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Despite three years of stubbornly low gasoline prices, municipalities still spend much of their budgets on fuel, especially for police cars, which run for extended periods.

Estimates on the cost of fueling a police car are all over the map. But assuming a car such as the Ford Police Interceptor Sedan is driven for two eight-hour shifts, six days a week, every week for a year, that car’s gas bill can approach $8,000 annually with the current cost of gas. Considering how much the typical police car idles, or how much time cash-strapped cities and counties insist those expensive vehicles stay on the road, fuel costs could even trend higher.

But Ford is introducing what the automaker says is the first hybrid police car in the industry. The Police Responder Hybrid Sedan will soon make its debut in New York and Los Angeles. The car’s 2.0-liter, I-4 Atkinson-cycle engine, with its 88-kilowatt electric A/C motor and a 1.4-kW lithium-ion battery, offers what Ford says is an average fuel-efficiency of 38 combined miles per gallon. That's twice as fuel efficient as the popular Interceptor.

By Ford’s estimates, each Responder driven 20,000 miles a year would save municipalities approximately $3,900 in potential fuel costs annually. The company included a calculator on a microsite that allows any city government (or curious citizen) to gauge annual savings based on local gasoline costs, as well as how many miles an average police car is driven annually.

And when it comes to crunching additional numbers, the Responder could catch the attention of municipalities that have to replace their aging police car fleets while trying to meet local sustainability goals.

In Ford’s estimation, the Responder will reduce gasoline consumption by an average of 526 gallons per car, per year. Using the U.S. Energy Information Agency’s data, switching one car to a Responder could result in the displacement of nearly six tons of carbon annually.

The math reveals both the environmental and economic benefits – especially considering Ford sells the most police cars across the U.S., at a rate that approaches nearly two-thirds of the total U.S. market share.

Ford views the Responder as evidence the company is moving forward on fuel efficiency, whether or not the current presidential administration rolls back federal fuel mileage standards (as the U.S. automakers wish).

The Dearborn, Michigan-based automaker pledged to invest $4.5 billion in hybrid and electric car technology over three years to make it not just an automobile manufacturer, but as the buzzword goes, a “mobility company.”

The move toward rolling out more electric vehicles coincides with Ford’s aggressive push to become a major global player within the nascent autonomous car sector -- which resulted in the $1 billion acquisition of an artificial intelligence company earlier this year. The automaker said it is determined to roll out a self-driving vehicle by 2021.

Image credit: Ford Motor Co.

Solar power continues to fall in price and has become far more efficient in the last few years. Competition is fierce, as many of us can judge by the solar installation telemarketers who keep our phones ringing. Nevertheless, plenty of homeowners object to solar panels’ aesthetics. The typical boxy set-ups do not resonate with everyone, especially if an owner purchased their home because of its architectural or historic significance.

But over the weekend, Tesla and Panasonic introduced a new product line of solar panels that practically blend in with the typical roof.

Gone are the rigid aluminum mounting hardware and the glaring grid design. As debuted in photos on Tesla’s website, the new panels manufactured by Panasonic have a more seamless appearance, and could work well on roofs atop contemporary homes or those designed and built decades ago.

And in keeping with Tesla’s promise to become the 21st-century's clean energy company, these panels will also integrate with its Powerwall batteries so homes can stay electrified both day and night.

The panels will be manufactured by Panasonic at Tesla’s second gigafactory in Buffalo, New York, the cleantech blog Electrek reported on Sunday.

Tesla has been pushing its next-generation solar roof tiles for several months, which show some promise to revolutionize rooftop solar and, finally, will reportedly be available for order this month.

Other companies that launched similar products in the past, such as Dow Chemical, have discontinued them due to lack of interest from consumers. But Tesla’s brand reputation could help give this technology a lift.

Telsa says the tempered glass tiles -- which are designed to replace standard roofing materials and resemble several textures, including slate and Spanish tiles -- are both affordable and viable for consumers.

Nevertheless, the reality for many homeowners is that a new roof is an investment that is only required every 20 years or so. And Tesla has been cagey about the price, as the company discloses little information about the systems publicly while asking consumers to contact the company directly for a quote.

But buyers could warm up to an alternative that balances the performance of a conventional rooftop solar installation with a design that is less glaring to the naked eye -- such as the single Panasonic solar panels.

Tesla has not made it clear when the Panasonic panels will be available, though the consensus is that they will launch at some point this summer.

