Energy Commission Monies Fund Innovative Retrofit of Utility Vehicles Nevada City-based
The Grant Farm connects Green Energy Professionals with Government Funding
Nevada City, California – Californians may all breathe a bit easier as a result of a recent grant developed by Nevada City-based The Grant Farm for Terex Utilities.
This week, the California Energy Commission approved nearly $500,000 in funds for the Terex Utilities Hybrid Hybrid Pilot project, which will retrofit 12 medium and heavy duty utility vehicles with new zero emissions technology. The grant matches an additional $2.4 million in private funds and in-kind contributions from PG&E and Terex.
Currently, most of the nation’s 2 million utility vehicles, tow trucks, dump trucks and fire trucks have to keep their engines running in order to power their aerial booms, worksight lighting, water and gas pumps and heating and cooling systems. For utility service vehicles, this can mean long stretches of 4 to 6 hours of an active engine, wasting gas, affecting air quality, and reducing engine life.
The Terex HyPower™ Hybrid utilizes stored energy from the system’s rechargeable batteries to provide power —virtually eliminating the need for chassis engine idling during those operations. The most immediate benefits of the HyPower™ Hybrid system are dramatically reduced levels of fuel consumption – with savings between 600 and 1,000 gallons per year per vehicle — lowered carbon dioxide emissions, and reduction of worksite noise pollution.
Longer term benefits of this technology include the creation of well-paying temporary and full-time manufacturing and service jobs. To promote and support these positions, Terex has included the creation of a Sacramento Area Workforce Training Center to suppor the HyPower™ Hybrid technology, and has also developed an implementation plan for a future multi-state network of vehicle technology centers.
The Grant Farm – which develops public fund campaigns for renewable energy and cleantech businesses throughout the United States – managed the grant development and submission process for Terex Utilities. The company has developed more than $350 million in renewable energy and cleantech grant submissions and recently secured more than $5 in federal monies for the Illinois Department of Transportation to replace an aging fleet of buses with compressed natural gas vehicles and another $5 million to retrofit 31,000 homes in Anaheim, California with Smart Grid technology.
“We founded The Grant Farm to connect renewable energy and transportation professionals with the massive investments being made in new technology by state and federal government,” said Shawn Garvey. “There is a transformation afoot in both energy and public finance — and our experience is in developing and professionalizing successful organizations that can attract significant public and private funds for innovative projects.”
The Grant Farm specializes in identifying public funding partnerships and implementing public fund campaigns for organizations seeking state and federal loans, grants, and tax credits for critical renewable energy projects throughout the United States. Principals at the firm have more than 35 years of combined experience in public funding, technical writing, strategic planning, and advocacy. Since 1995, they have helped develop more than $375 million in renewable energy, cleantech, transportation and infrastructure, and conservation projects seeking funding from a variety of public agencies—including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, California Energy Commission, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Federal Transit Administration and the California Energy Commission.
When Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich and talk radio types rail about the Federal Reserve and Wall Street and international bankers, do the words fringe and conspiracy theory and even wack jobs come to mind? Me too. Or at least they used to—but that was before the economic meltdown shook the world.
Three home grown success stories…….
Since then I’ve been talking with everyone I know, and some people I don’t know, about what happened to our money and why, what’s going on with it now, and how we can change the system.
I recently attended the Economics of Peace conference, sponsored by RSF Social Finance and the Praxis Peace Institute, and learned about a variety of positive and hopeful initiatives, including alternative, complementary, and local currencies, mutual credit exchanges, barter systems, and cooperatives.
One of the most compelling presenters at the conference was Ellen Hodgson Brown, the author of the book Web of Debt (Third Millennium, 2008). Brown laid out how we the people lost the power to create money and how we can get it back again.
Banking shenanigans have been with us since Babylonian times. According to Brown, we’ve also had egalitarian money systems that worked quite well. Before the Revolutionary War, each American colony printed and circulated its own currency. These currencies were not backed by commodities, like gold or silver. Instead, they were based on trust.
In Ben Franklin’s Pennsylvania and other colonies, people were willing to accept the local currency as legal tender, there was plenty to go around, and commerce thrived. But the British government intervened and forbade new issues of this colonial scrip. Taxes had to be paid in gold, which meant borrowing from the British bankers. The result was widespread depression, which was a key factor that led to the revolution.
