I just can't make up as self-serving as the Dark Roof Lobby. We live in the post-truth society so they are even successful despite having no science to back up their assertions.
[I learned about this issue, and about Floodlight News from the non-billionaire-controlled social media site, Bluesky. You can find me there under the handle, gspeng.]
Remember in 2012 when we replaced our dark asphalt composite roof with a Cool Roof? It cost no more than the dark color, and was also made of composite materials. Only, the cool roof contained light-colored bits of recycled and tumbled glass instead of dark asphalt bits. Instead of absorbing 70% of incident heat, it reflected 70%.
It's not a big change in appearance, costs no more, was just as easy and quick to install, and lasts just as long. (Actually, glass is one of the more stable materials and it might last longer than asphalt composite shingles.) Installing a cool roof will make a big difference in your comfort on a warming planet, and on your pocketbook in cooling costs. How often do you get something that is all upside?
That's a private benefit. The real gains are when it's multiplied at the city level. In Cool Roof 2: Cool Roof, Cool City, I explained mass deployment of cool roofs are the most effective and cheap method of reducing the Urban Heat Island Effect. We're talking dozens of studies using mesoscale modeling including radiative forcing calculations (instead of cheaper parameterizations), in a variety of climates.
In different climates, Cool Roofs always comes out the top or second most impactful intervention for combatting the Urban Heat Island Effect. They are also the cheapest. Unlike trees, they don't require you to find water in the desert to perpetually water them.
It's a sign of the times that I am not sure of the veracity of a epa.gov website and if it will be messed with later. As of June 19, 2025, these are factually correct.
Who could possibly be against replacing a dark roof at the end of it's natural lifespan with a cool roof?
Enter the Dark Roof Lobby, under the guise of an astroturf group calling themselves Coalition for Sustainable Roofing.
The Coalition for Sustainable Roofing (COSUR) represents companies who manufacture cool roofs, dark roofs, gray roofs, white roofs, and everything inbetween. Carlisle Construction Materials, Holcim Building Envelope, and Johns Manville are long-standing North American-based manufacturers of a variety of building products. Because they manufacture a wide range of roofing products instead of specializing in just one membrane type, these companies have a unique vantage point from which to offer insights on holistic roof system design and sustainable roof assemblies. COSUR works closely with roofing architects, roof consultants, and roofing contractors to emphasize holistic approaches to roofing solutions, promoting resilience, energy efficiency, and urban heat island mitigation.
What is "holistic roofing?" How is lobbying against Cool Roofs promoting resilience and energy efficiency? Just say it out loud. You don't want to change and you want to milk your old factories for as long as you can without learning how to make different things.
COSUR has exactly one employee, an operative government relations and equity-focused leadership professional. I am not going to link to her page, but here are screen shots from her LinkedIn.
It would be comical, except that they were successful in preventing Denver from adopting a cool roof requirement and rolling back Tennessee's requirement. COSUR also stopped adoption of cool roof requirements in national energy efficiency codes.
Their lobbying uses talking points that are just blatantly untrue lies. Cool roofs do not wear out any faster, or cause mold problems. They cherry-picked one study from Harvard and ignored dozens of studies from around the world showing that cool roofs are very effective at combatting the urban heat island effect.
But the weight of the scientific evidence is clear: On hot days, light-colored roofs can stay more than 50 degrees cooler than dark ones, helping cut energy use, curb greenhouse gas emissions and reduce heat-related illnesses and deaths. One recent study found that reflective roofs could have saved the lives of more than 240 people who died in London’s 2018 heatwave.
Energy insecurity is borne by renters, though landlords select the roofing material. This is why cool roof mandates matter. Over time, everyone will have access to this life-saving, and money-saving, measure. But we have to stop replacing dark roofs with dark roofs.
Large roof manufacturers can afford to retool to make cool roofs. They just don't want to. People will die.
I was coached to give an executive summary so people know where I am going.
Executive Summary
Sewage Capacity is not a reason to deny infill housing in established areas of Los Angeles County.
It's cheaper to service sewage from infill housing than for sprawl housing because you are using capacity that already exists and is currently underutilized.
Infill housing reduces or eliminates the cost of declining water flows, reducing costs to existing residents.
Infill housing spreads the fixed costs of infrastructure among more customers, reducing costs to existing residents.
And was also told to add more color pictures, like this One Water Cycle graphic by Brown and Caldwell, 2017.
It was such a classic display of NIMBY Kettle Logic about horrible traffic and parking woes, which they themselves contribute towards. This area is simultaneously such a historic area that it should not be desecrated with more traffic, while it is already so traffic-choked, that it cannot accommodate one more car.
But, since I had just been thinking about the societal impacts of chemistry and engineering, I homed in on the arguments about sewage.
A massive build like the one being proposed will dramatically change the character of our neighborhood.
It will also have a significant impact on traffic in the surrounding area.
It will further tax our already heavily burdened water and sewage systems, and potentially have damaging environmental impacts to the Quassaick Creek and its wildlife.
The build puts additional strain on the current water supply and added pressure to the city sewage system’s downstream capacity.
Residents in the town of Newburgh are currently nearing our maximum agreed sewage usage with the city. ... In 2004 the town updated their intermunicipal sewer agreement with the city to increase the amount of sewage the town sends to the city treatment plant at 2,000,000 gals/day with the ability to send an additional 2,000,000gals/day providing the town pay to enlarge the current city facility. This previously cost taxpayers $1,250,000 to construct the necessary facilities. According to the November 3 town planning board minutes, the town is currently sending 2,000,000 gals/day already and at their first allotment. They have 2,000,000 more gallons owed to them, but much of that has already been allocated to other projects.