It behooves Tesla to follow through on these new solar products if it hopes to keep investors confident about its long-term prospects. Despite the company’s history of falling short on expectations, this technology “unicorn” continues to defy stock market physics.

Earlier this week, shares of Tesla increased in value to the point that it surpassed General Motors as the most valuable car company in the United States: $51.5 billion compared to $50.2 billion for GM. That milestone came one week after its valuation blitzed past Ford Motors, the current value of which hovers around $44.5 billion.

Tesla's roller coaster of a ride, which exasperates many on Wall Street, is soaring high for now, but it could come crashing down fast if it fails to meet these latest lofty expectations.

Image credit: Tesla

By Michael Kanellos

The water burbling down the hillside amid thick, green foliage certainly looked like a stream.
In reality, it came from a broken water pipe leaking 280 gallons per minute, said Carl Alexander, the GIS director at White House Utility District (WHUD), a municipal water utility north of Nashville, Tennessee, that serves roughly 33,000 homes and businesses.

Over a year, the sylvan pipe break dripped 1.47 million gallons or enough for 2,239 homes in the region. Put another way, WHUD was spilling $300,000 a year down the drain.

“Our water treatment plant was having to run one hour a day just to feed that leak,” Alexander said. “Without us [knowing] there was a problem in that area, we would have never been able to stumble upon it.”

Leakage, or non-water revenue loss, is a chronic and growing problem for water utilities. On average, a utility should expect to lose around 10 to 15 percent of its water on the voyage from the treatment plant to the faucet. Unfortunately, the total is often much higher, thanks to aging infrastructure, small budgets, stretched staff and the challenge of patrolling hundreds, and often thousands, of miles of underground pipes spread across square kilometers of ever-changing terrain.

Chicago at one point was losing 60 percent percent of its water to leakage. The U.S. suffers 240,000 water main breaks a year. Globally, the World Bank estimates that we collectively lose 32.6 trillion liters a year -- or nearly enough to fill China’s Three Gorges Dam to the brim every year with clean, treated water.

Water losses mean more than just higher bills. Water utilities are often the largest consumers of power in their area, consuming 30 to 40 percent of the regional total, so leakage directly leads to excess energy consumption, unnecessary emissions and increased chemical consumption.

The problem gets even worse in emerging nations where drought and the booming growth of megacities are stressing on water supplies. Approximately 45 percent of the global population live in dry lands, defined as regions that get 600 millimeters of rain a year or less, said Alon Tal, a professor at Ben-Gurion University. The problem of leakage in these regions goes far beyond money.

So, what can be done? Cue the big data story. Algorithms can’t be used to dig holes or replace pipes, but they can be employed to pinpoint leaks -- saving time and labor.

WHUD segmented its service territory into 39 sub-districts and cross-referenced water inflow with sewage outflow. In a clever twist, the utility didn’t track daytime use. Instead, it compared inflow and outflow between 1:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. when any large water consumption would likely be leakage (or, perhaps, an illegal grow operation).

WHUD recovered $900,000 worth of water in 2015 and 2016. It also avoided $200,000 worth of system upgrades and freed up its data manager, who was trying to track leakage with spreadsheets, to tackle bigger problems. The utility even found another “stream” in someone’s backyard. The property owners had built a little bridge over it and made it part of the landscaping.

“It was taking our water analysts almost all day, six hours, to calculate all of the information needed for our DMA zones. Now it takes less than 10 minutes," Alexander said. “We are seeing $30,000 in savings just by optimizing his work flow.”

Cities around the world have seen similar results. Maynilad, the utility for Manila, Philippines, has cut water losses from 67 percent to 32 percent — this is across over 7,000 kilometers of water distribution pipes. And over 95 percent of its customer base now has 24-hour service. Halifax in Nova Scotia saves 38 million liters a day. Vitens, a water utility in the Netherlands, now says it can find a sizable leak two minutes after it begins. Some states have begun to require reports on water losses.

Stopping leaks, of course, won’t solve all our water problems. Water utilities, and consumers, are going to have to adjust their attitudes toward water. In Europe and the U.S., water is generally used without much thought. The technologies for increasing supply will also need to be improved and lowered in price.

Last year the California Public Utilities Commission noted in a report that California, among other places, will have to rely more on recycling, desalination and other sources of “new” water. Software also can’t be viewed as a magic bullet on its own: Data generated by pumps and other pieces of equipment piles up quickly, so to take advantage of it requires training and buy-in from the organization.

