She was new to the issues herself, she said. But the long-time social worker kept at her new job doing outreach for Community Action Network, a local non-profit dedicated to serving under-resourced communities. She slowly started getting people in her neighbourhood to take part first in home energy assessments, then a city program to swap out appliances, make structural fixes and more.

“In the beginning it was kind of hard – a lot of people were reluctant. If someone is knocking on your door and telling you they can fix up your home for free, most people don’t believe that,” Steward says. But, she adds, “Once one person tried it out, they’d tell their neighbours, and others would jump on board.”

Now the neighbourhood, Bryant, is set to pilot a first-in-the-country program that officials hope will speed the city’s transition to renewables – and offer a new model for how local governments can control their energy future.

A tandem system

The idea is technical but has sparked enthusiasm across Bryant and Ann Arbor: a new city-created Sustainable Energy Utility, known colloquially as the SEU. Rather than replacing the privately owned utility that serves Ann Arbor, the plan is for this city agency to run in tandem, offering a supplemental service that residents can opt into.

If they do, they’ll stay connected to the regular grid but will be outfitted with solar panels, battery backup systems or other infrastructure, drawing on that power for their home use and opening up the prospect of selling any excess. The city, meanwhile, would pay for the installation and maintenance of these systems, which Ann Arbor would continue to own – a vision of energy generation and storage distributed across the city.

The plan begins in the coming months in Bryant, a 1970s-era community with about 260 homes, many of which are officially considered “energy burdened.” A quarter of residents spend more than a third of their incomes on utilities, in a neighbourhood that is one of Ann Arbor’s only areas of unsubsidized affordable housing, according to Derrick Miller, Community Action Network’s executive director.

The SEU is a major step in a years-long process to address Bryant’s energy affordability and sustainability concerns – and then expand the approach across the city.

“When we started having a conversation about how to decarbonize the neighbourhood about four years ago, it felt outlandish. Now, it doesn’t feel like anyone can stop us,” Miller says.

A welcome solution

The appeal of the SEU became clear in November 2024, when a ballot measure on the proposal was approved by nearly 80% of Ann Arbor voters. A little over a year later, city officials are ready to implement the vision, SEU executive director Shoshannah Lenski says.

In late February, the city announced that it was accepting expressions of interest from residents and businesses to take part, accompanied by a flurry of community meetings, animated videos and ads in local theatre playbills.

Customers who opt in will get two utility bills – one for the power supplied by these new city-owned clean-energy systems and one for any power they’re still drawing from the regular grid – which Lenski and her colleagues say will add up to less than they currently pay.

“Just like customers don’t own a power plant, the city owns and finances the system upfront, and they pay for that electricity through a monthly bill,” Lenski says. She notes that the model could prove particularly helpful for renters, who are often left out of green energy incentives.  Signing up large multifamily buildings will be important to quickly expand the SEU’s size, she says.

In addition to installing clean-energy systems at participants’ homes, the SEU could build its own microgrids, something that would set it apart from other municipal clean-energy programs. For instance, the agency could install solar panels on a school to supply power when students and teachers are in the building, and that power could go to other SEU customers when classes are out.

Backers say the strategy allows Ann Arbor to build out its green energy system with lower financial risk – and lower potential for political or industry pushback.

“When coupled with DTE’s planned investments in clean energy, these voluntary, fee-based programs help accelerate economy-wide decarbonization while maintaining reliability and affordability,” Ryan Lowry, a spokesperson for DTE Energy, which currently supplies energy to the city, says in an email.

It might seem surprising that DTE, Michigan’s largest electric utility, is supportive of the SEU. But industry experts note that many investor-owned utilities are struggling under the unprecedented new demands for power. Having a local government try to help manage power needs could be seen as an asset, they suggest – though DTE will have no formal role in the SEU.

So far, more than 1,500 people across Ann Arbor have indicated that they want to sign up. The SEU plans to serve around 100 to 150 customers in Bryant this year, expand out to reach 1,000 next year, and then grow by several thousand annually after that.

Embracing ambition

The approach answers a question prompted when Ann Arbor adopted an ambitious climate plan in 2020.

That framework included an electrical grid powered completely by renewable energy within a decade, but a city analysis in 2023 warned it was likely to miss that goal by more than 40%. To reach it, the city would need to push DTE to accelerate its renewable-energy buildout, or lean on state officials to do so – or detach from DTE entirely and create a separate city-owned utility, an idea that does have some support in Ann Arbor.

But from the city’s perspective, these options seemed too risky or uncertain, Lenski says – until officials realized that the Michigan constitution allows municipalities to create and run their own utility, even if there’s another present. “That’s where the idea of the SEU was born,” she says.

When University of Michigan researchers compared the four options, they found that the SEU model had the greatest potential to lower energy prices and emissions, boost reliability and help low-income communities.

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“Overall, it came down to having some benefits of local control without some of the costs,” says Mike Shriberg, a professor who led the research, noting a similar model should be possible in every state.

Still, some worry the strategy does not go far enough. Advocates who want the city to break with DTE and replace its services with a utility fully owned by Ann Arbor are seeking a November ballot measure to set that process in motion. (Organizers are currently collecting signatures.)

Brian Geiringer, executive director of the advocacy group Ann Arbor for Public Power, says the SEU plan still leaves too much responsibility for the city’s energy transition with DTE. But if voters do approve creating a fully public utility, he says, it would not mean an end to the SEU: the two approaches could work together, with the SEU focused on generation within Ann Arbor, and a publicly owned utility able to make its own decisions on purchasing power.

“If you draw a circle around Ann Arbor, the SEU is doing stuff inside the circle,” Geiringer says. “And we’re interested in having the city control what comes in from outside of the circle.”

Cities take control

Like Ann Arbor, hundreds of cities are working to implement climate goals – and running into similar gaps between ambition and practicality, especially when it comes to control over energy sources.

