While the Washington State Department of Transportation doesn’t track the origins of trucks driving through this corridor, Gnull has experienced it firsthand: “There’s no way to separate the port and industry here.”

“The area is very polluted,” said Gnull, who is a longtime resident and advocate with the Climate Alliance of the South Sound, an organization founded to improve living conditions for the working class.

“All of Tacoma is polluted, but South Tacoma [is] in particular. Because of the affordable housing available to the poor, who are disproportionately marginalized by race and nationality, this area has become viable for the underprivileged to live in,” Gnull said. 

South Tacoma and the South End neighborhoods endure nearly the same level of diesel emissions each year as the Port of Tacoma itself. This pollution has high cancer risks and contributes to the lowest life expectancy levels in the entire city, according to local and federal environmental justice indexes. 

But the port-related pollution — from vessels and trucks — may finally taper.  

In June, the ports of Seattle and Tacoma announced the Puget Sound Maritime Air Forum’s emissions inventory — a count of greenhouse gasses within port boundaries, conducted every five years. According to the inventory, diesel particulate emissions from the Port of Tacoma have decreased by at least 80% since 2005, while the amount of freight moved has increased. It mirrors a broader trend of emissions reductions across Puget Sound ports.

Port leaders credit the shift to their electrification projects and investments guided under the Northwest Ports Clean Air Strategy. However, their efforts are at risk, because the ports’ transition to clean energy is not regulated and relies almost entirely on government funding. 

Much of the strategy’s $160 million in state funding largely comes from the Climate Commitment Act (CCA) that’s now up for repeal in this year’s election, according to Port of Seattle Commission Vice President Toshiko Grace Hasegawa. The legislature recently allocated another $35 million from the CCA in coming years for expensive upgrades.

While federal funding also supports the ports’ transition, local funding like the CCA is a competitive key to getting those grants. It demonstrates strong local commitment and can provide matching funds, often required to secure federal support.

“Our push for decarbonization would not be possible if not for the CCA,” Hasegawa wrote in a statement to The Urbanist. “At the port, we are striving toward our zero-emission commitment and have been making steady progress. However, when it comes down to it, funding is our biggest obstacle.” 

The slow, costly transition to decarbonizing ports 

The Port of Tacoma and Seattle’s best hope for the clean energy transition lies in the zero-emission commitments from commissioners to decarbonize maritime-related greenhouse gas emissions over the next three decades.

That’s because their pledge to achieve zero emissions by 2050 is voluntary, unlike other industrial changes driven by Washington’s Clean Energy Transformation Act. While that legislation set parameters for powering buildings and vehicles with fossil-fuel-free resources, and can indirectly support cleaner port operations, it does not specifically mandate rules for port infrastructure and freight activity. 

State regulations, like those in California, have effectively supported clean energy adoption in ports by providing both rules and financial incentives for compliance. Once fully implemented, the California Air Resource Board anticipates a 55% reduction in potential cancer risk for port-adjacent communities. 

In absence of specific regulation, the Washington state legislature is trying to help decarbonize ports through funding in the CCA. In the 2024 supplemental budget, the legislature funded $14 million for shore power — infrastructure that allows container ships to turn off their diesel engines and connect to the electrical grid. 

The Northwest Seaport Alliance (NWSA), a federal maritime commission that manages cargo terminals for the ports of Tacoma and Seattle, manages such projects. They estimate that a ship connected to shore power for 40 hours avoids burning 10 tonnes of diesel fuels. 

But the transition is slow, because of the high costs of underground wiring and plug points into the wharf.

“Ports aren’t a deep pocket,” said NWSA senior director Jason Jordan. “It’s really key to continue to be supported by state and federal grants if we’re serious about getting to zero emissions.” 

This year, Seattle’s Terminal 5 opened its second shore power plug-in, and renovations at Port of Tacoma’s Husky Terminal are reserving space for similar capabilities. But shore power does not address the emissions that happen on the way to and from port. Vessels out at sea are often too large and energy-intensive to be fully electrified. 

In hopes of eventually finding a solution to this problem, the state legislature funded a $250,000 sustainable marine fuels framework.

“There are major questions in sustainable marine fuel that still need to be answered. There is no consensus on which fuel to use,” said Kurt Ellision, Maritime Policy Manager for Climate Solutions. “How will it be made? How will we guarantee what are our definitions of a sustainable or green fuel? And those are really challenging questions that can be only answered to a limited extent locally.” 

Ellison, who started his career as a deckhand, believes the shipping industry is years behind its decarbonization efforts, but that ports could be the next frontier in reducing climate pollution. 

Electrification of trucks  

Ports have the potential to serve as hubs for implementing cleaner technologies, a vision strongly supported by significant federal funding. This year, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law created grants for new electric trucking hubs, and NWSA received $12 million for their own station to charge thousands of heavy-duty trucks. 

“One of the interesting reasons [for] looking at ports and also focusing some of our investment dollars there is because ports are an intersection of all these different transportation types, whether that’s trucks, trains, vessels, cargo handling equipment,” Ellison said.  

Nearly 4,000 short-haul trucks serve the ports of Seattle and Tacoma, going to nearby distribution centers and warehouses, but none of them are fully electric, according to Climate Solutions. Drivers often don’t have upfront capital to invest in electric vehicles, but a new state program — also funded by the CCA — is trying to offset that with point-of sale vouchers.

Fledgling truck electrification efforts come at a time of industrial expansion in Tacoma, with frontline communities of color bearing the brunt of the resulting pollution and traffic violence. Asians, Latinos, and Blacks collectively compose the majority in many of these frontline neighborhoods. Carbon emissions from trucks at the Port of Tacoma have increased by nearly 400 tonnes over the last four years, according to the maritime inventory.

NWSA told The Urbanist that the increase in emissions was due to prolonged idling times caused by Covid-19 related supply chain issues, which has now been resolved. However, advocates worry about a congested future that brings multi-layered threats to public health. 

“Having electrical vehicles and moving to electric is a good thing,” said Gnull. “But we also need solutions that democratic and look at the needs of the people.” 

As part of the Climate Alliance of the South Sound, Gnull has been rallying against the Bridge Industrial Project, a new 2.5 million-square-foot warehouse development in South Tacoma. Dubbed the South Tacoma Mega Warehouse by opponents, the development would result in thousands more carbon and diesel-emitting trucks on the roads, according to Earth Justice. Inhaling exhaust can give people asthma and other respiratory illnesses, and children – with developing bodies and lungs – are especially vulnerable.

The City of Tacoma granted conditional approval for the project without requiring a full environmental review — a move that the Climate Alliance for South Sound has called environmental racism. This, in part, inspired state policymakers to propose the Cumulative Risk Burden (CURB) Pollution Act. Although it failed in this year’s session, CURB aimed to bolster the existing Healthy Environment for All (HEAL) Act with stronger enforcement mechanisms to deny permits for polluting facilities in overburdened communities. 

For Gnull, climate justice work is personal. 

As a member of the Osage Nation whose family fled from settler violence and eventually relocated to the Pacific Northwest, Gnull’s environmental activism is inspired by her Indigenous ancestry. She has protested in movements that successfully canceled plans for a methanol refinery, and strongly opposed the construction of a liquid natural gas plant in Tacoma. In 2019, her commitment deepened when her mother was hit and killed by a motorist in the South End. 

“It’s the overall effects of increased traffic that I think has the bigger impact on our community,” said Gnull. “I can’t imagine the people whose children die from asthma. My mom, that’s tough, but it’s something that most of us are prepared for eventually. Losing a child? That’s different. It just breaks my heart, and I don’t want to see more of this. I want to see it get better.” 

The post Climate Commitment Act Repeal Imperils Port’s Pollution Reduction Efforts first appeared on The Urbanist.

The changes would largely align Seattle’s energy code for new apartments and commercial buildings with the Washington State energy code, creating more consistency for builders across jurisdictions and potentially ending a nearly two-decade run of the City of Seattle’s energy code being more stringent than the state’s by design. In some areas, Seattle’s code would still go further, including with a requirement that all new commercial kitchens be ready to make the transition to all-electric.

Among the provisions in the new code, which is referred to as the 2021 code, that wouldn’t take effect: requirements that 20% of windows in new buildings include expensive triple-glazing, and others limiting the overall size of windows. HVAC systems would be required to be even more energy-efficient than they already are, and the amount of wattage produced by a building’s lighting systems would have been required to be reduced by another 5%. The city code already requires a 5% lighting energy reduction beyond the state code.

These requirements would only impact new office or large multifamily buildings, with single-family homes, duplexes, and accessory dwelling units covered under the less restrictive residential building code.

After the last update to Seattle’s energy code, the 2018 code — which did not actually take full effect until March of 2021 — the city saw a big drop in new permit applications as builders rushed to submit ahead of the deadline. Those applications have stayed relatively low, with projects hindered by high interest rates that have impacted homebuilding nationwide. This drought has housing advocates concerned about an increase in housing costs in Seattle in the coming years even as new units are coming online relatively robustly right now.