Taking on leakage, however, is an effective way to start to rethink our approach to water.

Image courtesy of the author 

Michael Kanellos is the Industry Champion of Water at OSIsoft.

Editor's Note: This post is the second in a two-part series about commercial onsite solar. In case you missed it, you can read the first post here.

For too many American businesses, installing an onsite solar system is untenable thanks to solar-killing utility tariffs.

Local permitting can also kill a project. For many permitting departments, a solar project gains extra attention despite being proven technologically with thousands of permitted precedences.

The first of this two-part article series profiled these key issues.

But a solar project can still be developed successfully in the face of solar-killing utility rate designs and extra city permitting attention.

Using smart technology to overcome utility demand charges

Customer-owned solar economics used to be pretty straightforward. Many utilities offered net metering that allowed a customer-owned solar system to spin the meter backward. Net-metered solar projects could zero out their electricity bills by satisfying 100 percent of a building’s energy consumption.

However, net metering allows a building with solar to use the grid but pay nothing for this service.

To correct this flaw, utilities won approvals to apply non-coincident demand charges. A demand charge should recover grid investment costs created by a building’s use of the grid. But utilities have used non-coincident demand charges to create higher bills that are beyond the actual burden a building places on utility grid investments.

That was the challenge I faced in developing a solar project at a small medical building.

This medical building was a great solar opportunity: An installed solar system could satisfy 100 percent of the building’s energy needs. But the utility’s use of non-coincident demand charges, applied across all 12 months of billing, meant that solar could only reduce the building's energy bill by about 60 percent. That level of savings was insufficient to economically justify a solar system.

Installing batteries was the first solution we examined. The idea was to charge the batteries from the solar system and then discharge the stored electricity to reduce kilowatt demand. Doing so would allow the building to qualify for a lower rate and achieve an electricity bill reduction of more than 90 percent. But, while battery costs have dropped dramatically, for this application they did not economically pencil out.

But the deployment of a smart load-control system combined with a solar system proved feasible.

Today’s smart load-control systems can monitor thermostats, and other end-use applications, in real time. They are “smart” in their ability to control end uses, in this case it was the building’s air conditioners, to insure that the building does not exceed a threshold kilowatt target level while still maintaining a comfortable building temperature.

A combination solar system, plus smart load controls, allowed the building to move to a lower cost rate design. The added cost for the smart load control system was minuscule compared to savings.

Permitting lessons learned

Permitting was a second challenge for this project. The building owner wanted the solar system installed on a raised structure located on the property’s back parking lot. Parking lot solar structures are growing in use, especially when a building's roof is too congested for a solar installation.

Using a parking lot solar structure generated considerable attention from the city’s permitting staff. They initially said it merited public hearings. This type of review would have taken months of community engagement plus costly additional work by engineering professionals.

The project’s solar contractor was key to overcoming the staff’s initial reaction. They professionally supplied staff with precedents on how other cities permitted similar structures. With these insights, the permitting staff concluded that the project could be permitted without public hearing.

However, the solar structure did raise two additional permitting issues. The first was sizing it for emergency vehicles. This required gaining inputs from the city’s fire department and medical emergency agency. Their input enabled sizing the structure to allow unencumbered fire and medical emergency vehicle access around the property.

The permitting department also decided the solar structure should be designed to host a parking space large enough to accommodate a handicap van. This added cost and construction time, and required regrading of the parking space to satisfy parking surface gradient rules. Staff also required new handicap stripping across the parking lot to the building’s entrance plus modifications to the building’s entrance pad.

Combined, all three of these permitting issues added over six months of delay to the original construction time schedule.

Having a solar general contractor that could successfully work with the permitting department's staff was a key lesson learned. An additional value was having a solar general contractor with a strong customer service focus. In this case, the solar general contractor stood by their original contracted price despite the permitting delays and costs.

Technology is on the cusp of empowering customer-owned solar

Today, for most buildings, the promise of customer-owned solar is just a promise. Utilities are using non-coincident demand charges to block solar economics.

But this era of monopoly power is about to end.

Batteries, combined with solar, will define the future for electricity. A declining cost curve to price competitiveness will enable this combination system to overcome utility demand charges. This will shift economic power to consumers who can tell their utility to either price competitively or lose a customer.

Until that day arrives, smart technologies that can be combined with solar to win lower electric bills and achieve reduced emissions.

