HomeMy WebLinkAbout9/3/2019 Item 18, Schmidt
From:Richard Schmidt <
To:E-mail Council Website
Subject:Agenda: Reach Energy Code
RE Agenda Item 18
Comments on proposed Reach Code.
Dear Council Members:
This Reach Code is a Faith-Based Initiative.
Like all faith-based measures it bestows primacy and power to one faith’s doctrine.
In this case, the faith is propagated by a pontifical Greek khoros of Privileged Affluent Progressives (PAPs) among whom pontificating
is plentiful, knowledge is dear, and experience mostly absent.
Just as Mark Twain’s Geezer appeared in church to illuminate the unspoken implications of the reverend’s fervent prayer,
so must the unspoken be illuminated in the Reach Code prayer.
• What do building codes accomplish?
Such codes, even Reach Codes, do not assure good buildings, let alone better buildings. They define the worst building
it’s legal to build. That’s all your Reach Code will accomplish.
• Do we understand this stuff? Almost certainly not. The Reach Code is presented in a fragmentary legislative draft format,
adding document access challenges to its inherent complexities.
For example, here’s one measure that’s before you: “An All-Electric Building complies with the performance standards if both the
Total Energy Design Rating and the Energy Efficiency Design Rating for the Proposed Building are no greater than the corresponding
Energy Design Ratings for the Standard Design Building.”
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Right. I’m sure you understand that perfectly. And have checked all the references not included in your text.
So we turn to a Consultant, who’s said to be expert, and substitute Consultant’s “expertise” our own understanding.
• In Consultant We Trust.
But can we trust?
I don’t after finding two rather obvious problems in the draft code Consultant prepared. One item concerned window glass
specifications which would have made passive solar design nearly impossible. Since passive design is fundamental to reducing the
environmental impact of building, that provision’s finding its way into a Reach Code boggles the mind. The other item restricted
signatures on most certificates of compliance (building permit applications to lay people) to individuals who paid a private club a
large sum of money to be “certified” expert. Aside from the underlying impropriety and unfairness of such a measure’s being
enacted into law, it appears also to violate state Business and Professions Code provisions regarding the practice of architecture that
begin “No city shall…” To their credit, staff eliminated both provisions after their problems were pointed out. But why did a
trustworthy Consultant ever include such stuff?
Who knows what else this Reach Code might be slipping through?
A more sinister issue is the thinking behind measures that at first glance appear coherent. Take, for example, the premise a Reach
Code’s purpose should be to produce better buildings. So why does your code incentivize change by allowing builders to produce the
worst building state law permits? If you’re not following this, look again at the quoted Reach Code draft on All-Electric Buildings
several paragraphs back.
What this description says is an all-electric building merely has to meet the “Standard Design,” which is the worst building permitted
by state law. An all-electric building is not a better building. It’s merely all electric. It still wastes more energy than a better building.
Why not require a better building, one that needs less energy and other inputs?
Ironically, for gas/electric buildings, the Reach Code does require a marginally better building, one that exceeds energy allowances
of the Standard Building.
Such failure to improve building quality while adopting this Reach Code casts another shadow, for me, on Consultant’s work.
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• The Cult of the Holy Electron
The crux of this Reach Code is faith all-electric buildings are good buildings.
We’ve been there before, and it didn’t turn out well. When I was a kid, faith-based acolytes of Atoms for Peace insisted the wonders
of nuclear energy would soon make electricity so plentiful and so cheap there’d be no need to meter it. Before that happened,
builders were cajoled into building millions of all-electric homes. That was a fiasco. The homes were ridiculously expensive to heat
and cool, most performed poorly. Many couldn’t be retrofit, and were torn down prematurely to make way for homes that worked.
The faith-based super-cheap power promise on which these homes were built never happened.
The last thing we need on an environmentally stressed Earth like today’s is stumbling into this sort of mess again. Our goal must be
to build for the ages, a century or more, and not blunder by being led by the latest trendy fad, producing buildings needing to be
demolished after 30 years.
An all-electric subdivision is not a sustainable subdivision. Building for the ages means building for flexibility of function, for future
adaptability, not to any trendy fad of the moment.
Today PAPs believe in a cult of sustainable electricity provided by our coming CCA, MBCP. They believe MBCP is a radical change
agent that will save the earth.
The truth is less emphatic, and a lot less clear.
MBCP and PG&E both currently supply about 34% renewable power – about one-third of their total. For MBCP, the other 2/3 comes
mainly from Pacific Northwest hydro – from old facilities whose previous customers have been usurped by MBCP. That’s the only
way MBCP can hope to provide 100% non-nuke carbon-free power. But that is a finite, limited resource that’s not growing.
If MBCP demand grows rapidly due to “electrification,” what will happen to carbon-free power?
Rooftop solar is good, but we’ve not solved the intermittency problem of solar and most other renewable power. PAPs wax poetic
about batteries, but batteries are still too costly, too impactful on the earth for obtaining their materials, too iffy in performance and
disposal. There are sound questions whether there even exist sufficient strip-mineable natural materials for a massive societal
battery backup system plus electric cars, and many materials we mine today are as mired in human rights nightmares as conflict
diamonds. Compressed air, fuel cells, and other tech storage methods are still pipe dreams. We’ve made it to this point with
renewables precisely because they are only minority sources. As minority sources they are excellent, but ramping up to majority is
fraught with unknowns.