Ever since, Brown argues, private banking interests in the United States have usurped the public’s power to issue money and have captured the nation by debt. The tipping point came in the summer of 2007, with the collapse of two Bear Stearns hedge funds. The result was a credit freeze that crippled U.S. banks. The government’s solution has been to bail out banks considered “too big to fail” with taxpayer money. But Brown says the money isn’t making it into the real economy and that the derivatives exposure of U.S. banks is $175 trillion, far more than the taxpayers can afford to underwrite.
To escape the debt trap and reclaim control over our financial future, we need to quit bailing out Wall Street and restore the publicly issued money system of the American colonists. We don’t have to convince Washington or reform Wall Street to accomplish this. We simply need to think local, and create our own municipal and state banks. As Buckminster Fuller said, “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
The only state-owned bank in the United States today is the Bank of North Dakota, which was created by a movement of farmers in 1919 because they were losing their farms to outstate banks. North Dakota has largely escaped the Wall Street credit debacle by generating its own credit through this publicly owned bank. The state has the lowest unemployment rate in the country and the largest budget surplus it has ever had, $1.2 billion.
All state funds are deposited in the bank, which makes subsidized loans to spur development, underwrites municipal bonds, and even issues student loans. The bank’s president, Eric Hardmeyer, has described it as a “Mini Fed,” and it enjoys widespread public support.
Other states could start their own banks as well. Farid Khavari, a Democrat, is running for governor in Florida on this platform. Ellen Brown argues that California has enough assets to create its own bank, charge interest rates as low as 2 percent, and finance its entire budget out of the profits. (Jerry Brown, are you listening?)
We the people have the power to create a financial system that works for everyone. We need a national conversation about money. To learn more about how the system works, we need to risk sounding stupid, or fringy. Talk to your friends and neighbors. Ask your mayor and other local officials what they’re doing to establish a municipal or state bank where you live. And to Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, my apologies. Thanks for getting the conversation started.
For more information, see Ellen Hodgson Brown’s website, www.webofdebt.com.
“The Slow Money Principles are the path to a new, healthy food system. Sign them and be counted!“
-Greg Steltenpohl, Founder, Odwalla
“I signed the Principles. Hope you do, too. Together, we are building a strong, new voice for the wisdom of bringing our money home to build sustainable communities.”
- Judy Wicks, Chair/co-founder, Business Alliance for Local Living Economies
Principles
In order to enhance food security, food safety and food access; improve nutrition and health; promote cultural, ecological and economic diversity; and accelerate the transition from an economy based on extraction and consumption to an economy based on preservation and restoration, we do hereby affirm the following Principles:
I. We must bring money back down to earth.
II. There is such a thing as money that is too fast, companies that are too big, finance that is too complex. Therefore, we must slow our money down — not all of it, of course, but enough to matter.
III. The 20th Century was the era of Buy Low/Sell High and Wealth Now/Philanthropy Later—what one venture capitalist called “the largest legal accumulation of wealth in history.” The 21st Century will be the era of nurture capital, built around principles of carrying capacity, care of the commons, sense of place and non-violence.
IV. We must learn to invest as if food, farms and fertility mattered. We must connect investors to the places where they live, creating vital relationships and new sources of capital for small food enterprises.
V. Let us celebrate the new generation of entrepreneurs, consumers and investors who are showing the way from Making A Killing to Making a Living.
VI. Paul Newman said, “I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer who puts back into the soil what he takes out.” Recognizing the wisdom of these words, let us begin rebuilding our economy from the ground up, asking:
* What would the world be like if we invested 50% of our assets within 50 miles of where we live?
* What if there were a new generation of companies that gave away 50% of their profits?
* What if there were 50% more organic matter in our soil 50 years from now?
Dispatch From Davos: The Green Economic Solution Is Here At Work And Home
Rick Fedrizzi
The Huffington Post
1/27/2010
Here is the conversation starter I’m putting on the table when I speak today at the World Economic Forum at Davos: Why are we letting supply side obstacles — lack of capital, shortage of training, need for access to materials and technologies — derail what stands to be the single best immediate-term route to a global economic recovery?
There are about 120 million existing homes in the U.S., and about 5 million commercial buildings comprising more than 71 billion square feet of space.
