Paterson: Grants to Spur Clean Energy Jobs

Association of Energy Engineers

New York Chapter www.aeeny.org

May 2009 Newsletter Part 1

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Paterson: Grants to Spur Clean Energy Jobs

By Michael Gormley, AP Writer, Newsday, May 21 09

ALBANY - Gov. David Paterson says state grants will leverage $95 million in federal economic stimulus funds to create as many as 400 research jobs for clean energy projects statewide.
The stimulus money and more than $10 million in state grants will provide funds for projects at Columbia University, Cornell University, General Electric Global Research, the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island.
The grants will bring together top scientists in fields ranging from solar energy and electricity storage to materials sciences, biofuels, advanced nuclear systems, and reducing carbon emissions.
The goal will be major discoveries for a high-tech industry.
The money will be used to hire researchers and support staff and will fund those jobs for five years.
At Cornell in Ithaca, for example, the $1.6 million state grant will provide a total of $25 million and fund about 30 researchers. As discoveries are made and research "matures," more jobs are expected that will spin off an estimated 100 jobs in the community, according to a Cornell researcher.
Deputy Secretary for Energy Paul DeCotis said New York's five centers were the second most awarded to any state. He said the competitive bids were secured in part because of the state's commitment of about 10 percent in matching funds and the clean energy plans and projects under way through the Paterson administration.
Three of the five awards are for energy storage technology research, a high-tech field seeking to store massive amounts of power for cars, homes and other common uses. That fits with the state's Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium, called NY BEST.
Columbia, General Electric Global Research in Schenectady County and Stony Brook university center will each get more than $15 million, while Brookhaven will get $25 million.

Current NY Chapter AEE Sponsors:

The New York Chapter of AEE would like to thank our corporate sponsors who help underwrite our activities. Please take a moment to visit their websites and learn more about them:

§ Duane Morris LLP

§ Constellation Energy

§ Innoventive Power

§ Association for Energy Affordability

§ R3 Energy Management

If you or your firm is interested in sponsoring the New York Chapter of AEE, please contact Jeremy Metz at .

The Superintendents Technical Association (aka the Supers Club) is

the first technical society of multifamily building maintenance

personnel. For free e-mail edition of monthly newsletter, visit our Web

site: www.nycSTA.org or ask

Dick Koral, Secretary

NY Chapter Association of Energy Engineer
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Join us in our annual event celebrating New York colleagues' outstanding achievements…….. Socializing, fine food and good spirits in elegant surroundings
Seating limited - Reservations required.
Where: Tavern on the Green
Enter Central Park at Central Park West & W 67th St.
Paid parking is available at the Tavern (tavernonthegreen.com

When: Tuesday, June 16th, 2009, 6 - 9:30pm
DEADLINE for RECEIPT of mail-in reservations is JUNE 4th.

Your Name (please PRINT) ______
E-Mail Address: ______@______
Phone: ______
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Please Clearly Print Names of Attendees

PLEASE RETURN THE COMPLETED FORM WITH PAYMENT TO:

NY Chapter AEE c/o Energy Consulting Services Inc
351 Kent Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11211
Mail-in payment by check only, to "NY Chapter AEE."

For online reservations, see bottom of announcement or AEE-NY website.

The tab: ๲ for chapter members, for non-members
Tables of 10 are
Open wine and beer bar, cocktail appetizers, and 3-course dinner
Keynote: Francis Murray, President, NYSERDA
2008 Honorees
Energy Manager of the Year: John Bartlik, P.E. (NYU Langone Medical Center)
Energy Project: Red Hook Fairway Market CHP Project
Energy Engineer of the Year: Theo Breitenstein (EMACX Systems)
Renewable Energy Project: Bronx Brix PV Project
Corporate Energy Management: Mount Sinai Medical Center

