Often times we talk about the Green Spectrum, particularly with respect to projects that are green in general, or appear to have no sustainability aspect, when, in actuality, all projects have a sustainability element.  This time, we’ll look at a project that is Green by Definition, but is scrutinized through a sustainability lens.  And, it is a very,very interesting concept.

As part of the “Smart from the Start” (that sounds like a good phrase for sustainability in projects, too) initiative by Secretary of Interior Salazar, there is a proposal for a 200 mile-wide wind energy corridor stretching from Canada to the Texas coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

While we don’t know yet about the other sustainable aspects being considered, we do know, at this point, that the US Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) will write an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).  “Wind energy is crucial to our nation’s future economic and environmental security. We will do our part to facilitate development of wind energy resources, while ensuring that they are sited and designed in ways that minimize and avoid negative impacts to fish and wildlife,” said Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe. “This EIS process gives us an opportunity to evaluate impacts to dozens of imperiled species at a landscape level to ensure that wind energy development occurs in the right places in the right way.”

The reasoning behind the EIS is that in order to accomplish the project, an Incidental Take Permit (ITP) needs to be granted.  Section 9 of the Endangered Species Act and its implementing regulations “prohibit the take of animal species listed as endangered or threatened.”  It doesn’t allow the harassment, harm, pursuit, hunting, shooting, wounding, trapping, capturing, or collecting or, an attempt to engage in those practices when it comes to endangered or threatened species.  However, Under Section 10 of the Act, it allows for people to obtain an ITP as long as they are pursuing otherwise legal activities.  The permittee is then provided “incidental take” authorization.

The applicant must submit a Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) containing the measures that it will take to minimize, avoid, or mitigate incidental take.  The Service will then review the HCP and issue an EIS that considers the impacts.  The Service will also identify “potentially significant impacts on biological resources, land use, air quality, water quality, water resources, economics, and other environmental/historical resources that may occur directly or indirectly as a result of implementing the proposed action or any of the alternatives. Various strategies for avoiding, minimizing, and mitigating the impacts of incidental take will also be considered.  Sounds like risk management to me!

“The proposed Permit Area is defined as a 200-mile wide corridor determined by defining the center line of the whooping crane migration based on the database of confirmed whooping crane observations from the Cooperative Whooping Crane Tracking Program and buffering that line by 100 miles on either side. This corridor spans the Gulf Coast of Texas north to the Canadian border and encompasses such cities as Houston, TX; Oklahoma City, OK; Wichita, KS; Bismarck, ND; Grand Island, NE; and Aberdeen, SD. In addition, the permit area includes the current and a large part of the historic range of the lesser prairie-chicken which extends the covered area beyond the 200-mile wide whooping crane migration corridor to include parts of Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas.”

“Species currently considered for inclusion under the permit include the following: the endangered whooping crane (Grus americana); endangered interior least tern (Sterna antillarum athalassos); endangered piping plover (Charadrius melodus); and lesser prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus), a candidate species.”

There are two important points here for a project manager.  The first is that this will be one heck of a program, involving a huge amount of projects, wind energy projects including; the wind power generators themselves, transmission, distribution, support facilities, etc.  Secondly, it involves looking at the project through a sustainability lens.  In above case, a very narrow view because of regulatory issues (specifically the Endangered Species Act) one of the “drivers” in our book.  There will be more and more of these opportunities for the project manager who is not only aware of sustainability issues, vocabulary, and problems and drivers, but also uses that knowledge and considers greenality* when approaching any project.

* The degree to which an organization (project manager) has considered environmental (sustainable) factors that affect its projects during the entire project life cycle and beyond.

As I was waiting for my flight back from the PMI Global Congress in Washington, DC, I picked up a discarded Washington Post (…..REUSE..REUSE…).  There was an article by Juliet Eilperin about Google backing a “superhighway”  for wind power, subtitled Underwater Energy Grid. If that wasn’t exciting enough, there was a sub-subtitle $5 billion project would supply mid-Atlantic area.  Project!  This is definitely one of those projects we term green by definition, but it is a very intriguing one, and one that a company like Google is willing to partner with Good Energies, and environmentally focused international investment company.  Google will provide 37.5% of the equity for initial development.