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I asked MBCP what happens when their finite supply of carbon-free electricity becomes oversubscribed. Their response is they’ll
turn to the “spot market.” At that point all bets about availability of carbon-free power are off. The spot market has what it has, and
it may not be carbon-free, especially as non-carbon-free power becomes a stranded asset due to so many CCA’s seeking something
cleaner.
MBCP’s quest for renewables has its own environmental negatives, your granting yourselves a CEQA Categorical Exemption
notwithstanding. MBPC is doing this in a conventional environmentally-unfriendly way by building huge “solar farms” on remote
lands. This massive appropriation of the earth for human “needs” is hastening environmental collapse even while cutting carbon
emissions. It’s safe to say that continuing on this ill-considered path will cause many species to go extinct.
• Demon Natural Gas
In PAP faith-doctrine, natural gas is demonic because burning it emits GHGs (albeit a lot less than equivalent energy intensity from
other fossil fuels, which leads others to advocate it as a reasonable “bridge fuel”).
Does it make sense to “ban” it (although, in fairness that exaggerates what this Reach Code does)?
Nuance is called for in this analysis. In housing, the bulk of gas usage is for space heating, and the bulk of that is due to people
overheating their homes (T-shirt winters!) and being wasteful.
At the other end of use intensity is cooking, which accounts for only 4.5% of home gas usage (EPA).
For home space heating, electric heat pumps are ready for prime time. This is a place electric substitution is reasonable, especially if
rooftop solar helps with the load. But while electric heat pumps are good technology today, can we be confident they will not be
tomorrow’s tech white elephants (like the radiant heating of those 1950s all-electric homes)? Again, sustainability means
maintaining future adaptability and flexibility, not locking the future into today’s vision of the future – which is usually wrong,
anyway.
For water heating, the case for electricity is less clear. Good gas heaters don’t use that much gas, and electric heaters are often
clunky, costly and poorly responsive by comparison.
Cooking seems an odd place for expending political capital, given its tiny overall role and the strong reaction to “banning” gas stoves.
(Personally, I dislike stinky gas cooking, and am a lifelong electric fan, but I know others just as fervent about gas, and I respect that.
Cooking methods differ, and it’s not just a matter of “getting used to change.”)
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“Banning gas” means there will be no hookups, no mains, no availability today or tomorrow. How do you know THAT’s a good idea?
What if tomorrow’s dream green tech needs gas, say for hydrogen fuel cell deployment, or some other tech we cannot imagine
today? What if gas companies can develop a non-polluting “gas” that can use those pipes?
• A Better “Reach” Theology
Rather than rearrange chairs on the Titanic’s deck enacting PAP-demanded faith-based rules about electric buildings, the city might
do better to focus on what truly ails the earth: that its human inhabitants, and especially Americans, impose too much impact on it.
As far as Reach Codes go, the problem is we’re building too many crappy buildings.
Your draft Reach Code allows this to continue as long as fuels are changed.
Our energy problem, however, isn’t so much WHAT we use; it’s that we use too much. We are incredibly wasteful, not just of energy
but of stuff as well. We take too much from the earth, and we dump too much waste back on it. If everyone in the world lived like
Americans, it would take the resources of nearly 5 earths to sustain them. This cannot continue, and changing fuels does nothing to
solve the actual problems leading to environmental collapse.
Our city has been doing a poor job of getting sustainable buildings.
The junk dumped by the Manganos along Prado Road is a case in point. Starting with raw land, this should have been done right, but
our planning staff apparently doesn’t know how to do it right. So we have lots oriented 90 degrees off what’s optimal, houses with
skinny sides and few windows facing south, but long sides with windows facing east-west, and roofs with solar panels facing the
wrong direction because no roofs face the correct direction. The entire scheme is exactly the opposite of what one does to produce
sustainable houses.
In commercial buildings, lighting accounts for a third of the energy budget directly, and up to half counting ancillary impacts that
must be dealt with. This is low-hanging fruit easy to pick. Take yourselves on a field trip to Kohls. Wander around in that oppressive
environment, noting the lighting. Then go next door to Ralphs, and note the difference in feel, in pleasantness, in a daylit store.
Ralphs is a good 20 years old, yet Ralphs remains a unicorn in our city. Even with that wonderful public demonstration we continue
to allow one-story box commercial to be built with totally artificial lighting, wasting energy, materials, and on-going maintenance all
of which could be replaced by passive measures.
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In teaching architectural design, I was privileged to have students at the very start of their design learning. I let them know up front I
wasn’t looking for faddish flourishes, but for timeless principles, including low energy sustainable buildings. I told them that to be
successful in this class, the minimum requirement was to study their project site with great care, analyze its natural energy flows,
then conceptualize a building that would heat itself, cool itself, ventilate itself and light itself using free natural site energies and
passive design strategies. At the end of 10 weeks, they got it, and many returned later to say thanks for that solid beginning.
The problem with your Reach Code is it does none of this. “Net-zero” seems to mean no more than changing fuels and applying a
surfeit of green tech (which will ultimately fail because all tech ultimately fails) to unnecessarily wasteful over-consumptive building
designs.
In the real world, that’s not how one gets to net-zero. One begins with careful layout of projects on the land to maximize site energy
availability. One begins with analysis of the problem, figuring out where one can reduce or eliminate impacts and how to reduce
waste and get more bite for the kilowatt. Maximizing passive design’s free energy is almost always a part of this work. Only then is
tech applied to make up the residual difference between what’s still needed and net-zero. Every credible net-zero or near net-zero
building I know of was developed this way. We can do it.
That’s how a city gets to sustainability. Not through a theology that merely changes fuels.
Sincerely,
Richard Schmidt
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