My Last Long-Distance Car Trip

At least I hope it is my last one. I have made a few long-distance trips by car in my life. The first few were a lot of fun. I was seeing the country for the first time. But after crisscrossing Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma a few times, I would honestly rather have a root canal than have to do it again - especially when it means 25 hours on the road with three impatient kids in the car.

Things have changed quite a bit since my last trip, though. When I was in college, my first long distance road trip took me from College Station, Texas to Gaspé, Quebec (2,600 miles) and back. My most recent long-distance trip, in 2005, had taken me 1,150 miles from Northern Oklahoma to Montana (twice). This time, I drove from Montana to North Texas (1430 miles). For reference, New York to Los Angeles is about 2,800 miles. Here are my observations.

When we left Montana, I noticed that traffic was very light. That is unusual for Montana in the summer, because a lot of traffic passes through Billings on I-90 headed to Yellowstone National Park. The road is usually packed with RVs, but I was well into Wyoming before I saw the first RV. In fact, in the first 300 miles of driving, I saw only one RV on the road. This theme was consistent throughout the trip: Light traffic, and very few RVs. My wife commented that high gas prices had really done a number on the traffic. I told her that I thought an era had passed and that going forward we would start looking at personal mobility in a different manner.

I was towing a packed 4′ x 8′ U-Haul Cargo Trailer behind a Ford Escape, and I was pretty concerned about the impact on fuel efficiency. So I started out driving about 60 miles an hour, both to conserve fuel and because the trailer behind me was fairly heavy. I maintained my discipline throughout the first day, and I kept track of my gas mileage. With the trailer, and driving up and down some fairly steep hills, I managed about 22 mpg on that first day. According to the EPA, that particular model should get about 24 mpg on the highway. So, I figured that wasn’t too bad, considering there were five people in the car, and a heavy trailer behind me. I don’t know what fuel efficiency the vehicle normally gets, as this was my first time to drive it. This is my wife’s car. (As for me, since I will be in Europe half of the time, I don’t intend to get a car.)

I couldn’t help but reflect upon how desolate most of Wyoming is. We drove down a very empty I-25, which runs well east of the Rocky Mountains. It is scenic, but towns are few and far between. The soil is thin, and there isn’t a lot of water. Life there is probably going to become very hard as energy prices continue to escalate. In fact, a recent story in the New York Times identified rural Wyoming as one of the areas hardest hit by high gasoline prices. It made me think of Jim Kunstler’s prediction that areas like this are likely to be abandoned in a peak oil world.

I noticed as I made my way down Wyoming that my fuel efficiency was dropping. I wasn’t quite sure why, unless my elevation was changing and that was having an impact. I had started out at about 23 mpg, but then by the time I got into southern Wyoming, it had dropped to 21 mpg. It would drop further to 20 mpg as we turned east and traveled across Nebraska. It struck me that I could be getting some ethanol, but I tried to avoid the pumps that indicated that there was ethanol in the gasoline.

As I entered Nebraska, my thoughts turned to corn and ethanol. You enter Ogallala country right away when you enter Nebraska on I-80 from the west, and of course the depletion of the Ogallala aquifer has long been cited as a threat to agriculture in large parts of the Midwest. As I passed acre upon acre of corn being irrigated by drawing down the aquifer - now being spurred by misguided ethanol mandates - I couldn’t help but think about what the future holds for the area if the aquifer continues to deplete. I talked to my daughter a little bit about this, explaining to her the role of the aquifer in making corn production possible in that part of Nebraska. This would be one of those normally unaddressed negative externalities we talk about when discussing ethanol production from corn.

Regardless of your opinion on ethanol, Nebraska is one of the most energy intensive states in which to produce ethanol due to the irrigation requirements. In fact, in the USDA’s various analyses of corn ethanol energy inputs, Nebraska has consistently had the highest energy inputs of the nine Midwest states they examined. For a relative comparison, see The Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol; Table 4. (Note that while the energy inputs themselves may have declined over time, Nebraska will remain as the high energy producer).

Further, the USDA averaged all of the energy inputs across the nine states when they reported the energy balance. So the next time someone tells you about the energy balance of corn ethanol, remember - Nebraska is worse. From that report, the energy inputs for Nebraska corn were 54% higher than those of Wisconsin. It is certainly not out of the question that the net energy from ethanol produced in a typical Nebraska ethanol plant and shipped to Texas or California may be negative.