As stated in their draft scope, the proposed apartment complex would produce an estimated 28,380 gals of liquid waste per day. And according to the 2004 intermunicipal contract "when the town’s average flow exceeds 3.4 million gallons per day as evidenced by the last 90-day average flow" a second expansion will need to be constructed by and paid for by the town residents, unless we insist the cost be passed on to the builders of these new projects.
The US Census office estimates that Newburgh, NY has a 2021 population of 28,834.
If 28,834 people send 2,000,000 gals/day of sewage to the treatment plant, that's 69.4 gallons per capita per day (gpcd). How many times are they flushing every day?!?! Or do they have many industrial facilities? Why are they using so much water?!?!
If Newburgh residents were as water-thrifty as Angelenos, they could house 10,000 more people and have cheaper sewage service as well because they would be spreading fixed costs among more customers.
JWPCP has a design capacity of 400 MDG, we've added ~1 million people to the service area in the last 20 years, and we are still using only 60% of the capacity. We can add millions more residents without needing any more sewage treatment capacity.
JWPCP is a huge plant that serves almost half the people in the most populous county and one of the largest manufacturing centers in the US.
If Newburgh residents were really concerned about not overrunning their sewage capacity, they should look at water saving household appliances, low-flow toilets and low-flow shower heads. But, perhaps they are just not interested in providing homes for people.
They do seem interested in providing homes for cars. One of their objections to this apartment complex is that it will only provide 515 parking spots for 259 homes.
Enough poking fun at Newburgh NIMBYs. We have plenty of NIMBYs at home in Los Angeles County to poke fun of.
Gratuitous diagram of JWPCP, a social network tying together 4.8 M Angelenos
Consider the problem of declining water flows. This is a serious and expensive problem for established areas that are not building housing fast enough to offset improvements in water efficiency. Californians in existing developed areas are using about 2% less water per year. If that is not offset by infill, this causes problems for both drinking water and sewage systems.
California Urban Water Agencies surveyed their members and wrote a white paper on Adapting to Change: UtilitySystems and Declining Flows. Go to Section 6 (page 22), Impacts of Declining Flows on
Wastewater Treatment Plant
Operations. 40% of urban systems reported effluent quality problems.
Lower flow means longer residence times in the sewage pipes, which exacerbate production of gases. That's both an odor and a corrosion problem. It also decreases the amount of hydraulic pressure, which works with gravity to move sewage towards the treatment plant.
In fact, the less hydraulic pressure you have, the more energy you need to apply (e.g. sewage lifting stations) to push the effluent along. We have so much excess capacity in our existing sewage mains, it's costing us more energy to pump it to the treatment facilities.
You also need to spend more unclogging pipes. We sometimes have to put fresh water into the sewage mains to reduce the residence times, clear clogs, and provide hydraulic pressure.
We'll save the problem of declining flows on drinking water systems for another day. Spoiler, it's cheaper and safer for everyone if we concentrate new residents in existing areas rather than build new sprawl.
Bonus Sewer Content:
the year is 1873.
in cleveland, a tall and narrow sewer is being dug deep underground and built by hand, brick by brick to move sewage. the work is hard. the need is great. the city is growing.
* C&EN News = Chemical and Engineering News is the monthly general interest magazine for members of the American Chemical Society. Bad Dad and I both hold BSs in Chemistry and he also has a PhD in Chemistry (while I hold a PhD in Chemical Physics). Although our work is far from what most people consider chemistry, we still enjoy learning about happenings in the Chemistry world and the policy implications and societal impacts of Chemistry. Editorial leadership of C&EN News eliminated coverage of science policy and societal impacts. Sign the petition if you disagree.
I've given a talk in December 2022 and am scheduled to talk again in January and February 2023 to groups comprised mainly of older homeowners concerned about lack of transit and wheelchair-accessible housing in their communities. Most are unaware that those are connected.
The High Quality Transit Areas (HQTAs) is within one half-mile of a well-serviced transit stop or a transit corridor with 15-minute or less service frequency during peak commute hours.
Founded in 1965, the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) is a Joint Powers Authority under California state law, established as an association of local governments and agencies that voluntarily convene as a forum to address regional issues. Under federal law, SCAG is designated as a Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) and under state law as a Regional Transportation Planning Agency and a Council of Governments.
The SCAG region encompasses six counties (Imperial, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura) and 191 cities in an area covering more than 38,000 square miles. The agency develops long-range regional transportation plans including sustainable communities strategy and growth forecast components, regional transportation improvement programs, regional housing needs allocations and a portion of the South Coast Air Quality management plans
Seniors want to stay in their own homes, or at least in their own communities. And they want frequent transit to serve them. They've looked around and are deeply unhappy with what they have found. Why can't we have frequent and good transit like other places they have vacationed at?
Why doesn't the South Bay have good transit? We're visibly a transit hole. High quality, frequent transit does not touch most of the residential areas of the Beach Cities, El Segundo, Torrance and Palos Verdes Cities.
Is it because wealthy people can afford cars and don't need transit? Nope, not if you compare to Santa Monica, Culver City, Pasadena and Beverly Hills.
When we purchased our home in the late 1990s, we researched bus lines, bike commutes and USGS geologic maps. We really liked that the Torrance 8 bus ran between our home, daycare, workplace at 30 minute frequency throughout the day and even more often during peak commute hours. Those buses were well-used by people who worked in El Segundo and lived along the route in Torrance, North Redondo Beach and Hawthorne.