“We’ve heard from builders of homes, both affordable and market-rate, that there’s many things the City does that can make it harder to build our desperately needed housing,” Seattle’s Chief Operating Officer, Marco Lowe, said in introducing the proposal in May. “We’re working on many different fronts, but one of the things we’ve heard is that that city energy code, when it first exceeded the state code, was a really necessary important step that led the way, but then over time as it’s become more and more efficient, […] this may be becoming something that we were hearing from building developers that was making it harder for projects to pencil.”

Washington State’s energy code had previously lagged significantly behind Seattle’s, with a 2001 Seattle City Council resolution explicitly requiring the city energy code to be more stringent than the state in an attempt to pull it along. But the current state energy code is widely recognized as one of the most robust in the country, with Washington the first state to mandate that heating and cooling systems in new commercial and multifamily buildings be all-electric. Going further than the state code, builders say, is adding costs that are out of alignment with potential gains.

Stepping off the regulatory accelerator would represent an acknowledgement that requiring buildings in Seattle to be more energy efficient than elsewhere in the state could be having unintended consequences, making it more attractive to build outside the city. Meanwhile, many suburbs have an energy grid that is more carbon intensive than Seattle’s and transportation infrastructure that is also lagging. Development where transit and accessibility is lacking encourages car use, creating more climate pollution.

“You don’t have to create this weird incentive where you move housing out of Seattle very many times before you offset all the benefits you have from being a leader,” A-P Hurd, the president of SkipStone, a development consultancy firm, and the co-author of the book The Carbon Efficient City, told The Urbanist.

Hurd’s analysis of the current Seattle energy code suggests compliance costs add around $24,000 per unit compared to the state code, with the end result buildings that are more energy efficient, but don’t actually save carbon emissions thanks to Seattle City Light’s net-zero energy grid. Modelling on that code showed a 15% reduction in building energy, though those gains have not necessarily materialized in all cases because the introduction of heat pumps into new units encourage residents to take advantage of the ability to utilize air conditioning. Most apartments in temperate Seattle do not have air conditioning.

“As I look across all the emissions in the city, and all the priorities we have around building performance, transportation, emissions, putting people near light rail, making sure that we have equity around housing opportunity in Seattle, it’s put me in this kind of funny position of now, saying, maybe we’ve squeezed enough juice from this particular orange,” Hurd said.

Some environmental advocates argue that the City isn’t being data-driven enough in its methodology, instead simply responding to a blanket request from the real estate industry.

“It has felt throughout this process that there is a false narrative of this code versus housing affordability,” Deepa Sivarajan, a local policy manager with Climate Solutions, told the board ahead of the final vote. “And one of the frustrations has been that all of the data that we heard about, costs and cost increases, have not been about this code approval. They’ve not been about the measures that have been stricken from last year’s version of the 2021 code, they’ve been about the 2018 code.”

Meanwhile, some members of the development industry have alleged that builders are crying wolf about the impact the proposed changes will have.

“I would say that every cycle, there is kind of a very similar discussion, where the thought is that the changes are going to be incredibly expensive, they’re going to make development very difficult. They’re gonna make housing expensive. And at least from what I’ve seen, in architecture, very quickly, the developers, the builders, the designers, the city, they figure out how to make work,” said Nick McDaniel, a senior associate with the architecture firm NBBJ, said in May. “In my opinion, the proposed change represents a really dangerous rollback of progress on carbon, and on energy.”

However, affordable housing providers have praised the change as striking the right potential balance, noting that it will build on policies already adopted that will make existing buildings in Seattle more energy efficient.

“We are deeply committed to both addressing the urgent housing shortage in our city and advancing environmental sustainability in the built environment,” the Housing Development Consortium’s Laura Frankie said. “We collaborated with the City to pass the landmark building emissions performance standards, or BEPS, legislation, bringing together the stakeholders to craft ambitious policy that will de-carbonize all large multifamily and commercial buildings while ensuring the policy works for affordable housing operators. We believe that the proposed revisions to the energy code will build on BEPS and help create more affordable and sustainable city.”

The Seattle Construction Code Advisory Board (CCAB) did also vote to advance potential amendments that could add additional city-specific requirements, refining efficiency requirements beyond the state code. Those are likely to be hashed out at the Seattle City Council’s review of the policy at the Land Use Committee in late summer or early fall, but every individual amendment reduces the impact that could come from Seattle largely adopting the state code for the sake of making it easier for builders to source materials and complete projects efficiently.

With much more public scrutiny as the proposal heads to council, it remains to be seen how city leaders will thread the needle.

The post Rollback of Stricter Energy Code Advances to Seattle City Council first appeared on The Urbanist.

In April, Community Transit issued its long-term plan to transition to a 100% zero-emissions fleet by 2044 — though that transition could be realized sooner if things go well. Implementation of the plan is expected to happen incrementally, as the bus fleet is replaced and expanded over the next two decades. 

As part of the plan, Community Transit conducted an assessment on ZEB technology to determine how many service blocks could reasonably be achieved with BEBs. That assessment found that by 2050, 73% of service blocks (essentially routes using 40-foot buses) could be filled with BEBs without resorting to challenging service solutions, such as pulling buses out of service for midday charging at base or deploying a second BEB to continue service. The estimated 27% gap in service blocks, which is mostly on routes using 60-foot buses, forced the agency to consider another zero-emission technology solution in the form of fuel cell buses. 

Under the agency’s transition plan, all future bus procurements will be zero-emissions. This portends a major rollout of ZEBs beginning in 2027 with battery-electric buses, and fuel cell buses entering service somewhere between 2029 and 2030. 

Modeling suggests that Community Transit could reach a 100% zero-emissions fleet as soon as 2038 with a mixed ZEB fleet consisting of 191 battery and 90 fuel cell buses. As part of service growth plans, the agency would need additional vehicles by 2050, increasing the BEB fleet to around 210.

Interim estimates for a 30% zero-emissions fleet by 2030 indicate that the agency would need 50 BEBs and 25 fuel cell buses, costing about $158 million in vehicle and support infrastructure. Meanwhile, the cost of the full conversion to a ZEB fleet by 2038 is estimated to reach $560 million.

Community Transit is taking a methodical approach to electrification by trying out multiple technology options before committing to a decarbonization path, unlike King County Metro and Sound Transit, who have gone all in on battery-electric buses. Metro’s northern neighbor appears to be giving fuel cell buses a real chance to meet electrification, financial, and service objectives.

Based upon agency assumptions, Community Transit expects that fuel cell technology will be a better fit for heavier duty routes which operate more service hours. That includes routes like the Swift bus rapid transit lines that operate at a high frequency, seven days a week, on long corridors with full daily spans of service.

Fuel cell buses have obvious operational benefits over conventional battery buses, such as higher fuel capacity faster refueling, and can operate in more extreme weather conditions, resulting in longer ranges and more daily potential use. Fast-charging solutions are increasingly available for BEBs, including en route wireless induction charging, but it still isn’t enough to meet the needs of most workhorse bus routes.

The hydrogen that powers fuel cell buses usually comes in a compressed gas form that is pumped into tanks onboard buses. When the fuel is released into fuel cells, oxygen from the air is pulled in, and the chemicals react through a catalytic process that creates electricity, plus water vapor (H₂O) as a byproduct. As part of this process, heat is also generated, which can be transferred to warm the occupied portions of the vehicle. Electricity charges onboard batteries and powers bus systems, including the engine. 

In new fuel cell buses by New Flyer Industries, vehicles operate at a higher efficiency through regenerative braking. This recovers kinetic energy from braking to recharge batteries.

However, some environmentalists criticize hydrogen fuel as a zero-emissions solution due to the emissions generated in its production and transport. 

Currently, most hydrogen in the United States is produced from methane (CH₄), also known as natural gas or fracked gas, through a process called steam-methane reforming that separates hydrogen atoms from carbon atoms. This “grey hydrogen” method creates harmful byproducts, such as particulate pollution and carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas for which ZEBs are intended to solve. Additionally, most hydrogen fuel is transported by trucks which usually aren’t zero-emissions vehicles, often over long distances, introducing another source of carbon emissions into the equation.

Nevertheless, production of fuel cell buses involves less embodied carbon than BEBs, where the manufacture of batteries to power the bus drive up the carbon footprint. Moreover, government programs are investing in green hydrogen solutions that transit agencies hope to deploy in the coming years. Under the green alternative, scientists aim to use renewable energy to harvest hydrogen via the electrolysis of water, which, if achievable at scale, would be much greener than using fracked gas as the input.

For now, Community Transit will be procuring conventional hydrogen fuel and trucking it from California to their base facilities in Snohomish County. But the agency intends to move toward green hydrogen in the future — and to use the least carbon-intensive hydrogen fuel available in the interim. 