“Cities have set these goals, and the utilities aren’t obligated to follow those,” says Matthew Popkin, manager for U.S. cities and communities at RMI, an energy think tank. “So Ann Arbor’s SEU is an example of cities taking more control of their future without dismantling or acquiring existing utility systems,” he says. “That’s a really interesting model.”

Other models also exist. In Washington, D.C., for instance, a program called the D.C. Sustainable Energy Utility has been operating for 15 years, overseeing the city’s efforts to help residents use less energy. The initiative is far narrower than the Ann Arbor vision, functioning not as a utility but rather as an organization contracted by the city to boost energy efficiency and increase access to clean energy through subsidies and rebates.

The program is a central part of the city’s goals to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, managing director Benjamin Burdick says, and has helped cut some 10 million metric tons of emissions while saving residents more than US$2 billion from reduced energy use. Nationally, “the conversation that we’re hearing is around how do you continue to talk about climate with affordability,” he says. “Programs like the D.C. SEU are going to continue to be the way that we double down.”

The work in Ann Arbor is now receiving its own attention across the country. “What caught my eye about Ann Arbor’s efforts were the references to citizen involvement and co-investment in their own grid,” says Jim Gilbert, a retired medical product designer in Boulder, Colorado, who is now helping the city assess the Ann Arbor model.

Boulder has dealt with recent power outages due to worsening climate impacts and aging infrastructure, and Gilbert says an SEU could offer a way forward.

Back in Ann Arbor, as the city prepares to launch the initial pilot of its SEU, the plan is to reach half of the Bryant neighbourhood by the end of the year – and local residents are “all in,” says Krystal Steward.

Older members of the community are particularly excited, Steward says, noting that many are on fixed incomes and will particularly benefit from lower energy bills. “It’s hard for me to keep up,” she says. “Now it’s not me reaching out to residents to sign up – they’re blowing up my phone.”

Carey L. Biron reports on sustainable cities, inclusive development and local solutions. He is based in Washington, D.C. 

This article originally appeared in Grist. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at grist.org.

The post A Michigan city is building its own parallel grid for clean energy appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The plant – operated by CertainTeed Canada, a division of the French construction giant Saint-Gobain – will transition from the use of fossil fuels to clean power provided by Hydro-Québec and increase its use of recycled materials to cut its reliance on incoming shipments of virgin gypsum.

Such carbon-reduction initiatives are becoming increasingly common among industrial operators, data-centre developers and electrical utilities, all of which are pushing to find efficiencies to cut their emissions in response to regulatory, consumer and investor pressure. Cities, countries and corporations are looking for ways to get ahead of the climate crisis, with a range of measures driving green trends behind the scenes.

Herewith, Corporate Knights’ annual survey of important trends for 2025:

More cities will be designing for extreme heat

The summer of 2024 was the hottest on record, and there’s every reason to expect more of the same this year, with similar results. A growing number of urban regions that now endure extended periods of extreme temperatures are looking at responding more proactively to deadly heat waves. As Corporate Knights reported last year, several city regions have appointed “chief heat officers” to spearhead a range of measures, from public health initiatives to safety practices for firms with outdoor employees, and many more municipally driven extreme-heat strategies will roll out 2025.

Indeed, planners, designers, landscape architects and municipal governments are stepping up their efforts to alter or adapt the built forms in cities in 2025 to mitigate the urban heat-island effect. From the construction of shade structures in public spaces to the use of light-coloured exteriors on buildings and white paint on paved surfaces, expect to see more of them in urban centres around the world. Many cities are also adopting more aggressive approaches to tree planting on streets, along bike paths and in parks, creating more green corridors and replacing hard impervious surfaces.

More new builds will also have fewer staircases. Some North American jurisdictions (British Columbia and Washington State, among others) are easing up on fire codes to allow single-stair apartment buildings, which are commonplace in much of the world. This reform provides a range of benefits, not least of which is cross-ventilation within individual apartments, reducing the need for air conditioning.

Power-hungry data centres face a reckoning

The Canadian government’s decision, late in 2024, to incentivize major pension plans to invest up to $15 billion in “green” data centres is the latest piece of evidence about the growing recognition of artificial intelligence’s heavy carbon footprint. The program is aimed at encouraging data-centre developers and tech giants to use low-carbon electricity to power the huge amount of cooling required to allow these vast server farms to operate safely.

There have been several recent developments on this front, including Microsoft’s move, announced in September, to purchase 20 years of electricity from a refurbished reactor at Three Mile Island. “The agreement is intended to provide the company with a clean source of energy as power-hungry data centres for artificial intelligence (AI) expand,” the BBC reported.

Other developers are anticipating the arrival of small nuclear reactors as a means of providing low-carbon electricity, although these modular plants are still 10 to 15 years from coming online.

As data centres pop up in urban areas, some architects and critics have called out the monolithic and dehumanizing design of these “anti-monuments,” while data-centre developers are looking to reduce embodied carbon, using modular construction techniques and even employing green materials like cross-laminated timber.

Such changes reflect the data-centre industry’s awareness that increasingly stringent regulation is on the way. Starting in fall 2024, the European Union is targeting data centres with tougher regulations, including the disclosure of energy and water consumption. Other jurisdictions, including Australia, Singapore and a growing number of U.S. state governments, are following suit with their own regulations.

Giant ‘grid’ batteries are making renewables more viable

As wind and solar installations account for an ever-larger supply of renewable electricity, some utilities and systems operators have realized they need to figure out how to make better use of these low-cost/low-carbon sources. Systems operators for decades stored power behind hydro dams, using the renewable electricity to pump water up into reservoirs.

But in recent years, so-called long-duration energy storage (LDES) has become an increasingly viable low-carbon alternative. Citing International Energy Agency forecasts, The Economist reported in November that grid storage has become the fastest-growing energy technology, with 80 gigawatts forecast to be added in 2025, three times the level achieved in 2021. (For comparison, Canada has electricity capacity of 149 GW nationwide.)

