Yes, folks, it’s been a long, only somewhat excusable hiatus (deadlines, Conventions, new jobs, economic meltdowns, Alaska!), but we’re back and focused on all the glory that is Autumn in NYC, and we’ll be spending a good amount of time catching up and getting back in front of the ball.

If there were any way to have shortened this break in the action, we would’ve.  (Anyone know of a deep-pocketed underwriter who wants to sponsor this outlet?  Is anyone deep-pocketed around here anymore?)

We missed you, and we’re so happy you havn’t locked us out.

[We really wish we’d be doing more of this, but in fact we’ll be working hard on our August getaway.]

With a humble heart and an enflamed sense of guilt (the real Italian mother kind of guilt), we’ve owe it to you to report that we’re going to be on a bit of a hiatus here for a couple of weeks.   There is much, MUCH travel in our future–almost all of which is directly related to the actual professional obligations that actually pay the bills.  But not too long into September, we’ll be reimmersing ourselves in the wonderful world of NYC’s sustainability scene. And we look forward to reconnecting with you on that side.  Until then, stay cool.

-Ben, Naveen, and SustaiNYC

We’ve been parking ourselves on the East River waterfront and taking in this annual treat for years.  Good times, great films.  At Solar One:

Thursday, Friday & Saturday August 21-23 and September 4-6

AT 8PM

FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

THERE WILL BE A LIMITED NUMBER OF CHAIRS AVAILABLE, FIRST COME, FIRST SERVE- PLEASE FEEL FREE TO BRING YOUR OWN

Thursday August 21 Running Fence + Christo’s Valley Curtain

Friday August 22 Gimme Green + Invisible Creek + City of Water

Saturday August 23 The Greening of Southie

Thursday September 4 Burning the Future

Friday September 5 Garbage Warrior

Saturday September 6 The Future of Food

Plus popcorn, beer, ice cream, trivia games, director Q&As and much more! Scroll down for the full schedule.

About the Solar Powered Film Series

The Solar-Powered Film Series is the first in New York City to use the power of the sun to construct an outdoor “eco-theater” like no other. Our independent film venue integrates natural and human-made components of our urban environment creating the city’s “greenest” motion picture showcase.

This free six-evening program features nightly screenings of a range of films including acclaimed documentaries, dark comedies and sci-fi classics. The series showcases Solar One’s commitment to green energy by powering each screening in part with clean, renewable, carbon-free solar energy.

As part of Solar One’s dynamic and exciting summer schedule, the film series is held at Solar One’s outdoor location in beautiful Stuyvesant Cove Park, overlooking the East River south of E. 23^rd Street. For each of the last three years, Solar One has been proud to welcome award-winning director and Oscar nominee Albert Maysles for a Q&A session following one of his films- Grey Gardens in 2005, Gimme Shelter in 2006, and the rarely-seen What’s Happening! The Beatles in America in 2007, making this an even more valuable contribution to New York’s cultural landscape.

The series’ power to demonstrate the utility of renewable energy has never been more relevant or important, particularly with the specter of summer blackouts looming just over the horizon. Since its launch in 2003, Solar One has hosted a plethora of sustainably produced popular arts events like the film series, all of which clearly show the power of renewable energy. Guests can expect great entertainment paired with demonstrations and information regarding key green initiatives.

Info about each film after the hop… (more…)

• Bloomie launched a Climate Change Task Force.
• Then he went and proposed a pretty ridiculously ambitious wind energy initiative for the city.
• You could study wind and other renewables under the Center for Sustainable Energy’s new course offerings.
• The City Council is going to fine all those stores that pump cool AC air out on the street waste energy.

From Times Up, who had a free bike decorating station set up at the cube:

And another from reader Carol Binkowski:

Thanks so much, Carol!

Elsewhere, Brad Aaron at Streetsblog ponders the necessity of the “fast” and “slow” lanes.  Can cyclists and pedestrians ever get along?

 

[Photo of Robert Burghardt mural: wallyg/Flickr. Found on Streetsblog]

Come one, come all.  Come join SustaiNYC, your friends Ben and Naveen, and a whole bunch of roadside revelers as we celebrate the glory that is Summer Streets.

Tomorrow, Saturday, August 16th

We’ll be staking out some street on 4th Avenue between East 10th and 11th, sipping coffee and stuffing bagels, striping lines for some competitive four-square, and generally loitering and enjoying the scene as the streets are (temporarily) reclaimed from the automobile and given back to the people.

Ben, Naveen, and SustaiNYC

Wow.  Well that video just about captures it.  What more could you ask for out of a Summer Street?

Plenty of links about the day:

• NRDC’s Scott Todd loved it and has a rather incredible slideshow of photos he took: “Look Ma, No Cars!“
• Streetsblog has some great photos too.
• The Times was all love and roses for Summer Streets.
• More headlines courtesy of Streetsblog:
  • No Traffic on a Saturday? Well, No Cars, Anyway (NYT)
  • NYC Experiments With Car-Free Urban Playground (AP)
  • Takin’ It to the (No-Traffic) Streets (News)
  • Gentlemen, Stop Your Engines (Voice)
  • A Car-Free Day (Post)
  • Car-Free Zone Biz Was Feast, Famine (Post)
  • 7 Miles of Manhattan Streets Go Car-Free (WNYC)

This should be interesting….

It’s Not Easy is an exhibition inspired by the recent tidal wave of efforts to go “green”.As new buildings seek LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification, as major corporations seek to “green” their practices, and as global warming puts the need to be green at the forefront, we are virtually inundated with social pressures to be environmentally sustainable. But how is the word ‘green’ really interpreted?
Exit Art asked that question to artists, activists and the general public to solicit their personal responses through email.