“We are currently exploring long-term, sustainable solutions for establishing a hydrogen supply nearby,” Monica Spain, an agency spokesperson, told The Urbanist. “Being in the Pacific Northwest, we have a clean electrical grid, so we are uniquely positioned in this area to take advantage of that clean energy source.”

Initially, the BEB will have access to a cleaner source of energy since Community Transit facilities are powered by Snohomish County Public Utility District No. 1, which gets at least 96.5% of its electricity from clean power. 

In the next few months, both of Community Transit’s ZEBs will be deployed on various routes for testing and to evaluate performance. Riders trying to catch them may want to use an app like Pantograph to determine when and where they are in service at any given time, since they won’t necessarily be assigned exclusively to one or two routes. Community Transit hasn’t given specific dates on when they’ll go into service just yet, but the agency said that the BEB should start regular service sometime in the summer and the hydrogen fuel cell bus will follow sometime in the fall.

Both zero-emissions buses that Community Transit will be trialing are 40-foot low-floor vehicles. New Flyer manufactured the fuel cell bus whereas the BEB comes from Gillig. The yellow and blue paint jobs should set them strongly apart from the rest of the fleet, denoting them clearly as hydrogen and electric, respectively. 

In terms of range, Community Transit is hoping to get about 200 to 250 miles out of the fuel cell buses (New Flyer touts a range of up to 370 miles) while the agency is hoping to get around 150 miles on a single charge in the battery bus. Equivalent diesel-hybrid buses usually get 300 to 350 miles on a full tank. Testing out the new zero-emissions buses will help answer questions about range and reliability, and aid the agency in determining how they can best serve environmental and operational goals.

The post Community Transit Rolls Out Region’s First Hydrogen-Fueled Bus first appeared on The Urbanist.

This move, which could advance as soon as next month, comes after strong signals from leaders in the executive branch that they are interested in reducing hurdles to construction in areas of the city that currently allow apartment buildings. A move towards a more pro-housing approach, which so far has mostly manifested itself in the form of small, targeted upzones around Downtown and Belltown, comes as the Harrell Administration faces considerable pushback stemming from a reluctance to open up new areas of the city for denser growth, as part of the major update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan.

The standards for new buildings could come on the heels of an ambitious plan for emissions reductions in Seattle’s existing buildings, signed by Mayor Harrell late last year.

“We’ve heard from builders of homes, both affordable and market-rate, that there’s many things the city does that can make it harder to build our desperately needed housing,” Marco Lowe, Seattle’s Chief Operating Officer, told a city advisory board that oversees construction code updates this week. “We’re working on many different fronts, but one of the things we’ve heard is that that city energy code, when it first exceeded the state code, was a really necessary important step that led the way, but then over time as it’s become more and more efficient […] and this may be becoming something that we were hearing from building developers that was making it harder for projects to pencil.”

Lowe specifically mentioned a new requirement that at least 20% of a new building’s glazing be constructed out of high performance material, which usually comes in the form of triple glazing, along with the fact that some of the advanced mechanical systems that the city is poised to require are harder to maintain, and add significant cost on a per-unit basis.

Before being tapped to join the Harrell cabinet, Lowe worked as government affairs director at the Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish Counties, which has pushed for easing zoning restrictions and reducing red tape and fees on builders. Lowe’s pro-housing stands are familiar to anyone who has browsed his Twitter account, where he often openly questions the utility of the City’s Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) program, which requires builders in the city’s denser neighborhoods to include a certain number of on-site affordable units or pay a fee. Single-family homes are generally exempt from the fee.

At the construction code advisory board meeting, Lowe was joined by another Harrell cabinet member, Jessyn Farrell, the Director of the Office of Sustainability and the Environment, who also spoke in favor of making the change, while still leaving the door open for some Seattle-specific amendments that could get added in the next few weeks to retain specific provisions around energy efficiency. Farrell’s presence suggested that the City was ready to defend the environmental impact of a potential softening of its standards.

“We’ve really been a national leader and our code has been one of the key things that has actually pushed the state to adopt the most progressive state energy code across in the country,” Farrell said. “At the same time, we are in a deep housing crisis, and housing production is really challenged by rising construction costs, inflation, higher interest rates, and it’s had really profound impacts on a worsening housing crisis.”

Under the proposed changes, Seattle would adopt state standards except in the cases where Seattle’s 2018 code, the last one to be adopted, already exceeds those standards. The City doesn’t seem to be at risk of defying a long-standing city council resolution that requires Seattle’s energy code to be at least 20% more stringent than the national energy code.

Most of the people commenting at Thursday’s meeting were, unsurprisingly, developers and real estate professionals who were largely supportive of the change.

“The multifamily industry is more or less flat-lining right now,” testified Brian Runberg of Runberg Architecture. “Obviously, some of that’s due to interest rates. But there’s been other key factors that have been piling on for years in this industry, which has inherently higher risk, and lower margins.”

“The marginal benefits of ratcheting down Seattle’s energy code beyond the state code would be outweighed by the downsides caused by the costs that that will impose on multifamily housing developments,” Dan Bertolet of the Sightline Institute said in defense of the changes. “We all know that the single biggest source of climate pollution in our region is cars, and also that the best long-term solution we have for reducing carbon emissions is to build more housing in places with good options for transit, walking, and biking. Any cost added to development makes it less likely that housing will be built, and then less housing means higher average rents for everyone.”

There were a few skeptics in the (mostly virtual) room as well, with some climate hawks not fully convinced.

“We heard today that this policy would have a net benefit in terms of the level of housing being built, which we support, but we didn’t hear any serious cost-benefit analysis,” said Alice Lockhart of 350 Seattle, a climate advocacy group. “Before proceeding further, we really should have a non-anecdotal analysis of the increased climate emissions that would follow as well as the cost savings to developers and the expected effect on housing production.”

But it remains to be seen just how much pushback the proposal will receive from environmental groups concerned about walking back potential emissions reductions. Traditionally, Seattle has been much more eager to adopt policies around reducing building emissions than it has been to make moves around reducing transportation emissions, the city’s single biggest source.

The Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI) Construction Codes Advisory Board is planning to solicit additional public comment on the proposed changes at its next meeting on June 6, with a potential vote scheduled for two weeks later on June 20. In between now and then, work is being done to determine just what specific provisions in Seattle’s code should remain in place. After that, the proposal will head to the city council for approval.

“This is an opportunity to make sure that we’re balancing multiple priorities around efficiency, around housing production, and really threading the needle,” Farrell said. “This is a unique moment in time where we’re grappling with a really profound housing crisis, and predictability across different policymaking arenas and levels of government is really important.”

The post Seattle Floats Scaling Back Energy Code Changes to Cut Housing Costs first appeared on The Urbanist.

When Governor Jay Inslee announced the Blue Wind Supply Chain Collaborative alongside local industrial and port leaders in October, it was clear Washington State wanted offshore wind manufacturing jobs. What was less clear is if the state actually wanted to see the wind turbines spinning off its shores.

Washington is the last West Coast state or province to make a leap into offshore wind, but leaders are still hesitant to move fast on advancing projects. That’s because they share the concerns from coastal communities and tribes about impacts to ocean fisheries and harming wildlife. As they search for a just energy transition, a recent market analysis makes a compelling economic case that offshore wind can meet the high energy demand while aligning with the state’s ambitious climate goals.

“[T]here are important, unanswered questions about offshore wind in Washington specifically,” Governor Inslee wrote about the collaborative. “We need to better understand potential impacts to the ocean environment and fisheries. Treaty-reserved rights must be protected. The technology must also pencil out to be profitable, and there are substantial costs to transmit energy back to shore.”

The reason offshore wind could be key to Cascadia’s energy portfolio is because climate change is hurting the reliability of hydroelectric power that has traditionally been the region’s top power source. Drought conditions are reducing power output at dams, and extreme temperatures are contributing to higher energy demands from residents and businesses. Solutions like solar can help cover gaps, but it will take an energy portfolio of diverse renewable resources to meet the reliability and generation of hydropower. Without that mix, public utilities are left to buy energy on the open market to cover shortfalls — this is both expensive to ratepayers and has been an excuse to keep polluting fossil fuel power around.

It’s something that happened this year when low precipitation coincided with high energy loads in Seattle, triggering a surcharge as Seattle City Light bought more power than usual from other energy producers. To help make up for a $70 million deficit in its cash reserves, SCL instituted a 5% rate increase. It will show up on bills starting in the new year.  

As Seattle experiences record-breaking energy consumption, offshore wind would help diversify the energy portfolio and prevent utilities from costly responses in the future, according to Alla Weinstein, CEO of Trident Winds, a company pursuing an offshore wind project off the coast of the Olympic Peninsula.

“The state should definitely pay a lot of attention and [look] into developing this resource, because in the process it could save a lot of money for the ratepayers,” Weinstein said. “Because the state does not have to overbuild something else in order to meet its energy and climate goals.”

Hydropower accounts for 86% of SCL’s power mix, an energy portfolio that the utility must keep green under the state’s Clean Energy Transformation Act all while meeting increasing demand from their customers. It’s why SCL is looking to diversify its renewable energy with wind power leading new supply resources, according to recommendations in its latest integrated resources plan.