The dawn of the smart, solar building has arrived. The future will be smart zero net energy buildings.

Image courtesy of the author 

By Brian Collett — Pinpointing the source of cotton goods in today’s complex market has been made possible through technology devised by growers and scientists working in partnership.

PimaCott, which runs farms in California, and Applied DNA Sciences, a biotechnology company in New York state, add molecules with DNA tags to the cotton at the start of the manufacturing process so that the textile can be scanned and identified.

This allows supply chain stakeholders to verify that the cotton is derived from responsible sources.

The procedure should help companies to avoid cotton from growing areas such as Uzbekistan that use slave labour and textiles that are falsely claimed to be made from, say, Egyptian cotton.

The partners that have produced the scheme accept that DNA tagging may take years to be widely accepted, partly because it represents another expense in an industry often plagued by unfavourable weather and commodity price slumps. However, PimaCott says it is helping growers with upfront costs.

There is speculation, too, that this tracing method could be applied to other agricultural products.

Photo: iStock Andrea Renata

Companies are getting an earful from shareholders this year. Climate change and social justice dominated discussions at many shareholder meetings, compelling companies to take a more aggressive stance when it comes to the issues that matter to investors.

Last month, two more shareholder groups spoke out -- this time about the need for better transparency when it comes to companies' lobbying efforts and the political views they support.

In early March, investors at Walt Disney Co. submitted a resolution asking the board to prepare and update annual reports about the kinds of public policies it lobbies.

Pat Miguel Tomaino, associate director of Zevin Asset Management, said investors have been asking the board for clarification about the kinds of political and social issues it spends money on for more than 10 years. “[Transparency] is now more important than ever,” Tomaino wrote in a Denver Post op-ed.

He said the shareholder resolution calls on Disney to “delve a bit deeper” and reveal the kind of lobbying it does on public policies as well as the memberships it holds in organizations that write and endorse model legislation. The resolution identifies four principal issues shareholders feel would help investors better understand the company’s philosophies and strategies when it comes to public policies.

Disney responded to the proposal by saying it already complies with all disclosure laws and urging shareholders to vote against the proposal.

Royal Bank of Canada also heard from its shareholders last month. The global advocacy organization SumOfUs submitted a resolution in preparation for the company’s April 6 meeting, calling on Royal Bank to update its shareholders on how it addresses public policy issues, both in the U.S. and Canada.

The resolution not only asks the board to outline the kinds of policy and procedures that govern the board’s lobbying decisions, but also to reveal the payments the board has made toward direct or indirect lobbying and grassroots lobbying efforts.

“As shareholders, we encourage transparency and accountability in RBC’s use of corporate funds to influence legislation and regulation,” the group wrote in its proposal.

SumofUs said RBC lobbied the Canadian government 47 times in the 2016 fiscal year and contributed more than $800,000 lobbying the U.S. Congress during that same time. The figure doesn’t include any lobbying the bank may have made to state and local governments.

“Payments to organizations that pursue agendas contrary to RBC’s stated vision ‘To be among the world’s most trusted financial institutions’ may pose additional risks to shareholder value,” the shareholders stated in their resolution.

Lisa Lindsley, capital markets advisor for SumOfUs, presented the resolution to the board.

“One of the currencies banks deal in is trust. For banks, trust is pivotal because people are literally investing their life’s work, their family’s legacy, planning for their children’s future or trying to make their dreams come true,” Lindsley said in a statement.

“RBC has been mired in a number of high-profile scandals recently using high-pressure sales tactics to dupe customers. While this resolution doesn’t address all of these challenges, it is a step in the right direction. Judging by today’s result, it’s clear that a huge percentage of shareholders agree that RBC must be more transparent about lobbying efforts that put shareholder value at risk.”

The resolution was also supported by the Vancouver-based organization SHARE (Shareholder Association for Research and Education), which said it is also on a mission to get companies to reveal better information about their political contributions and lobbying efforts in Canada.

SHARE was successful in recent years in persuading a number of Canada’s larger companies to commit to more transparency. CN Rail Co., Goldcorp and Cenovus Energy have all agreed to improve transparency when it comes to lobbying efforts and political contributions. Cenovus has also recently announced that it has stopped making political contributions.

Proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Service also encouraged shareholders to vote for the resolution, noting: “While lobbying is widely acknowledged to be an important strategy in fulfilling organizational objectives, it also carries risk. Poorly thought-out efforts can heighten reputational risks such as corruption or other scandals." Transparency, said the firm, increases shareholder confidence. And that confidence benefits company success.