And virtually every one of them is an energy hog.
Virtually every one of them has a plumbing system that literally flushes our potable water down the drain. Energy expenses alone in U.S. commercial buildings total more than $100 billion a year.
This is the norm in every country across the world, and it’s not sustainable.
Bold action to bring green building to scale is the fastest way to meet current economic and environmental challenges, put millions to work in green jobs and save families and businesses billions of needed dollars.
Using something as mundane as buildings as the lever that moves the global economy forward seems almost counter-intuitive. But for those of us who see the world in the simple terms of paychecks and savings accounts, it sounds straightforward enough to actually work.
The LEED rating system, Green Star, BREEAM and others provide a road map for improving the energy performance of existing buildings and creating millions of jobs financed through energy savings.
Last summer, the U.S. Green Building Council sponsored a McKinsey study that showed that investing in the energy efficiency of buildings represents a powerful and strategic energy and climate solution that, combined with other non-transportation initiatives, could:
Reduce U.S. energy consumption by 23 percent by 2020
Save the U.S. economy1.2 trillion
Reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1.1 gigatons annually
One of the most significant paths to financing these retrofits, and reaping the tremendous benefits, is a paid-from-savings approach that leverages the savings generated from building system upgrades.
Typically these upgrades are straightforward – replacing boilers, chillers and water fixtures; upgrading lighting systems; and installing building automation systems.
A recent Adobe project is an example of using a paid-from-savings approach to finance and implement green performance measures. With a $2.1 million investment in energy and environmental retrofits, Adobe is saving $1.5 million in energy and water costs annually, making for a 91 percent return on investment with a payback in just 1.1 years.
The iconic Empire State Building is undertaking green retrofits that represent $20 million of a $500 million makeover. These retrofits will reduce energy use by 19 percent in the initial stages of the upgrade, increasing over full implementation to a 38 percent reduction in total energy use. This will save $4.4 million in energy costs annually and will prevent 105,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions over the next 15 years.
The building’s owners, Wein & Malkin, used energy performance contracting (EPC), an approach that pays for the building upgrades from energy cost savings generated down the line. This is aside from the retrofit’s enhancement to the building’s marketability and asset value.
Similar retrofits can occur right now, across America — and across the globe.
On the residential side, the government has an important role to play, and the U.S. stimulus legislation offers many advantages. As an example, the City of Houston began piloting a program to improve energy efficiency in lower income communities in 2006 through a partnership with the local utility. Efficiencies of upwards of 20 percent were achieved through simple weatherization measures with payback periods of approximately two years. The average annual savings of more than $800 per household was significant to families, not to mention the CO2 reduction and other environmental benefits.
The program has continued to grow, and The Mayor’s Office of Environmental Programming is currently writing grants utilizing recovery dollars. Major programs include the Department of Energy’s Weatherization Assistance Program and Efficiency Conservation Block Grant, and the Housing and Urban Development Department’s Assisted Housing Stability and Energy and Green Retrofit Investments program.
The common thread among these projects is the jobs that were created to get the work done. In fact, we’re confident that green building will support 7.9 million U.S. jobs and pump $554 billion into the American economy — including $396 billion in wages — over the next four years (2009-2013).
Green construction spending currently supports more than 2 million American jobs and generates more than $100 billion in gross domestic product and wages. The economic impact of the total green construction market from 2000 to 2008, the study found, contributed $178 billion to U.S. gross domestic product; created or saved 2.4 million direct, indirect and induced jobs; and generated $123 billion in wages.
In many cases these jobs are skilled and semi-skilled trades jobs that can begin to replace lost manufacturing jobs. There, we must address the supply side obstacle of to training. We must expand current programs and create tax incentives to encourage individuals and companies to take advantage of them; create new programs in our vocational schools; and engage our union craftspeople — anything it takes to field this green workforce as fast as possible.
We can, and must, do much more to leverage the opportunity for a better economy and better environment that’s all around us, right here at home.
And so I’m going to spend my week in Switzerland trying to push the conversation back to the United States.
