Water, Power, Transit: The Critical Elements to Building Sustainable Cities

With half of the world’s population now living in cities or towns, the future will depend more than ever on building sustainable urban communities with three key factors: potable water, reliable power and efficient transportation.

That was the message at a 27 May climate change forum sponsored by Hitachi Ltd. and featuring panels organized by AAAS and The Brookings Institution. The forum, the second in a series sponsored by Hitachi, examined the growing pressures on the world’s cities and some of the strategies, such as “smart” power grids, that could help ensure a more livable urban future both in the United States and globally.

The challenges are complex, driven by demographic trends, aging infrastructure, inefficient use of energy and water, multiple and overlapping governmental and regulatory jurisdictions, and other issues. But the imperatives are clear, forum participants said: Find better ways of managing water, power, and transportation, or suffer the consequences of dramatic and dynamic changes in the urban landscape.

Urban areas play a dominant role in the American economy, driving prosperity and innovation, said Bruce Katz of The Brookings Institution. The top 100 metropolitan areas contain two-thirds of the U.S. population and account for three-quarters of the gross domestic product, said Katz, founding director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings. The population of those metro areas has grown by 10.5% in the past decade, he said, and most of that growth has been fueled by racial and ethnic minorities who already were in the country in 2000 rather than by immigration.

“We have a very young population, and that’s put enormous pressure on our environment,” Katz said. That pressure, he said, “is happening at a faster pace and intensity in our metropolitan areas.” He also noted that in those areas the growth rate in low-density outer suburbs has been three times the growth rate in the cities and inner suburbs. “Sprawl is alive and well in the United States,” Katz said.

To change that pattern, Katz said, urban communities need to grapple with new ways of planning and managing growth. “We have to accommodate this growth in fiscally and environmentally sustainable ways,” he said. “And we have not figured that out yet.”

Peter Silva, assistant administrator for water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, also stressed the need for new thinking in a keynote address at the forum. “The way we’ve thought about building in the past just doesn’t work anymore,” Silva said. The boom-and-bust cycles and the emphasis on suburban growth were not environmentally sustainable, Silva said. The current economic slowdown has offered an opportunity, he said, to step back and “think about how we re-invest, how we restore our cities” while using “green” infrastructure in the process.

Specialists at the Hitachi forum, held in the AAAS Auditorium, offered some examples of good practices and stressed the need for planning that takes into account the often intertwined nature of water, energy and transportation services.

Michael Miller, director of environment for the Electric Power Research Institute, said water and power generation are inextricably linked. “We need electricity to treat water, to pump water,” he said, and water also is needed to produce electricity.

Forty percent of the fresh water withdrawn from lakes and rivers in United States is used in power generation, mainly in cooling systems, Miller said. That is second only to agriculture for water withdrawals. Power companies send all but 3% of their water back to rivers or lakes after using it, Miller said.

Still, water is a shared community resource that must be managed wisely, he said. Some utilities have been using water from municipal wastewater treatment plants as an alternative to tapping fresh water. Utilities also have been building “dry” cooling towers that use fans to condense steam, Miller said. As a reciprocal water benefit, the electricity from power plants can be used in desalination plants as a means to provide more fresh water.

Naofumi Sakamoto, the chief researcher at the Hitachi Research Institute, said reducing the “water footprint” of power production will require a major research effort, including attention to associated issues such as how to reduce the amount of energy used in water treatment facilities.

In pursuit of more integrated approaches to power and water use, it is important to look at how local building codes or state laws and regulations may hinder new approaches, said William Parks, senior technical adviser for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability. He mentioned an outdated law in a Northeast state that required a full-time, on-site operator for any combined heating and power generation facility. The law, aimed at industrial-scale facilities, discouraged installation of combined heat and power equipment in residential settings, Parks said.

More broadly, the sustainable use of energy in urban communities has become a major research focus, with much emphasis recently on the use of “smart” power grid technology. The interest is driven in part by $4.5 billion in federal stimulus money for development of smart grids. Such projects, aimed at increasing the efficiency and reliability of power distribution, include smart-metering systems that allow consumers to adjust their energy consumption in response to real-time data on usage. The systems also relay power-use data back to utilities. A smart grid can accommodate more solar and wind power, inconsistent sources of energy that can become more reliable with better controls.

Miller said smart meters can have what he calls the “Prius effect.” Just as the dashboard display of real-time gas mileage in the hybrid Prius automobile can induce changes in driving habits, so can smart meters prompt homeowners to use electricity more wisely, he said. Studies suggest that consumers reduce electricity demand by 5 to 15 % when they are able to monitor their power use in real time, Miller said.