The idea behind grid storage is to create what are effectively giant banks of batteries that can be recharged with renewable power when the wind blows and the sun shines. These batteries can then be discharged over the course of eight or 12 hours, thereby providing backup low-carbon power to the grid at scale.

China has the world’s largest supply of grid-storage capacity, but other jurisdictions will be racing to catch up over the next decade.

In the United States, California leads the pack, announcing the procurement last year of two gigawatts of 12- to 24-hour LDES, to be built out in the 2030s. Which is critical, since California requires solar and energy storage in new homes.

Elsewhere, Australian authorities are also commissioning several LDES projects, typically providing hundreds of megawatts of capacity using various technologies, including a 200-megawatt compressed air system with eight hours of capacity, developed by Toronto-based Hydrostor.

Tariffs will help fight climate change

At a period when the incoming Trump administration has threatened large-scale tariffs as a means of driving investment into the United States, the European Union’s carbon border tax, or “carbon border adjustment mechanism” (CBAM), adopted in 2023, will become a hot topic of diplomatic debate as the 27-nation bloc spends this year preparing for the launch in 2026.

An EU innovation, CBAMs are essentially carbon levies on imported goods and commodities, designed to mitigate against carbon “leakage,” or the problem of importers in high-regulation regions bringing in materials from countries with lax carbon policies. A few jurisdictions, such as Brazil and the United Kingdom, have followed suit, while the Canadian government is considering its own version, although, like so many trade-related files, this one is up in the air.

Not surprisingly, this policy approach received a good deal of pushback last year from Brazilian and Indian steelmakers. It seems likely that the chorus of objections will grow louder this year as EU member states ramp up their CBAM regulations.

Either way, CBAM will play a key role in 2025 in aligning trade policy with the broader climate targets.

Given the anticipated political headwinds facing climate policy, 2025 may be the year in which rapidly maturing climate technologies and resiliency solutions will be called upon to prove their own significance in combating extreme weather and intensified stresses on our energy systems.

John Lorinc is a Toronto journalist, author and editor. He writes about cities, climate and cleantech.

The post Four climate-saving trends for 2025 appeared first on Corporate Knights.

This shift isn’t just changing lifestyles – it’s also affecting commercial spaces. Office vacancy rates post-COVID-19 shot up almost overnight, and they remain near 20% nationwide, the highest rate since 1979 as tenants downsize in place or relocate. This workspace surplus is putting pressure on existing development loans and leading to defaults or creative refinancing in a market already plagued by higher interest rates.

Office tenants with deeper pockets have gravitated to newer and larger buildings with more amenities, often referred to as Class A or “trophy” buildings. Older Class B and C buildings, which often have fewer amenities or less-desirable locations, have struggled to fill space.

High vacancy rates are forcing developers to get creative. With reduced demand for older buildings, along with housing shortages in many American cities, some downtown buildings are being converted to residential use.

These projects often include some percentage of affordable housing, underwritten by tax incentives. In October 2023, the Biden administration released a list of federal loan, grant, tax credit and technical assistance programs that can support commercial-to-residential conversions.

As an architect, I’m encouraged to see these renovations of older commercial buildings, which are more economical and sustainable than new construction. In my view, they are fundamentally changing the character of our cities for the better. Even though only about 20% to 30% of older buildings can be profitably converted, architects and developers are quickly learning how to grade these structures to identify good candidates.

From workplace to living space

Converting commercial buildings to apartments didn’t start with the pandemic. In the decade leading up to the outbreak of COVID-19, developers converted more than 110,000 apartments from outdated hotels, office buildings, factories, warehouses and other buildings across the U.S. According to industry data, more than 58,000 apartments are currently being converted from office buildings.

Several characteristics of older Class B and C buildings make conversion particularly attractive. These buildings typically have smaller floor plates – total square footage of space per floor. Importantly, they also have shorter “core-to-shell” distances – the distance from the building core that contains stairs and elevators to the window wall.

Residential building codes generally require that natural light reach most rooms. Since living spaces, bedrooms and bathrooms are often separated by walls, a smaller core-to-shell distance allows more rooms to access natural light, making the conversion easier.

In contrast, typical new office buildings have larger floor plates and core-to-shell distances that sometimes can exceed 50 feet. This makes them more difficult to convert to residences.

But it’s not impossible. One creative solution involves moving the window wall inward by several feet to create outdoor decks. That’s an appealing amenity, but also an extra cost. In some conversions where the core-to-shell depth is greater than needed, developers have added interior vertical shafts or window wells to bring daylight to interior spaces.

Many older commercial buildings also offer higher ceilings, which are especially desirable in the residential market. Apartments and condos typically don’t need to conceal mechanical and electrical services with suspended acoustic tile ceilings, as offices do, so they can provide 12 feet or more of clear ceiling height.

Some older buildings, including many made of brick or stone, have large windows, which also are desirable in residential use. Conversely, smaller windows or higher sill heights may be disincentives to conversion.

Many older buildings were constructed before air conditioning was widely available, so they have operable windows. This is yet another plus for residential conversion, since occupants typically desire natural ventilation in their dwelling unit.

Obstacles to conversion

Some characteristics of older buildings can make residential conversion more difficult. For example, location always matters. Buildings that are far from other amenities, such as restaurants or grocery stores, may be less desirable.

Buildings with more unusual floor plates or geometric forms that work for office use may be difficult to carve up into residential units. Older structures that contain asbestos or lead paint can require expensive remediation.

Zoning laws may bar residential use or otherwise limit what can be done with a building. Cities can play an important role in encouraging residential conversions by revisiting zoning codes or offering tax incentives to developers.

One of the biggest costs of a residential conversion is the need to replace building systems such as plumbing and heating. Plumbing requirements in commercial office spaces, for example, are largely met with restroom facilities in the building core. Apartments or condos each require their own bathroom and kitchen, adding significant cost.