Offshore wind can take advantage of reliably strong coastal winds, providing more dependable power than inland wind turbines. Output tends to be strong in low solar months or when summer droughts sap hydroelectric generation, which currently makes up half of the state’s power.

Where offshore wind could fit into energy mixes

Last year, Trident Winds asked the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) for permission to lease a site for a floating offshore wind project in federal waters, located more than 40 miles off the coast of Grays Harbor, Washington. They are one of the two companies who filed a request with BOEM. 

Trident Wind’s proposed project aims to build, operate, and maintain a floating offshore wind farm with a capacity of around 2,000 megawatts. That’s enough energy to power 800,000 homes, according to the company. To move the project forward with government agencies, Weinstein commissioned a study — released publicly this November — to unpack the reliability of offshore wind along Washington’s coastline. 

That economic study, conducted by the firm Energy+Environmental Economics, showed offshore wind as a significant and cost-effective clean energy resource that helped balance Washington’s clean energy portfolio and climate policies. Without offshore wind, the evaluation showed that alternatives to meet the same level of system reliability would rely on out-of-state wind and could require building expensive combustion plants.

In addition to saving on construction costs, the study reveals that integrating offshore wind into the state’s energy mix has the potential to save ratepayers $5 billion in total, because of its robust generation in winter months. That’s when Washington has its highest energy demand.

Additionally, the cost to install offshore wind would be less than building more infrastructure for other clean energy technologies like solar, Weinstein said.

“So, the conclusion of the study was that between the resource and demand, and because of its availability on the west side of the state where you have the highest population, it could be a resource that the state would have a hard time to not have in its portfolio mix,” Weinstein told The Urbanist. “Offshore wind is very well-aligned with the demand profile of the state of Washington.” 

That alignment is something that Governor Jay Inslee’s office agrees with, but instead of immediately incorporating it into the state’s energy mix, the focus of his office has been on investing in the advancement of offshore wind technology and generating manufacturing jobs. 

In his October announcement, Inslee emphasized the regional tech sector’s ability to solve how offshore wind can operate in the Pacific Northwest’s deep waters. Unlike the East Coast, where turbines are typically fixed to foundations on the ocean floor, those off Washington’s deeper shores will rely on floating platforms.

“We’re developing new technology to have a submerged, buoyant platform. We’re designing it right here,” Inslee said. “To put this into context, what Louisiana has in the oil industry, we could have in offshore wind. And I’m less worried about wind spills than I am about oil spills in the Gulf.” 

Addressing challenges of offshore wind

Offshore wind adoption in Washington faces challenges beyond technological readiness, with a laundry list of concerns: potential impacts on commercial and tribal fisheries, the health of the marine ecosystem, and the cost to transmit energy to shore. Additionally, the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary covers 40% of Washington’s coast, limiting ocean space for renewable energy projects. 

“We have a lot of siting challenges in the state and have certainly heard from tribal nations in Washington, particularly located along the coast and coastal communities and fishing communities — a lot of concerns about what offshore wind could mean,” said Nora Hawkins, senior energy policy specialist at the Washington State Department of Commerce. “Those conversations haven’t yet started.” 

A couple of weeks after Inslee’s announcement, the Department of Commerce — the agency that oversees the state energy strategy — announced a new project to engage federally-recognized tribes, coastal communities, fishing and labor groups, and several other stakeholders about potential offshore wind development and its impact on culture and the environment.

The project’s primary goal is not technical development but rather the creation of a communication framework for rural communities. This is essential as these communities sometimes feel that their natural resource extraction efforts benefit larger metropolitan areas at their expense. 

This Washington coastal community engagement project coincides with growing resistance in Oregon, where electric utilities are considering offshore wind farms in two locations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. 

“[In Oregon], there was a lot of conversation about the need to ensure that that power serves coastal communities, which are often farther from sources of generation [and] potentially have less reliable power,” Hawkins told The Urbanist. “So, a desire to see if transmission is coming onshore to make sure that that electricity goes into local communities and doesn’t just go via a transmission line over their heads.” 

Coastal communities in Washington are already being creative to keep money made from renewable energy. In Grayland, the Coastal Community Action Program worked with General Electric nearly 10 years ago to install four turbines and sell its generated power to their local utility. Ever since, the action program has used revenue to support different services, like housing and job training in the Aberdeen area. But that may not be enough when it comes to a large-scale project. 

It’s why government workers say they want to understand the perspective from those who live along the coast and get ahead of potential problems before they jump behind a proposal.  

“[The project proposal] signals a shift in the use of ocean space essentially,” said Lisa Pfeiffer, economist with NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Sciences Center. “BOEM has been trying to minimize fishery impacts by avoiding areas where there’s conflict with lots of fisheries, but there’s still a lot of concern among the fishing industry.”

Pfeiffer is part of a team responsible for the conservation of fisheries, marine mammals, and habitats. They’ve been helping BOEM with leasing and permitting for potential offshore wind projects. She also accounts for the bigger picture, going beyond impacts to ratepayers, like implications that marine infrastructure could bring on fishery revenue and subsequently coastal town economies. 

From her perspective, offshore wind isn’t an urgent need just yet, and the Department of Commerce suggests that the practical integration of offshore wind into the energy mix may take at least 20 years. But project developers like Weinstein believe concurrent progress in infrastructure discussions, community engagement, and economic considerations help prevent extreme supply and demand imbalances that could come in the future.

“There’s only so many resources you can tap into,” Weinstein said. “And you have to look at that technology readiness and what would be now, what would be later, and how the state is going to address its electrical system needs and the climate objectives.”

The post Washington State Explores Offshore Wind While Neighbors Charge Ahead first appeared on The Urbanist.

When the Bullitt Center – the world’s first commercial building to achieve net-zero use of energy and water – opened in Seattle in 2013, it was an exceptional building.

Ten years later, it still is. 

“Sadly, it’s still rare,” said Deborah Sigler, education and outreach coordinator for the University of Washington’s Center for Integrated Design, which is housed in the Bullitt Center. “But I’m also happy it’s still on people’s radars. It’s just as relevant as it was 10 years ago.”

Sigler leads scores of tours of the six-story building on Madison Street each year, introducing architecture students, policymakers, and environmentalists to one of the few projects completely certified according to Living Building Challenge 2.0 standards. (Those standards have now evolved into Living Building Challenge 4.0.)

Jason McLennan, who created this system of seven “petals” that make up the Living Building Challenge, said the Bullitt Center stands out as the shining example of a truly sustainable building.

“We’re still using it as a teaching tool,” said McLennan, who serves on the board of the International Living Future Institute, which continues to promote living buildings. “A month ago I was in Australia, and we used it as a case study for a major conference there. So it continues to inspire and to be a benchmark.”

Unlike other green building standards such as LEED, the Living Building Challenge is founded on seven principles that a building must meet not only in the design and construction, but also in operation: net-zero energy use, net-zero water use, sustainable materials, site-specific design, and significant attention to health, equity, and beauty.

Lindsay Baker, the CEO of the International Living Future Institute, said that only about 40 buildings worldwide have fully met the ambitious standards of the Living Building Challenge. “We want these buildings to serve as beacons for change,” Baker said. “They need to be examples to the community that allow us to change policy.”

In fact, when Denis Hayes, Bullitt Foundation CEO and the visionary behind the Bullitt Center, first pushed the project forward, his team had to engage in many hours of negotiation and persuasion with Seattle Department of Construction & Inspections (SDCI) to create exceptions to existing code. SDCI went on to create a pilot project that would, among other things, allow for buildings that could collect and treat rainwater or process their own wastewater.

Sigler remembers a time she was giving a tour to architecture students a few years ago and one of them asked Hayes what was one thing they could do to make the biggest impact in terms of the climate impact of buildings. He said: “Change the code,” Sigler said.

SDCI’s Living Building Challenge Pilot incentive program was created to encourage developers to certify their buildings for at least partial certification of some of the “petals” of the Living Building Challenge. To receive additional height and floor-area-ratio allowances, a building needs to either meet the full challenge, or meet one of the core water, energy, or materials petal of the challenge, plus exceed Seattle Energy Code efficiency targets by more than 25 percent, as well as significantly reducing potable water needs by using non-potable water for toilet flushing and irrigation.

According to Jess Harris, green building program manager for SDCI, two projects have completed that certification – the Bullitt Center and Stone34, a mixed-use commercial building in Fremont which houses the headquarters of Brooks Running. In addition, a total of 13 projects are now in the pipeline to meet SDCI’s standards for its Living Building Challenge pilot, Harris said. The program is well on its way to meet a goal of 20 certifications by 2030. Harris said extending the pilot beyond 20 buildings would require action by the Seattle City Council.

