Colin Rowan, the stakeholders hope to discover how homeowners will respond to changes in the price of energy during peak demand.  Equally as important, according to Rowan, “is learning whether people will like having control over their energy usage or will they be frustrated by it?”

In 2008, the Project aimed to move the smart grid and renewable energy industry forward to reduce energy usage, pump money into the local economy, and create smart grid jobs in the Austin area within 25-30 years.  After the Department of Energy Awarded the Pecan Street Project $10.5 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the first data-gathering phase began.

In 200 Mueller homes, the new smart grid system gathers information about energy usage from circuit breakers every three seconds.  In 15-second intervals, those data are sent to a supercomputer at the University of Texas.  This allows for real-time monitoring of appliances, heating and air conditioning, solar panels, and even electric vehicles that are plugged into the grid.

After a worldwide search, the Pecan Street Project selected a company based in Austin to install the smart grid software: Incenergy LLC.  Grant funds from the Recovery Act helped Incenergy to hire a certified master electrician, who received training to install and troubleshoot the platform.  Incenergy also employs three engineers who developed the software for 15-second monitoring.  The Pecan Street Project hired individuals with technical skills to oversee the Project, including a Ph.D.-holding former faculty member of UT-Austin and a postgraduate fellow who analyzes the data from the first 200 homes.

In a similar experiment in Washington, the results were encouraging. Homeowners saved 10 percent on their electricity bills and the utility’s peak load decreased by 15 percent with smart meter usage.  For businesses, the benefits can be more substantial: the U.S. Department of Energy found that power outages and quality issues cost the private sector more than $100 billion each year.  A grid with fewer spikes in demand can guard against blackouts in addition to saving money.

Photo Credit: Pecan Street Project

Jose Beceiro, who represents the Austin Chamber of Commerce on the Pecan Street Project’s Board of Directors, identified one area in which early data are providing useful information.  For example, “the way you orient a solar system on a rooftop has a big impact on demand,” Beceiro said.  The conventional wisdom is that south-facing solar panels are preferable because they capture more sunlight during the day.  “But south-facing solar generates the maximum amount of energy possible only when the sun is directly overhead.  West-facing solar produces more total power for a larger amount of time,” he said, noting that peak demand occurs in the evening, when west-facing solar arrays are most effective.

The Pecan Street Project has issued a request for information to determine what services companies around the world can potentially provide to the Project in later stages.  Selected firms will be able to test their technology in a new facility built in conjunction with the University and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Each of the stakeholders hopes that the information about consumption patterns will show the viability of smart grid technology after the demonstration ends. The Environmental Defense Fund, for example, will look for environmental benefits from reduced fossil fuel use; the University of Texas will want to retain the research and development work in its labs; and the Chamber of Commerce hopes that smart grid jobs and reduced energy bills will translate into more economic activity in Austin.

Jeff Smith, the director of operations for Incenergy, hopes that his company’s work can demonstrate the benefits of smart grid for homeowners, for businesses, and for the environment.  “We are the ‘feet on the street’ to develop these systems and figure out what is possible to deploy,” he said.  “We are getting out of the laboratory and into the real world.”

To learn more, visit http://www.pecanstreetproject.org/.