About two months ago I stood on the lawn by the old NCO club at the Presidio in San Francisco overlooking the work being done on the final stage of the Doyle Drive project at the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge. We are hosting a policy event on clean transportation at this site next week, and as I stood there with two colleagues assessing the venue - a huge freighter moving under the towering and iconic Golden Gate Bridge, and the tunnel that will fold over what was once the unsightly (and seismically unsound) Doyle Drive onramp - I saw the near future. I took in a deep breath, a luxury that was scarce for me just one year ago and a pleasure I savor each time I can draw clean, clear air deep into my weakened lungs.
A year from now the tunnel will be covered with greenery, blending into the natural environment of the Presidio, and if you look out from the floor to ceiling windows of the Presidio Outlook the remnants of years of construction (a public/private partnership that I was pleased to note involved my college classmate Mike Ghilotti's family-owned Marin based construction firm) will be relegated to still photographs on walls in offices and hallways joining the old black and whites commemorating the construction of the bridge itself. I like to think ahead a year on clean transportation itself - and ten years on, envisioning this same venue. We are on the threshold in California, and I think regionally and potentially globally, but I am proud that California is leading the way. By merging planning and policy decisions across industry sectors to fold environmental policies over energy and transportation planning and by utilizing technological advancements that rival those of the late 19th century in the way they will revolutionize how we produce and use energy, how we fuel our vehicles and heavy equipment, how our cars and transit systems operate, how maritime transport is fueled, docked and how we move freight away from our ports - we are ready now to cleanse, improve, and advance all of the sectors together.
We have to bring the products to market now, utilize the intelligence housed in smart meters and smart grids, transport information to and from homes and offices and change behaviors to match the needs of our energy and transportation economies. Two decades ago a revolution took hold in the communications sectors that less than a decade ago moved into the video/broadcast sectors. Built upon a backbone network of copper and fiber optics on the traditional telecommunications side and co-axial and hybrid coax on the traditional cable/broadcast side - these networks merged out along with wireless technologies and today we can communicate, stream information and conduct commerce from tiny devices in all corners of the world. We can port our lives, our business, the world to wherever we go in our 21st century version of what the comedian Eddie Izzard characterized as a 'cunning use of flags' by the tiny British nation that led to the worldwide British Empire. We are conquering existing economic models with non-traditional conveyance, but we have to be as mindful of harmful ripple effects as if we were 'benevolent' occupiers. Forge ahead, wisely.
And now, integrating communications platforms over how we've traditionally provided, transported and used energy and then further extending this out into the transportation sector, we can build the full scale working models and replicate and scale them to forge what is desperately needed by everyone on this planet - a clean energy economy. A year from now there will be more cleanly idling medium and heavy duty vehicles double parked on city streets, loading and unloading, and you won't always have to breath through your mouth, and sparingly, when following a school or city bus down the street. There will be significantly more electric and hybrid electric as well as other clean fueled vehicles on the road as well, and with better and cleaner public transit options we may begin to move away from the two cars in every garage ideal of success to thinking about how being situated next to a clean transportation hub, a community renewable energy generation/energy storage microgrid and in the smartest home or complex.
Throughout California today we have pilots going on of just these types of hubs and they are functioning well. We still have large power plants, and we will likely continue to need these for quite some time to come, but they are also cleaner and more efficient in general and the focus is that all new plants will be clean, smart and very efficient. We're also learning with the various types of renewable power that is being generated, how to shape power generation and customer demand to ensure reliability and security of the grid. Smart, electric vehicles don't just rely on electricity as a fuel, reducing or eliminating tail pipe emissions, but they are also increasingly part of the solution for storing energy so that we have to generate less. The larger the vehicle - the greater the impact on reducing both onsite and ancillary emissions.
That is why it is so important to plan and integrate now. To transition from traditional methods of generating power, fueling vehicles, and sourcing and routing an electric grid - the market has to respond and adapt and there have to be market signals in place to create the incentive to innovate. Because we can now and because the costs of doing so are coming down more and more every day. Entities we have traditionally thought of as monolithic - governments, utilities, etc., are learning how to tighten their turn radius and change course. Down-sizing how we provide and consume are positives, not negatives, and they actually stimulate and grow the economy if we succeed in moving them forward them across sectors and not one niche at a time. California is where the modern highway system was not just born, but perfected. It is the home of Silicon Valley. It sits on the edge of the Pacific Ocean with easy trade access to Asia and serves as the gateway to the rest of the nation. If we plan well here and execute policies decisively and cooperatively utilizing the abundance of intellectual and capital resources uniquely available here - we will literally move the nation's and the world's clean economy forward in our homes, our businesses, on our highways, our rail system, through our ports.
When I come back to the Presidio next year and stand as I often do near the arc at Fort Point, my favorite place to gaze at the sky and the ocean going back to my earliest days working in San Francisco in the mid 1980s, I'll see some of this progress and I will certainly be able to breath it deeply into my lungs. Ten years from now when I hope to have a grand child or two, or just to enjoy this spot with my three children, I expect to be able to breathe even deeper. All of my adult life I have been caught up in technology, energy, transportation and I think sometimes the view from the outside is that all of these things we think of as progress and commerce are bad for the earth. In reality we have evolved to the place where we know how to make all of them good for the earth, and it is time that we did so.
No comments:
Post a Comment