The project is dubbed the Atlantic Wind Connection and is intended to provide the transmission lines for a series of offshore wind turbines capable of supplying 1.9 million homes without taxing the already overburdened electric grid.  It is very ambitious project covering an area of 350 miles with on-shore transmission nodes in Norfolk, VA, Lewes, DE, the proximity of Manasquan, NJ, and Newark, NJ.  The article goes on to say that the water remains relatively shallow 10-15 miles offshore, far enough so as not to be seen from shore, one of the issue plaguing the Cape Wind Project.

How exciting to be a project manager on that project.  One of the risks would certainly be that since it is the North Atlantic, there is always that possibility of the “prefect storm”.  The timeline for the project looks like a deliverable in 2013 of construction start, complete in 2020, but with an interim milestone of the initial stage of construction complete in 2016.

Interestingly, Ken Salazar, Interior Secretary, said last month “Rather than develop transmission infrastructure on a piecemeal basic, we should – in close coordination with the private sector, states, and tribes – lay out smart transmission systems upfront.”  Gee, a strategy for a change (sorry-editorial comment).

Anyway, we’ll keep an eye on this project and this is just another reason for PMs to be “surfing the green wave“.

A champion of green projects passed away suddenly August 7th.  Matt Simmons, well known for his views on peak oil in his book Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy apparently drown after suffering a heart attack.  Here in Maine, however, he was best known for championing green energy projects (Green By Definition from our book). He had big plans for some big projects, particularly trying to harness the ocean’s energy.  He founded The Ocean Energy Institute in Rockland, Maine, whose grand opening was in July, a “think tank” focused on tidal energy.  It is both a not-for-profit research facility coupled with a for-profit venture capital enterprise to fund the alternate energy.

From an article by Michael Corkery in today’s (Aug 9th) Wall Street Journal Blog, Matt Simmons is quoted as saying that, “When it comes to alternative energy, wind is perfectly commercial today. But when you try to scale it, it just doesn’t work. I suspect the cost of solar will finally come down, but you’ll never have solar be anything more than an intermittent source of electricity.” To him, the ocean was the logical place to capture energy.  In the same article he is quoted as saying “The Gulf Stream is essentially the largest river in the world … and there are devices being developed that are anchored in a current and end up having a rotor that turns because of the current. It might be perfectly viable to create a floating dry dock. Or you combine the water in a boiler with ammonia, and once you have boiling you have steam, and steam powers a turbine and creates electricity. This doesn’t sound nearly as complicated as creating fuels cells, for instance, which is still a real bugaboo.”

Matt believed that “Oceans are the last energy frontier, yet we know so little about how to harness them. The Ocean Energy Institute’s mission is to quickly fill this knowledge void and let our oceans supply us the energy that fossil fuels have provided for the last hundred years,” a direct quote.

A press release today from the Institute indicated that the work of the Institute will continue.  We hope so.  We didn’t know him personally, but he was on our list of “get to knows” because of the potential projects he was involved with.  We’ll be watching the work of the Institute, that’s for sure.  Matt Simmons was 67.

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With apologies to Liza Minnelli and  Joel Grey,  I’ve have to agree.  And there is some great  news here for project managers.  In a recent article in the Springfield (Ohio)  News-Sun headline, Green Legislation Could Lure Projects to State.  ” The Ohio Senate went “green” in a bipartisan way on Tuesday, May 18, voting 28-4 for legislation aimed at attracting renewable energy projects such as wind farms and the jobs they create to the state.” The legislation provides tax incentives for renewable energy projects.  Ohio is lagging in their amount of renewable energy capacity and part of that problem may be that Ohio tax structure for renewable projects is up to 8 times higher than that of neighboring states.  It gives advantage to those other states competing for “green” projects.