Over time, the service degraded noticeably and wasn't reliable any more. That's the main reason why I ride my eBike during the day and drive at night. Transit isn't viable for me any more, even if I want to take a bus to dinner and then walk home (burn off dessert) or catch a ride home with my dinner companions. Even during peak hours, the buses are infrequent and often get canceled at the last minute.
Moreover, the southern terminus of the route used to be at Newton St and Hawthorne Blvd, a short walk from hundreds of homes. Now the route has been shortened to end at the intersection of two state highways, Pacific Coast Highway (CA1) and Hawthorne Boulevard (CA107). To reach the stop, people have to walk farther from their homes and cross wide highways with 7-9 lanes of deafening traffic.
When I regularly took the bus, they were well-utilized. Most seats were occupied at peak hours. Even after peak, about half the seats were taken by people out shopping or going to their retail/service jobs.
Buses operate at a loss. That's why we pay taxes to subsidize them. But roads and parking lots also operate a loss and we never question whether or not they are necessary. Fuel and registration fees cover only about half the costs of roads; the rest comes from general funds.
The cost of "free parking" is borne by customers or tax payers, including those that didn't drive there. The subsidy is flowing towards drivers, not bike riders. In fact, pedestrians receive the lowest subsidy, then bike riders (cost of bike racks), then transit riders, then drivers.
But I digress. Let's get back to poor bus service. The seniors I talk to all want frequent buses that run near their homes. They would prefer the buses to run past their existing homes, but are willing to move to a condo or apartment complex within their communities if that is the only way they will get high-quality transit.
Sounds good. Let's pick some areas to serve intensively with transit, and then build lots of homes there. The more transit riders there are, the better service we can maintain; it's a virtuous cycle that serves seniors aging out of driving well.
Not so fast, building housing is politically toxic throughout the southland. Today's seniors have elected (for decades) local leaders running on platforms of preserving the "neighborhood character" of their "unique community", and fighting "overbuilding" and "Sacramento overreach".
Elected leaders are suing the state of California about whether they should be exempt from state housing law (like the Housing Accountability Act) and questioning both the legality and the numbers in the Regional Housing Needs Allocation.
The State of California's Department of Housing and Community Development (the CA analog of the Federal Government's HUD), tells each regional planning authority how many homes their region needs to build to provide for existing and future residents. Each region decides for themselves how they want to allocate those homes based on their goals and values.
The formula is a product of our professed values. We claim to value opportunity, so we assign more housing near where the jobs are. We claim to value clean air and want to lower Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, so we place homes in HQTAs. We claim we want to address inequality, so we assign more low income housing to places that traditionally have not provided lower income residents.
Conversely, it assigns more higher income housing in poorer communities that can benefit from the tax base provided by higher earners. It's not forced gentrification or ghettofication. It's just trying to level the playing field to help everyone succeed. The goal is to work together with neighbors to solve regional problems like pollution, congestion, and the housing crisis.
Just select your city of interest in cell D5. Here's Torrance, the city that runs Torrance Transit and presided over its demise. Torrance is big mad at their 6th Cycle RHNA "quota" of 4,939 homes over the next ~8 year RHNA cycle. They have never been given such a high allocation before. Their 5th Cycle allocation was 1,450, and they didn't even meet that.
I paired Torrance with their neighbor, Gardena; and Redondo Beach with neighboring Lawndale. Notice how the smaller cities are given higher RHNA allocations than their larger and more affluent neighbors. They are assigned 2-3x as many homes per capita.
Is it because of job access? Look at the SCAG GIS map of Job Centers. Torrance is smack dab in the middle of one of the largest job centers in Southern California, with ~129,000 jobs.
Both loudly-complaining cities, Torrance and Redondo Beach, have more jobs and easier access to jobs than Gardena and Lawndale, hence they were assigned more homes in the Jobs column.
What explains the big differences then?
Go back and look at the HQTA map. It's all based on existing population in the HQTAs within each jurisdiction.
The more people already living inside the existing HQTAs used in the planning formula, the higher their HQTA-based RHNA allocations. Most cities like jobs (with the possible exception of pre-pandemic San Francisco) so they don't play as many games with that.
Cities know that the way to finesse lower RHNA housing allocations is to minimize the areal coverage of HQTAs in your city, and then to minimize the number of people who live in the HQTAs.
This is how El Segundo, home to LAX and the 121,000 jobs in the LAX job center,
and with 3 light rail stations inside of their cities and one just over the border at LAX, got allocated just 1 home due to HQTA. Yes, just 1 home!
When El Segundo fought to avoid permitting homes east of PCH, this is the subtext. They gave up land to Hawthorne to avoid having homes in their jurisdiction near a rail station.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but South Bay seniors who want to live in wheelchair accessible home with viable public transit will have to move away. Transit sucks now and will not be added back if it will expand HQTA coverage area. No new homes will be built in HQTAs if local officials can stop it.
(This is also why California enacted laws to preempt local officials to force them to permit home building in HQTAs.)
It's all connected to the decisions made by the people we elected and the incentives they operate under. When they talk about preserving the "neighborhood character" of your "unique community", and fighting "overbuilding" and "Sacramento overreach", they collect donations and win elections.
They don't tell you that they will never allow expansion of HQTAs within their jurisdictions if they can help it. This is a large part of the subtext of the fight over Metro C line extension routing. Your elected officials are fighting to ensure you don't get access to rail transit (which is harder to cancel/decrease than bus lines) so that they won't have to build housing.
They don't even want to build in existing HQTAs lest it expose them to higher RHNA allocations in future cycles. So instead, they talk about shadows and view sheds, impose high parking minimums. These all serve to reduce the number of homes that can be built and the number of people in the homes.
