Letter from Dijon: In a place known for wine and mustard, Elithis Tower shows fine taste for energy conservation - washingtonpost.com

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By Edward Cody
Sunday, October 25, 2009

DIJON, FRANCE -- The Elithis Tower, its builder says, is an office building like no other, an oval-shaped showcase for how to help save the planet on a reasonable budget.

According to Thierry Bièvre, the 10-story tower in the eastern city of Dijon has the potential to become the world's first commercially priced office building that produces more energy than it consumes. Already, he boasts, it is the most "environmentally sober" such tower in operation, using an average of 20 kilowatts per square meter, or 11 square feet, a year -- 400 is the average in France -- to heat, cool, light and otherwise occupy its 54,000 square feet of office space.

Getting the rest of the way, from 20 to zero and beyond, Bièvre adds, will entail cooperation from the people who work in the building -- turning off their computers at night, using low-consumption bulbs at their desks or walking down the stairs at quitting time rather than automatically taking the elevator.

"To get the best results, you have to change your behavior," he said, shortly before heading from his ninth-floor office down the brightly painted staircase to where his hybrid car awaited outside.

Bièvre, 49, who heads the Elithis engineering firm, said in an interview that he did not start out as an environmental missionary, but as a businessman who wanted to make money. The tower's main purpose, he specified, is to make a profit from rents and sales and, over time, attract clients from around France and abroad to hire his firm to build more such energy-saving towers.

With that in mind, the building was designed and constructed over three years for about $10 million, which Bièvre said was a standard commercial price for such structures. The difference, he said, was that his team of architects and engineers focused relentlessly on energy conservation, making it a priority in every decision and employing every known trick to cut back consumption of electricity, fuel and water.

The roof was covered with solar panels, and the tower's south side was shrouded in a "light shield," a grille that controls heat-producing sunshine without cutting off the natural light flowing in through windows that make up 75 percent of the building's surface. Water, collected from rain, turns off automatically in the lavatories when users walk away, as do the overhead lamps.

Carefully controlled ventilation means that 85 percent of the time there is no need for air conditioning to maintain an average of 68 degrees. At above 39 degrees outside, the building gets all the heat it needs from sunshine. When it is needed, heating comes from a biomass system that provides enough for a year with the equivalent of 86 square feet of wood.

"This building says who we are, and with this we want to develop our business," said Bièvre, a native of the celebrated Burgundy wine country that surrounds Dijon, about 190 miles southeast of Paris. "We don't just make mustard," he added, referring to the city's fame as a producer of the spicy condiment.

Dijon has long been known as a capital of conservation -- mostly of the kind of ageless traditions that make Burgundy's wine great and that local mustard a world favorite. Until only eight years ago, for instance, cafes here were barred from opening terraces because the then-mayor, Robert Poujade, a Gaullist conservative who ran the city for 30 years, thought customers might get rowdy and disturb the cosseted tranquillity of nearby residents.

But in 2001, Poujade was succeeded by François Rebsamen, a Socialist and champion of ecology, who has set out to make the city a center for a different kind of conservation. The new mayor welcomed Bièvre's crusade.

"This building is an example of what the world will have to do in the future," Rebsamen said in a conversation with foreign reporters. "We encouraged him. We helped him. And now I am happy to see that people are coming from around the world to visit it."

Rebsamen said some of the techniques fine-tuned by Bièvre will be put into use in "eco-neighborhoods" that the city and its suburbs plan to build in the next several years. The neighborhoods will have low-energy buildings throughout, he said, and will be serviced by public transportation with the goal of making cars unnecessary for people who live and work there.

In general, France has been slow to alter its energy consumption habits, particularly compared with Germany or the Scandinavian countries. But despite its late start, it has wakened in recent years to the appeal of conservation, turning it into a political issue that pays. President Nicolas Sarkozy, a conservative, has made the environment a major theme of his administration.

Sarkozy pushed hard last winter to get the European Union to adopt ambitious goals for the reduction of greenhouse gases and has prodded the Obama administration to do the same at the environmental summit scheduled for December in Copenhagen. His enthusiasm for the cause redoubled in June, when France's Green parties scored well in European Parliament elections, creating an opening for Sarkozy to attract votes from the Socialists, his main opposition.

Bièvre, however, emphasized that individual decisions, multiplied across society, remain the most effective way to reduce human pressure on the environment. Driving his hybrid the same way he used to drive his high-powered German cars, he found, meant he still used a lot of gasoline. To get the best results, he recalled, he had to train himself to accelerate slowly and hold down the speed.

"It's the little actions that will change things," he said.

Spain's Answer to Unemployment: Go Greener - washingtonpost.com

Leader in Renewable Energy Considers Subsidies, Mandates to Build Industry

By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, September 24, 2009

MADRID -- As world leaders converge in Pittsburgh for a major economic summit this week, one of the biggest questions they face is this: How do you begin to replace the millions of jobs destroyed by the Great Recession, now that the worst of the crisis has potentially passed?

Here on the sun-drenched and windy Iberian Peninsula, Spain thinks it has an answer: create new jobs and save the Earth at the same time.

Green jobs have become a mantra for many governments, including that of the United States. But few nations are better positioned -- or motivated -- to fuse the fight against recession and global warming than Spain. The country is already a leader in renewable fuels through $30 billion in public support and has been cited by the Obama administration as a model for the creation of a green economy. Spain generates about 24.5 percent of its electricity through renewable sources, compared with about 7 percent in the United States.