A return to ‘walkable cities’

Despite these challenges, if residential conversions bring people and energy back to downtowns outside of the workday, stores, restaurants, entertainment and other amenities of a vibrant lifestyle will follow.

Architects, planners, developers and politicians are increasingly interested in “walkable cities” or “20-minute cities.” Both of these concepts allude to providing necessary amenities like grocery stores, schools and restaurants that are accessible to residents on foot, reducing the need to own a car and promoting a more sustainable lifestyle.

Walkable cities aren’t a new idea. Throughout the 19th century, people in U.S. cities like New York and Chicago lived, worked, shopped and socialized within mixed-use neighborhoods.

The growth of car ownership post-World War II separated these uses into residential suburbs, office parks, shopping malls and cineplexes. Many critics view suburbanization as a failed experiment that has promoted sprawling development, reliance on cars and economic inequality

As more downtown office buildings are converted to residential use, many of them are likely to house restaurants, day care facilities, grocery stores and other service businesses, typically on their ground floors. These amenities contribute to the financial success of a project and to the vibrant lifestyles of its residents.

All of these shifts prompt questions. Can architects and developers find ways to design buildings that serve multiple uses over several centuries, rather than a single targeted use that becomes obsolete in 100 years? Can mid- and high-rise buildings be envisioned as flexible structural grids, with lower-cost and easily changeable modular inserts? Such structures could accommodate ever-changing needs, some of which we may not yet know will be critical to the urban infrastructure.

Architects, planners and developers are beginning to explore these questions. Converting downtown offices to residential use could be just the starting point. And it’s a reminder that dynamic cities can reinvent themselves in response to challenges.

John Weigand is professor of architecture and interior design and interim dean at the College of Creative Arts, Miami University.

This article was first published by The Conversation. Read the original story here. 

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The presence of heavy industry was felt throughout Odense for decades. Its first shipyard opened in 1918. A four-lane highway – named after Danish industrialist Thomas B. Thrige – carved through the city centre, splitting it in two. 

This all started to change after the global financial crisis of 2007/2008. The crisis, coupled with international competition, led to the Maersk shipyard closing in 2012. But where other industrial towns started falling into disrepair, Odense experienced a rapid post-industrial transformation into a high-tech hub. And the secret to that metamorphosis partly involves two wheels. 

When heavy industry started to leave Odense, the city needed to reinvent itself with a new strategic vision. Elected officials wanted to draw a new type of industry: tech and robotics. They had to change the way the city thought about urban design and mobility so that car traffic flow wasn’t the top priority.

For Joost Nijhoff, the head of economic growth and tourism at the City of Odense, it was a given that Danish people cycled everywhere. But some of the tech companies he pitched Odense to asked whether the city had a subway system. With around 200,000 residents, that wasn’t something the city could deliver (although Odense does have a light-rail system now), but it did have superior cycling infrastructure. 

“It suddenly became an issue of ‘How is the bicycle infrastructure?’” he says. “Because they realized that cars are so expensive in Denmark that a family could not afford a second car. But what they can afford is an electric family cargo bike where you have two kids in front of you and maybe one at the back.” 

The Danish city, where 19% of trips are taken by bike, has long had superior cycling infrastructure compared to other parts of the world. In Paris, a city praised for its recent investments in bike infrastructure, just 11% of trips are done on bicycles. Odense has 560 kilometres of cycle lanes, as well as 65 tunnels and 125 bridges exclusively for cyclists. But it’s taken its commitment to sustainable transportation to another level. 

“We turned the hierarchy upside down,” says Peter Rahbæk Juel, the mayor of Odense. “Now we’re thinking what is the best [thing] to do . . . for having good conditions for pedestrians and people on bikes.”

It paid off being ambitious. You need some old-style courage to move your city in the right direction.

 

– Peter Rahbæk Juel, mayor of Odense

In recent years, the city redeveloped a chunk of its city centre and shut off car traffic to the Thomas B. Thrige roadway to build a new automobile-free district with bike lanes, squares, parks, retail and restaurants. Local leaders say these efforts have brought investment to the area and have helped make Odense a place where new industries can thrive, draw talent and retain it. “It’s part of what makes Odense attractive,” says Rahbæk Juel, who uses cycling as his primary means of transportation. “It’s a green city. It’s a city where you can breathe, you can live, and it’s a part of the lifestyle that you can go by bike.”

It’s hard not to feel like the city is ascending. In 2019, Meta, then Facebook, opened a data centre in Odense. American robotics company Teradyne has bought two Odense start-ups and is building a new facility to house them. In recent years, the city centre has come to life with an increase in cafés, bars and restaurants. And Odense, which was named after Odin, the Viking god of war, and was the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen, has become a growing tourism destination, even making The New York Times’s 52 Places to Go list in 2023.

“It paid off being ambitious,” Rahbæk Juel says. “You need some old-style courage to move your city in the right direction.”

Could this happen in North America?

Being bike-friendly is only natural for a Danish city. During the global oil crisis of the 1970s, Denmark decided to make itself less dependent on foreign fossil-fuel producers by becoming a leading cycling nation. Any North American bike advocate would drool at the country’s cycling infrastructure. But even in car-centric North America, there’s a growing understanding among urban leaders that building out their bike infrastructure and making their cities more walkable helps attract investment and business. 

In 2013, at the opening of a new protected bike lane, Chicago’s then-mayor Rahm Emanuel declared that his city was becoming a tech hub thanks to the cycling infrastructure being built there. He drew a straight line between Chicago’s growing investments from the tech sector and its progress building more bike lanes. “You cannot be for a start-up, high-tech economy and not be pro-bike,” he said at the time. 

That sentiment has been true for National Landing, a Virginia neighbourhood just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., which Amazon chose as the location of its second headquarters, HQ2. The e-commerce giant opened its facility last summer with an indoor bike cage with 620 racks and two repair stations.