RBC's board of directors however, encouraged investors to vote against the resolution. It added that while it will “continue to review [its] approach against best practices and to enhance [its] approach … the board of directors does not believe the additional disclosure called for by the proposal is necessary.”

Just under 43 percent of RBC shareholders voted in favor of SumOfUs’ resolution. The support for the resolution calling for more transparency at Disney was not available at press time.

But even though neither of the two resolutions passed, shareholder advocacy does appear to be making an impact. The investor group Ceres regularly publishes a list of companies that receive shareholder resolutions on social and environmental issues. As the list reflects, shareholders want to know their investments are aligned with corporate views and actions they can support.

Wikimedia/Raysonho @ Open Grid Scheduler - Public Domain

By Kristen Kleiman

A popular talking point for many years linked low-carbon policies to job loss. Further, some critics say green policies are a drag on the economy, leaving blue-collar workers behind. But in this day of he said/she said, fake news, if-I-believe-it, it’s-not-a-lie, kind of atmosphere, let’s look at the facts regarding job creation and losses in relation to low-carbon economic policies.

A politicized argument has been framed that salt-of-the-earth, blue-collar workers must sacrifice their jobs for the advancement and growth of elite white-collar jobs — but the reality is anything but. The job market shift is essentially about capitalism: how economic progress finds ways to move people out of dying industries and into new industries with living-wage jobs.

First the bad news: If you are a coal miner, chances are you have lost your job or are nervous about losing it. That’s because the coal-mining industry has lost 26,000 jobs, or 30 percent of its workforce, since 2010. To make matters worse, most coal-mining jobs are located in rural or semi–rural areas with average annual incomes lower than the national average.

During the presidential campaign, we heard a lot about saving coal jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS), about 58,000 Americans were employed in the coal-mining sector in January 2017. To put that in perspective, that’s less than .04 percent of total American jobs, or approximately the same amount of people employed in retail sewing and needlework.

In fact, of the roughly 350 industries listed by the BLS, only about 10 percent had fewer employees than coal mining. And although job losses in coal are a devastating problem to the affected communities, blaming low-carbon regulations for this situation is not warranted.

Approximately 86,000 Americans worked in coal-mining jobs in 2010 — that equates to a loss of almost 30,000 workers in less than a decade.

Contrast that rate with the jobs created by a low-carbon economy. In 2010, renewable energy accounted for about 175,000 U.S. jobs. According to a recent U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) report, that figure grew to almost 800,000 workers employed in low-carbon electricity generation by January of this year.

Most of the job growth in renewables can be attributed to solar and wind development. Of those 800,000 jobs, 374,000 were in solar and 102,000 in wind for a total of 475,000 jobs — more than 2.5 times the number of jobs these sectors provided six years ago. And the outlook is positive: The DOE reports solar employment increased by 25 percent in 2016, while wind employment increased by 32 percent.

It is important to note the types of jobs created by low-carbon policies. According to a December 2016 report by the Solar Foundation, the installation sector accounts for 57 percent of all solar-sector jobs, and manufacturing makes up less than 15 percent. Moreover, almost two-thirds of all solar jobs were in the residential market in 2015.

Growth in the solar industry means the creation of blue-collar jobs that stay local and cannot be outsourced to other countries. These professions involve locally-based workers who, in turn, spend their money locally. And, importantly, jobs are in suburban and semi-rural areas where employment is needed the most.

So, what is driving this impressive growth in jobs? State-based policies have been shown to drive low-carbon employment more than a state’s physical attributes. Massachusetts is a good example of this: It ranks as the 26th sunniest state, but is positioned as second in solar employment with over 15,000 jobs in 2016. Why? Because the state provided progressive tax and feed-in tariff incentives to bolster a renewable energy industry which, in turn, provided much-needed jobs in manufacturing and in trades like plumbing and electricity. Over half of Massachusetts’ solar jobs were in installation and 14 percent in manufacturing, with an average hourly wage of $21.

Contrast these rates with states that receive the most sun: Arizona and New Mexico, which rank seventh and 27th in solar jobs, respectively. It would seem obvious that given the amount and quality of sunshine in Arizona and New Mexico that each locale should have booming solar industries. But without the right incentives to attract early-stage capital, they have largely missed the boat.