1) Online Reservations
Online Reservations available here (click here) [http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102584591929&amps=142&ampe=001Zi7SkuQuxOGuKozGrSrFDzYMsSDwHmHe9Cvk56n1TTZ-X5_cUwjBPhVAuq2Llk8bESNgDeptjOFq9oSv4EsjmlpfJZFUVL6B2ih34vw606GomircYOnXpfYH6jFxs8_pS_A69bor7XoeLNtjk8nXFg==]
Note additional (nominal) processing fees apply to on-line purchases.
Or
2) Mail-in Reservation Form below by June 4 check payable to “NY Chapter AEE"
Asit Patel, 718-292-6733 x-205
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Association of Energy Engineers New York Chapter
2009 JUNE AWARDS GALA - MAIL-IN RESERVATION FORM
The New York Chapter of Association of Energy Engineers is holding its 22nd Annual
Gala / Awards celebration on June 16, 2009. The Gala begins at 6:00pm.
DEADLINE for RECEIPT of mail-in reservations is JUNE 4th.
Your Name (please PRINT) ______
E-Mail Address: ______@______
Phone: ______
Company Name: ______
Total Number of Reservations: ______
Please Clearly Print Names of Attendees
PLEASE RETURN THE COMPLETED FORM WITH PAYMENT TO:
NY Chapter AEE c/o Energy Consulting Services Inc
351 Kent Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11211
Mail-in payment by check only, to “NY Chapter AEE."
Association of Energy Engineers, New York Chapter | www.aeeny.org

New ASHRAE Standard Guides Designers in Moisture Control Measures

Guidance on how to best design buildings with adequate moisture control features is contained in ANSI/ASHRAE 160: Criteria for Moisture Design Analysis in Buildings. The standard introduces criteria to handle rain, wind, and other exterior moisture weather loads. The cost is $39 ($33 for ASHRAE members). To order, visit www.ashrae.org/bookstore.

Drop in CO2 in U.S. and Power Use in China - for Now

By Andrew C. Revkin, NYTimes , May 21 09

Researchers at Stanford University say blazing growth in the generation of electricity in China ended last year as the global recession struck. (Data collected by Ricard Morse and He Gang, Program on Energy and Sustainable Development Stanford University. Source: China National Bureau of Statistics)

Not surprisingly, given the depth of the recession, emissions of carbon dioxide from fuel burning in the United States declined 2.8 percent last year, the biggest annual drop since the early 1980’s, according to a preliminary estimate released by the Energy Department on Wednesday.

The drop parallels a sharp decline in the amount of electricity being generated in China, tracked by researchers at Stanford University led by Richard Morse. I wrote about their initial findings in January, and the decline is holding in their latest results. For years electricity generation there grew at a rapid clip, reflected in a building boom for power plants. Presumably declines in coal burning and emissions will now follow (there is a lag between power data and emissions data). Many experts on China caution that most sources of data there should come with fat error bars, given past instances in which official estimates of activities ranging from coal extraction to fish catches proved to be way off.

Other specialists focusing on energy and the economy warn that the drops are almost surely temporary and should not be a source of comfort for countries grappling with ways to curb emissions while fostering prosperity.

There may already be signs of an uptick in China’s energy thirst. Platts is reporting today that China consumed 31.47 million metric tons of oil in April, up 4 percent from the same month last year. In a news release, Dave Ernsberger, senior editorial director for Asia at Platts, said this could mean that “the first seedlings of a broad stabilization and recovery in oil demand are starting to poke through around the world.”

Ecological Intelligence

By Daniel Goleman (Author of Emotional Intelligence, Working with and Social Intelligence.)

Ecologists tell us that natural systems operate on multiple scales. At the macro level there are global biogeochemical cycles, like that for the flow of carbon, where shifts in the ratios of elements can be measured not just over the years but over centuries and geologic ages. The ecosystem of a forest balances the entwined interplay of plant, animal, and insect species, down to the bacteria in soil, each finding an ecological niche to exploit, their genes evolving together. At the micro level cycles run their course on a scale of millimeters or microns, in just seconds.
How we perceive and understand all this makes the crucial difference. "The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way," wrote the poet William Blake two centuries ago. "Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees."

…Ecological intelligence allows us to comprehend systems in all their complexity, as well as the interplay between the natural and man-made worlds. But that understanding demands a vast store of knowledge, one so huge that no single brain can store it all. Each one of us needs the help of others to navigate the complexities of ecological intelligence. We need to collaborate.