They don't tell you that the kind of low-density zoning they are protecting will only every yield townhomes with stairs, built on top of car garages. Low density zoning and height limits makes building accessible apartments with elevators prohibitively expensive to build. They hope developments don't "pencil out" (can't be built profitably), so that the developers go away.
What homes do get produced will be very expensive because they have to cover the parking and land. If you can build 2 stories of housing over 1 story of parking, they have to charge a lot more than if they built 4 stories of housing over the same parking structure on the same land. To maximize affordability, they could even stop requiring parking since seniors and the disabled are much less likely to drive or own cars anyway. Parking is another proxy war to suppress housing.
If you want to solve a problem. then you solve the problem. You don't spend decades screaming the problem doesn't exist. You don't enact ordinances that make the problem even worse. You don't sue people who point out that the problem exists. You don't defund researchers who collect data and evidence on the problem.
This applies to climate change and our regional housing crisis.
Enough, tonight. I just want to point out that it's all related.
Enjoy the Metro C Line (Green) Extension to Torrance Project Simulation Video. Think about how you want to live as you or your parents age out of driving. Think about where you want your children and grandchildren to live as the planet gets hotter and hotter. Do you want them on the cooler coast with you? Then make room for them.
I know that I will fight for a light rail route that is closer to my home. And I will also fight for a 7th Cycle RHNA allocation that can't be gamed by climate arsonists.
Even if we get a higher RHNA allocation based on light rail routing, California law gives us local control about where we place that home growth. We can and should spread it out, particularly as our area ages. The medical industry jobs in Torrance keep growing, and South Redondo Beach is very close to those jobs.
Aside:
Coastal Los Angeles Communities are facing a Silver Tsunami of aging residents and a dearth of younger families. Housing is so expensive, our children move far away. (A few may live with us.) The SCAG RHNA formula projects future housing needs based on demographics of existing residents. If you have few current residents of child-bearing age, then you won't have many births or future residents to house.
Since we have moved homes affordable for young, families so far into the inland deserts, they were assigned higher RHNA allocations than older communities along the coast. I included the data for Coachella in my comparison table.
Coachella has 14,277 Households in 2020, while Culver City has 17,146. Yet, Household Growth in Coachella is projected to be 5,794 while Culver City's is only 296. That's a 20-fold difference!
If you push young people out of your city, you will be assigned lower RHNA numbers. But then, who will help you change your senior diapers? How often will you see your children and grandchildren?
Anyway, stop fixating on "winning" a game of foisting housing elsewhere. Plan for a better future for yourself by planning for a more inclusive future in your community.
Neighborhood Defenders bring up aesthetics, the environment and property values as reasons to oppose things. There are quite a few in my city (and likely yours, too). Sometimes, it seems like nothing must ever change or else we will incur their wrath. I've been begging for bike lanes for 25 years, to no avail. Bike lanes must never take away on-street parking (mostly FREE PARKING) so they don't get built. Instead, we'll just keep making blood sacrifices of our children on the streets.
Anyway, I digress. This is a blog post about electricity and pollution. But I have to digress a little bit longer first.
Since 2019, I have been a director on the boards of both League of Women Voters of the Beach Cities and of Los Angeles County. Due to my science background, I was assigned the Natural Resources Portfolio.
I've been passionate about water and the environment since I took Field Biology in high school. So I also joined the LWVC Water Committee. I was a little bit too outspoken at the Water Committee meetings because I ended up being assigned to write nearly half the Overview of California Water articles, including the one on the Water-Energy Nexus.
This led the LWVC chair of Natural Resources to ask me to serve as her deputy in the area of Energy/Electricity. Thus, I found myself the Energy Subcommittee team leader. I promptly ordered and read a bunch of books about energy and clean energy in particular. It's a fascinating topic. I never imagined that I would know the names and boundaries of the regional balancing authorities of The Grid, or that I would have opinions on their governance. But, I do now. ;-)
Back to electricity.
There's been a spate of articles lately about the fate of a handful of power plants along the California coast that use ocean water for cooling. OTC (Once Through Cooling) plants have to suck in large volumes of ocean or river water, which can suck in small sea/aquatic life. That is totally no bueno.
At one time, we had quite a few of them. They sit on prime ocean-front land so their real value is often more due to real estate than power production. OTOH, they also have infrastructure, such as existing transmission lines, that would be difficult to assemble today.
So I started researching the fate of the OTC plants that are no longer using ocean water for cooling. It turns out that I didn't have to look far. In 2013-2014, a similar power plant just a few miles to the north, the El Segundo Energy Center, was repowered* from Boiler-type OTC to a dry-cooled Combined Cycle Gas Turbines (CCGT).
* Repowering means updating an older power plant with newer equipment that is more efficient and pollutes less. Switching from a gas boiler system to CCGT yields 50-70% more energy per amount of gas burned or per molecule of CO2 produced. They can be powered up in 20-30 minutes compared to many hours for older boiler plants.
Newer Reciprocating Internal Combustion Engines (RICE) can be powered up in 2 minutes, meaning they can react quickly to things like the marine layer moving in and decreasing local roof-top solar power output. RICE are air-cooled, yielding substantial water savings of millions of gallons per day.
You know how much I love data. I discovered the EPA Clean Air Markets Program Data Portal (aka Cap and Trade). I looked up the characteristics and 2021 data for five area power plants, including the repowered one in El Segundo and AES Redondo Beach.
The comparison is stark! On every pollution metric, AES RB is much, much worse than ESEC--about 2-3.5x as much pollution per unit of power, over the course of a year, and it operates 4x as many hours.