Even more perplexing is that in Arizona and New Mexico, where electricity for cooling is the predominate use of energy, renewables make far more sense than in northern states like Massachusetts -- which are less sunny and warm and which must continue to rely on fossil fuels to heat the majority of homes for the foreseeable future.

Beyond jobs, the low-carbon economy benefits the rural poor even more directly. According to the American Wind Energy Association, U.S. wind farms pay $222 million a year to rural landowners, with more than $156 million going to landowners in counties with below-average incomes.

The demise of the coal industry and the decline of traditional fossil fuels is a result of capitalism, not a concerted effort to undermine an industry. The reason why coal is a failing industry has more to do with competition from the record-low rates for natural gas than the rise of renewables. Natural gas investments are making electrical generation via coal obsolete. Renewable energy didn’t kill coal, nor did low-carbon regulations. Capitalism killed coal.

If the price of electricity from solar and wind become less costly than natural gas production, renewables may yet render fracking obsolete. That’s just how capitalism works. Better, cheaper products replace higher-priced, less-efficient ones. The fact that renewables don’t generate greenhouse gasses and nasty pollutants is an important co-benefit, but not the driver of investment in those assets.

Nobody wants to see people lose their jobs. But to suggest that low-carbon policies are job-killers would be inaccurate. In fact, the opposite is true — they are job creators.

To press their partisan viewpoint, some have made the case that new industries must survive from infancy without government assistance in order to be considered as established or successful. For context, we need only look to the U.S. government’s support of regional roads in the early 20th century, when many states imposed fuel taxes that were used exclusively for road construction to accommodate the automobile. This successful program is a prime example that regulatory policies that encourage investment will create new industries, ultimately creating more jobs.

An economy based on low-carbon energy should be seen as progress: It creates jobs that can’t be outsourced, stimulates new products and designs, increases American energy independence, and, in the end, makes our economy and planet healthier.

Image credit: Flickr/Centre for Alternative Technology

Kristen Kleiman is the Director of Investments for The Climate Trust

'Déjà vu all over again' could sum up the Union of Concerned Scientists’ reaction to the Heartland Institute’s latest push to convince teachers that there is hardly scientific consensus on climate change.

The libertarian think tank, which several years ago compared climate scientists to Unabomber Ted Kaczynksi, says it plans to mail a book rejecting scientific consensus on climate change to 200,000 K-12 teachers this year.

The book, Why Scientists Disagree about Global Warming, was published in 2015 on the same day the COP21 climate talks launched in Paris. It has already gone out to at least 25,000 science teachers across the country.

The book disputes the fact that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that the pace of climate change we're seeing is man-made, and further posits that the presence of climate change in debate is "an insult to science.” The volume, co-written by three leading climate skeptics, also asserts that the United Nations' climate change panel has failed to provide any “objective guidance” on its view of the issue and accuses U.N. climate researchers of bias.

Heartland included a letter with the book and a 10-minute DVD. In the materials, the organization reassures teachers it is a “top-rated nonprofit” and insists any claim that climate science is “settled” is false.

As Heartland disperses the first round of these packages to teachers, science education leaders are making it clear what they think of this attempt to influence local school district’s curriculum. “The Heartland Institute is within its rights to have its unscientific opinion about climate change,” Meghan Groome of the New York Academy of Science wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post. “But opinion is not fact.”

Groome pointed out that Heartland, along with other climate-denial groups, has followed a similar path in the past. Those steps include forceful rhetoric with vocabulary that rings like science jargon; highlighting who are supposedly influential climate skeptics; and adopting phrases such as “it’s only a theory” in an attempt to confuse scientific research with pseudoscience.

The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) also lashed out at Heartland. In a recent interview on PBS's "Frontline," the NCSE Executive Director Ann Reid criticized the organization’s tactics, saying of the packets: “It’s not science, but it’s dressed up to look like science. It’s clearly intended to confuse the teachers.”

Heartland adopted similar tactics in the past in order to exert its influence on science education. In October 2013, the organization shipped a report entitled 'Climate Change Reconsidered,' which critics say was designed to have the look and feel of materials from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In countering that mailer, the NCSE pointed out that for years, Heartland has taken an active role in opposing any government regulation of tobacco and fossil fuels while accepting millions of dollars from the secretive Donors Trust.

Meanwhile, Heartland is pushing back at its critics. In response to several U.S. lawmakers' criticism of this latest mailer to teachers, the organization dismissed those public statements and press releases as a collective lie and “freak out.”