The photographs, texts, drawings, graphics and other works in It’s Not Easy are printed on 8½” x 11” recycled paper, giving equal – and sustainable – attention to each work. With over 300 responses, It’s Not Easy explores the multiplicity of cultural, environmental and political meanings of GREEN.

It’s Not Easy is the second exhibition of SEA (Social Environmental Aesthetics), a major new exhibition program and archive initiative in Exit Underground that presents social and environmental issues and the way artists respond to them. SEA will occupy a permanent space in Exit Underground. The SEA Archive will be a permanent archive of information, images and videos that will be a searchable database for scholars and researchers. Central to the mission of SEA is to provide a vehicle through which the public can be made aware of this kind of work, to provide a forum for collaboration between artists and ecologists and to inspire them to continue the tradition of work that SEA presents.

More here.

Were you there?  Have photos?  Have video?  Leave a link or a description in the comments below!

Summer Streets from GammaBlog on Vimeo.Elsewhere, feedback has been pretty unanimously positive!

Janette Sadik-Khan to Arun Venugopal on WNYC:

I talked to the mayor about if this is successful, and it appears to be, that down the line we would look at potentially extending the hours, extending the days, and looking at different locations and different boroughs. So, stay tuned.

CBS-TV,  WNYC, “newyorkers” livejournal!

Occasionally, we’ll break out of the “reblogging” and use this venue for a spot of original editorial.  This is the first such instance–a report on a recent forum on distributed generation and how New Yorkers can put electricity into the city’s grid, and a powerful, promising idea that emerged from the session.

It was in Manhattan, way back in 1882, that Thomas Edison flipped the switch on the world’s first electrical grid, sending 110 Volts of direct current (DC) to 59 downtown customers. It’s fitting, then, that 126 years later it was again Manhattan where an idea was hatched that could prove yet another global model for the production and distribution of electricity, in this case for urban areas as they necessarily shift towards clean energy sources.  The concept is the solar empowerment zone, and it addresses directly the challenges of integrating the distributed generation of clean, renewable energy into a grid that was built to deliver electricity from a select few centralized power plants.

Last week at Hunter College, the New York City Council’s Infrastructure Task Force convened a public forum on distributed generation and how New Yorkers can add their own power to the grid.  It was, according to Chris Neidl of Solar One, a local non-profit clean energy advocacy and education organization, “arguably the most substantive public forum ever held on the complex subject of distributed energy sources and the New York City electricity grid.”  [Full disclosure: Chris Neidl is a friend and former colleague, as I used to work for Solar One.]  New York City’s grid has, since Edison’s time, remained a marvel of engineering, stretching and spreading power through the world’s most complicated and intricate “mesh grid” system of transmission lines, transformers, and network protectors.  Such complexity creates big challenges for the integration of photovoltaic (PV) solar arrays, small-scale wind and other distributed clean energy sources.

Photovoltaic solar emerged over the course of the 4-hour forum as the most logical and promising clean energy solution for New York City.  Because the five boroughs are in a load pocket, much of our power must be produced locally, and anyone who’s spent a summer here knows that there’s an enormous burden on the grid during the peak demand periods of sweltering summer afternoons.  Solar panels, of course, produce the most energy at precisely those times when New Yorkers are cranking their ACs.  And throughout the city, particularly in the outer boroughs, there’s no shortage of rooftops that are prime to harbor PV arrays.  During the forum, through a series of three panels, energy experts, business leaders, academics and city officials discussed the potential of solar and identified the key hurdles to spreading PV across the city’s rooftops.

Recent legislation out of Albany has made the personal economic hurdle a much smaller factor.  With expanded net metering, property owners can sell more power (now up to five megawatts) back to the utility, and the solar property tax abatement will, according to Con Ed’s calculations, help reduce the cost of a five kilowatt system from around $40,000 to $9,000.  But getting connected to the grid is another factor.

Under the current system, a building owner must pay for the costs of hooking a power source to the grid.  It’s a long, unpredictable, and often expensive process. The variables are enough to scare most developers away.  (If they’re not already put off by the hefty and intimidatingly titled document that outlines the process: “Standardized Interconnection Requirements and Application Process for New Distributed Generators 2 MW or Less Connected in Parallel with Utility Distribution Systems.” [PDF])

Enter “solar empowerment zones,” a term coined by City Councilmember and Infrastructure Task Force co-chair Daniel Garodnick.  The innovative concept calls for the identification of areas in the city that are well suited for widespread PV installation, which Garodnick defined as “low-density areas that have buildings with large rooftops to create a synergy for an entire neighborhood to become solar-powered.” Within these zones properties would be eligible for increased incentives for solar investment, potentially dropping upfront costs below even the newly reduced costs. Con Ed, hopefully serving as partner, would commit to fast-tracking grid feasibility analyses and tests within the established zones.  And, importantly, resources could be pooled to pay for any necessary improvements, and arrays could be tied together to necessitate only one connection to the grid, further streamlining the process.  These solar empowerment zones would serve to, said Neidl, “scale up solar capacity in the city at an exponential, rather than incremental rate.”  Speaking to some broader implications, Neidl emphasized, “Realization of the concept would establish, irrefutably, the Big Apple’s leadership position on the national stage in renewable energy adoption and innovative policy making.”

Solar empowerment zones could, in a relatively short timeframe, propel New York City to the forefront of urban clean energy implementation.  If the day comes when PV arrays atop the roofs in the city’s first solar empowerment zone start pouring juice into the grid, it may be celebrated as the most important flip of the switch since Edison himself first lit up Pearl Street.