I summed up the data from Jan 1, 2021 to Dec 31, 2021 to get an idea of how much power and pollution each plant puts out in a year.
Each Facility/Power Plant has more than one generator. They turn on the amount they need to meet the anticipated electricity demand/load. No one wants to burn more fuel than they need to because that's just burning money.
El Segundo has 2 generators, Redondo Beach has 3. Operating time is summed up over generators. If all 3 are running for one hour, that's 3 hours of operating time.
Gross load is how much power they are making.
Despite providing comparable amounts of power over the course of a year, the older AES RB plant puts out 2x the SO2 and CO2 and 3.5x the NOx than the AES plant. It also operates over more hours. (Click on the table to enlarge it.)
I made histograms for hours of the day that each plant ran. Redondo Beach, which has the older boilers, has to run pretty much continuously to keep warm so that they can deliver electricity during the peak demand hours on hot summer evenings. Incredibly wasteful and polluting.
El Segundo EC can ramp up and ramp down each day that it runs. Notice the vertical axes on AES RB are 2x higher. ESEC has 2 generators, running an average of 50 days a year, mainly during the late afternoon and evening hours. It shuts down at other hours because it can. Saves money, saves CO2/SO2/NOx. It's just better all around.
I made a scatterplot of power output by each hour of operation. Redondo Beach operates a lot of hours with low power output. (This is summed up over all generators. Sometimes, 2-3 generators are working at the same time.)
El Segundo rarely operates both generators at the same time. It also runs some warm up hours with little power output, but uses a lot less gas to do it at those times (if you look at the full data).
Nameplate capacity is how much power a plant can generate, if it ran at full tilt. ESEC has a nameplate capacity of 560 MW with both generators operating. They ran one for part of 538 hours and the other for 626 hours. There are 8760 hours/year. If it ran at full capacity the entire year, it would generate 4,905,600 MWh of energy. It generated 227,487 MWh in 2021, so it ran at .046 capacity factor in 2021. ESEC is an example of a "peaker" plant, that runs only when the grid demand is high.
AES RB is another peaker plant. Nameplate capacity is 496 MW so annual capacity is 4,344,960 MWh. It generated 251,192 MWh for .058 capacity factor.
There are activists who want to block all fossil fuel investments. That's seductive because why would people spend money on something that they are going to idle most of the time? If we have it, we will use it. Right?
Induced demand has been shown to apply to car traffic. When you add a lane (like we did to the 405 freeway), then more people drive until the congestion is just as bad or even worse than before. If there is parking at a destination, people tend to drive. If there isn't, they tend to find another way to get there (e.g. transit for DTLA or bikes for the beach).
The converse is also true. When you make driving a hassle, people do it less. If people don't have cars, they make fewer trips. If they are thinking of driving somewhere, and that place doesn't have parking, they may forgo the trip rather than deal with the hassle.
So, if you have a car, how often do you use it? The answer is ~5% of the time, about the same percentage of time as a peaker power plant!
Does induced demand work for natural gas power plants? Do operators have the self control to build new, highly efficient and clean ones, and then let them sit idle most of the time? ESEC spent $ rebuilding the power plant, but they run it profitably by only running it during the hours when power buyers are paying the highest prices. They also installed advanced emissions controls. Under cap and trade rules, they can sell emissions credits to other operators.
AES Alamitos and Huntington Beach are much bigger plants and serve "baseload" instead of running only at peak demand times. AES proposed another peaker plant in Redondo Beach. The question becomes, do you think that AES will adhere to the plan they submitted?
CAISO (California Independent System Operator) runs the CA Grid and has the authority to tell power plants when to operate, when to curtail/go offline. Do you think that CAISO, the Coastal Commission and the CPUC (CA Public Utilities Commission) would allow AES RB to deviate from their plan/permits? Would they all be in on the same conspiracy? I trust not, but I know that many of the voices that carried the day did not feel the same.
Here's something in a report from San Diego Gas & Electric. See how the generation capacity of gas power plants remains high, but the amount of electricity produced from them ramps down over time? That's due to California's Renewable Energy Portfolio Standards (RE PS). Power producers are required to serve more Renewable Energy over time. Even if they are tempted to run their gas plants more to recoup their investment, they really can't.
In the future, with high integration of renewable energy sources, all gas plants will operate as peaker plants. If they can't be nimble enough, they will be retired. It's the most rational and economic choice. It's also the only way they will meet California's RE PS which is the law of the land.
However, if they don't make the investment in modern facilities that can ramp up and down in minutes, the old technology requires them to run many more hours than needed, burning more gas and generating more pollution along the way.
These old plants are so, so bad. They aren't responsive enough to serve the needs of today's grid with high renewables content. They are wasteful of money and fuels. They generate high amounts of pollution per unit of energy. They require water in a water-scarce region. The OTC plants are even worse because of their ocean water intakes.
So why wasn't AES Redondo Beach repowered? AES tried. But there was so much opposition from Redondo Beach leaders, they gave up. RB Patch covered it pretty thoroughly and doesn't have a paywall.
AES officials say the new plant will run more efficiently, have a smaller footprint and provide flexibility for the grid when energy from renewable resources isn't available.
Opponents, on the other hand, argue that the plant will continue to decrease property values and blight the waterfront, despite a $300 million revitalization effort. Additionally, they point to AES' application and say a new plant will run more often than the current one, and thus produce five to 15 times more particulate pollution.
Anyway, for almost a decade, Redondans have suffered 2-3.5x more pollution than we would have if AES RB had been repowered to the same scale and technology as ESEC. We lived with more noise as the proposed upgrade would have been enclosed to contain sound and ran much fewer hours/days. We also continued sucking marine life into the water intakes.