We finally got to our stopping point for the night in Lexington, Nebraska. We were staying at a hotel right off of I-80, and there were few cars in the parking lot. We had smelled the hog farms for quite a while, and we could smell them from there as well. If you have never smelled a large hog operation, let’s just say it isn’t pleasant. In fact, I doubt you could get away with building a factory anywhere with that kind of smell coming out of it.

Day 2, we were up early and off. I made a strategic decision on this day that is contrary to my typical obsessive desire to conserve energy. We had spent 13 hours in the car the previous day. Google Maps had indicated 10 hours and 39 minutes. While my wife and I can deal with that OK, that’s cruel and unusual punishment for three kids. So I decided to bump the speed up to 70 mph for the drive today. I estimated that this would get us to our new home in Texas in 11 hours. After driving for the day, I calculated that it also had the impact of dropping our fuel efficiency down to 18 mpg.

The second strategic decision was to take a shortcut. We did not have a map, but at the hotel I had calculated that I could save about 20 miles by leaving I-80 at its most southerly point in Nebraska and cutting across to Kansas on U.S. 183. At first this seemed like a great decision. Traffic was very light, and the road was pretty straight. However, after entering Kansas, we suddenly encountered a construction worker standing in the road with a stop sign.

Twenty minutes later, my short cut wasn’t looking like such a good idea. We were just parked in the middle of nowhere - no traffic in sight. I told the family that maybe some joker was pulling a prank to see how long he could hold up traffic. But after 20 minutes, we were allowed to go. And the part that I could never understand is that we drove 4 miles before coming up on any signs whatsoever of construction - and then it was a spot of less than 100 feet. Why they had to back up traffic four miles away from that spot was lost on me.

But that wasn’t the end of our delays on the shortcut. I remembered the town of Phillipsburg, Kansas from one of my previous trips. It stood out in my mind for three reasons. First, when I was driving from Oklahoma, it had the first gas station I had encountered for many miles. I was in danger of running out of gas when I finally pulled in there. Second, there is a train track that crosses Highway 183, and my previous time through the train had blocked traffic for 15 minutes. Third, there is a rusting refinery on the north end of town that had been owned by a farmer’s co-op until it was shut down in the 80’s.

So, as we pulled into town, there were the rusting remnants of the refinery. And up ahead, I could see the crossing barrier on the train tracks descending. So we pulled up, parked, and watched car after car of (ADM) ethanol go past. And just as the train was about to clear the tracks, it reversed direction. We went through this routine several times. The train would pull up, almost clear the tracks, and reverse direction. I kidded that the ethanol producers must have known I was coming. Finally, after another 20 minutes of delays, the tracks were cleared and we proceeded toward I-70. I had always heard that a train could only delay traffic for five minutes in case there was a medical emergency and an ambulance had to get through. Given our 20 minute delay, this may be just urban legend. But I won’t voluntarily travel through Phillipsburg, Kansas again.

Finally, we got to I-70 in Kansas. Wouldn’t you know it? The interstate was down to one lane, and traffic was creeping along at 40 mph. This ended up costing us another 15 minutes or so, and my shortcut ultimately ended up costing us almost an hour.

Traveling along I-70 toward Salina, Kansas, I started to see a lot of wind turbines. I mean a lot. There may have been more wind turbines concentrated together than I have ever seen before. I looked it up when I got a chance, and it turns out that this was the Smoky Hills Wind Farm, which is ultimately a 250 megawatt project. You can see a map of the various wind projects in Kansas here; there are a lot.

At Salina, we finally turned south toward Wichita. I had chosen our route to avoid cities, and the only ones we would pass through were Wichita and Oklahoma City. Wichita was actually a breeze, although we did encounter our only road tolls of the trip south of Wichita. The trip across the rest of Kansas and Oklahoma down I-35 was uneventful, although I did have one close call in traffic outside of Oklahoma City when a semi tried to move over on top of us. One thing I did note in Oklahoma is that I saw fields that had been planted in nothing but wheat as far back as I can remember, but they were now planted in corn as far as the eye could see.

We arrived pretty late - about 9:30 p.m. - at our new home in North Texas. It had taken us 12 hours on the second day (thanks to my “shortcut”) for a total of 25 hours in two days. It was a long grind, and I hope to never have to repeat it. Despite traveling without a map or a navigation system, we never got lost, nor took any wrong turns.