How to reshape market society and redefine democracy
“This is a deeply thought-provoking book about the dramatic changes we must make to save the planet from financial madness” — Naomi Klein. Opening with Oscar Wilde’s observation that “nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing,” Patel shows how our faith in prices as a way of valuing the world is misplaced. He reveals the hidden ecological and social costs of a hamburger (as much as $200), and asks how we came to have markets in the first place. Both the corporate capture of government and our current financial crisis, Patel argues, are a result of our democratically bankrupt political system.
If part one asks how we can rebalance society and limit markets, part two answers by showing how social organizations, in America and around the globe, are finding new ways to describe the world’s worth. If we don’t want the market to price every aspect of our lives, we need to learn how such organizations have discovered democratic ways in which people, and not simply governments, can play a crucial role in deciding how we might share our world and its resources in common.
This short, timely and inspiring book reveals that our current crisis is not simply the result of too much of the wrong kind of economics. While we need to rethink our economic model, Patel argues that the larger failure beneath the food, climate and economic crises is a political one. If economics is about choices, Patel writes, it isn’t often said who gets to make them. The Value of Nothing offers a fresh and accessible way to think about economics and the choices we will all need to make in order to create a sustainable economy and society.
Praise for Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing
“As we confront the crisis in the worldview of orthodox economics, Raj Patel offers us a whole new way to think about price and value. Bracingly written and full of surprises, The Value of Nothing is itself invaluable, showing us a path out of the darkness of the economic woods.”
- Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma
“With The Value of Nothing, Raj Patel has done something of great value: in language utterly clear, concise, literate, and engaging, he takes readers through the murk and mess of the economy’s collapse. He shows the hows and whys, how we seem bent on a repeat (no real substantive changes to the practices that got us where we are, at the policy level), but also how we, in our communities, if not larger concerted efforts, have some power to right the course. What Raj Patel did so brilliantly with food in Stuffed and Starved, he now does so with money and the economy.”
- Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company
“In this riveting eye-opener of a book, Patel dismantles with great fluidity and precision the reigning theory of the free market and its applications: how it creates in our global society deep inequalities of power, based solely on the diktat that our fundamental needs (water, decent food, housing, health care) are worthless because not profitable, and thus leading to economic chaos and a loss of community empowerment. But there is also hope in the emergence of social groups around the world who are insisting and reclaiming ‘the right to have rights’ through their democratic engagement. Patel brilliantly shows us how both a fairer society and a sustainable economy are possible as long as we are willing to seize back our freedom to choose from colluding governments and corporations. The Value of Nothing should be required reading for any self-respecting citizen of the world.”
- Marie du Vaure, Vroman’s Bookstore
“With great lucidity and confidence in a dazzling array of fields, Patel reveals how we inflate the cost of things we can (and often should) live without, while assigning absolutely no value to the resources we all need to survive. This is a deeply thought-provoking book about the dramatic changes we must make to save the planet from financial madness — argued with so much humor and humanity that the enormous tasks ahead feel both doable and desirable. This is Raj Patel’s great gift: he makes even the most radical ideas seem not only reasonable, but inevitable. A brilliant book.”
- Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine
“It’s only January 2010, and we already have a candidate for the most important book of the year. Raj Patel’s The Value of Nothing takes aim at the conservative orthodoxy that has dominated American politics and economics for the last several decades, and he scores a direct hit.”
Slow Money is a new nonprofit organizing an international movement to bring money back down to earth.
Founded by Woody Tasch, a pioneer in merging investing and philanthropy, Slow Money’s mission is to build local and national networks, and develop new financial products and services, dedicated to:
investing in small food enterprises and local food systems;
connecting investors to their local economies; and,
building the nurture capital industry.
Soil fertility, carrying capacity, sense of place, care of the commons, cultural, ecological and economic health and diversity, nonviolence — these are the fundamentals of nurture capital, a new financial sector supporting the emergence of a restorative economy. And these are the fundamentals of the Slow Money Principles.
Slow Money is launching a national campaign to obtain one million signatories to the Slow Money Principles. For those who wish to do more than be a signatory, membership in the Slow Money Alliance provides a more active form of participation. Slow Money has attracted more than 100 Founding Members including many recognized leaders in organic food, sustainable agriculture, philanthropy and social investing.
“The Slow Money Principles are the path to a new, healthy food system. Sign them and be counted!” -Greg Steltenpohl, Founder, Odwalla
“I signed the Principles. Hope you do, too. Together, we are building a strong, new voice for the wisdom of bringing our money home to build sustainable communities.”
