Past Summits | 2010 North America Working Tracks

Distributed generation includes forms of solar power, (small) wind, geothermal, and cogeneration. While these sectors are distinct, we see overlap in many of the barriers to accelerated growth, as well as similar driving factors: technology cost, fuel costs, utility adoption, tax incentives, feed-in tariffs, land use issues and land availability, transmission, and consumer acceptance.

The Electrification Coalition (EC) has developed a policy roadmap to promote the penetration of GEVs into the nation’s light-duty surface transportation fleet. While the EC roadmap was not focused on the deployment of GEVs into managed fleets, many of the issues identified and addressed in the EC’s Electrification Roadmap are relevant to our discussion of fleets.

The McKinsey 2007 report stated the case the clearly and raised awareness: energy efficiency upgrades to buildings are on the left side of the cost curve. Since the release of the McKinsey report, there have been a number of additional reports that have strengthened the case; in addition, the PACE program has gained national traction with 16 states passing enabling legislation. There is significant momentum in this area, but barriers remain.

Estimates show that the smart grid has the potential to reduce annual CO2e emissions reductions between 1% to 2% by 2020. The estimated investment for a U.S. Smart Grid is in the neighborhood of $200 billion over 10 years, as reported by the Center for American Progress (CAP) in their 2009 study. As a national investment, this is lower than the bill for the national highway system, footed by the federal government over a 30- year period and estimated to cost around $450 billion in today’s dollars.

The U.S. government has committed $4.5 billion in stimulus spending to the Smart Grid (and an additional $6.5 billion to transmission), compared to China which has committed $170 billion in stimulus funds to grid updates.

Impressive efficiency improvements have been achieved by the aviation industry in recent years, but fuel consumption continues to rise due to the fact that demand is outstripping efficiency gains. The increase in demand is driving increasing emissions. According to Clark and Chagas (2010), aviation emissions are the fastest-growing category of anthropogenic emissions.

There are two approaches to reducing emissions from aviation: (1) fuel use reduction (either through decreases in aviation or through efficiency gains) and (2) fuel replacement strategies, including drop-in renewable fuel replacements. Renewable fuels have becomes the focus of the latter, because alternative propulsion systems for air transport are quite restricted compared to ground transport.

While the different freight sectors are distinct, we see overlap in some of the barriers to change in these sectors and similar driving factors: fuel costs, availability of alternative fuels, efficiency potential and technologies, delivery pressure (e.g. just-in-time), and interaction with warehousing, or storage facilities.