Certification in SDCI’s program includes a one-year evaluation to determine if the building actively meets its net-zero goals. That’s also one of the most distinctive elements of the global Living Building Challenge that sets it apart from other green certifications such as LEED: building owners have to demonstrate that their project actively achieves its sustainability goals over a 12-month period. 

“Performance is really impacted by human behavior,” Baker said. “So we do ask for a full year of performance at the level people are aspiring to before we certify.”

Among the 13 buildings hoping to achieve SDCI’s partial Living Building Certification incentives is The Watershed Building in Fremont, a mixed-use green building that meets three of the seven Living Building petals. One of its most distinctive features are terraced bioswale and bioretention gardens that capture dirty runoff from the Aurora Bridge and Troll Avenue, filtering out toxic runoff.

“By the time the water actually gets to Lake Union, the particulates that have been killing the salmon that come off of the tires of cars are filtered out,” Sigler said.  

Other buildings in SDCI’s pilot include a five-story office building at 3524 Stone Way N, a 15-story, 112-unit apartment building at 303 Battery Street, a 7-story, 207-unit apartment building with retail at 2517 Eastlake Avenue E, and a 6-story, 24-unit apartment building at 6817 Greenwood Avenue N.

One completed project, Harris said, did not pass the one-year operational test, and faced a fine as a result. 

In the 10 years that the Bullitt Center has been in operation, architects, developers and building managers have had the opportunity to learn lessons from this project in the vanguard of net-zero buildings. 

Some aspects of the building exceeded expectations, Sigler said – most notably, energy use and generation. “When the building was designed, we had no idea at the time that we would be as net-positive as we are,” she said.

A white paper published in 2014 by UW’s Center for Integrated Design examined the lessons learned from the building, noting that “The Bullitt Center is an audacious and provocative experiment. It challenges expectations for how efficiently a modern office building can operate.” The white paper reiterates: The Bullitt Foundation chose to pursue the more rigorous Living Building Challenge (LBC) because it is performance-based. In selecting the LBC for green certification of the Bullitt Center, Denis Hayes said, “We no longer have time for good intentions, to check-off boxes that say we’ve done this and done that, but result in a building that doesn’t perform as it was designed to perform.”  While the systems designs were bold, most are performing very well. 

Sigler notes that the building’s rooftop solar panels generate around 244,000 kilowatt hours of energy per year, about what building designers expected. But the Bullitt Center sells much more power back to Seattle City Light than anticipated because of better-than-expected performance from the building’s climate-control features. 

Those include natural ventilation and passive cooling, automatically controlled exterior blinds that continually adjust based on the location of the sun, and a ground source heat pump that generates both heat and cooling through a series of pipes that reach to a depth of 400 feet below the building.

The Bullitt Center’s Energy Use Index (EUI) is currently around 13 kBTU per square foot (sf) year, better than the 16 kBTU/sf that project engineers PAE Consulting predicted, and much better than the current office building average in Seattle, which is around 50 kBTUS/sf year, Sigler said. 

Sigler acknowledges that the building’s overall energy use has also declined slightly since the pandemic, but this hasn’t been a huge factor in the net-positive energy balance. The building was largely empty during the height of COVID-19, but occupancy has now climbed back to 78%. Salley Anderson, CFO of the Bullitt Foundation, estimates that those clients have staff in their offices about 60% of the time on average.  

The water treatment system has also performed well. Potable water for drinking, showers, and dishwashers is first collected in a 56,000-gallon cistern and then filtered and treated with ultraviolet light and chlorine. The greywater waste from those sinks, showers and dishwashers is filtered and treated with UV-light and re-used to flush toilets. Excess greywater is pumped into an on-site wetlands garden.

What didn’t perform as well as expected, said Sigler, were the Bullitt Center’s composting toilets, which were replaced in 2021 with a vacuum-based toilet system. The composting toilet system, which had used foam-based flushing and 10 composters in the building’s basement, proved to be problematic. Fans were needed to run continuously to vent odors, trucks were required to haul the composted waste to a site 52 miles away (adding to the building’s carbon footprint) and the building’s maintenance personnel spent roughly half their total time dealing with issues related to the toilets.

The current vacuum-based system, which Sigler said cost about $1 million to retrofit the entire building, uses just 0.4 gallons per flush. The system grinds and separates out solids, and the remaining sewage is piped to King County Metro’s treatment facility.  

One of the projects that’s taken lessons from the Bullitt’s Center’s experience with its toilet system is the PAE Living Building in Portland, which is home to PAE Consulting, which also worked on the Bullitt Center. That building in Portland, which incorporates vacuum-based toilets, is the world’s first developer-led project that aims to achieve full Living Building Certification. The five-story office building was created to last 500 years and utilizes cross-laminated timber certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).

Cross-laminated technology wasn’t quite available when the Bullitt Center was designed by Miller Hull architects, said Sigler, noting that glue-laminated FSC timber was used exclusively in framing. The building was the first wood-timber office building constructed in Seattle since 1927.

During our tour of the building, we entered a small loading area in the basement with a few recycling bins and several bicycles. Sigler pointed out that the building has a walkability score of 99 out of 100 and was designed to be accessed by walking, cycling and transit. “I tell people you’re standing in an example of a 21st century parking garage,” she said. “They look around and chuckle because all they see are racks for bicycles – and that of course was very intentional.”

We then ascended the building’s famous “irresistible staircase,” a bright, wood-framed stairway that technically serves as a fire escape but was designed to attract people to prefer it rather than the building’s elevator, which primarily serves those with disabilities or who need extra assistance. 

At the end of our tour, we took in the expansive view from one of the office spaces – and even though it was a cloudy day, the light inside the building was palpable. “The organization of each floor plan is designed to meet the equity imperatives,” Sigler said, “so that everybody who works in this building gets equal access to daylight and natural ventilation.”

Sigler said that those who assume that a net-zero building like the Bullitt Center is either too expensive to be profitable or requires cutting edge technology are mistaken.

“The technology in this building is all off the shelf,” she said. “There’s nothing in this building that’s state of the art.” She noted that the $32 million price tag for the Bullitt Center was about 23% above the cost of a similar building built to code in 2013. “But much of that premium had to do with changing the codes to bring down the barriers to building the building in the first place,” she said.

Sigler said local and state governments will need to fund incentives and pass more restrictive energy code legislation in order to push developers to create truly green buildings like the Bullitt Center. Time is running out, she said.

“Do you want to live? Do you want to breathe clean air? Or do you want to cook yourself to death? Because that’s essentially what we’re doing if we continue to behave the way we’ve behaved for the last 150 years.”

The post Ten Years Later, the Bullitt Center Still Sets the Standard for Green Office Buildings first appeared on The Urbanist.

When asked about the causes of climate change, most may picture cars, coal mines, and power plants. But fewer consider the buildings we occupy. Yet, our buildings represent a sizable portion of planet-warming emissions.

Nationwide, residential and commercial buildings account for around 13% of annual planet-warming emissions. That’s more, even, than the agricultural sector. In places like Seattle, where we have a carbon-neutral utility and limited amounts of agriculture, buildings (counting the industrial sector) account for an even more significant slice of annual emissions: 37%. The buildings sector in Seattle is second only to the transportation sector, driven by the cars that clog our ill-designed streets.

This reality, and the fact that existing buildings are unlikely to make emissions-reducing upgrades until they have to, is putting the City of Seattle in the position to push building owners to cut emissions as quickly as possible. At the end of former Mayor Jenny Durkan’s term, she issued an executive order to the Office of Sustainability and Environment (OSE) mandating that they establish standards for all large buildings in the city to meet, which would force the building sector to cut carbon. Over the last two years, OSE’s buildings team has done just that. The process, however, has been anything but simple.

For those of us uninvolved in the nuances of policy development but nonetheless heavily invested in their outcomes, it seems simple enough for the city to set strict, ambitious standards that would force large buildings throughout the city to achieve carbon neutrality as quickly as humanly possible, whatever the financial obstacles may be, because the market must adapt to planetary realities, or perish, along with the rest of us.

In reality, city staff have been faced with the challenge of balancing feedback from stakeholders that represents building owners, labor unions, climate advocates, and others. Not only have these different segments contributed conflicting comments, disagreement exists inside some stakeholder groups.

OSE began engaging with the public as soon as then-Mayor Durkan submitted the Executive Order. Over the next year, OSE staff held two open house meetings, six meetings with a multi-talented technical advisory group, six meetings with an affordable housing advisory group led by the Housing Development Consortium, and an assortment of closed-door meetings with various stakeholders. With this input, OSE staff developed an initial draft of the policy, and then between late 2022 and the first half of 2023, they engaged stakeholders further.

The initial meetings clarified the scope of the policy but also revealed the tensions that would place OSE’s buildings team in the middle of a tug-of-war between building owners, labor unions, and environmental advocates.

The first piece of clarification that emerged was that to truly accomplish the goal stated in the executive order — reducing building emissions — the policy needs to go beyond a similar, statewide policy that targeted energy use within buildings. That’s exactly what the city team did.

