The new all-electric Nissan Leaf. (Photo: Josh Cassidy)

This week, California officials are voting on the toughest new regulations in the country to promote cleaner cars. If passed, by 2025, 15% of new cars and trucks sold in the state would have to be powered by batteries, hydrogen fuel cells or other technology that produces little or no air pollution.

These kind of tough mandates have been tried before and they failed. But officials are confident that era of electric vehicle as finally arrived in California. That’s becoming the case in the Bay Area, which has been a strong market for advanced cars since the first Prius came out a decade ago.

“This is a Prius V,” says Joe Testa at Downtown Toyota in Oakland, showing one of several new Prius models that Toyota is releasing this year. “It’s the longer, wagon style, so it has a little more room.” Testa says there’s already a waiting list for the new Prius Plug-in, which comes out in March.

Toyota came out with hybrids ahead of other carmakers, maybe because the company anticipated changes in the market. Or, as some believe, it was due to a California state agency.

“We have been at the forefront of encouraging, and some would people would say forcing, new technologies. The Prius hybrid electric vehicle is an example of that,” says Tom Cackette. Chief Deputy Director of the California Air Resources Board.

California’s Clean Car History

Cackette says to see California’s legacy of shaping national car policy, you have to go back to 1975. The state had a growing smog problem, so the air board required cars to have catalytic converters. The federal government followed. California then tightened air pollution rules for cars. And tightened them again. “And almost in every case, the federal government would follow two, three, four, five years later.”

Today, new cars emit 99 percent less smog than cars did in the 1960s. “It’s probably the most successful environmental program in the world,” says Cackette.

Now, California has a new goal: dramatically cutting greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change. Transportation accounts for 40% of the state’s emissions. “The number one strategy to reduce greenhouse gases is these car standards,” he says.

The proposed standards would cut greenhouse gas emissions from new cars in half by 2025. “We actually worked very closely under the federal government under the Obama Administration and we’ve jointly developed the standards. So they won’t just apply in California. But they’ll apply nationwide.”

Meeting these tougher standards will raise car prices by about $1900, but Cackette says those costs would be offset by fuel savings.

Jumpstarting Electric Car Sales

On top of that, California is taking an even bolder step, requiring automakers to sell increasing numbers of clean cars in the state. By 2025, they’d have to sell almost a million and half vehicles that run on electricity or hydrogen fuel cells.

The thing is – California has tried this before. And it didn’t work. “I guess I would call it a little too visionary perhaps,” says Cackette. In 1990, the Air Resources Board mandated that 10 percent of new car sales be “zero emission” cars by 2003.

“Obviously that didn’t happen. The price of gas was cheap in those times. The price of the technologies were high,” he says. The air board loosened the rules to include hybrid cars and cleaner gasoline engines, which he says drove carmakers to develop them faster.

Now, Cackette believes that technology has come of age. Nissan is selling the all-electric Leaf and Chevy is selling the Volt, a plug-in hybrid. And there’s another big difference.

Automakers Onboard

“The car manufacturers were adamantly opposed to the concept of government telling them they needed to build a new type of technology. That’s changed.”

“You are seeing more agreement between automakers and California and the federal government,” agrees Gloria Bergquist, a spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers in Washington DC.

“Automakers have invested billions of dollars in these technologies. And so in some ways we have similar interests. Our interest in recouping our investment is now aligned with the societal imperative to get more of these vehicles on the road,” she says.

Bergquist says meeting the mandate calling for carmakers to sell a certain number of clean vehicles will ultimately depend on consumers. “There’s still a concern about what the consumer acceptance of these technologies is going to be and that can make a mandate very scary.”

Groups Push for Tougher Rules

“We think California could be bolder,” says Don Anair is with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit group that supports even stronger clean car rules.

“We need that technology to advance for the technology cost to come down and make these vehicles accessible to more and more consumers. By having a more aggressive standard, that gives more certainty to investors that California is committed.” Anair wants to see tougher standards sooner rather than later, since it takes 15 years on average for the entire fleet of cars on the road to turn over.

If the new rules are successful, electric cars could be adopted at a much faster pace. Tom Cackette of the Air Resources Board says they’re doing all they can to encourage consumers to buy them, including funding a popular rebate program and working with companies to build an electric car charging infrastructure.

“Right now, you’ve got to sort of have a jumpstart to this whole process and in the absence of a jumpstart, there’s a chance that it will fail,” he says.

A projection of how zero emissions vehicles like electric cars will be 87% of all cars on the road in California by 2025. Source: California Air Resources Board.

Summer Study participants were treated to two insiders’ take on energy efficiency in China.

Notes from Asilomar: The 15th Biannual Summer Study, Energy Use In Buildings, of the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (August 15–20, 2010).