In 2017, Amazon announced it was planning to open a new corporate headquarters somewhere other than its original head offices in Seattle. The company released a request for proposals, inviting cities to pitch themselves, and in that document, Amazon asked cities to include information about bike lanes that commuting employees could use.

Local leaders in National Landing say the area’s existing cycling infrastructure, as well as commitments to invest further in active transportation, made the area particularly attractive to Amazon. (Of course, US$750 million of tax subsidies from the state of Virginia helped, too.) When Amazon chose National Landing, the area had 2.7 kilometres of protected bike lanes, which has grown to 4.5 kilometres (with more than 18 kilometres total). This may seem small when compared to Odense, but it’s not bad for a U.S. neighbourhood with only around 24,000 residents. More bike lanes are in the works, and the area also has a bike share with more than 20 stations.

Since the early 2000s, local governments have worked to transform the once car-centric place into a people-centred environment. Roughly 75% of trips taken in National Landing, which is also now home to Boeing and a Virginia Tech campus, are by modes of transportation that are not cars, such as bike, walking and public transit. 

“We knew that in order to accommodate growth and to attract both residents and employers, we would need to compete on place,” says Tracy Sayegh Gabriel, the executive director of the National Landing Business Improvement District. “One of the essential ingredients [that] workers, residents and visitors alike are seeking is highly walkable, bikeable and vibrant public realms and urban environments.” 

Michael Anderson, an urban policy analyst who wrote a report about how protected bike lanes helped urban economies boom in the United States after the great recession, says that the competition to attract economic investment nowadays is largely a competition to attract people. And for the last few decades, Anderson says, jobs have chased people rather than the other way around. “So to the extent that you can create a pleasant city to spend time in – one that’s built for human interaction, health and subjective well-being, among other things – you are also creating a place that will attract employers and investment,” he says. “Bike infrastructure isn’t the only ingredient in that recipe for a city that people want to live in, but it’s good at being one of the ingredients.”

Back in Odense, the local government is working to further cement its place as a modern green city where young people want to study, work and live. The city is striving to be carbon-neutral by 2030. For Rahbæk Juel, that means getting even more people riding bikes. “We are not there yet, but we have plans and we’re striving to be sustainable. It’s not just good for the climate,” he says. “It’s also good for the city if you can walk the talk on that narrative. I believe we are close to walking the talk in Odense . . . We have some steps on the road yet.”

Alex Robinson is the Ottawa-based deputy editor at Corporate Knights.

The post How this Danish industrial city attracted start-ups with two wheels appeared first on Corporate Knights.

As car ownership took off in the 1950s, urban planners and engineers designed streets and roads around automobile travel, allowing suburbs and sprawl to proliferate along highways. 

Many parts of Europe avoided this car-centric approach. The Netherlands, which was quite car-friendly in the 1960s, rethought its roads after more than 400 children died in car accidents in 1971 and widespread protests called on the government to “Stop de Kindermoord” – or stop the child murder. During the 1973 oil crisis, Denmark figured it was better to use transportation methods that reduced its reliance on oil-producing nations. Ever since, both countries’ cities have led the world in their cycling infrastructure.

A growing number of congested cities in North America are now trying to rethink their streets in similar ways to make them safer and more climate-friendly, but they’re having to undo decades of entrenched engineering practices and standards that favoured cars. Some blame John Forester, a Californian cycling advocate, for those engineering standards. In the 1970s, Forester fought against rules that were introduced in the town of Palo Alto, in Silicon Valley, that forced him to ride in protected bike lanes and on the sidewalk, banning him from sharing roads with cars. He became highly influential, mobilizing cyclists against separate bike lanes and publishing an engineering guide that argued that roads should be shared by drivers and cyclists.

“There’s no question that the John Forester effect on engineering standards has been huge. And those engineering standards are still in the process of being revised,” says Kay Teschke, a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia who has done groundbreaking research on helmets and bike infrastructure. 

For decades after Forester’s efforts, much of the research around bike safety focused on helmet wearing and showed that, yes, if you’re in an accident while cycling, a helmet will lower your risk of head injury. But the sole focus on helmets neglected something studies later revealed: that proper bike infrastructure prevented cyclists from getting into those accidents in the first place. And research has also shown that a lack of separated bike lanes was the largest obstacle to people feeling safe cycling. 

“It’s a bit of a vicious circle,” Teschke says. “When you don’t have infrastructure, people don’t bike; they drive. And then the demand falls off for biking infrastructure. Kids don’t bike to school any more. Parents don’t bike. The whole thing compounds.”

Across the U.S. and Canada, the landscape for urban cycling is rapidly evolving. In some cities, like Montreal, things have shifted into high gear as holistic cycling networks with separate bike lanes are being built. In Washington, D.C., like a lot of North American cities, a combination of bureaucratic inertia and political pushback have kept cyclists in harm’s way. 

Like the legislative and vehicular congestion it’s known for, the progress of D.C.’s bike infrastructure has been slow when compared to international cities. So much so that of the G7 capitals in advocacy group PeopleForBikes’s 2023 rankings of the best cities for biking, Washington, D.C., ranked dead last. It came in 261st place overall in the ranking of more than 1,700 cities thanks to its dangerously disjointed bike lanes. Last year, 33 D.C. cyclists suffered major injuries in collisions, and three died. Cycling advocates admit that bike infrastructure has progressed a lot in the city over the last two decades, but its fragmented network of lanes is leaving cyclists exposed.

“By American city standards, D.C. is doing very well. By global standards . . . we have a long way to go,” says Colin Browne, director of communications for the Washington Area Bicyclist Association, an advocacy group that pushes for better cycling infrastructure. “There are a lot of places that you still can’t get to in a way that feels safe on a bike.”