Gas prices had varied during the trip. The most we paid for gasoline was $4.08/gal at a truck stop in Nebraska. Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska tended to all have gasoline above $4.00. Gasoline in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas was generally below $4. The cheapest price we paid for gas was $3.78 at a Flying J station in Ardmore, Oklahoma.

Reflecting back on the trip, I firmly believe that we are undergoing a permanent shift in traffic patterns. Those summer RV trips are going to become increasingly reserved for the wealthy, and people are going to think twice about taking long road trips to vacation destinations. The roads are going to be less crowded, and the cars on them will be smaller. The world is going to seem a little bit bigger to future generations.

Mumbai’s Deadly Trains

Given my recent trip to Mumbai - in which I took a trip on a very packed train - this story caught my attention:

Mumbai’s deadly trains claim a dozen daily

MUMBAI (AFP) - The death toll on Mumbai’s railways averages a dozen a day — more than a whole year on New York’s subway system, which has an average annual accidental death rate of eight.

In the first four months of this year, 1,146 commuters died and 1,395 were injured, railway police said.

Many of the victims had been hanging on the side of the packed trains, unable even to wedge themselves inside, and fell to their deaths after losing their grip, they said.

Last year’s total toll was 3,997 deaths and 4,307 injuries.

“We could enforce a limit on the number of people on a train but people still need to go to work. They’ll sit on the tracks and stop trains from moving,” Central Railways chief security commissioner BS Sidhu said.

A dozen a day? That is stunning to me. Now I know what my friend Kapil meant, when he asked if I wanted to ride the train there. His question was “Are you feeling adventurous?”

Mumbai’s Deadly Trains

Given my recent trip to Mumbai - in which I took a trip on a very packed train - this story caught my attention:

Mumbai’s deadly trains claim a dozen daily

MUMBAI (AFP) - The death toll on Mumbai’s railways averages a dozen a day — more than a whole year on New York’s subway system, which has an average annual accidental death rate of eight.

In the first four months of this year, 1,146 commuters died and 1,395 were injured, railway police said.

Many of the victims had been hanging on the side of the packed trains, unable even to wedge themselves inside, and fell to their deaths after losing their grip, they said.

Last year’s total toll was 3,997 deaths and 4,307 injuries.

“We could enforce a limit on the number of people on a train but people still need to go to work. They’ll sit on the tracks and stop trains from moving,” Central Railways chief security commissioner BS Sidhu said.

A dozen a day? That is stunning to me. Now I know what my friend Kapil meant, when he asked if I wanted to ride the train there. His question was “Are you feeling adventurous?”

The Fault of the Government

I have long maintained that the root of our energy problems in the U.S. stems from our failure to enact a consistent, long-term energy policy. Big energy projects generally take years to complete, and when there is an extra risk that the government will change the rules halfway through the project, companies are going to take a very cautious approach. So, we end up with less energy than we might have if there was more consistency.

For the first time, it seems that the public overwhelmingly thinks so as well:

Drivers blame D.C. for high gas prices

According to a Consumer Reports Auto Pulse Survey released Thursday, 77% of consumers said the root of high gas prices lies with the government’s failure to implement an effective energy policy. That compares with 75% of drivers who blamed oil companies, 70% who said foreign oil producers were at fault and 68% who thought the Middle East conflict was a leading cause for record fuel costs.

So, 152% of those polled thought it was either the government or Big Oil behind the problem. (Must have been a case of “Vote early and often.”)

One thing that was surprising to me was the number of people who favored off-shore drilling:

As a result, 90% of those surveyed support an increase in alternative energy development, and 81% want the U.S. government to allow more drilling on and off our nation’s shores. Americans also favored conservation measures, with 83% saying they supported tax incentives for alternate transportation.

Of course I know one person who voted for Big Oil as the culprit behind oil prices. He works for the government. Chuck Schumer, notorious demagogue when the topic is oil, had this to say following the recent congressional hearings into the impact of speculation on oil prices:

Schumer downplayed the role of speculators in driving up oil prices, and he placed blame on the oil industry and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

“I think it is interesting that the big oil companies and OPEC are blaming speculators for out-of-control prices, when they may be much more of the cause,” said Schumer.

Attaboy, Chuck. Keep looking for that boogie man. But don’t be surprised if you spot him during your morning shave.