All for what? To say we won? To say that we stopped AES? To cost AES money?
It certainly didn't help the marine life or reduce CO2/SO2/NOx emissions.
It didn't have to be this way.
(I'll write about Grayson another day as it's past my bedtime.)
We are experiencing record heat in both North America and Europe, during a La Nina year (when the planet surface tends to be cooler than average). The only way to stop this long-term runaway heating is to quit emitting so much CO2 and other planet-warming gases. Yet, our elected leaders, even in deep blue states, are not doing the necessary work.
I am so tired of fighting for substantive changes that I wrote about in Data Driven Climate Action. We know that 44% of LA County's GHG emissions comes from the transportation sector. If you add fossil fuel refining, it's over 50%. Over 2/3 of transportation emissions comes from private light-duty vehicles (cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans). Much of those miles are "junk miles" in the sense that they are short trips that could be done without a car if the built environment were not so auto-centric.
I have been a bicycling advocate since graduate school in the 1990s, when I was studying gas-phase chemical physics. We knew it was cars back then, and it's still true today.
Global Atmospheric CO2 was 360 ppm (parts per million) when I volunteered for my first Boulder BikeWeek.
CO2 was 367 ppm when I volunteered for my first El Segundo Bike to Work Day Challenge in 1998.
CO2 was 369 ppm when I went to my first Beach Cities Bicycle Network Community Outreach meeting in 1999. Community outreach took forever. My 21 year old daughter wasn't even conceived yet, which was why I had time to attend the meeting.
CO2 was 392 ppm in 2011 when the South Bay Bicycle Master Plan was adopted. Cities pledged that they would add the bike lanes when they repaved or did work on any of the streets in the network. Over time, the network would be completed. A few cities did the bare minimum, striping in door zone bike lanes or stenciling sharrows when they repaved streets. Others, just ignored the plan.
CO2 is 428 ppm in mid-2022. Here are the existing bike lanes in the Beach Cities. Transportation planners are still expecting people to drive to the beach and ride along the Strand as recreation, not as every day transportation.
Here's the innovation in 2022. Those promised bike lanes will become a Local Travel Network, LTN, suitable for use by all sorts of low-carbon vehicles such as electric golf carts, eBikes, eScooters, motorized wheelchairs, skateboards, etc. They plan to start delivering this network in 2024. Notice how much less ambitious it is than the 2011 plan. It will not include anything other than sharrows and a few beg buttons at existing traffic signals. Unlike the 2011 plan, there will be no new traffic signals to allow cyclists to cross busy arterial streets.
These purple lines are streets/roads where speed limits are 35 mph or less and are not truck routes. But notice how few of them cross the 405 Freeway or any of the high-traffic arterial roads/state highways.
Not only are the legal crossings few and far between, necessitating long detours, but some of those purple streets are one-way. Going in the reverse direction will require an even longer detour. I can't make anything this ludicrous up.
Consider the case of a student in North Redondo Beach who attends Mira Costa High School on an inter-district transfer. (The bus from North RB to RUHS in South RB is jammed and leaves kids stranded at the bus stop. To avoid this, some families beg for an inter-district transfer to the closer MCHS.)
If they had delivered on a bike lane along Artesia Blvd when they repaved it, students could take a direct route with a maximum grade of 5%. Not super pleasant, but doable if you had a protected bike lane. Of course there is no bike lane of any kind because that would have removed free on-street parking. Which is more important than our kids' lives and planetary health.
Direct route: 1.6587 km, max 5% grade
Instead, students must take a roundabout way to an existing traffic light at Robinson/2nd St.
Westbound detour: 2.2982 km, killer 15% grade short hill
But Robinson is a 1-way street going westbound, and so is Plant, the only other street connected to the east side of that traffic signal. To get home, our student has to take a different detour that crosses Artesia Blvd (CA 91) twice and Aviation at an angled intersection.
2.874 km, wheelie territory 15+% grade sustained climb
If they had built the 2011 Bicycle Master Plan, with a new traffic signal at Voorhees, our student would have had a reversible direct route. There's a 13% grade climb for half a block. But it's doable with an eBike or a very low gear or if they dismount and walk that section.
1.6991 km, max 13% grade
(I used mappedometer.com in metric to make calculating grades easier. )
In what world do we expect people in an automobile to take a detour that adds 75% more length to their trip and steepens climbs from 5% to 15% grade? That's just abusive.
It's late, so I won't dissect why kids are riding eBikes in all sorts of unsafe ways. Spoiler, it's because the streets are hostile and don't allow them to take more direct and safer routes.
This LTN will not make any difference when completed.
* "the crash may have been a result of misaligned crosswalks due to the single diagonal cut handicap ramp, rather than two separate ramps aligned with the crosswalk."
Sometimes, I read something that makes me so mad, I dash off a quick email to a friend who gets it. This time, I sent it off to the entire LWVC googlegroup and got some 'attagirl' affirmations back. So, let's share this take down.
Hamby also pointed to the huge amounts of water that are still wasted, in his view, in cities such as Los Angeles. "It’s very easy to point at the alfalfa field, but what about drying out the lawns and useless grass?"
The Colorado River (CR) is subject to all sorts of unrealistic math, well-documented elsewhere. We have these benchmark Colorado River allocations based upon 16.5 Million Acre Feet (MAC). Mexico gets 1.5 MAF, and the Upper and Lower Basin states get 7.5 MAF each.
