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Posts Tagged ‘Berkeley’

Mountain lion roams Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto

Posted in environment, tagged , , on September 2, 2010| Leave a Comment »

photo: Mountain Lion Foundation

In Thursday’s New York Times, I write about the mountain lion that was stalking the streets of Berkeley, Calif., this week:

The appearance of a mountain lion Tuesday near downtown Berkeley, Calif., caused a stir in this animal-loving, environmentally conscious community, where residents may obsess about locally grown organic food but don’t expect to be on the menu.

The mountain lion, a 100-pound female, was spotted around 2 a.m. Tuesday in the city’s Gourmet Ghetto district, according to the Berkeley Police Department.

The cougar roamed within pouncing range of Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse restaurant, the temple of California cuisine, where twice-cooked kid goat with cumin, ginger, eggplant, and chickpeas was the featured dish that evening. But the state’s top-level predator probably was on the hunt for venison and got lost, according to wildlife experts.

“A mountain lion traveling through an urban environment is infrequent but looking at aerial photographs of the surrounding area you can see why it chose Berkeley,” said Marc Kenyon, the statewide mountain lion program coordinator for the California Department of Fish and Game.

The reason: deer, the mountain lion’s main prey. Berkeley is wedged between San Francisco Bay and sylvan foothills that abut miles of forested parkland. It’s a mountain lion smorgasbord with cougar chow wandering the hills and valleys. (On Wednesday morning, for instance, I walked out of my hillside house to find a pack of deer ambling down the street.)

“Where there are deer, mountain lions not far behind,” noted Mr. Kenyon. “The mountain lion might have been following a deer down the hill and at one point turned off a path and spotted a raccoon and decided to chase that raccoon and got turned around and walked west toward the city instead of east toward the hills.”

More than half of California is classified as mountain lion habitat by the Department of Fish and Game, which estimates there are between 4,000 and 6,000 of the animals in the state. California voters banned the hunting of mountain lions for sport in 1990.

While reports of mountain lion sightings have been growing as human development expands into the animal’s habitat, Mr. Kenyon said the number of mountain lions actually is thought to be falling statewide due to a decline in deer population in some regions.

“California is the state with the highest number of humans coexisting with the highest number of mountain lions,” said Tim Dunbar, executive director, Mountain Lion Foundation, a non-profit based in Sacramento, Calif. “And though there have been some fatal incidents on occasion we’re doing very well.”

Such encounters usually do not end well for the mountain lion, though. In Berkeley, police officers tracked the cougar as it ran through the surrounding residential neighborhood for an hour, jumping over fences from backyard to backyard. According to news reports, an officer shot and killed the animal at 3:30 a.m.

The incident unleashed a Berkeley-style debate on Berkeleyside, a local blog, over whether the mountain lion should have been killed.

You can read the rest of the story here.

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Will Berkeley become an electric car capital?

Posted in electric cars, green cars, green policy, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on August 16, 2010| 1 Comment »

photo: Todd Woody

I wrote this story for Grist, where it first appeared.

With months to go before the first mass production electric cars hit American streets, the $41,000 question (before rebates and tax incentives) is whether drivers will buy them en masse.

Which is why you should keep your eye on Berkeley, Calif. While I would hardly hold out my hometown as an avatar of mainstream American values, on the environmental front it’s often been in the vanguard of things to come, like curbside recycling.

Take hybrid cars. When I was reporting a story earlier this year on the San Francisco Bay Area as the launch pad for mass-market electric cars, Andrew Tang, an executive with PG&E, told me that the utility was closely watching local sales of the Toyota Prius as a proxy for likely purchases of electric cars. Studying Prius distribution helped PG&E create a heat map of neighborhoods where the electricity demand might spike.

In Berkeley, he said, one out of every five cars sold for the past four years has been a Prius. Made sense to me. Priuses seem as common as Obama bumper stickers and are just part of the visual landscape, like Alice Waters. But it wasn’t until my friend Mike and his son Bryce were visiting from Texas recently that the hybridization of Berkeley really became apparent to me.

We were at REI picking up some gear for a camping trip when Bryce remarked that he had counted eight Priuses in the store’s rather small parking lot. On the 2.8-mile drive home we decided to see how many Priuses we could spot along the road into the Berkeley Hills.

We counted 34, including four on my block.

A few weeks later I played the Prius game on the way down the hill to the Berkeley Bowl to pick up some groceries. I counted 25 Priuses, two Honda Insight hybrids, an old Toyota RAV4 electric and one gunmetal gray Tesla Roadster.

