Tag Archives: UCLA
Water is Rising: Where Performance and Purpose Collide
Posted on 19. Oct, 2011 by Sarah Hadburg.
Water is Rising is an inspirational group, and a living representation of why climate change is a worldwide phenomenon. They encourage their supporters to educate themselves, and use innovative projects like OG to get out their message.
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UCLA Hosts Energy & Sustainability Symposium Promoting Sustainability Integration into Business Strategy
Posted on 20. Sep, 2011 by Sarah Hadburg.
On September 1st, the UCLA Faculty Center hosted an Energy & Sustainability Symposium. Sponsored by Johnson Controls, General Electric, LA County, City of LA, the Department of Energy, EPA’s Energy Star Program, and UCLA, the symposium focused on fostering private and public partnerships in sustainability. It consisted of speakers and panels from UCLA, private companies and public entities.
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Top Ten Green News Stories of August 2011
Posted on 08. Sep, 2011 by Justin Pakdaman.
OG|10: Green News Monthly Roundup featuring the top ten green news stories from August 2011 as followed and covered by Opportunity Green.
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Politics Puts Solar Feed-in Tariff in the Shade
Posted on 09. Apr, 2010 by Ben Upham.
The Los Angeles Business Council (LABC) could not have chosen a worse time to introduce a feasibility study (PDF) of a solar feed-in tariff for Los Angeles. The study, a joint project with the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, shows how LA could add 500 megawatts of solar power over the next ten years by paying utility customers who install solar panels for any unused electricity the panels generate.
The problem is where to get the money to pay for it; typically it comes from rate payers in the form of higher energy bills. But Angelenos are already up in arms over rate hikes proposed last month by the Department of Water & Power. The city council sharply reduced the hikes, prompting DWP to withhold $80 million or so the city was counting on to help shore up a $200 budget deficit.
(Ironically, those hikes were meant in part to pay for the Mayor’s ambitious renewable energy goals, including 150 MW of solar power.)
As a result, the political loggerheads surrounding the hikes overshadowed LABC’s release of the FiT study, and, along with similar battles at the state level, helped cast doubt over the future of renewable energy initiatives across California.
“Pushing forward and falling back.”
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and City Comptroller Wendy Gruel, who are in the thick of things at city hall, both spoke at the summit today.
Gruel emphasized how badly the city needs the DWP cash, or any cash at all. But she also called talk of reneging on renewable energy and greenhouse gas reduction commitments “disturbing.”
On the state level, both Republican candidates for governor, Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner, have called for postponing state law AB 32, which requires California to lower its emissions of greenhouses to 1990 levels by 2020. Poizner has also backed an astroturf campaign to get the law postponed until unemployment stays at or below 5.5 percent for a year.
Attorney General and Democratic candidate for governor Jerry Brown, who was at the Sustainability Summit today, danced around the issue of postponing AB 32, but called for the state to work within the limits of what it can do financially.
Brown, a veteran of California politics, made one of several memorable statements, calling governance a process of “pushing forward and falling back.” Given the state of things in California, I would say we are definitely in “fall back” mode, and any plan to bring a FiT to Los Angeles in the near-term is just that: a plan.
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Interview with Paul Bunje, Exec. Director of the Center for Climate Change Solutions
Posted on 01. Nov, 2009 by Susanna Schick.
Paul Bunje is the Executive Director of the Center for Climate Change Solutions (CCCS) at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment
OG: So what are some of the projects you’re working on at the center? It’s a little hard to tell from your website.
Paul: We never have enough time to update the website, but you can find the most up-to-date information at UCLA’s Climate Change Portal, which is like one stop shop for all things going on in climate, energy, sustainability. It’s still in the beta phase, but it is live. We try to stay on the cutting edge of interdisciplinary studies, so this keeps UCLA people aware of what’s going across campus, to better learn from each other, and prevent redundancies in research.
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Opportunity Green Reports on CRA/LA’s Progress with the Cleantech LA Initiative
Posted on 20. Aug, 2009 by Ben Upham.
Opportunity Green checked in this week with the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles (CRA/LA) to learn what progress the collaborative organization has made in their initiative to attract clean technology companies, large and small, to the Los Angeles area. As it turns out, there was both good and bad news.
Announced in April to much fanfare (see Opportunity Green’s coverage), Cleantech LA is a multi-agency collaboration between the Mayor’s Office, CRA/LA and numerous local institutions, including UCLA, Caltech, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to establish LA as the global leader in clean technology development.
One of CRA/LA’s key roles in all of this is the identification and redevelopment of cleantech opportunity sites around Los Angeles focusing on the “Cleantech Corridor” in downtown LA, but also including other industrial zones throughout the city. The centerpiece of this initiative is 20 acres of land at the corner of Sante Fe Avenue and Washington Boulevard, just southeast of downtown, which CRA/LA purchased last year.
So here’s the good news: according to Alexandra Paxton and Jenna Gulager of CRA/LA, the MTA is in negotiations with Ansaldo Breda, an Italian manufacturer of railway cars, to renew their contract to supply the MTA with light rail cars. If the contract is renewed, Ansaldo Breda said it would build a $70 million factory to produce the cars on the 20 acre site – a promising start to the nascent “Cleantech Corridor”.
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A Pragmatist’s Approach to Sustainability: An Interview with Gensler’s Nellie Reid
Posted on 20. Aug, 2009 by Gaia Dempsey.
It’s easy to be drawn to the flashiness of radically innovative design: imagine the possibilities of a futuristic community where every building is entirely self-sufficient and biologically integrated into the natural landscape. What could transportation look like? Spider web zip lines? Solar powered hovercrafts? The possibilities are endless. But here and now, the progress of sustainable design in “mainstream” architecture often comes down to making small incremental changes, both in terms of building practices and in the building codes that determine what is legal, safe, and economically feasible. Nellie Reid, Sustainability Leader for the southwest region at the architecture firm Gensler–a sponsor of the Opportunity Green conference–is quick to remind us that even though we may not be making gargantuan strides at lightning speed, there are many simple changes we can make right now that are not necessarily all that radical, yet still have far-reaching impacts. In other words, good green architectural design is often about implementing that elusive specimen in modern building and urban planning practices: common sense. And it’s not all up to legislators and architects. In Nellie’s words, “political, corporate, community, and individual will are essential to changing the industry.” My conversation with Nellie follows after the jump.
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Opportunity Green attends launch of CleanTech Los Angeles
Posted on 15. Apr, 2009 by Chathri Munasinghe.
Esteemed figures in the academic community and Los Angeles government converged this morning to announce the launch of CleanTech Los Angeles. This unique partnership aims to introduce Los Angeles into the greenspace as the hub of clean techonology. Members include the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles, Caltech, DWP, JPL, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, UCLA, and USC.Opportunity Green Co-Founder Mike Flynn was on hand to witness the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding, signed by all involved parties. During the Q&A, Flynn highlighted the importance of creating clean technology curriculum at engineering schools, such as USC, UCLA, and Caltech. In general, he is positive about the CleanTech intiative, stating “I’m very excited to see this collaboration between academia, policy and business in LA.”