Policy analysts at Heartland are also sharpening the knives for the Donald Trump administration. On Monday, the group described an Interior Department decision to let an endangered species designation for a bumblebee species as a huge misstep. “If this is the kind of housecleaning and swamp draining we’re going to get, we’re in real trouble,” wrote one advisor yesterday.

Image credit: Tony Webster/Flickr

Installing solar on your commercial building can make a lot of money. But it can also be a nightmare.

What makes developing solar power such a hit-or-miss process?

A key determining factor is how your utility prices electricity. If your building's electricity bill includes a non-coincident demand charge, that could be an an unsurmountable economic mountain for a solar project to overcome.

The second determining factor is how your city approaches solar permitting. Because time is money, a city with an arduous solar-permitting process could threaten your project's financial success.

The great news is that emerging smart technologies and batteries are increasingly overcoming solar-killing utility rate designs. But ironically, these same technologies may create permit-approval challenges that endanger their economics.

Two economic drivers that can make solar a fantastic investment

Falling solar prices is the No. 1 reason businesses should investigate owning their own system. Just last year, the price of solar technology fell by more than 17 percent! Falling technology prices have made solar price-competitive against average electricity rates from a utility. Plus, a customer-owned solar system is insurance against future utility rate increases.

Solar also still has attractive tax benefits. Installing solar earns your business a 30 percent federal investment tax credit. The project also benefits from five-year accelerated depreciation. These tax benefits, combined with bill savings, often recover capital costs within five years. After that, free electricity!

How utilities use rate designs to destroy solar economics

There is one overriding reason why America's businesses are not massively investing in solar power. It is our electric utilities' purposeful deployment of solar-killing rate designs.

Ironically, utilities are falling in love with solar. But only if they can meter it. Solar power plants now have lower costs than natural gas or coal generation. As a result, solar accounts for over 75 percent of the new generation being installed by utilities.

But utilities look at customer-owned solar as a threat to their revenues and existence. In response, utilities introduced rate designs that use KW (kilowatt) demand charges to destroy the economics of customer-owned solar.

A KW charge is a rate-design option that a utility can use to charge customers for grid use. The companion kWh (kilowatt-hour) charge recovers operations costs.

On the surface, that seems fair. A customer-owned solar system that generates 100 percent of its energy (kWh) requirement will still need to use the grid when the sun does not shine.

But utilities are not seeking fairness in how they apply KW charges. They are looking to optimize their payments from customers at the expense of customer-owned solar. This is most obvious in their use of non-coincident KW demand charges.

Here’s an extreme example of how this works: Let’s assume a building’s maximum demand during a year is 30 KW at 3 a.m. on a fall day. During this time period, a utility can be spinning reserves (running fossil-fueled power plants) to keep the grid from crashing because of a lack of customer demand.

Under a non-coincident KW demand charge, our hypothetical building is charged as if it were consuming 30 KW on the hottest day of the year when the grid is threatened by high consumer demand. Even worse, it will face this high charge every month for a year!

A non-coincident demand charge makes no sense in terms of allocating grid investment among customers. It makes a lot of sense in terms of optimizing utility revenues. It allows utilities to charge customers a lot of money even if they own a solar system that is reducing utility investments needed to sustain the grid during a hot, sunny day.

Protecting a project from non-coincident demand charges is the first task in successfully developing a customer-owned solar system. A key step is to find a developer that understands both the complexity of utility rate designs plus how to use technologies like smart-load systems, fuel cells or batteries to overcome non-coincident demand charges.

Working with your city’s permitting department

Unintentionally, your city’s permitting department can also harm the economics of your customer-owned solar system.

In most permitting departments the staff holds considerable latitude in deciding how to evaluate and permit a solar project. This is not a beef against permitting departments. My experience is that city permitting staff are talented, experienced professionals trying to do the right thing. But they can often look at a solar permit as an opportunity to address other issues with a building. When they do so, a Pandora's box of costly requirements can surface.

For that reason, most solar companies will not offer contract protection against permitting delays or costs.

To protect your solar project, select a solar contractor with the ability to be professionally and technologically responsive to your city’s permitting department. A customer-owned solar project will greatly benefit from having a general contractor that can maintain a positive relationship when permitting issues arise, because they always arise.