The new incentives would apply to wind and solar projects, clean coal technology, advanced nuclear technology and cogeneration ( the simultaneous production of heat and power in a single thermodynamic process) projects.  It could mean upwards of 700 new jobs in this sector. For us, that’s what it is all about, planet, projects, and putting people back to work.  700 jobs don’t seem like a lot, but multiply that by the number of states who have similar or who will have similar incentives and it is an good start toward recovery of the job market.  Couple that with the indirect benefits of a job (the multiplier) and it could mean an additional 4 or more jobs in support of those workers.  After all, we all need to purchase a pair of Earthkeepers®

Of course, the point is, that every project should have a project manager.  Project managers can keep their ears to the ground and their eyes on EarthPM to see how this “Green Wave” is affecting and will affect the future of our discipline.

“Green Projects” are being implemented at breakneck speed.  It is hard to keep up with the sheer volume.  That’s exciting news for project managers embracing the “green wave”.  One particular project caught our attention, not only because it garnered national attention, Parade Magazine, April 18, 2010, but because it is local to Earthpm and my wife is an alum.  The University of New Hampshire (UNH), and Waste Management (WM), are powering the college with garbage.  Yes, garbage!  According to the recent article, Waste Management, the operators of a landfill a dozen or so miles from the campus of 15,000 students, was dealing with surplus gas containing 50% methane.  Most landfill operators are forced to burn the gas because it is a pollutant, but can be used as fuel.  WM realized that UNH could use methane, but how to get it there was a problem.  $49 million dollars and 12.7 miles of pipeline later, UNH has its methane.

We wondered how UNH will pay for the project.  The answer is from an article by the EcoLine Partnership.  UNH will sell the renewable energy certificates (RECs) generated by using landfill gas to help finance the overall cost of the project and to invest in additional energy efficiency projects on campus. In addition, UNH will sell power in excess of campus needs back to the electric grid. “By selling the RECs from EcoLine™, UNH will further fund its aggressive plan toward climate neutrality,” says Tom Kelly, UNH chief sustainability officer and director of the office of sustainability. “With this climate action plan, called WildCAP, UNH has committed to lowering its emissions by 50 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2080.”

Of course, WM cannot simply tap the landfill and send it down the pipeline.  The naturally occurring by-product of landfill decomposition is collected via a state-of-the-art collection system consisting of more than 300 extraction wells and miles of collection pipes.  The gas is purified and compressed at a new UNH processing plant at the Waste Management’s Turnkey Recycling and Environmental Enterprise (TREE) in Rochester, N.H.  It then travels through a 12.7-mile-pipeline from the landfill to UNH’s cogeneration plant, where it will replace commercial natural gas as the primary fuel source.

Just in these few paragraphs alone, there were three major projects identified; collection of the methane, the pipeline, power generation conversion at UNH.  While UNH is the first in the nation to do this, we are sure that more and more universities (and business/municipal complexes) will follow, especially those within close proximity to a landfill.  And these days, who isn’t!

“Clean tech is always in a boom-and-bust cycle,’’ said Matt Moscardi, manager of investor programs at Ceres, a green investment coalition based in Boston. “Without a price on carbon, or some other mechanism by which you measure pollutants and emissions, the playing field will not be level.’’ [Reference: Boston Globe article, 9-Mar10]

The ’tilted playing field’ or unfair advantage alluded to by Ceres is also referred to as clean energy’s “competitive conundrum”.  Since clean energy costs are higher than those available from conventional sources, what is going to convince a typical consumer to pay that higher price?  And, are those lower prices from conventional sources truly reflective of the true ‘price‘ of their service, including emissions?  It’s not easy or convenient for consumers to think of it this way, but when they ‘save’ money on low energy costs, they’re paying for it later in tax dollars and cleanup efforts that result from the dirtier sources of power – not to mention the ‘intangible’ loss in ‘quality of life’ for this and future generations.  I know… it sounds a little preachy, but it’s true.