Jonny Kocher, Carbon-Free Buildings Manager at Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), has been supporting environmental advocacy with on-going analysis of the building emissions performance standards policy as it has been developing. 

“The Washington State code will make sure that people aren’t doing inefficient electrification,” Kocher said. “But the Washington State building performance standard doesn’t talk about emissions, so it doesn’t get at the heart of the problem, which is climate.”

Since the Seattle policy explicitly targets building emissions, Kocher said “they actually complement each other really well.”

While this focus was met with immediate support from environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Climate Solutions, not everyone was ecstatic to see the city emphasizing building electrification. While MLK Labor passed a resolution in support of BEPS, other labor unions like UA Local 32 and LiUNA expressed concerns that, though the policy might create between 150 and 270 jobs every year, the focus on electrification would lead to a slow but steady loss of jobs for the gas pipefitters in their unions.

To remediate this impending loss, UA Local 32 and LiUNA urged the city to avoid prescribing the pathways that building owners should take to meet the emissions targets laid out in the policy. Moreover, they recommended that the city include in the policy reference to what they saw as decarbonization alternatives, specifically synthetics, biofuels, green hydrogen, and so-called “renewable natural gas.”

While some might think that when we replace fracked methane gas with “renewable” methane gas, that we can limit some of the associated hazards – including increased rates of childhood asthma among those raised in homes with gas-powered stoves, furnaces, and water heaters – that’s simply not the case. 

Deepa Sivarajan, the local policy manager for Seattle-based Climate Solutions, pointed to this problem. “We don’t think that renewable natural gas is a good solution for building decarbonization,” Sivarajan said. “Heat pumps are a really good solution for buildings on so many levels that using renewable natural gas in buildings just isn’t economically sound. And one of the other issues is that the indoor air pollution implications are exactly the same as fossil gas. If you are using a gas stove, renewable natural gas is methane just like fossil gas is, so you’re still not reducing the air pollution aspect.”

Regardless of these concerns, OSE Director Jessyn Farrell said during a press conference on June 8th that, for the policy to be legally defensible, the city can’t prescribe pathways for building owners. So, renewable natural gas remains an option despite the only differences between renewable and fossil methane being the way it is produced and collected.

So-called “renewable” methane is captured at capped landfills, livestock facilities, wastewater treatment facilities and other locations that don’t involve direct extraction from the ground. These processes supposedly reduce atmospheric carbon emissions by preventing gases from entering the atmosphere, but the irony of offsets awarded for these practices is that the gasses are nonetheless transported via pipelines into cities to be burned, resulting in emissions from use and from pipeline leaks.

While there seem to be many reasons not to allow methane gas to be a part of our building decarbonization agenda, that’s not to say climate advocates are calling for the people working in gas-associated jobs to be abandoned. There’s no justice in that. Instead, they argue it’s essential that we support those workers in finding new jobs that are appropriate for the carbon-free economy emerging in the city. This is something the unions themselves supported.

During the stakeholder engagement, UA Local 8 and LiUNA recognized that given the protracted timelines proposed by the policy, there is more than enough time for the City to develop and implement training programs that would help gas workers become a part of the clean energy transition by, for instance, becoming certified in the HVAC-refrigerant work associated with the heat pumps that represent a critical component of all the work that is to come.

The timelines proposed by OSE do certainly allow ample space for that training, but the slow roll out of the policy has been another point of contention on both ends of the spectrum.

In the initial draft of the legislation, the first compliance window would have began between 2027 and 2030 for the largest commercial buildings, those with gross areas covering more than 50,000 square feet, then slightly smaller commercial buildings with total floor areas between 20,000 and 50,000 square feet along with all residential buildings over 20,000 square feet would have their first compliance window between 2031 and 2035. 

This was an area that both commercial building owners and environmental advocates pushed hard on. Climate organizers were anxious to see the timeline accelerated because of the tight window we have to limit global warming, which requires that we eliminate half of global carbon emissions by 2030 in order to have even the slightest chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) – a world that we will glimpse in the coming years as the ensuing El Niño temporarily raises average global temperatures above that deadly level.

Despite these scientific realities, building owners are more concerned with their bottom lines. So, instead of recognizing the realities of climate change and stepping up to lead, they are doing everything they can to delay action and postpone timelines and fought often to weaken the bill.

In a letter to Mayor Bruce Harrell in March co-signed by the Downtown Seattle Association, NAIOPWA (the primary association representing commercial real estate), and the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, the cosigners outlined what they believe to be the most important actions that the city can take to ensure the vibrancy of Downtown Seattle. Among these recommendations, they urged the mayor to pause and roll back taxes and they encouraged the city not to enact the building emissions performance standard policy in the near future.

The city submitted to pressure from the building owners and delayed the starting timeline by a further three years. Now, under current policies, commercial building owners won’t have to hit their first performance targets until a 2031 to 2035 compliance window, the same first window as those for residential buildings. Under the currently proposed standards, commercial buildings over 20,000 square feet will need to achieve net-zero emissions by 2045, and similar sized residential buildings by 2050.

Sivarajan of Climate Solutions said these delays hurt the policy’s ability to be an effective climate mitigation strategy.

“We are really focused on trying to make sure that it is equitable, effective, and enforceable,” Sivarajan said. “We want to make sure the policy is bold enough to make these reductions. We know that it’s going to get us to net-zero, but we do want to see improvements in the short-term as well. That 2031 start date misses the Green New Deal goal of trying to get to zero emissions by 2030.”

Beyond just pushing to delay the initial compliance windows building owners have tried to extend the length of time they could emit planet-warming carbon. In a letter sent on behalf of downtown building owners to the OSE buildings team on April 12, building owners explicitly recommended that OSE “reduce final compliance target below 100% and/or extend final compliance timetable.” However, OSE has held firm to the 2045 and 2050 final compliance targets for net-zero.

Of course, not all building owners sought to weaken the policy. Affordable housing providers were quite eager to support the policy. “It’s important that the policy move forward, and it’s important that affordable housing providers and low-income tenants are supported with this policy being implemented, and we remain committed to finding solutions to making that happen,” says Patience Malaba, executive director of the Housing Development Consortium, a local association of affordable housing providers that convened an advisory task force around the policy.

Malaba made it clear that the affordable housing community was entirely supportive of the building emissions performance standards because they are collectively committed to achieving net-zero emissions across their respective portfolios. Their commitment stems from a recognition of two factors. First, the climate crisis is affecting and will continue to affect low-income people and people of color first and worst. Second, more efficient and less emitting buildings lead to better living conditions for residents through reduced indoor air pollution, improved heating and cooling, and more resiliency in the case of extreme weather events.

Dylan Plummer, the Senior Representative for Sierra Club’s Building Electrification Campaign, has seen the ample benefits that removing fossil-fueled appliances has both within and around the building. Plummer shared that removing gas-powered furnaces and water heaters reduces indoor and outdoor pollution, which cleans up the air for everyone in the city. But some of the bigger benefits come from installing in-unit heat pumps which, despite their name, both heat and cool.

Because it will encourage installing heat pumps, the emissions policy “helps to incentivize building owners to provide their tenants with access to cooling,” Plummer said, “which is incredibly important at this moment as we’re experiencing more and more days of extreme heat that are actually life-threatening in many cases.”

But whether the heat gets you beat or not, heat pumps have an undeniable benefit that few will balk at. Plummer said, “Heat pumps have such a high level of efficiency that we expect there to be long-term savings both for residents and building owners on their heating and cooling bills.”

Heat pumps also include air filtration systems that help filter out smoke during forest fire season, providing indoor comfort even as outdoor air quality drops. This climate adaptation that could become increasingly vital as the likelihood of major fire events climbs with rising temperatures and more frequent droughts.

These are all benefits that Patience Malaba and the affordable housing community are keenly aware of. Yet, even while affordable housing providers are supportive of this policy and the benefits buildings with net-zero emissions would provide to their tenants, Malaba made it clear that some concerns linger with her and the community that she advocates for, primarily finances. 

Affordable housing providers operate on thin margins, which means they have few resources to spare for the building upgrades OSE’s new policy will require.

To alleviate the financial pressure this would impose, the Housing Development Consortium’s advisory task force stated that OSE and the City should provide new sources of funding that affordable housing providers could tap into, and help them access funds from the state or federal government. A response to this concern is built directly into the policy, where any revenues generated through the policy will go towards supporting under-resourced buildings.

There are two potential ways the policy could produce revenue: an alternative compliance payment and fines for non-compliance.

The alternative compliance payment allows building owners to pay a fee based on the social cost of carbon as defined by the State during the first, 2031 to 2035, compliance window instead of decarbonizing their building. Building owners who take this option would pay around $100 per metric ton of carbon that they would be expected to produce during the full five years of the compliance window, and they would also be required to submit a building decarbonization plan that shows how they intend to comply in the future.

The fines, on the other hand, are intended as a penalty for noncompliance and could be levied during any of the compliance intervals if a building misses the targets for the given interval. These fees have been a subject of contention and constantly fluctuated throughout the drafting process. 

