Owen

If the wind displaces hydro, as it is apt to do in many places in the south, the power stored in the lakes stays in the lakes when the wind is blowing… and the hydro generator isn’t a thermal plant that has to be on standby, it is more like a battery, smoothing the load.

This makes it the cheapest rather than the most expensive. This is one of the most common and least useful arguments against wind that actually exists. See below.

A more cogent objection is noise, which does affect some people, but that is mitigated by size. Larger turbines are quieter, not louder.

————

The real problems for NZ lie in the North, where there is more sun and less wind, lower hills and fewer hydro resources. A good power grid will HELP, but it doesn’t fix the location problem

Tidal power can do SOME useful displacement and North Island has geothermal. Again, not a fossil fuel but not yet developed into a resource capable of powering points North.

Finally, there is the possibility of generating surpluses with the wind, most of which has to be dumped at present… the resource is almost unlimited. What is surplus can be transformed into something else without regard to the fact that it is not 100% converted. It can be stored and shipped.

Make H2 from water and electricity, make methane from the H2 and Carbon, turn that into LNG or CNG and ship it to the North Island where it can be used in a thermal plant or fuel cells. This gives us a storable medium. It also solves the issue of providing power to apartment blocks.

I would prefer a more complex hydrocarbon, less apt to making a methane problem for us if it leaks (an issue with the gas reticulation as well).

http://ssrl.slac.stanford.edu/research/highlights_archive/pmmo.html
http://www.rsc.org/publishing/chemscience/volume/2006/12/from_methane_to_methanol.asp

Additionally CH4 in the form of LNG can be burned in existing cars with a few modifications. No batteries. No drama. Methanol has issues if water gets into the system (as it will).

respectfully
BJ

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Those studies were hugely misleading. They deal only with transport related emissions as you recognise in your post. But total transport (air, car and rail) accounts for only about 10% of the typical household’s total carbon footprint. Food accounts for about 30%. And the higher density housing in CCs has a heap of public space which needs to be lit etc. And of course concrete and steel has a higher carbon footprint that the timber of light timber frame construction. And try retrofitting solar heating to a apartment block.

Go to Consuming Australia for the most thorough analysis. See the pie chart p5.
http://americandreamcoalition.org/ConsumingAustralia.pdf

They found that the lowest carbon footprint households were in the peri-urban area or rural areas.
It has to do with income. But essentially you can live and work where you like.
Isn’t that good news?

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New research from the Center for Neighborhood Technology indicates that transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions are up to 70 percent lower per household in cities than in suburbs, a pattern that holds true in lower-density cities like Houston as well as in higher-density cities such as New York.
http://www.houstontomorrow.org/livability/story/area-outside-beltway-8-contributes-most-per-capita-carbon-emissions/

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Owen

I reckon that those numbers would be about right… though I think that more of that 50% is actually just bi-polar about the issue. City and Country both have major attractions… the suburbs have malls.

BJ

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Peak oil Owen. Electric cars are decades away from being affordable to the masses, due to their current high prices and the fact that our car fleet is pretty old.

Having read quite a few books on the matter, it really does seem like oil is a bit of a ‘holy grail’ when it comes to ease of use and energy intensity. I fully expect transportation costs in the future to be higher than they are now. Perhaps that will lead to a ‘re-localisation’ of society in the future, counter-acting the ‘de-localisation’ of the virtual world.

Crikey, sounds like a thesis topic.

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jarbury, why do you think the costs of transport will rise when technology is rapidly reducing the cost of transport?

And the PEW surveys in the US and the recent surveys which followed their methodology here all show that about 50% prefer suburban living, about 20 percent prefer inner city living and about 30 percent prefer to live in rural areas or small towns.
It will take a lot of coercion to change the behaviour and preferences of 70% of the population.

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That depends on how apocalyptic things get john-ston. In a situation where transport costs go up significantly but the structure of society still functions I would rather live in a higher density mixed use area where I can do most of what I need to do within walking distance or a short bus/cycle trip from where I live than out in the distant suburbs where I live 40 km from where I work and a few km from the nearest shopping area.

If things do get truly apocalyptic then yeah I guess it would be good to have a quarter acre section – but it’s been 40 years since we subdivided down to quarter acre sections. Most sprawl in recent times is only 400m2 sections.

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Fortunately, the ARC is following what most people agree is good sense and are focusing on providing for significant intensification of the Auckland area in the future:

Most people agree is good sense? Has a poll been conducted of people Jarbury on intensification – I highly doubt it. Certainly, it isn’t good sense when tens of thousands are being locked out of inexpensive housing because the value of land is being driven up, and you cannot deny it, the vast majority of centres where New Urbanism thinking has come to the fore has suffered incredible housing affordability issues.

Talking along a more sustainability line, I am thinking more that suburban sized sections might be more useful in your peak oil environment than intense living – consider what you can do on a quarter acre section for self sufficiency; you could easily have a sizeable garden with which to grow vegetables, a couple of fruit trees for fruit, and chickens to provide you with eggs – these sort of possibilities are simply not possible within high rise apartment buildings.

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Liberty, I suggest reading a District Plan one day. Then you’ll realise that it’s a million times easier to comply with the rules when building sprawl than it is for intensification.

The planning rules provide for sprawl (although they’re slowly being changed), so that’s what we end up with. It’s not about choice, it’s about what’s easy.

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Because pollution is aggression and therefore gives the local and central government the right to organise our public goods in a manner that limits this aggression…

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Nothing like the debate between people being able to choose how they want to live and those who want to plan for how they think they should live.

Jarbury, if most people agree on it, why do there need to be rules and laws to make it happen, and why is most demand for new housing based on suburban development of sections and new subdivisions, not the onanistic replication of old world cities with highrise near railway stations?