Oil Cracked $140 Today

Peak demand or not, oil prices show no signs of subsiding:

Oil Surges Above $140 to Record as Libya Warns of Output Cut

June 26 (Bloomberg) — Crude oil jumped above $140 a barrel to a record as Libya threatened to cut output, OPEC’s president said prices may reach $170 by the summer and the dollar weakened.

Libya may curb output because of a U.S. law that allows terror victims to seize assets of foreign governments as compensation. OPEC President Chakib Khelil said oil may surge on a European interest rate rise, France 24 reported. Oil, gold and copper climbed today as the dollar dropped because the Federal Reserve gave no signal of higher interest rates yesterday.

Crude oil for August delivery rose $5.09, or 3.8 percent, to $139.64 a barrel at 2:59 p.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange, a record settlement price. Futures touched $140.39 today, surpassing the previous intraday record of $139.89 reached on June 16.

I think you’re seeing a clear flight from equities into commodities, said Kyle Cooper, an analyst at IAF Advisors in Houston.

Record oil prices helped send U.S. stocks tumbling. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index plunged 38.82, or 2.9 percent, to 1,283.15 in New York. The Dow decreased 358.41, or 3 percent, to 11,453.42.

I am starting to think Matt Simmons could win his $5,000 bet that oil will average $200 in 2010. (I still think he’s likely to lose, but at one time I thought he was sure to lose).

PEIX Drops Below $2

Wow! I just checked a few stocks that I tend to watch, and Pacific Ethanol (PEIX) has now fallen to $1.85 a share. It is now down more than 95% off its high, and down more than 90% from the first time I warned that the company was overvalued. Once boasting a market cap of almost $2 billion, that has now fallen to $82 million.

Now, where are all of those posters who kept telling me what a deal this was after it fell to $10? Like our friend James, who cited PEIX investor Bill Gates’ “ability to see into the future” as a reason to invest in PEIX, and told me I was “very, very stupid” if I thought the price would continue to fall. Of course Gates has recently been dumping his shares as quickly as he can (at a huge loss). Personally, as I have said before, if I want some insights into the future of computing, I would listen to Gates. On the topic of Pacific Ethanol, or for that matter any topic far-removed from his area of expertise, not so much.

Updated Corn Ethanol Economics

Executive Summary: The current cost to produce a gallon of ethanol is approximately $3/gal. The current price of ethanol is $2.86/gal, which explains why ethanol producers are shutting down. If corn and natural gas prices remain high, I think ethanol has to rise to something like $3.40-$3.60/gal to make it worthwhile to ethanol producers. So, if I was a commmodities investor, I would probably go long ethanol right now. The only risk factors I can see - given that there is a mandated (and rising) demand for ethanol - is if corn or natural gas prices collapse.

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This is an update to a post I originally made back in February 2008: Corn Ethanol Economics. While this is approximate, I think I captured most of the major economic considerations. In fact, one of the comments I received following the first essay was: “I work in an ethanol plant. Those numbers are pretty accurate, but the price we get for ethanol has been going up lately. Our margins have been poor lately, but are improving. But you did capture the important economic factors that have hurt us lately.”

Since then, natural gas, corn, and ethanol prices have all risen. So what do the economics look like today? The following is my previous analysis, with updated numbers.

I found multiple references for all of the numbers I am going to use, but I will only reference a single source. According to Ethanol Reshapes the Corn Market, one 56-pound bushel of corn will yield up to 2.7 gallons of ethanol and 17.4 pounds of distiller’s dried grains with solubles (DDGS).

The price of corn for July delivery as of this writing is $7.24/bushel, so each gallon of ethanol contains $7.24/2.7, or $2.68 of corn per gallon of ethanol. However, the DDGS can be sold, so a credit is applied for that. The current price of DDGS as of this writing is $175/ton, which is $0.0875/lb. Given that a bushel of corn yields 17.4 pounds of DDGS, there is then a $1.52 credit, which spread over 2.7 gallons is equal to $0.56 gallon. This reduces our cost per gallon to $2.68 minus $0.56, or $2.12 for just the corn input. (Note that there is sometimes a credit for carbon dioxide sales, but it is very small relative to the other costs and credits).