But there have been hitches. When Pacific Gas and Electric rolled out a smart-metering system in northern California, Miller said, the utility received numerous complaints about billing increases that consumers blamed on the meters. The utility found that a small portion of the more than 5 million meters installed were not working properly so the company is conducting a root cause investigation, Miller said. Other utilities have received inquiries from customers concerned that the radio transmitters associated with the meters might emit harmful radiation. EPRI’s initial analysis indicates that they meet all radio frequency exposure standards but the issue will be investigated further.

The experience shows the need for consumer education programs as utilities move to new models of power distribution, Miller said. “We’ve got to communicate to these communities about what these smart meters are for and what their value is,” he said.

Meanwhile, smart grid technologies are taking hold in a variety of locales, including Austin, Texas, Sacramento, Calif. and Boulder, Colo. “There also are new players,” Parks said, including utilities in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City and Detroit. “We’re seeing a lot of movement in the smart grid area,” he said. Sakamoto said that 31 Japanese companies, including Hitachi, are working on a smart grid demonstration project in New Mexico with the aim of developing and testing advanced technologies. “I’d like to see more of those kinds of projects,” he said.

Sakamoto said there also are four demonstration projects underway in Japan, with the United Kingdom, Sweden, Italy and Germany also among the leaders in deployment of smart meters. It remains difficult for experts, much less consumers, to estimate the economic and environmental benefits of the emerging smart grid technologies, Sakamoto said. Efforts are underway in Boulder to study the impact of some 25,000 smart meters that have been deployed in that city, he said.

Smart grids and other energy technologies, such as photovoltaic and solar thermal power arrays, will cost taxpayer and ratepayers money, Parks said. “We need well thought-out solutions,” he said, that can help consumers maintain their lifestyles while promoting a more sustainable future.

On the transportation front, former U.S. Representative David McCurdy, now the president of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, said efforts to toughen standards for greenhouse gas emissions cannot be accomplished “without a radical shift in the mix of vehicles and fuels.” And a more sustainable transit future will depend on an infrastructure—such as charging stations for electric vehicles—that is not yet in place, he said.

The benefits of improved transit options are more than environmental, said Robert Puentes, a senior fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at The Brookings Institution. “Very few issues have as much a role to play in our economic future as infrastructure and transport,” Puentes said, with transit choices affecting the spatial and social fabric of a metropolitan area.

While transportation has been pushed to the front burner in policy discussions, however, finding the money to pay for improvements remains a daunting challenge. “We can talk about all we want about the great things we want to do in transportation sustainability,” said Michael Meyer, director of the Georgia Transportation Institute at Georgia Tech. “But we have to eventually talk about how we are going to finance or fund these things.” He noted that high-speed rail initiatives in Florida and Texas fell apart for lack of money.

Puentes echoed that sentiment, noting that a six-year reauthorization bill for federal transportation spending has been stalled in Congress. Meanwhile, lawmakers have transferred close to $70 billion from the general fund to make up for gaps in the Highway Trust Fund, he said.

In pursuing a sustainable transportation future, it makes sense to focus development at transportation hubs, such as metro stations in the Washington, D.C. area, said Matthew J. Klein, president of Akridge, a commercial real estate firm in Washington. But he said “it is a lot heavier lift to build a project in a smart-growth location or a transit-oriented location than it is to build it in the next farm field over.” The higher density developments can draw opposition, he said, although there is a growing recognition of the cultural and environmental benefits of smart growth. “The momentum is going in the right direction,” Klein said.

The District of Columbia also seems poised to join the revival of light rail systems in cities across the United States. Funding for a new streetcar initiative in D.C. was restored at the last minute after an outcry from proponents. Operating costs are cheaper for street cars compared to buses, Klein said. There are plans for 37 miles of new street car lines in D.C. When the city’s earlier generation of streetcars disappeared in 1962, there were 200 miles of track.

Klein also said that developers will do what their clients want when it comes to better transit options. “If our clients want charging stations [for electric vehicles] in buildings, we’ll make it happen for them,” Klein said. “We anticipate this is going to be a fact of life in the future.”

The future of sustainable urban development will depend, above all, on recognizing the value of a systems approach that understands the connections among transportation, housing, water usage, energy production, environmental policy, education and other factors, forum participants said.

“It’s only in the stovepipe world of federal and state bureaucracies that we’ve kept them apart,” Puentes said. Germany, for example, has a single integrated agency that oversees urban development, housing, and transportation, he said. But he also acknowledged that installing such an integrated approach in the United States remains “a tough nut to crack.”

Earl Lane

14 June 2010