Summer Study participants were treated to two insiders’ take on energy efficiency in China.

Mark Levine was recently the director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and is now working full time with the China Energy Group at LBNL, a group Levine founded in 1988.

William Chandler is an expert in energy and climate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as well as the president of Transition Energy and the co-founder of DEED China—private companies with energy efficiency investments in China. Chandler was a 1992 ACEEE Champion of Energy Efficiency.

Both Levine and Chandler provided lots of information about energy efficiency policy and reality in China—past, present, and future. But more important, they each shared a wealth of insight that only comes with a long history of lived experience interacting with people developing energy efficiency in China. Imagine the amount of time they’ve spent in airplanes during the past 25 years!

One insight from Tuesday night’s plenary is the extraordinary progress China has made since 1980 to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, and lower energy intensity in an economy that has grown by leaps and bounds. Between 1980 and 2002, China’s GDP increased by a factor of 8, while its energy use increased by a factor of only 3. Between 1980 and 2002 energy intensity, or energy per unit of GDP decreased about 5% per year. From 2002 to 2005, energy intensity increased about 5% per year, mainly due to a huge increase in the production of steel and cement. But energy intensity then began to decrease again, dropping 16% between 2005 and 2009.

Looking to the future, Levine outlined a likely scenario where China’s total energy use and greenhouse gas emissions will continue to grow, but then level off in 20 years or so, and then begin a slow steady decrease. But at its peak Chinese energy use per capita will stay well below that of the United States and below that of Europe. China’s emissions will not overwhelm us, according to Levine, because of several reasons, but mainly due to saturation in the appliance and transportation markets in China.

Chandler urged cooperation with China in regards to energy efficiency policy, and warned that a lack of cooperation, “I won’t do anything if you don’t”, will be a suicide pact. We need to better explain to the west China’s successes and commitment to reduce energy use and carbon emissions, encourage China to be more accurate and transparent with its energy and emissions data, remove barriers to business between the United States and China, and resolve diplomatically the rift in relations between China and other nations that are part of the Copenhagen climate agreements.

Can China do its part to mitigate climate change and obtain energy security for itself and other nations? Levine and Chandler both say, “Yes.” But only if the United States and other developed and developing nations do their part as well.

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Blower door equipment is used to measure a home's
air leaks. A blower door test is part of the evaluation for
determining a home's HERS Index.
Photo by: D&R International

Remember the day when most men knew the horsepower of their muscle cars? Now most of us are concerned about miles per gallon. But what can we use to bring prestige to our houses? It used to be that a large square footage gave us bragging rights. But if all goes according to the plan of the Residential Energy Services Network (RESNET), the talk around the water cooler will be "What's your house's HERS score?"

Home energy ratings have been around since 1981. The idea began in the mortgage industry to credit the energy efficiency of homes towards the home mortgage. An energy efficient home means that the homeowner is spending less each month on electricity and natural gas and therefore has more to spend on the mortgage. RESNET has been developing the Home Energy Rating System (HERS) since 1981. In the beginning, it was the higher the HERS score the better. But because of the more widespread introduction of renewable energy systems, such as photovoltaics (PV) and solar hot water systems, into homes, and the ability of many houses today to produce as much electricity and/or hot water as they need over the course of a year-these are called net zero-energy houses-a HERS Index of "0" is the goal. A HERS score of 85 means that a new home meets Energy Star standards. A HERS score of 150 means you're living with an Energy Hog. The typical existing home in the United States has a HERS Index of 130.

HERS raters look at a home's heating and cooling efficiency, insulation levels, appliance and lighting energy use, window efficiency, a home's solar orientation, and other factors that are tailored to the home's climate region, and use computer software to calculate a HERS index.

Some readers my be asking, "Why should I care?" You should care because the HERS score is becoming the standard du jour for homebuilders. If you want a bigger, energy efficiency mortgage, you'll need a HERS rater to measure the efficiency of the home you want to buy and to tell you what retrofits you need to do to qualify. If you are a builder and want to catch the "green wave" by earning an Energy Star rating for the new homes you are selling, you've got to get those homes rated by a certified HERS rater.

Many states have Energy Efficiency Portfolio Standards and Energy Efficiency Credit trading, and many more will in the future as we move towards national standards for meeting greenhouse gas emissions goals. The HERS Index is in place to serve the need for a third-party verifier of energy efficiency improvements.

Want energy efficiency tax credits for your new home? Better find a RESNET-certified rater. Moving to Canada? The Canadian RESNET, or CRESNET, is in the process of accepting the U.S. standards. I don't know the HERS Index of my home, but we did recently have some air sealing and insulation work done-but not quite to Energy Star standards. My guess is we'd score about 100. What's your HERS score?

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