John Addison writes in his blog about the city of Santa Monica, CA and its plans to be the nation's first "Net Zero" city. Through energy efficiency, solar and other renewable energy, the city hopes to generate enough clean energy to match its total energy consumption. Two paragraphs from the post and you can read the rest at Cleantech blog.
Solar Santa Monica formally launches a two year program on January 1, 2007. The voluntary program will start with 50 residential and commercial buildings. With the benefit of what is learned from these 50 projects, the program will be made available to all. The 50 buildings will include 30 to 35 residences, 5 to10 business and 5 municipal buildings.
Susan Munves estimated that over 20 years, $1.4 billion is the probable investment required to achieve being a “Net Zero” city. This is likely to offset a utility electric charges which would be higher than the $1.4 billion.
Great goal! Look to the San Diego survey of rooftop solar locations (53% of their power could come from rooftop solar)and a large scale switch to geothermal cooling instead of air conditioning to acomplish this.
Cool ocean water circulation could substitute for most air conditioning load at a fraction of the energy use, maybe 10% of present air conditioning load. air conditioning is the brownout, grid straining load in socal and the southwest in general.
Solar collectors on roofs also tend to shield buildings from summer heating, reducing cooling loads directly.
I believe it could be done for much less than that billion dollar figure with these technologies. And a great large scale clean energy (and deslainated water) source would be offshore wind/wave power platforms. Floating 10 miles offshore where NIMBYs won't see them.
Backup power can come from vehicle to grid (v2G)generation. A good way to start this would be serial hybrid municipal fleet vehicles of the plugin/ fuel cell-microturbine variety. They can power the grid when parked and plugged into a biogas (from municipal sewer plant, supplemented with other waste sources))or natural gas source.
Posted by: amazingdrx | December 16, 2006 at 10:43 AM
the project is ok, but the investment is huge. I wonder where they will find all that money. Big project, but also big money.
Posted by: electric bicycle | July 16, 2009 at 08:47 PM