D.C. has built approximately 167 kilometres of bike lanes, including just 39 kilometres of separated lanes. When the district looked to build a 2.5-kilometre separated bike lane on 9th Street, the project saw years of delays after a loud contingent of residents and business owners voiced concerns about losing parking spaces and the effects of bike lanes on their bottom lines. And cycling advocates are worried that a proposed project on Connecticut Avenue – a major thoroughfare that runs from suburban Maryland to downtown Washington, D.C. – will suffer the same delays.

“When they say the squeaky wheel gets the grease, they mean it,” says Elizabeth Kiker, executive director of the Washington Area Bicyclist Association. 

To counteract these forces, cycling advocates are organizing one-on-one conversations with business owners to explain the environmental, health and economic benefits of bike lanes. Getting support from within the business community is always a big step up, Browne says. And it’s hard to argue with the research: studies show that building bike lanes improves business in retail and restaurants and that taking one trip a day by bike rather than by car can lower your individual transportation-related carbon footprint by 67%.

When they say the squeaky wheel gets the grease, they mean it.

 

– Elizabeth Kiker, executive director, Washington Area Bicyclist Association

Advocates say policies that mandate separate bike lanes can help cut some of those arguments off at the pass. “It shouldn’t really be a debate at the start of every bike project – whether we’re going to [build bike infrastructure],” says Rebecca Davies, the city ratings program director for PeopleForBikes, which has released a legislative guide for lawmakers. “It should be about how we can [build bike infrastructure] in a way that best meets all of the needs of the community.” 

Mayor Muriel Bowser has helped spearhead a lot of the new cycling infrastructure in D.C., but advocates say her office has let bike-lane opponents stall important projects, such as the 9th Street one. 

Electing strong, consistent leaders who won’t let these kinds of arguments slow down bike infrastructure can be a huge part of the battle, say advocates, who point to cities like Montreal and Paris, where Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s government shut down a major road running along the River Seine to car traffic. 

“Without the political leadership, it’s hard to move quickly on anything,” Davies says. 

Lessons from Montreal

D.C.’s bike network stands in stark contrast to that of a city that has been an outlier in North America: Montreal. Quebec’s largest city boasts a network of more than 900 kilometres of bike lanes (717 kilometres of which are cleared of snow during the winter months and 218 kilometres of which are separated from car traffic) – and it’s building more. 

The city, which placed 57th in the PeopleForBikes ranking (and was the top-ranked large Canadian city), has had a bit of an active transportation renaissance in recent years under the leadership of Mayor Valérie Plante, whose Vision Vélo initiative plans to expand the bike network with an additional 200 kilometres of separated cycling lanes by 2027 and a network of high-capacity lanes called the Réseau Express Vélo.

Montreal built its first bike paths in the late 1970s, connecting a few parks. Cyclists later started pushing for paths that would take them to other places they needed to go. In the early 2000s, the city built westbound bike lanes on De Maisonneuve Boulevard in downtown Montreal. Simply having those paths made residents see what was possible, and from there, they wanted more. “You can see a progression in the bike infrastructure in Montreal that shows what can be done,” says Stéphane Blais, the director of research and consulting at Vélo Québec, an advocacy organization. 

It’s taken a while since its first bike paths for Montreal to build out its infrastructure, but things have been accelerating in recent years. And electing a staunchly pro-bike mayor has gone a long way in getting good bike infrastructure built. Advocates say that the city, under Plante’s leadership, refocused its efforts on bike infrastructure that is separate, rather than simply painting “sharrows” on the roads. The city is looking to expand popular bike lanes that opened on Saint Denis Street in 2020. 

You can see a progression in the bike infrastructure in Montreal that shows what can be done. 

 

– Stéphane Blais, Vélo Québec

Beyond electing the right leadership, bike advocates in Montreal say it’s important to have meaningful consultations on bike plans to figure out exactly what communities want. “So every time people are arguing that we’re taking away space for not the right reason or that we should put it on another street, we go back to these consultation nights and say we heard what people had to say, and this is what they wanted,” Blais says. 

It’s also vital to have officials go door-to-door to explain the new infrastructure that’s coming. But the point is not to restart the whole debate on whether the infrastructure is necessary. “You are not consulting people [at that stage] on whether we need a bike lane or not,” Blais says. “You’re consulting people on small issues that maybe the designer didn’t see.”

And rather than making the debate about bikes versus cars, Blais maintains that we should be talking about the fact that these kinds of projects simply provide more choice for how people can get around a city. 

Blais says that within three to six months of a bike lane being built, the anger tends to dissipate and people tend to see the benefits and forget what it was like before. 

Blais and many other Montreal residents now bike with their children down streets that they would never have imagined biking down just a few years ago. With any luck, that will also be the case for a growing number of Washington, D.C., residents and cities across North America as the bike infrastructure grows. 

“We’re really fortunate to live in this period of time when a lot of change is coming,” Blais says.

This story is part of the Sustainable Cities package in our Spring 2024 issue. 

The post Lessons on how (and how not) to build a bike-friendly city appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Some important developments are coming for this year, including the ways in which we plan cities, emerging applications for artificial intelligence in the energy transition, and the comeback of traditional ideas about how we design buildings in a warming climate. Here are four trends to keep an eye on. ‘

AI and renewable energy

The broad acceleration of both private and public investment in renewables, charging stations for electric vehicles, and electric heat pumps is continuing to amplify the complexity associated with managing electricity grids on both the supply and demand sides of the energy market. According to industry experts, the massive uptick in both AI computing power and emerging applications for large language models holds out the promise of sharply improved demand forecasting and grid management systems.

“Consulting firm Indigo Advisory has counted more than 50 possible uses for AI in the energy sector,” Reuters reports. “The company estimates that 100 vendors have already introduced AI solutions into their products and that the market for AI is now worth up to US $13 billion in the energy sector alone.”

In a commentary published in December, the IEA noted that links are deepening between the power system and the transportation, industry, building and industrial sectors. “The result is a vastly greater need for information exchange – and more powerful tools to plan and operate power systems as they keep evolving.”