Given that if a building failed to comply with both the City’s emissions standards and the Washington State energy standards, the owners would be fined twice. With the state’s fine averaging out $2.50 per square foot of building area according to Climate Solution’s Sivarajan and the initial fine for the city’s standards sitting at $5 per square foot, the total fine for noncompliance on both standards would be $7.50 per square foot, which adds up quick for buildings 20,000 square feet and larger. Naturally, building owners were quick to push back on what they felt were punitive fines.

Yet, even in their initial form, environmental advocates were quick to point out that not only were the aggregate fines lower than what has been seen around the country – DC, for instance, has instituted a similar policy with noncompliance fees assessed at $10 per square foot – but beyond that, the fines were still likely too low to incentivize compliance over paying fines among commercial building owners.

Nonetheless, the city lowered the compliance fees first to $2.50 per square foot. But during the subsequent iteration, when they shrunk the number of five-year compliance windows from four to three for non-residential buildings, meaning that instead of having 20 years to reach net-zero, building owners would only have 15, which means faster decarbonization over a shorter period of time, they also raised the fees from $2.50 per square foot to $3.33 per square foot for non-residential buildings while keeping residential fines at $2.50. While this at face value is an increase in the fines, the reality is that – if a building or portfolio were to fail to comply during every single window – it averages out to be the same.

Whether this fee structure is sufficient to encourage compliance is something that Kocher and his colleagues at the RMI will be assessing in the coming weeks as the OSE wraps up their draft legislation and sends it out for review under the State Environmental Policy Act.

Once that review is completed, the policy will be forwarded to the City Council for deliberation and consideration. The council process will be the best time for residents to get involved and give feedback. While there are not yet any definitive dates or times for hearings, there will no doubt be several opportunities going forward over the coming months for you to get involved.

The Sierra Club, 350 Seattle, and Unite Here Local 8, who have all been involved in advocating for the policy, will start a canvassing campaign to raise awareness and get people prepped and ready to testify before City Council as they start their process later this year. Follow the Sierra Club Seattle Chapter and 350 Seattle for updates and opportunities to volunteer. The Urbanist will continue to track this legislation as it works its way through the process and implementation.

Since most of our buildings will be around for many decades to come, the future of our built environment is being determined by policies like these. So make sure to follow along and get involved.

The post Seattle Releases Plan to Curb Climate Pollution from Buildings first appeared on The Urbanist.

While these initial sales do not extend outside of California, they are precursors for the potential of wind energy off the Washington coast. Floating offshore platforms are a new technology that has found footing in Europe and Asia, but until now not the United States. Northwest seaports stand to benefit from growth in the technology as the region has expertise in the industry and port capacity to service the sector.

The Biden-Harris administration announced the sale as part of a goal to install 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy capacity by 2030. BOEM estimated the electricity produced by these sites could power a million and a half homes. Initial statements from the purchasing companies suggest the final installations could double that mark.

California’s position at the front of the line for West Coast wind farm development comes from the state’s attempt to aggressively wean itself from fossil fuels. The large population and recognized pollution issues have made California a leader in vehicle efficiency and solar energy development. In 2021, the state legislature ordered up a strategic plan for offshore wind by 2023, and looks to be setting some audacious goals.

The same pressure has not appeared in the Pacific Northwest due to the prevalence of hydroelectric power in Oregon (46% of the state’s energy production) and Washington (65%). But offshore wind will be coming north.

For Puget Sound ports, the California offshore wind leases “put into motion efforts to develop new clean energy sources that will help industries transition away from fossil fuels.” Northwest Seaport Alliance co-chairs Ryan Calkins and Don Meyer said when contacted via email. “As leaders in West Coast transmodal transportation and one of the world’s top hubs for maritime innovation and workforce, Puget Sound ports and local maritime industrial businesses would be natural partners to support California offshore wind with logistics, maintenance, and other services.”

Commissioner Calkins was bullish on the opportunities of offshore wind when he appeared on The Urbanist Podcast in November. In Washington, “we have a mature inland wind and inland solar industry,” he said. “I anticipate by the end of this decade we’ll have a handful of turbines off the Pacific coast of the United States. It will be cheaper than any form of fossil fuel before you know it.”

Puget Sound has an inherent ability to capitalize on this market, and Calkins points to the region’s specialty vessel designers, the large boat yards on a calm fjord, and the employee expertise in shipping and aerospace as attractions for the industry: “It would be my dream to point to a robust offshore wind industry in Seattle in ten years and say I was here at the outset.”

The post California Floating Wind Lease Bonanza is a Bellwether for West Coast Clean Energy first appeared on The Urbanist.

While many environmentalists appear to be celebrating the legislation as a promising step in the right direction, for urbanists, it’s hard not to lament the failure to grapple with the underlying car dependence and sprawling land use that undergirds American’s massive fossil fuel habit and heavy impact on the environment. As the proposed bill demonstrates, American climate and transportation policy continues to be all about cars.

Urbanist approach to climate action

An urbanist approach to climate action would rightly tackle sprawl and car dependence head on. It would entail an aggressive expansion of transit, a rapid buildout of energy-efficient sustainable social housing in transit-rich areas, pedestrianized green streets, protected bike routes, electric bike rebates, street trees, wider sidewalks, and low-emission zones to vastly improve quality of life in cities. It may sound like a pipedream to American ears, but climate-leading countries are already implementing much of this package.

Instead, here in America, we double down on our car-based lifestyle and keep the same sprawling land use and car-first planning, but with electric cars grafted on top of this destructive and inequitable system. Yes, the proposed bill will help on climate, but only so much. Other problems like the housing affordability crisis and the traffic safety crisis — nearly 40,000 Americans die in car crashes every year — remain unaddressed. Cleaner traffic jams may not offer much solace to frustrated commuters. And electric cars are cleaner, not 100% clean. Toxic chemicals from car tires will still threaten salmon runs and other ecosystems and contribute to the particulate pollution that causes asthma. Heavier battery-laden electric cars are likely to be even more deadly for pedestrians, and rising pedestrian fatalities are already a troubling national trend.

40% emissions reduction promised and “plausible”

Still in a time of political gridlock and apathy, it is commendable that Senate Democrats are on the verge of passing a climate bill — assuming Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the Democratic caucus’s other squeaky conservative wheel in the senate, goes along. Lowering energy costs in a time of high inflation is a good move, and it could repair some faith in the Democratic Party’s ability to get stuff done at the federal level.

“Both high energy costs, and the growing impacts of climate change, pose a significant burden to every American,” Senate Democrats wrote in their summary of the bill. “The historic investments included in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 will bring down consumer energy costs, increase American energy security, while substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

The sponsors go on to claim that the bill’s combined investments “would put the U.S. on a path to roughly 40% emissions reduction by 2030, and would represent the single biggest climate investment in U.S. history, by far.” Economic modelers at Rhodium Group said that the 40% figure was “plausible” after an initial review of the bill, Vox‘s Rebecca Leber reported.

“Without any new action from Congress or the president, economic modelers at Rhodium Group estimated that climate emissions are on track to be, by 2030, somewhere between 24 percent and 35 percent lower than they were in 2005, the peak year for carbon emissions,” Leber wrote. “That’s not a lot, even if it sounds like it: Biden had set a target under the Paris climate agreement of slashing those 2005 levels in half by the end of the decade.”

In other words, the climate bill still wouldn’t get us to our Paris climate agreement commitments and that 40% figure piggybacks on emissions reductions that are already expected. A 40% emissions reduction sounds hopeful, but it’s also important to note that electric car incentives do not have a stellar track record at propelling EVs to market dominance. California has had similar electric car rebates in place for a decade, but adoption was still slow, and the state has only reached the point where 12% of new car sales are EVs. And even once nearly all new car sales are electric, it still will take the better part of a decade for the car fleet to turn over as people gradually replace their aging vehicles.

The bill’s investments in solar and wind power, energy efficiency, and clean technology research are certainly wise and will pay dividends in emissions reductions. But, nonetheless, it’s still not enough to rectify the climate crisis or deliver for Americans the true mobility justice and choices they deserve.

The $2 trillion climate plan that President Biden campaigned on was much more ambitious than what the U.S. Senate is weighing now. The Senate’s $369 billion 10-year bill whittled down the House bill’s $555 billion for climate investments, but kept many of its programs at lesser levels. Gone are the public transit and high speed rail investments that headlined the president’s earlier climate vision. And the $300 million Biden had proposed for affordable housing creation in his earlier jobs plan also hasn’t found traction, with investment absent in it from both the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill passed late last year and the new Senate climate bill.

Despite everything it’s not, the Senate climate bill is still better than nothing. Below are the programs in the bill according to the summary provided by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and his caucus.

What programs are in the bill?