Psychologists conventionally view intelligence as residing within an individual. But the ecological abilities we need in order to survive today must be a collective intelligence, one that we learn and master as a species, and that resides in a distributed fashion among far-flung networks of people. The challenges we face are too varied, too subtle, and too complicated to be understood and overcome by a single person; their recognition and solution require intense efforts by a vastly diverse range of experts, businesspeople, activists — by all of us. As a group we need to learn what dangers we face, what their causes are, and how to render them harmless, on the one hand, and, on the other, to see the new opportunities these solutions offer — and we need the collective determination to do all this.

Evolutionary anthropologists recognize the cognitive abilities required for shared intelligence as a distinctly human ability, one that has been crucial to helping our species survive its earliest phases. The most recent addition to the human brain includes our circuitry for social intelligence, which allowed early humans to use complex collaboration to hunt, parent, and survive. Today we need to make the most of these same capacities for sharing cognition to survive a new set of challenges to our survival.

A collective, distributed intelligence spreads awareness, whether among friends or family, within a company, or through an entire culture. Whenever one person grasps part of this complex web of cause and effect and tells others, that insight becomes part of the group memory, to be called on as needed by any single member. Such shared intelligence grows through the contributions of individuals who advance that understanding and spread it among the rest of us. And so we need scouts, explorers who alert us to ecological truths we have either lost touch with or newly discover.

Large organizations embody such a distributed intelligence. In a hospital a lab technician does one set of jobs well, a surgical nurse another, and a radiologist still another; coordinating all these skills and knowledge allows patients to receive sound care. In a company the sales, marketing, finance, and strategic planning departments each represent unique expertise, the parts operating as a whole via a coordinated, shared understanding.

The shared nature of ecological intelligence makes it synergistic with social intelligence, which gives us the capacity to coordinate and harmonize our efforts. The art of working together effectively, as mastered by a star performing team, combines abilities like empathy and perspective taking, candor and cooperation, to create person-to-person links that let information gain added value as it travels. Collaboration and the exchange of information are vital to amassing the essential ecological insights and necessary database that allow us to act for the greater good.

The way insects swarm suggests another sense in which ecological intelligence can be distributed among us. In an ant colony no single ant grasps the big picture or leads the other ants (the queen just lays eggs); instead each ant follows simple rules of thumb that work together in countless ways to achieve self-organizing goals. Ants find the shortest route to a food source with simple hardwired rules such as following the strongest pheromone trail. Swarm intelligence allows a larger goal to be met by having large numbers of actors follow simple principles. None of the actors needs to direct the group's efforts to achieve the overall goal, nor is there any need for a centralized director.

When it comes to our collective ecological goals, the swarm rules might boil down to:

1. Know your impacts.

2. Favor improvements.

3. Share what you learn.

Such a swarm intelligence would result in an ongoing upgrade to our ecological intelligence through mindfulness of the true consequences of what we do and buy, the resolve to change for the better, and the spreading of what we know so others can do the same. If each of us in the human swarm follows those three simple rules, then together we might create a force that improves our human systems. No one of us needs to have a master plan or grasp all the essential knowledge. All of us will be pushing toward a continuous improvement of the human impact on nature.

Signs of the dawning of this shift in collective consciousness are amply visible globally, from executive teams working to make their companies' operations more sustainable to neighborhood activists distributing reusable cloth shopping bags to replace plastic ones — wherever people are engaged in creating a way of interacting with nature that transforms our propensities for short-term trade-offs into a long-term, saner relationship. High-profile investigations into the innumerable dangers human activity poses to our planet's ecosystems, like the growing study of global warming, are a bare beginning. Such efforts help raise our sense of urgency. But we can"t stop there. We need to gather the on-the-ground, detailed, and sophisticated data that can guide our actions. That takes a thorough and ongoing analysis, determined discipline — and the pursuit of ecological intelligence.

From the book Ecological Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, published by Broadway Books, an imprint of The Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Reprinted with permission.