The inputs run the gamut from the growing inventory of solar and wind farms to the data that is gathered by sensor-based home heating systems and shared with utilities or equipment providers.

Other highly promising applications, according to the IEA, include the use of machine learning algorithms and the deployment of sensors on grid assets like power lines to predict the maintenance requirements and thus reduce downtime in order to optimize energy production.

‘Unplanning’ reaches critical mass

Urbanists have understood for many years that dense, compact cities represent the most effective way to build low-carbon urban regions. But zoning laws and seemingly bottomless highway budgets have long conspired to produce, in North America anyway, a tenacious sprawl cycle that has greatly exacerbated global warming.

Yet the housing affordability crisis that has inundated big cities in many countries seems to have finally forced local, regional and national governments to cast aside some of the most sacrosanct principles of planning in favour of blanket “up-zonings” and a broad relaxing of other rules governing development and parking.

This epochal shift in outlook, akin to changing the direction of an ocean liner, didn’t begin last year, but it feels like 2023 will be remembered as a critical turning point – the moment when the post-World War II  planning consensus finally gave up the ghost.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government took the constitutionally risky step of using lucrative federal “housing accelerator” grants as a carrot/stick technique to force municipalities to increase minimum residential densities across the board, and the seeming success of this initiative has attracted the attention of a growing number of cities of various sizes.

In the U.S., Minneapolis, California and Oregon have led the way with zoning reforms that triggered a boom in so-called accessory dwelling units (small rear-yard dwellings) and multi-unit residential buildings with significantly less on-site parking. Last year, a bi-partisan “YIMBY” act was tabled in Congress and aims to provide a similar set of incentives as Canada’s Housing Accelerator grants. Also as in Canada, the momentum and expert consensus behind such reforms – which expand supply but don’t necessarily create a lot more affordable housing – means they’ll almost certainly spread to many other parts of the U.S. in the coming year.

The single-staircase ‘radicals’

For decades, multi-unit residential buildings have been required, and with good reason, to provide at least two sets of exits/entrances to satisfy fire safety regulations. But for generations prior to the advent of such rules, many apartment buildings, especially low-rise ones in the core areas of older cities, were constructed around a single central stairwell – a configuration that allowed apartments to have not only more exterior windows but also cross-breeze ventilation. (The staircases often encircle an elevator shaft.)

Why? The central staircase in those older buildings allowed units to, in effect, straddle a corner, which means that windows could be opened in such a way as to allow the air to flow through, thus providing inexpensive and low-carbon cooling and ventilation. In the apartments of the fire-code era, by contrast, apartments tend to be situated on either side of a central (aka “double loaded”) corridor, which means there’s no possibility of cross-ventilation.

Numerous climate-minded architects have been trying to crack the riddle of how to bring back single-staircase design without compromising safety. The other benefits, according to proponents: more efficient use of space, better light, better apartment floor plans, including layouts suitable for families with children.

A related trend is the design of mid-rise European-style apartment blocks built around a central courtyard and, crucially, single-loaded corridors that overlook this space. These corridors also permit cross-ventilation – they can be outdoor spaces or enclosed but with windows that open on one side into the apartments and on the other onto the courtyard space.

In North America, California is leading the push to reform its outdated building codes. Last October, the state legislature set in motion a process to develop changes to the building code meant to allow single-exit multi-family buildings.

Will 2024 be geothermal’s breakout year?

The prospect of tapping into the energy from the earth’s molten core has long been seen as one of the most promising forms of low-carbon heat. Volcanic regions, such as Iceland or central Turkey, have an abundance of relatively shallow reserves and do in fact rely extensively on geothermal energy. But in areas where the earth’s heat is much deeper, the cost of bringing geothermal energy to the surface has remained economically prohibitive.

In 2023, however, policy-makers in the U.S. and Canada stepped up investments in geothermal systems, through, for example, the Inflation Reduction Act’s 30% tax credit and a $200-million loan by the Canada Infrastructure Bank to Enbridge Sustain, which builds and operates residential clean energy systems. This could be geothermal’s breakout year.

Much of that funding is directed at stoking the geothermal heat-pump market for residential use, and in particular new subdivisions. In Barrie, Ontario, for example, Enbridge is partnering with a local builder, Sean, to construct a 73-unit development that will use geothermal, as well as other green building techniques, such as solar shading and cross-laminated timber.

Yet the development of large-scale, commercial geothermal power plants to provide baseload energy remains in its infancy in much of North America (except for hot spots in places like California), despite the enormous potential and falling costs due to technology improvements, which make it competitive with coal, nuclear and some solar applications.

The Swan Hills geothermal power project in Alberta came online in early 2023, and several others in Western Canada are in the pipeline. While the U.S. is the world leader, with more than 3,500 megawatts of geothermal capacity, countries like Indonesia, Turkey and the Philippines have seen substantial new investment in recent years, the IEA says.

At least one Canadian venture, Deep Corp., has raised $52 million in private and public capital to use spent oil and gas wells in Saskatchewan as conduits for accessing geothermal reserves. Its plant is expected to come online next year.

The post All is not lost: Four climate-saving trends for 2024 appeared first on Corporate Knights.

When testing begins next year, the “bioclimatic bus stops” will combine the oldest, most fundamental form of cooling (through heat transfer) with tried and true solar panels and the latest in high-tech thermal sensors to lower temperatures inside the shelters by as much as 20°C.

Such solutions are urgently needed in a city where the high temperature broke 40°C last week.

The Andalusian capital has always been hot and dry. But climate models show that Seville, the largest city in southern Spain with a population of 710,000, could face an average temperature increase of 4.5°C and a 20% reduction in rainfall by 2100.

With those future risks in mind, the European Climate Adaptation Platform Climate-ADAPT, a partnership between the European Commission and the European Environmental Agency, launched its LifeWaterCool initiative in July, 2020.