I still have to consider utilities (natural gas is a major cost), labor, enzyme and yeast costs, and depreciation. I have a spreadsheet from an actual ethanol plant, but there isn’t much in the public domain that I could find on this. The closest thing to a source on these is the spreadsheet in the presentation Fossil Fuels and Ethanol Plant Economics (for a standard dry mill process). If you look at Page 16 of the presentation, you can see that all of the miscellaneous costs together total approximately as much as the corn inputs. If you take the spreadsheet on Page 24 and change the natural gas price to the current price of $13.20/MMBTU, you get an overall energy cost of $0.51/gal of ethanol. (You can play around with the original spreadsheet that is in the PDF here). The sum of enzymes, yeast, and other chemicals comes out to be $0.14/gal, and labor, maintenance, and various miscellaneous expenses add another $0.23/gal.

On depreciation, I have several sources for capital costs that are pretty consistent. In the EIA’s Energy Outlook 2006, capital costs per daily barrel of corn ethanol ranged from $20,000 to $30,000, depending on the size of the plant. This breaks down to between $1.30 and $1.95 per gallon of installed capacity. This is also consistent with A Guide for Evaluating the Requirements of Ethanol Plants, which states “Current capital cost per annual gallon of installed capacity for an ethanol plant ranges from $1.25 to $2.00.” So let’s be conservative and say that we want to build a big plant, so the capital costs are on the low end at $1.30/gallon. Depreciate that over 15 years and this portion amounts to about $0.08 per gallon (but is captured above already).

However, for biomass to liquids facilities - which would include the biomass gasification to ethanol that some are calling cellulosic ethanol - the capital costs in the EIA’s Energy Outlook 2006 are listed at around 5 times that of a conventional corn ethanol plant. Thus, the capital depreciation portion is going to be around $0.40 per gallon of ethanol. (On the other hand, the feed costs should be much lower).

Summary

Times are tough for ethanol producers. This is what the economics roughly look like at $7.24 per bushel of corn and $13.20/MMBTU of natural gas. To produce 1 gallon of ethanol requires:

• $2.68 of corn
• $0.51 of energy
• $0.14 of enzymes, yeast, etc.
• $0.23 of labor, maintenance, and various miscellaneous expenses

There is a DDGS credit per gallon of ethanol of $0.56. Thus, the total cost to produce a gallon of ethanol today is $2.68 + $0.51 + $0.14 + $0.23 - $0.56, or exactly $3/gallon of ethanol. For reference, the July contract for ethanol in the Midwest closed yesterday at $2.86. And $3/gallon is merely cost of production. It doesn’t take into account any return on investment.

Also note that due to the lower energy content, this production cost is equivalent to a $4.48 per gallon production cost for gasoline ($3/0.67) - and that this production cost is a moving target: As long as the ethanol mandates are driving up the price of corn and increasing the demand for and cost of natural gas, corn ethanol producers must chase their tails in a vicious circle.

Producers are going to be hard-pressed to ever match the 2006 windfall that was given to them when the MTBE phaseout drove ethanol prices sky-high. But my conclusion is - since ethanol is mandated - some marginal producers will shut down and prices will rise. If everything else remained constant, I think ethanol would have to rise to something like $3.40-$3.60/gal to make it worthwhile to ethanol producers. So, if I was a commmodities investor, I would probably go long ethanol right now.

Ethanol Roundup

Couple of ethanol-related stories of note in the past few days:

Corn prices hurt ethanol industry

Iowa’s ethanol industry is being squeezed by high corn prices that are partly due to the estimated 3.3 million acres of crops that have been destroyed by spring floods, Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey said Friday.

“These kinds of prices are not profitable to produce ethanol at the current ethanol price,” Northey said at a taping of Iowa Public Television’s “Iowa Press.” “There will probably be decisions of whether they want to keep processing or not at these prices.”

Farmers can replant and still be covered by crop insurance, but coverage levels drop with each passing day, and late-planted crops could face the threat of frost in the fall, ag officials said earlier this week.

That is ironic. It is sort of like the fact that high oil prices are hurting oil refiners.

The next one spells out some of the now realized implications of tying our food supply to our fuel supply:

Flooded corn crop to bring wave of higher food prices

NEW YORK - Raging Midwest floodwaters that swallowed crops and sent corn and soybean prices soaring are about to give consumers more grief at the grocery store.

Rod Brenneman, president and chief executive of Seaboard Foods, a pork supplier in Shawnee Mission, Kan., that produces 4 million hogs a year, said high corn costs are already forcing producers in his industry to cut back on the number of animals they raise.