California gets the lion's share. In the benchmark scenario, farmers, mostly the IID, get 3.85 MAF out of California's 4.4 MAF. The remaining 0.55 MAF goes to the Metropolitan Water District (MWD), who sells it wholesale to 19 Million urban users based on a system of rights allocated decades ago. It's roughly a 70/30 split between farmers and urban users before water rights transfers. (Cities buy about 0.5 MAF of CR water allocations from farmers.)
In practice, the CR does not have that much water and IID gets around 2.5-2.6 MAF and the cities get about half that, and then purchase more from farmers.
IID commissioner Hamby pointed to LA lawns in a rhetorical trick called misdirection. It's often employed by magicians so you don't look at what they are really doing.
Let's do the math!
If we take him literally, let's run the numbers for the City of Los Angeles' Department of Water and Power, LA DWP.
IID receives 2.5-2.6 MAF from the CO River.
LADWP uses 0.5 MAF/year from all sources and serves 4 M people. An acre-foot serves 8 Angelenos for an entire year. (An acre foot serves 20 apartment dwellers in new, efficient homes!)
About half is imported river water purchased from Metropolitan. 0.25 MAF
The exact mix of SWP and COR water each year varies based on availability, but figure half on avg. 0.125 MAF
City of LA residents are pretty water thrifty.
About 1/3 might be outdoor use (perhaps 1/4).
Not all of the outdoor irrigation in LA is lawns.
Trees and shrubs are necessary to improve urban livability.
Even if it were all lawns, we're down to (at maximum)
0.125 MAF/3 or 0.04 MAF compared to 2.5-2.6 MAF for the farmers of the IID.
Anyway, finger pointing is a standard rhetorical trick to hijack the discussion.
As always, verify. Does not pass the sniff test.
Hamby said some other whoppers, which I won't go into here until I finish some other work with real deadlines.
I got asked this again and decided to publish this as a blog post instead of in an email because this is such a common misconception.
First, read Vacancy Truths from September 2021 for background. There's a link to Darrell Owens' explanation about why home might be vacant and what we can learn from US Census Data. If a rental changes tenancy every 2 years, and it takes a month to clean/rehabilitate/lease out the rental. Thus, a 1/48 or 2.1% vacancy rate can mean essentially no open homes available.
As housing stock gets older, it takes longer to rehabilitate the units. Supply chain issues are also increasing the amount of time it takes to build new homes or spruce up old ones. It's not unusual to spend 2-6 months remodeling. A major SoCal developer announced to investors that home building is taking 6-8 weeks longer due to lack of materials and/or workers, citing kitchen cabinets as a major pain point.
The particular question from yesterday was from new homes in Pasadena, CA. She was sure that the new buildings in Pasadena are vacant and that developers get tax breaks to keep them vacant.
In 2010, Pasadena had 59,551 homes (4,281 vacant) and 137,122 people
In 2020, Pasadena had 61,643 homes (3,659 vacant) and 138,699 people
This means that Pasadena added more homes than people in the last 10 years. This is not a failure in planning. This reflects the general trend of households (HH) trending smaller and older people staying in their homes longer, even if they don't need all that space. Younger people can't afford the single family homes (SFH) or don't have the down payments required to purchase SFHs or condos, so they end up living in the apartments downtown.
It's possible that some of the new infill homes in central Pasadena are vacant, but they may still be under construction (lack certificate of occupancy), rentals being readied for a new tenant, or be for-sale condos waiting for a buyer. (For-sale homes are vacant longer than for-rent homes.)
Let's look at the data from the SCAG Local Profiles for communities in the 6-county (Ventura, LA, OC, Riverside, San Bernardino, Imperial) SCAG region. I pulled these charts from page 12 of the Pasadena Local Profile, 2018. They are derived from building permit data. Some of them are rebuilds and do not produce net new homes. (Likely source of discrepancy between the SCAG and Census data.)
Pasadena has done a better than average (for the region) job of building new homes in the downtown area. That is also why so many young people live there. New people (young people forming households, newcomers to the area) will flock to where the open homes are.
It may seem like there is a lot of construction, especially downtown, but it's a sampling bias. The City of Pasadena Development Activity Map shows building permits distributed throughout the city, but many of them are remodels or ADUs. The big construction projects are downtown, along major streets and freeways, because that is the only place cities allow them to be built. If we are driving around on the major roads (as most of our driving should be) we'll see more of the major projects. Explore the map; click on the orange dots to view data on each building site.
I checked Apartments.com and there are 164 apartments available for lease in Pasadena with next day occupancy (June 14, 2022). I checked Zillow and it shows 218 homes for sale and 152 for rent. I checked hotpads.com and it shows 279 apartments for immediate lease. Anyway, that's well under 1% of rental homes truly vacant, looking for a renter. Sounds like a very tight housing market.
Rate.com says that Pasadena has a 1.2% homeowner vacancy rate and a 2.9% rental vacancy rate. I found it informative to compare Pasadena and Redondo Beach. That "little old lady from Pasadena is real; 27% of Pasadena residents are seniors. But 25% are 20-34.
Pasadena has 53% working age population (20-64) supporting 47% elderly (65+) or youngsters (0-19) for a dependency ratio of 0.89. Redondo Beach has 44% working age population supporting 56%, for a dependency ratio of 1.27. If you don't provide for young people, then your children will have to move elsewhere, and that can socially isolate the elderly as they age out of driving. My home town of Redondo Beach is facing the Silver Tsunami with no plan.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about low-income and affordable housing in California and beyond. I was similarly confused, but learned a few things when I signed up to be a League of Women Voters volunteer and attended housing meetings at the regional and local level.