The project issued a call for urban planners, architects, and engineers to develop and test solutions that would help Seville cope with increasingly high outdoor and indoor temperatures, flash floods and, especially, drought.

With an extended drought looming large in Spain, water stands at the very heart of the LifeWaterCool initiative. The call for proposals states that Seville’s “urban water network will act as the basic structure for the development of urban green solutions and cooling measures to adapt to the effects of climate change, maximizing the sustainability of the city and citizens’ well-being.”

Drawing on the age-old principle of “bioclimatic” construction, which relies on the natural environment in shared public spaces for heating and cooling, LifeWaterCool sought cost-effective “demonstrations of a bioclimatic comfort, for short-, medium- and long-term stays”. It defined a short-term stay as “one with a high density of occupation for a short period of time,” such as a bus stop or pedestrian crossing.

The bioclimatic bus stops are meant to be cooled by thermal radiation, the University of Seville team says. When sensors in the stop’s “intelligent” canopy register a waiting passenger, the system will send cold water from an underground tank through tubing in the back of the shelter, quickly lowering the inside temperature.

The canopy sensors will also monitor the outside temperature, ensuring that the cooling mechanism kicks in only on hot days, and only between 1:00 and 7:00 PM, typically the warmest hours of the day.

Solar-generated electricity will propel water from the underground tank and through the structure as needed during the day.

At night, the water in the tank will rise toward the solar panels through a separate set of tubes, to be cooled using the night sky as a heat sink. That natural action will be supplemented by “falling film technology,” which uses gravity to help a specially-designed liquid film accelerate heat transfer from the water inside the tubes into the colder night sky. The cooled water will then be returned to the underground storage tank for use when the sun is high.

The research team that designed the bus stop is also working on extending the concept to create climate shelters for children at school.

“We are installing a 1,000-square-metre roof at the Arias Montano school in Seville to block the sun and create a cool thermal sensation,” research lead José Sánchez told The Telegraph. “In this way, the children will be able to play and [learn] outside, even in the hottest moments.”

This article is republished from The Energy Mix. Read the original article.

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Yet, in a surprise twist, the hottest conspiracy theory of 2023 comes from an unlikely corner: town planning. This relates to the idea of “the 15-minute city” and has even gone so far as to be mentioned in UK parliament by an MP who called the idea “an international socialist concept” that will “cost us our personal freedom.”

As town planning academics who have published research on 15-minute cities, we know this is nonsense. But what actually is the 15-minute city? And what’s the fuss about?

The 15-minute city itself is a simple idea. If you live in one, it means that everything you need to go about your daily life – school, doctors, shops and so on – is located no more than a 15-minute walk from your house.

Designed for people not cars

The concept, which originated from the French-Colombian urbanist Carlos Moreno, is the current zeitgeist in planning, and calls for city design that is centred on people and their needs rather than being designed for cars. It gained international attention when the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, announced her intention to make Paris a 15-minute city following her reelection in 2020, with the plan to enhance neighbourhoods across Paris while ensuring connections between them. The idea flourished in the wake of COVID, when lockdowns and working from home had more of us ditching the car and recognising the need for well-served local neighbourhoods.

Yet this connection to how our towns and cities are changing in the wake of COVID is also probably the reason that 15-minute cities are now a hot-topic in the conspiracy world. Among other things, the charge sheet against 15-minute cities is that they are a “socialist”, or even “Stalinist”, attempt to control the population by actively preventing citizens from straying more than 15 minutes from their homes.

However, the reality is that the 15-minute city does not seek to exclude people or to prevent them from leaving. Instead, the idea is about providing high-quality neighbourhoods so that you don’t have to travel further to get the service. Crucially, this doesn’t mean you’re trapped where you live.

Yes, if travelling by car, the 15-minute city might make the journey to leave the neighbourhood longer as the urban realm and roads shifts from car dominance to a more equal distribution of space for active travel. But this might also mean that other ways of getting about town (walking, wheelchair, cycling, bus or train) might make sense for most journeys, with the car used only when necessary.

It’s fairly easy to see how Moreno’s idea has been perverted here. Within this, it’s also equally easy to trace a line between this and the prevalence of conspiracy theories surrounding COVID and the role of government. In this world, encouraging us to use cars less is seen as a limitation of our freedom rather than an opportunity to live in more vibrant and less polluted neighbourhoods.

The thing is, like so many other conspiracy theories, it gets into trouble when it comes into contact with reality. In many British cities, the reality is that having most services within a 15-minute walk of your house is already closer than you might think – what matters more is the quality and equity of those services.

Most people want things nearby

What’s more, these ideas are popular. Not only have organisations like Sustrans consistently shown that more than two-thirds of people are in favour of these sorts of interventions, they are also endorsed at the ballot box. For example, when some candidates attempted to turn local council elections into a referendum on active travel interventions, they largely failed to get this opposition off the launchpad.

If anything, the 15-minute city envisages even the most urban parts of the country as something quintessentially British: a small market town. Indeed, if harking back to the past is your thing, then the past 50 years of transport planning has done more to damage this British ideal than make it a reality.

In fact, you would imagine that the Conservative MP who raised this conspiracy theory in the House of Commons might regularly get correspondence from the public bemoaning the lack of high-quality services in their neighbourhoods.

After decades of car-dominated culture there is a “gear change” happening in which pedestrian and cyclist experiences do increasingly matter in city planning. There is still a long way to go to make our streets and neighbourhoods places for all, and movements fuelled by conspiracy theory risk slowing these transitions and spreading unjustified fears.

While the 15-minute city has nothing to do with creating ghettos where people will be locked in, fake news like this circulates broadly and quickly, making it crucial for policymakers to convey clear messages about what’s at stake.

Alex Nurse is a senior lecturer in urban planning at the University of Liverpool. Alessia Calafiore is a lecturer in urban data science and sustainability at the University of Edinburgh. Richard J. Dunning is a senior lecturer in housing and planning at the University of Liverpool.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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