“There’s definitely liquidation of livestock happening,” and that will cause meat prices to rise later this year and into 2009, said Brenneman, who is also the vice chairman of the American Meat Institute.

Brenneman’s cost for feeding a single hog has shot up $30 in the past year because of record high prices for corn and soybeans, the main ingredients in animal feed. Passing that increase on to consumers would tack an extra 15 cents per pound onto a pork chop.

It’s a similar story for U.S. beef producers, who now spend a whopping 60-70 percent of their production costs on animal feed and are seeing that number rise daily as corn prices hover near an unprecedented $8 a bushel, up from about $4 a year ago.

“This is not sustainable. The cattle industry is going to have to get smaller,” said James Herring, president and CEO of Amarillo, Texas-based Friona Industries, which buys 20 million bushels of corn each year to feed 550,000 cattle.

Corn’s prices were already rising before the floods, driven up 80 percent over the past year as developing countries like China and India scramble for grains to feed people and livestock. U.S. production of ethanol, an alternative fuel that can be made with corn, has also pushed prices higher, prompting livestock owners to lobby Washington to roll back ethanol mandates.

For the record, my Dad is in the cattle business, and he at first thought the ethanol mandates were a great thing. When I testified against the proposed Montana ethanol mandate in 2005, he told my Mom “I don’t understand why he would testify against farmers.” I warned him at the time that these mandates were likely to distort markets and drive up prices in unexpected ways. I told him that I favor incentives, but mandates were not the way to go. But the government was intent on “helping”, and of course they have such a good track record on energy policy…

The Oil Industry for Dummies

Because apparently, this is a business that any dummy could run. Take Ed Markey’s new bill, for instance:

America’s untapped oil

“Big Oil is more interested in pumping up prices and pumping up their own profits rather than pumping more oil,” said Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass), who has co-sponsored a bill to charge oil companies a fee for land they hold that’s not producing oil. “We should not even begin discussing handing over more public land to the oil companies until they first use [the land] they already hold.”

You would think it would occur to oil companies to develop the land currently under lease. They must be even dumber than the likes of Markey, who should have obviously been an oil company CEO.

The oil industry says it pays millions of dollars for these leases, and not producing oil on them is something they would not intentionally do.

“No one is sitting on leases these days,” said Rayola Dougher, senior economic advisor for the American Petroleum Institute. “Those making those assertions don’t understand the bidding and leasing process.”

Now, now. That’s what we would expect the oil industry to say.

So who’s right?

The oil industry is correct about not hoarding oil, said Oppenheimer analyst Fadel Gheit. With prices at $135 dollars a barrel, everyone is trying to pump as much as they can, he said.

But fearing oil prices will eventually fall, the industry is leery about making too many investments in the fields it has - many of which are in deepwater areas that can be pricey to develop.

Personally, I think Markey should just set up a hotline, so oil companies could call him up and ask which areas should be developed. Of course this is the same guy who screams that 1). Gas prices are too high; and 2). Carbon emissions are too high. Apparently, the irony of his positions has been lost on him.

Solar One Event

I recently received the following press release from Solar One, a non-profit organization that specializes in solar energy awareness and advocacy. Since I am passionate about solar energy, I am happy to call attention to this event.

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Contact: Chris Neidl
Solar One
(212) 505-6050

News Release – June 20, 2008

SOLAR ONE TO HOST THREE PANELS ON ENERGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT DURING CITYSOL

Solar One Green Energy, Arts and Education Center is proud to announce three illuminating panel discussions to be presented during its Citysol summer festival from June 26-29. These talks are organized in conjunction with Solar One’s “I ♥ PV” advocacy campaign, an initiative that intends to transform policy regarding solar photovoltaic development in New York City and State. This initiative utilizes coordinated outreach events and direct actions such as street team and letter writing campaigns, as well as presentations by trained volunteers and high school interns, to target legislative change.

On June 27, 2008 at 6:00 PM, Solar One will host “From Temporary to Permanent: Sustainable Design for Solar One”, a panel discussion that will address issues of sustainable design and its relevance to New York City’s future. Over the past three years, Solar One has been the site of a series of experiments in sustainable design. Next year a permanent green energy, arts and education center, Solar 2, will break ground on this same site. Designed by Kiss + Cathcart, Solar 2 will be New York City’s first carbon neutral building. This panel discussion will mark a moment of transition from Situ Studio’s series of environmentally themed temporary pavilions to this ambitious and visionary initiative. These projects will provide a starting point for a broader discussion of the challenges and potentials of sustainable design initiatives throughout the five boroughs.