But with unemployment at 18.5 percent, the government here is preparing to take a dramatic next step. Through a combination of new laws and public and private investment, officials estimate that they can generate a million green jobs over the next decade. The plan would increase domestic demand for alternative energy by having the government help pay the bill -- but also by compelling millions of Spaniards to go green, whether they like it or not.

In the long term, the government envisions a new army of engineers and technicians nurturing windmills and solar farms amid the orange orchards and carnation fields of Andalusia and Galicia. In the short term, officials say, the renewable-energy projects and refurbishing of buildings and homes for energy efficiency could redeploy up to 80 percent of the million construction workers here who lost their jobs in 2008.

Spain's ambitious effort is being closely watched by the Obama administration and other governments forming their own green-job plans. The U.S. stimulus bill is dedicating billions in grants and loans to renewable-energy projects, marking a shift away from Washington's more passive approach to green growth, which relied largely on tax incentives.

But the bid for governments to take an ever larger role in creating jobs in the private sector -- which many leaders gathering in Pittsburgh see as their mission -- is also fraught with risks.

Though the Spanish government estimates that the alternative-energy sector generates about 200,000 jobs here, about double the number in 2000, critics contend they have cost taxpayers too much money.

In some instances, the government's good intentions have distorted the energy market.

Take, for example, the recent Spanish solar bubble.

Though wind power remains the dominant alternative energy here, the government introduced even more generous inducements in recent years to help develop photovoltaic solar power -- a technology that uses sun-heated cells to generate energy. Lured by the promise of vast new subsidies, energy companies erected the silvery silicone panels in record numbers. As a result, government subsides to the sector jumped from $321 million in 2007 to $1.6 billion in 2008.

When the government moved to curb excess production and scale back subsidies late last year, the solar bubble burst, sending panel prices dropping and sparking the loss of thousands of jobs, at least temporarily.

"What they're talking about now -- creating a new sustainable economic model through alternative energy -- is going to be exactly the opposite of sustainable," said Gabriel Calzada, a Spanish economist and critic of the government's alternative-energy policy. "You're only going to create more distortion, more bubbles. It isn't going to work."

Like Building the Internet

In 2007, only one in 20 working-age residents of advanced economies was without a job. By next year -- when the International Monetary Fund expects global unemployment to peak -- that number will have jumped to one in 10.

The job market is often the last to recover after a recession. But some economists predict a years-long stagnation in job creation and wages in developed countries, including the United States, Britain, Ireland and Spain.

At the same time, governments are trying to hash out a deal by December that would establish new cuts in emissions by 2020 in an effort to stem global warming. One of the most obvious ways for nations to meet their goals, experts say, is through alternative-energy projects.

"This is going to be like the building of the Internet," said Carlos Mulas-Granados, director general of the Ideas Foundation, a Spanish think tank associated with Prime Minister Jos? Luis Rodr?guez Zapatero's ruling Socialist Party. "We're going to use this crisis as an opportunity to rebuild the economy with clean, green growth."

The multibillion-dollar investment is a gamble Spain is willing to take because, more than any other nation hit by the crisis, it is desperate for jobs. The unemployment rate here is now one of the highest in the developed world.

The streets of Madrid and other cities are being dug up and repaved in a short-term government effort to offer temporary work to the unemployed. For most, the work will last only a few months.

"And what do we do when the roadwork runs out?" Jos? Luis Salazar Garc?a, 32, said as he installed terra-cotta tiles on a Madrid sidewalk in a government-funded job. "There are no other jobs in Spain."

The country's answer is to go greener.

Spain now exports more windmills and solar panels than wine. An armada of Spanish companies has invested heavily in the United States, with one buying up an old steel mill a few dozen miles from Pittsburgh and turning it into a wind turbine plant.

Though still undergoing final touches before being presented to parliament next month, Spain's new Economic Sustainability Law would effectively create more demand for renewable fuels. All new homes and commercial buildings would require higher levels of energy efficiency, including solar power sources, leaving their owners no choice but to adopt green habits.

Government-backed loans to green companies would allow them to offer generous terms to homeowners and corporations for the installation of solar and other alternative energies.

A Jump in Energy Costs?

A new $300 million thermo-solar plant in the arid mining town of Puertollano, about 100 miles south of Madrid in the Don Quixote country of Castile-La Mancha, offers a glimpse into Spanish hopes. The partnership between the large corporate utility Iberdrola and a national energy agency employed as many 650 workers to build the plant over the past two years. The huge plant was like manna from heaven for a host of companies stung by the recession. A maker of car mirrors retrofitted its assembly lines to produce the plant's massive reflective panels, for example.

But Calzada's recent study -- which has come under fire by green advocates here and abroad -- suggests that the government's cost to create one job in leading alternative-energy sectors has averaged $855,000. It notes that although hundreds may be temporarily employed to build plants, a far smaller number gain permanent positions.

Because alternative-energy plants are more expensive than traditional power plants that burn fossil fuels, the government here has made green generation profitable by promising big subsidies for years to come. Though most Spaniards have so far seen only modest increases in their electricity bills, even government officials are warning that prices might suddenly jump in the coming years as more of the real costs are passed on to consumers.

In the meantime, some power distributors in Spain have converted their government guarantees for higher-than-market energy prices into complex financial instruments, then sold them off to the highest bidders in a manner similar to the repackaging of subprime mortgages in the United States. If the government doesn't make good on those guarantees, critics fear, the securities could suddenly devalue, soaking the investors who hold them.

"There are going to be people who say we're doing this wrong or that wrong," said ?ngel Torres, Spain's secretary general of economic policy. "But the reality is that government needs to help create a critical mass in alternative energy to make it sustainable in the long run, and that's what Spain is doing.