So will Toyota’s hegemony stand once Nissan’s battery-powered Leaf blows into town? No doubt, many will trade in their Prius to go electric. The Leaf sports a distinctive look that, like the Prius, screams green to your neighbors. (And keeping up with the Joneses is just a part of Berkeley’s cultural fabric.)

The Chevrolet Volt may be a harder sell, given it is an electric hybrid and boasts a muscular all-American look that you don’t see too often on the streets here.

But every Prius owner won’t have to switch to electric in order to have an impact. Seeing a Leaf or Volt in the neighbor’s driveway or in the REI parking lot will make an electric car less a curiosity and more just another automotive option when trading in that ’95 Volvo station wagon.

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Berkeley hands out solar checks

Posted in alternative energy, energy, green financing, green policy, renewable energy, solar energy, Sungevity, SunPower, tagged , , , on February 27, 2009| Leave a Comment »

solar_and_your_home_header
photo: Sungevity

Berkeley on Friday hands over checks to the first two homeowners who tapped the California city’s pioneering solar financing program to install solar arrays.

The city fronts the cash for rooftop solar panels for any Berkeley business or homeowner, who pays back the cost through a 20-year surcharge on their property tax bill. If a home is sold, the surcharge rolls over to the new owner. The city council created a Sustainable Energy Financing District and launched a $1.5 million pilot program for the Berkeley FIRST Financing Initiative for Renewable and Solar Technology) in November to finance 40 rooftop systems. It took all of nine minutes for those 40 slots to be filled when the online application went live.

Berkeley issued a bond for the programs that was bought by Oakland-based Renewable Funding, which financed the solar arrays and whose president, Francisco DeVries, devised the Berkeley program when he served as Mayor Tom Bates’ chief of staff. Renewable Funding now is taking the program nationwide as cities from Portland to Tuscon consider adopting similar solar financing schemes. Under legislation enacted last year, any California city can implement a Berkeley-style program.

Municipal financing of solar arrays has become even more attractive since October when Congress lifted a $2,000 cap on federal tax credits for residential systems. Homeowners now can claim a tax credit for 30% of the cost of a solar system. When a state rebate is added, the cost of going solar in California has fallen by half.

Municipal financing programs are good news for solar panel makers and installers like SunPower (SPWRA), SunTech (STP), Akeena (AKNS) and First Solar (FSLR), the thin-film solar company that recently jumped into the residential market.

On Friday, Berkeley homeowner Jeanne Pimentel will receive a check from the mayor to hand over Borrego Solar, which installed her solar panels while homeowner Aaron Mann will sign his check over to Sungevity.

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Berkeley approves public financing of solar panels

Posted in alternative energy, energy, energy efficiency, Google, green policy, PG&E, solar energy, tagged , , , , , , on September 17, 2008| 16 Comments »

BERKELEY, Calif. – The Berkeley City Council Tuesday night gave final approval for the nation’s first municipal program to finance solar arrays for homes and businesses.

The city’s Sustainable Energy Financing District could accelerate the adoption of rooftop solar by overcoming one of the biggest obstacles to homegrown green energy: the $20,000 to $30,000 upfront costs and long payback time for a typical solar system.

Here’s how the program will work: Berkeley will seek bond financing up to $80 million for the solar program – enough to install solar arrays on 4,000 homes and pay for some energy efficiency improvements. For those who sign up, Berkeley will pay for the solar arrays and add a surcharge to the homeowners’ tax bill for 20 years. When the house is sold, the surcharge rolls over to the new owner.

According to city staff, a typical solar array will cost $28,077 – you won’t find many McMansions in this city by the bay) – and after state rebates, $22,569 will need to be financed at an estimated interest rate of 6.75%. Berkeley is counting on obtaining a favorable interest rate given that the debt will be secured by property tax revenue. (And to answer the inevitable question, the foreclosure rate in Berkeley is low and property values have been relatively stable. How the meltdown on Wall Street will affect the program is another matter.)

For a typical solar system, the homeowner will be assessed an extra $182 a month on her property tax bill. To put that in perspective, the property tax bill on a $800,000 house – your basic middle-class home here if it was bought within the past three years – runs about $900 a month.

Electric bills are relatively low in Berkeley due to the temperate climate – Green Wombat’s was $15 in August. The real benefit of the program may come if it is used for solar hot water systems and expanded to pay for energy efficiency measures, such as installing new windows and insulation in Berkeley’s housing stock, most of which dates from the early 20th century.

The remaining hurdle is for the city to secure financing at a favorable rate. Once that is obatined, the program. which has won the support of local utility giant PG&E (PCG), should also be boon for solar panel makers and installers like SunPower (SPWR), SunTech (STP), Akeena (AKNS) and Sungevity.

The solar program is designed to help Berkeley meet a voter-approved mandate to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050.

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