- Judy Wicks, Chair/co-founder, Business Alliance for Local Living Economies
Principles
In order to enhance food security, food safety and food access; improve nutrition and health; promote cultural, ecological and economic diversity; and accelerate the transition from an economy based on extraction and consumption to an economy based on preservation and restoration, we do hereby affirm the following Principles:
I. We must bring money back down to earth.
II. There is such a thing as money that is too fast, companies that are too big, finance that is too complex. Therefore, we must slow our money down — not all of it, of course, but enough to matter.
III. The 20th Century was the era of Buy Low/Sell High and Wealth Now/Philanthropy Later—what one venture capitalist called “the largest legal accumulation of wealth in history.” The 21st Century will be the era of nurture capital, built around principles of carrying capacity, care of the commons, sense of place and non-violence.
IV. We must learn to invest as if food, farms and fertility mattered. We must connect investors to the places where they live, creating vital relationships and new sources of capital for small food enterprises.
V. Let us celebrate the new generation of entrepreneurs, consumers and investors who are showing the way from Making A Killing to Making a Living.
VI. Paul Newman said, “I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer who puts back into the soil what he takes out.” Recognizing the wisdom of these words, let us begin rebuilding our economy from the ground up, asking:
What would the world be like if we invested 50% of our assets within 50 miles of where we live?
What if there were a new generation of companies that gave away 50% of their profits?
What if there were 50% more organic matter in our soil 50 years from now?
Sign these Principles and be counted as part of the emerging network that’s working to improve the health of local food systems and the economy. These Principles are a living document, a beginning, a reflection of the vision that is unfolding in communities around the country.
Thank you. Please
Pass The Principles On to your friends. And if you want to do more, consider becoming a member of the Slow Money Alliance. Join folks like George Siemon, CEO of Organic Valley and Jim Cochran, the first organic strawberry grower in California, and Eliot Coleman, one of the nation’s top organic farmers, and Joan Gussow, one of the pioneers of nutrition and ecology, working together to build support for this beautiful movement. To see a list of our Founding Members, click here.
Watch and share the video.
Read the transcript below.
We’re living in a time of economic crisis. We’re living in a time when the economic system, the money system itself, the markets are unraveling.
And this is a very frightening time for people.
At the same time, if we can recognize that what is unraveling is that which has no viability. What is unraveling is that which is not sustainable. Practices, ways of being with money, markets that are not based in true value any longer are starting to fall apart.
If we can see that what’s happening is a truing, is a recalibration, it helps us see how to deal with it on a personal basis.
It doesn’t mean it’s not going to be painful; it doesn’t mean that there’s not suffering; it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be paying close attention to how we use money.
But if we look on a larger scale, if we step back from the personal trauma, the fear, that we’re all caught in and that the media’s caught in, and see that we’re living at a time of enormous excess that has created financial structures and systems that are inappropriate and completely unsustainable. And now they’re falling apart. We’ll know that, at the end of this, we’re all going to be better for it, because we’re going to be in a truthful, more accurate, more integrous (appropriate) relationship with our self, with money and with the resources on this planet.
We can get through this.
It’s a difficult time. I don’t deny that.
But it can also be a beautiful time. Because we can move towards thrift rather than accumulation; we can move toward appreciating what we love rather than being afraid of what we’ve lost. We can focus our attention and intention not on what we’re losing, but on what we already have that’s so valuable and nourishing to us. And we can stop clamoring for more of what we don’t really need and take care of what we have.
This is a time that I think history will look back on and say,
“These are the people, this is the generation of humankind, that made the changes that went through a transformation that made the future of life possible. These are the people who had the courage to make profound changes in the way they were thinking–as well as in the way that they were behaving–that gave the future to life itself.”
So, I’m privileged to be living at this time.
I’m excited about being the generation that goes through this courageous period.
It’s a gift, it’s a blessing; a tough one, but something that will create the profound transformational change that’s absolutely necessary and required for us to have a future on this planet.
Energy Commission Monies Fund Innovative Retrofit of Utility Vehicles Nevada City-based
Sign these Principles and be counted as part of the emerging network that’s working to improve the health of local food systems and the economy. These Principles are a living document, a beginning, a reflection of the vision that is unfolding in communities around the country.