Image courtesy of the author

By Jeff Sutton

This year Ethical Corporation asked my company, thinkPARALLAX, to present at its Responsible Business Summit on the role of storytelling in corporate reporting — a subject many organizations struggle to address properly.

Our view on the subject is straightforward: A report is not for storytelling.

Very few stakeholders spend time reading dense, formal corporate reports, and those that do want two things:

• An explanation of how sustainability and/or CSR create long-term value for an organization and its many stakeholders


• Data (evidence) to supports these claims

The audiences who read formal sustainability and/or corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports are not concerned with the heart-touching, human interest stories that resonate with audiences on websites, social media, and elsewhere.

That doesn’t mean that reading these reports can’t be an engaging experience. It just means that the majority of report readers are interested in engaging with a different type of content.

Here are a few tactics to make reports interesting for the people who actually read them:
(For a deeper dive into the different audiences of sustainability, check out our piece on the evolution of sustainability reporting — it includes tips, insights, and examples of how to meet the needs of a few specific stakeholder groups.)

The business case

During our session and throughout the conference, we noticed an interesting theme: Many of the people we spoke with and heard from mentioned a spike in interest in ESG-related content from analysts, investors, and business leadership. The business community at large is increasingly becoming concerned with how ESG and/or sustainability can contribute to the long-term value and/or viability of a business.

However, although interest from the investment community seems to be increasing, there’s still a gap between the information that these readers are looking for and what companies actually provide. (PWC, EY, BlackRock and others have touted this disconnect for a couple years now.) Investors, analysts, and business leaders have a limited appetite for the majority of content that typically ends up in a sustainability report, what they desire is more information than most companies provide about how sustainability relates to strategic alignment, company goals, and value creation.

If they want to know more about how sustainability positions an organization for long-term growth, why would we keep this information from them? The business case for sustainability is the most important narrative of a sustainability report — and will make your report an engaging read for those who are interested.

Explain why sustainability is core to the viability of your business, describe external environmental and social trends that impact your bottom line, and show how sustainability helps your organization navigate the bumpy waters of business. How do your strategic pillars and key material issues align with your business strategy? What goals and targets have you set, and what is your progress against them? Be transparent and explain why you’re progressing well against some and not others. Investors will read attentively.

Less is more

For the record, just because there is value in a reporting narrative doesn't mean your report should be a 100+ page document. Unless you’re being paid to read a report, the odds are you’re not going to read it cover to cover. Honestly, when was the last time you read an entire report?

All of us are inundated with far too much content these days and have very little time to take it all in. As is often the case, less is more. A business case for sustainability can be conveyed in less than 20 pages. Keep it simple, impactful and visual. An overview of your sustainability strategy is enough to pique the interest of the reader to want to dive deeper if need be. Many companies are increasingly taking a “modular” approach to reporting, with an overview or summary document as the centerpiece supported by a variety of supplemental materials – like, videos, infographics, single-issue fact sheets, and reports. This approach allows organizations to provide a menu of digestible content in ways that meet the needs of their various stakeholder groups.

An integrated approach
And (of course) we can’t fail to discuss the merit of integrated reporting. From a reporting standpoint, there’s no more effective way to frame sustainability/CSR inside of an organization’s business case than combining non-financial and financial information into a single narrative.

However, we heard from many organizations where this simply wasn’t possible — for a variety of reasons. If an organization is not in a position to integrate reports, they should not assume that the investors will think to look for and read a sustainability report. Instead, consider integrating the business case narrative into existing investor relations communications — your corporate site, annual financial reports, investor decks, targeted email campaigns, roadshow presentations, quarterly calls, etc.

In summary

Sustainability/CSR reports as we know them are not aligned with the needs of the diverse audiences of different corporate stakeholders — yet many businesses feel handcuffed by the limitations of their team’s resources, capacity, and budgets to meet the requirements of ever-evolving reporting standards.

To overcome these challenges, we need to think differently and to remind ourselves that most successful sustainability communication presents specific audiences with information that focuses on what’s most important to them — and presents that information in ways that resonate with that group. For the readers of your formal report, the audience’s priorities are extremely clear — cut right to the business case.

If these users want storytelling, they’ll be able to find it on your website.

Image credit: Pexels

Jeff Sutton is the Vice President of thinkPARALLAX, a communications consultancy dedicated to building brands with purpose. Their work sits at the intersection of business strategy, corporate responsibility, and communication. Creating strategies, campaigns, and stories that influence behavior and drive positive change in the world and greater business community.