I keep saying that I am not an expert, but people I consider to be true experts say I know more than 99% of CA voters. So I'll blog about a few things I learned, in no particular order except that it was at the top of my mind for some reason (usually answering a recent question).
No low rent housing project shall hereafter be developed, constructed, or acquired in any manner by any state public body until, a majority of the qualified electors of the city, town or county, as the case may be, in which it is proposed to develop, construct, or acquire the same, voting upon such issue, approve such project by voting in favor thereof at an election to be held for that purpose, or at any general or special election.
For the purposes of this Article the term “low rent housing project” shall mean any development composed of urban or rural dwellings, apartments or other living accommodations for persons of low income, financed in whole or in part by the Federal Government or a state public body or to which the Federal Government or a state public body extends assistance by supplying all or part of the labor, by guaranteeing the payment of liens, or otherwise.
For the purposes of this Article only there shall be excluded from the term “low rent housing project” any such project where there shall be in existence on the effective date hereof, a contract for financial assistance between any state public body and the Federal Government in respect to such project.
For the purposes of this Article only “persons of low income” shall mean persons or families who lack the amount of income which is necessary (as determined by the state public body developing, constructing, or acquiring the housing project) to enable them, without financial assistance, to live in decent, safe and sanitary dwellings, without overcrowding.
For the purposes of this Article the term “state public body” shall mean this State, or any city, city and county, county, district, authority, agency, or any other subdivision or public body of this State.
For the purposes of this Article the term “Federal Government” shall mean the United States of America, or any agency or instrumentality, corporate or otherwise, of the United States of America.
This guarantees that no new subsidized rentals can be built in wealthier, higher opportunity areas. It also explains why public housing in CA is so old. We have to hang on to old, decrepit and dangerous subsidized rental housing because we can't offer modern replacements.
HUD used to help fund modest market-rate apartments (until about 1970) that have become "naturally affordable" as they rotted and became less desirable. That downward "filtering" of homes to lower income households no longer works with our severe housing crunch. Even older apartments can command high rents. This is why you now see families headed by two working PhD rocket scientists squeezing into 2 bedroom apartments built in 1969. My area has slowly become whiter and more affluent. (Anyway, this is getting off-topic and I'll save it for a separate blog post.)
Today, low and moderate income housing is likely to be built without public subsidy by non-profits or by for-profit developers who are willing to build a few below market rate units in order to be allowed to build more units overall. This is called a cross-subsidy.
In strong housing markets, nonprofit or mission-driven for-profit developers who build affordable homes can use profits from the sale or rental of market-rate homes to subsidize the costs of affordable homes. For example, some developers have used the profits from market-rate condominium units to subsidize affordable condominium or rental units for working families within the same development.
Here's an example in North Redondo Beach, along a loud and polluted truck route called Artesia Boulevard. I'm using the satellite view option of a California Property Tax Map, which shows you how much taxes are assessed in a bunch of California urban counties, including Los Angeles County. Click the link to see this area.
Each balloon represents a parcel. A range means that there are multiple properties on the parcel (condos, townhomes). Yellow or black means they pay near average taxes. Red means they pay higher than average. Green means they pay lower than average. Proposition 13 allows people to pay much lower than average taxes, as exemplified by the single family home at the top center paying around $1,346/year while adjacent townhomes pay $4,490-$10,525 each (3-5 homes on the same size lot).
On the commercial side of the block, several lots were combined for a mixed-use project of commercial on the street level with 3 stories of housing above. There is a 2-level parking garage below and behind the commercial offices.
Click the bubble with a range on that building and a spiral with all the assessments becomes visible. Note the 9 green bubbles among the 39 black ones? When the developer built this complex, they offered to sell 8 units below market rate and the buyers of those 8 units promised to sell only to income-qualified buyers at below market rate prices.
It looks like one of the original 40 market rate homes is now paying lower taxes, perhaps an older person who sold another home and used Proposition 13 portability of lower taxes. Unlike the original 8, that unit does not have any limitation on who they can sell to and at which prices. (I'll explain that later because that is another mind-bogglingly inefficient and stupid system we use because we fetishize home ownership over affordable rentals. This is also rife for fraud and abuse.)
Under strong housing market conditions, the market-rate share of a mixed-income development can generate more income than is necessary to cover costs for developing these units. These profits can fill the gap between income and expenses for the portion of units that are rented or sold at affordable (below-market) rates. This “pure” cross-subsidy model is likely to be viable only in strong markets, where rents and/or home prices are high enough to generate profits to cross-subsidize the affordable units.
As the federal funding available for affordable housing has declined in recent years, communities and developers have sought more cost-effective and market-based strategies for increasing the supply of affordable homes. The inclusion of market-rate units within a mixed-income development or community can make the development more financially feasible and less reliant on public subsidy through cross subsidization.
Anyway, the 30-second elevator pitches is that developers can sell a few homes as loss-leaders if they can command high-enough prices for the other homes to "pencil out". How many homes is determined by their costs and the prices they can command for the other units. The higher the prices in that local market, the more loss-leaders they can create.
These mixed-income cross-subsidized developments require no public money for construction, which is why they can be built under the conditions of Article 34. But they do mean that new residents who share the building will have to pay higher prices than they normally would have (or the developer takes a lower profit). Usually, it's a bit of both. The higher the inclusionary minimum (more cross-subsidized homes), the higher the costs borne by the market-rate inhabitants of the new housing (who may be themselves housing-burdened).
But, local governments can raise their costs by throwing impediments at developers until they can't afford to do so. This is why streamlining the development process is so important. If something can be built "by-right" without any additional permitting processes other than normal health and safety ones that apply to everyone, then CEQA challenges aren't possible.