Lower Consumer Energy Costs

• $9 billion in consumer home energy rebate programs, focused on low-income consumers, to electrify home appliances and for energy efficient retrofits.
• 10 years of consumer tax credits to make homes energy efficient and run on clean energy, making heat pumps, rooftop solar, electric HVAC and water heaters more affordable.
• $4,000 consumer tax credit for lower/middle income individuals to buy used clean vehicles, and up to $7,500 tax credit to buy new clean vehicles.
• $1 billion grant program to make affordable housing more energy efficient.

American Energy Security and Domestic Manufacturing ($64.5 billion)

• Production tax credits to accelerate U.S. manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and critical minerals processing, estimated to invest $30 billion.
• $10 billion investment tax credit to build clean technology manufacturing facilities, like facilities that make electric vehicles, wind turbines and solar panels
• $500 million in the Defense Production Act for heat pumps and critical minerals processing
• $2 billion in grants to retool existing auto manufacturing facilities to manufacture clean vehicles, ensuring that auto manufacturing jobs stay in the communities that depend on them.
• Up to $20 billion in loans to build new clean vehicle manufacturing facilities across the country.
• $2 billion for National Labs to accelerate breakthrough energy research.

Decarbonizing the Economy ($72 billion+)

• Tax credits for clean sources of electricity and energy storage and roughly $30 billion in targeted grant and loan programs for states and electric utilities to accelerate the transition to clean electricity.
• Tax credits and grants for clean fuels and clean commercial vehicles to reduce emissions from all parts of the transportation sector.
• Grants and tax credits to reduce emissions from industrial manufacturing processes, including almost $6 billion for a new Advanced Industrial Facilities Deployment Program to reduce emissions from the largest industrial emitters like chemical, steel and cement plants.
• Over $9 billion for Federal procurement of American-made clean technologies to create a stable market for clean products, including $3 billion for the U.S. Postal Service to purchase zero-emission vehicles.
• $27 billion clean energy technology accelerator to support deployment of technologies to reduce emissions, especially in disadvantaged communities.
• A Methane Emissions Reduction Program to reduce the leaks from the production and distribution of natural gas.

Invest in Communities and Environmental Justice ($10 billion)

• The Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grants, funded at $3 billion, invest in community led projects in disadvantaged communities and community capacity building centers to address disproportionate environmental and public health harms related to pollution and climate change.
• The Neighborhood Access and Equity Grants, funded at $3 billion, support neighborhood equity, safety, and affordable transportation access with competitive grants to reconnect communities divided by existing infrastructure barriers, mitigate negative impacts of transportation facilities or construction projects on disadvantaged or underserved communities, and support equitable transportation planning and community engagement activities.
• Grants to Reduce Air Pollution at Ports, funded at $3 billion, support the purchase and installation of zero-emission equipment and technology at ports.
• $1 billion for clean heavy-duty vehicles, like school and transit buses and garbage trucks.
• Some of the previously mentioned programs that focus on disadvantaged and low-income communities are also important to environmental justice, like the technology accelerator and consumer home energy rebate programs. In addition, the many of the clean energy tax credits include either a bonus or set-aside structure to drive investments and economic development in disadvantaged communities.

Farmers, Forestland Owners and Resilient Rural Communities (~$30 billion)

• More than $20 billion to support climate-smart agriculture practices.
• $5 billion in grants to support healthy, fire resilient forests, forest conservation and urban tree planting.
• Tax credits and grants to support the domestic production of biofuels, and to build the infrastructure needed for sustainable aviation fuel and other biofuels.
• $2.6 billion in grants to conserve and restore coastal habitats and protect communities that depend on those habitats.

The post Manchin-Approved Climate Bill Focuses on Electric Car Rebates and Ignores Transit, Walking, and Biking first appeared on The Urbanist.

100 years ago, the land use code was as thick as a children’s book. It was simple enough that out-of-town developers like John Wallingford, L.H. Griffith & E. Blewitt, James Moore, and many others moved to the city to build anything from kit craftsmen bungalows to mid-rise apartments without thick packets seeking the city’s approval. This allowed for speedy housing delivery to match the city’s robust job and population growth.

But today, Seattle’s official land use code is 1,400 pages long. To read it cover to cover is the same as reading the Holy Bible from Genesis to Revelations, while tacking on another 200 pages just to call it even. Charles Darwin explained how all life on Earth came to be in just 502 pages, yet we can’t even describe a desired building in Seattle’s land use code with a book three times as thick. It has become a lesson in urban micromanagement, a lesson that ends with housing shortages, soaring costs, segregation, and unequal development practices that often pick on the poor and disadvantaged. 

Seattle’s land use code makes ugly buildings

Design is subjective and, in my estimation, pointless to argue about in a housing crisis, but for those architectural critics out there, the land use code is what makes buildings look weird and wonky. Too many requirements for setbacks, modulations, and floor area limitations dictate what all our structures look like.

The zoning code is so micromanaged it blankets every lot like a straight jacket outlining what a building can be. In the thousands of pages and years of revisions, planners have calculated how much area matches the height of a zone and then added ticky-tacky setbacks and modulation requirements to get developers to “commit” to more expensive buildings. A commitment that trickles down to higher rents and home prices.

If this is what we want our buildings to look like, then great, the planners have mastered it. But something tells me this is a bluff. Planners set the stage for the wonkiest shape possible and force applicants to ask for code changes. This comes with an adversarial tone from the city’s Design Review Boards, who ask for development tradeoffs or are skeptical of the request which just puts all our vital multifamily housing and the Mandatory Housing Affordability funding contributions they come with on trial.

Streamlining for sustainability

Seattle’s desire for carbon neutrality and sustainability is well documented. Seattle City Light offers 100% clean energy, and with the city mandating bicycle commuter facilities, switching to electric vehicles, and expanding the robust energy code to reduce the impact on new construction, this shows Seattle’s commitment to sustainability. Architects have been pushing for mass timber construction to replace the embodied carbon that comes from building with concrete and steel.

It’s a no brainer since wood sequesters carbon and concrete or steel exhaust it in production. But wood buildings have limitations and Seattle’s land use code makes it next to impossible to choose anything over concrete or steel. Developments seeking timber die on the drawing boards because of Seattle’s land use restrictions.

Timber buildings prefer to be simple and beautiful. With wonky setbacks, modulations, and floor area limitations, a simple box is not possible to build. Every step is another column and another reason to switch to concrete. If the city is serious about its goals, it’s time to get real on what that land use code is doing to add embodied carbon emissions every time something is built.

Passive House construction is a method of building that reduces energy use and makes buildings healthier and occupants happier. But like timber, passive house construction prefers simplicity. The fewer ins and outs, the better. Every step back is another surface, another chance for air or heat leakage. Like timber, many goals for passive house construction die during feasibility or design when the land use code just makes it next to impossible to achieve.

What kind of city makes you commit to embodied carbon? To do away with this we must rethink the whole code from the lens of sustainability. Eleven years ago Brussels updated their code so that all new buildings met passive house standards.

Speeding up housing

Another problem with thickening the land use code into an encyclopedia is long review cycles. Even the simplest building proposals seeking no variances must document their compliance in a thick set of plans before they can pursue a construction permit. Planning departments are stacked to the brim with mountains of other problems ranging from displacement protections, zoning changes, transportation plans, and other building permit applications.  

Spending time reviewing a building from the lens of self-imposed land use micromanagement seems like a misallocation of time. And, since every building is now an affordable housing project through the city’s Mandatory Housing Affordability program, we don’t have time to waste. Holding up homes and millions of dollars to build affordable homes seems like a step backwards for what this city needs and what City Hall is striving for.

Oh, did I mention that timber buildings also go up faster than concrete and steel ones?

The new code we need

The solutions we need today are more in line with the solutions we had in the past. From the day the Empire State Building’s land was acquired until the doors first opened only took 600 days. This included fifteen redesigns, permitting and construction timelines. Today, it takes over 800 days in Seattle just to get to construction and have shovels hit the ground. 500 days of that is stuck in land use review. This should not come as a surprise considering there are hundreds of pages to thumb through just to make sure a building complies. This problem is self-inflicted.

The city’s planning department should be taking hundreds of pages out of the land use code every year. Start with the lowest hanging fruit, things like parking requirements, loading berths, and other wonky silliness. Then move to bigger things like setbacks, modulations, transparency requirements, and streamline the whole thing down.

We want beautiful buildings, right? Then legalize them again. Eliminate all the silly nonsense about setbacks, modulations, ground floor standards, and upper floor limits. Then just define what a building height shall be and how much area you can build. Simple boxes are beautiful once they’re detailed and articulated. It also turns out they’re the best thing for sustainability too. Let’s encourage the buildings that deliver homes and sustainability. Let’s cut the red tape of process and become a more equitable, sustainable and beautiful city. We don’t need public input veto points (processes which are dominated by White homeowners) for every little thing. We need cities that meet our environmental and housing goals and that don’t trip ourselves up in the process.

The post To Meet Housing and Sustainability Goals, Seattle Must Streamline Land Use Code first appeared on The Urbanist.