Julie V. Iovine, Executive Editor of The Architect’s Newspaper, will moderate this discussion with designers from Situ Studio and Kiss + Cathcart, along with Charles McKinney, Chief of Design for New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and Christopher Collins, Executive Director of Solar One.

On June 29, 2008 at 2:00 PM, Solar One Green Energy, Arts and Education Center will host “Solar Power Potential and Politics in New York City and State: Science, Policy and Activism”, a panel on the future of solar power in New York on the closing day of Citysol 2008. This timely discussion will address technical, economic and political issues inherent to the adoption of solar energy as a widespread energy source for residents and commercial enterprises throughout the city and state, including legislation passed earlier this week in Albany regarding increased property tax abatement and net-metering incentives for solar installation. Will the new legislation help Empire State and its most famous city assume a role of international leadership in the race to bring solar to the mainstream? What is the potential for such a transition? In this conversation with a number of the region’s foremost solar experts, guests will treated to an accessible, highly informative account of New York’s solar present and future.

This panel will be moderated by Shaun Chapman, the Campaign Manager for the New York Chapter of Vote Solar, and will feature some of the most respected names in the field, including Richard Perez, Ph.D. – Research Professor and Senior Research Associate at the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center at SUNY-Albany and former Associate Editor of Solar Energy Journal; Wilson Rickerson – Policy Advisor at the Center for Sustainable Energy at Bronx Community College and Policy Fellow at the Center of Energy and Environmental Policy; Tom Thompson, Senior Vice President at Atlantis Energy Systems, a manufacturer of Building Integrated Photovoltaic (BIPV) systems; and Fred Zalcman, Northeastern States Director of Regulatory Affairs at SunEdison LLC.

On June 29, 2008 at 4:00 PM, Solar One will host “Interactivism: A Conversation About the Practical Intersections of Design and Advocacy”, a panel on the evolution of grassroots advocacy through innovations in media and design, as a fitting end to Citysol. This phenomenon has transformed the relationship between public opinion and progressive politics. While the network power of the internet is primarily responsible for this transformation, other inventive modes of interaction have emerged at the margins to offer creative new ways of engaging and educating citizens, generating feedback to elected officials, and building enduring connections between members and organizations. Practices from game making, exhibit design, architecture and other disciplines have been creatively imported into activist approaches. All of these diverse approaches involve a level of interactivity that is meant to engage, impress, elucidate and include in ways that more conventional means of outreach cannot deliver.

Led by a panel of accomplished artists and designers who are separately pioneering ‘interactivist’ approaches in the NYC area, this discussion will explore a number of specific local projects and future innovation in advocacy and education. Panel members include: Natalie Jeremijenko, Ph.D. – New York University, Environmental Health Clinic; Eve Mosher, artist – HighWaterLine, Insert____Here, and seeding the city; Elliott Montgomery, designer – “I ♥PV” mobile solar chargers; and Chloe Varelidi, game designer – The Institute of Play. Solar One’s Advocacy Coordinator Chris Neidl will moderate.

These events are free and will be held at Solar One, at 23rd Street and the East River.

About Citysol

The centerpiece of Solar One’s summer-long Green Energy Arts Festival, Citysol is a free four-day music and art festival that runs from June 26 through June 29 at Solar One on the East River and 23rd Street. Citysol promotes renewable energy and environmental stewardship in NYC and aims to inspire and support local environmental initiatives in a manner that is both educational and entertaining. Last year’s event drew over 5,000 attendees to witness 17 art installations, 12 contemporary and innovative musical acts, ten workshops and a green marketplace featuring dozens of vendors. In addition to our two panel discussions, this year’s festival will feature 14 more musical acts, four comedy acts, six installations, seven workshops, as well as food, drinks and our annual wind energy sign-up drive. For more information on Citysol, please visit www.citysol.org.

About Solar One

Solar One is New York City’s only Green Energy, Arts and Education Center, working to educate New Yorkers about environmental issues through education, outreach and arts programming. Started as a project of Community Environmental Center, Solar One has reached tens of thousands of people in just three years and drawn acclaim for its unique and innovative approach. For more information, please visit www.solar1.org.