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Ah john-ston I guess we’re never going to resolve our disagreement on this issue.

Fortunately, the ARC is following what most people agree is good sense and are focusing on providing for significant intensification of the Auckland area in the future:

http://www.bdcentral.co.nz/afa.asp?idWebPage=8338&idBobDeyProperty_Articles=12558&SID=538208765

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jarbury Says:
July 5th, 2009 at 12:14 am

> Ah yes that was quite a tragedy really. And while the streetcars may have no longer been making a profit, what road makes a profit?

I bet the traffic lights weren’t making a profit either. Did they close them down as well?

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RE: Freemans Bay. That proposed “urban renewal” was a joint idea of the MOW planning department and Robbie.
It was called slum clearance and I was fortunate to join the City Development Team in the early sixties and be one of the major players in removing the slum clearance programme and by deregulating the land use etc enable the genuine urban renewal which then flourished. We also used the cleared flat land at the base of the valley to produce a range of medium density housing (and I invented the word Town House and Infill Housing to describe some of the prototypes) and I lived in them for four years so the architects upstairs could not reduce standards on the grounds “these people don’t need carports and washing machines” etc.
The once we reduced the ban on building (an rebuilding) on lots under 24p (most were 10 and 12p) then renewal took place naturally because people could now borrow mortgage money. The “workers” living there had the longest trips in Auckland to work because most worked in the meat works in south Auckland.
IF it was not for our market led approach the whole valley would now be star flats and high rise towers on the ridge. All built down to a cost.
The sections were small because these were initially working class suburbs. The middle class suburbs of early auckland were around 24 perches while the upper class suburbs such as Remuera had lots from 1/4 to an acre which is why there are so many large trees. These differences in lot size were established early in the piece and had nothing to do with transport and density. The quarter acre lot has always been more myth than reality in our cities. We always had a decent spread until density became a goal and we now have lots too small to allow for a decent sized house and several decent sized trees.

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Sorry, but when did they managed to build it?

I was in Denver 4 years ago, but I don’t remember this thing….

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Guys, its blockquote > /blockquote >, or to italicise, the much more convenient i > /i >. Important – take out the spaces.

The relevant help page seems out-of-order at the moment. Will have that looked at.

Ah the arrows, should have known, cheers…

I’m glad I joined this site looks like its full of climate change deniers, people who think public transport is the devil “cause my Daddy votes National” and those who say Auckland’s development is going just dandy thanks, I’m sooo glad central government ignored Sir Dove-Myer Robinson… Quite hilarious these people should be on a “green” site, trying to change the enlightened minds methinks…

@john-ston do you really think Los Angelenos today don’t wish the Municipal government hadn’t picked up the tab and keep the system going for all these years..?

It would have saved them untold billions in traffic congestion costs, much of the cost they face in expanding their current system and if San Fran is anything to go by added to their tourist market…

The anti-competitve law they faced now seems at best a joke (like contact energy not being able to sell power to itself if it decided to build a LRT in Christchurch) and at worst corrupt (the american political corruption when it came to the Big Oil and the like started in 1913). Furthermore the “car lobby” was prosecuted and convicted of conspiracy…

So:
- GM et al (car lobby) either through influence or luck have a law passed that essentially forces streetcars to go for tender.
- Car lobby buys system.
- Car lobby destroys system.
- Car lobby sells and operates buses and sells cars.

If the inevitable decline had happened as you say, it would have given the locals the chance to campaign for the system and Municipal government the option to buy it when it was very cheap al’a the San Fran cable cars (just look at the Bay area’s rail transport in comparison now)…

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I guess you mean brownfield/intensification redevelopment. I certainly don’t think that government involvement would result in crime-ridden cesspools. We’re certainly not expecting the Hobsonville redevelopment (undertaken by Housing New Zealand) to be a cesspool, neither the case with the Flat Bush town centre development (Manukau City Council). I know both those examples are greenfield developments, but the point is that public developers can lead to outcomes other than Otara or Glen Innes. You just need to be careful about the amount of subsidised housing you put in an area.

Jarbury, while you are hopeful, I am not – particularly about Flat Bush. My father did some surveying work in that area sometime in either 2007 or last year of people in that area, and a number of people who live in the outskirts of what will be Flat Bush are already worried about the increasing amount of crime in their area. My father commented that one gentleman even said that he would move out of the area as soon as a Secondary School opened in the area because of vagrancy, and he also noted that almost every house had some sort of fancy high-tech security facility.

While the amount of subsidised housing might play a role, remember the lowest common denominator issue and think of that area that was mentioned in the Aucklander article a few months ago.

That’s why I have little time for those who oppose plan changes that provide for intensification on NIMBY grounds. Although councils have to take some of the responsibility for the opposition by taking so long to come up with half decent rules that make higher-density developments fairly simple to consent, but at the same time lead to high quality outcomes.

This is a different sort of NIMBY though; consider what happened when the council planned to bowl over Freemans Bay back in the 1950s. I can foresee there being a massive outcry in the next decade or so, and it will not be a good one. Heck, the only reason why the Eastern Motorway was defeated was because of NIMBYs and that resulted in Banks losing office all those years ago.

Build in brick then.

Well done, not only have you created high crime areas where people need to spend tens of thousands in security, but when an earthquake hits, you are going to kill them all.

That’s only good for encouraging public transport use amongst those commuting. The trip to and from work only accounts for around a third of the vehicle trips people in your average sprawled city make. The rest are things like picking the kids up from school, popping down to the dairy and so forth. It is only a focus on intensification and mixed-use developments that can reduce people’s auto-dependency for those kinds of trips.

How much auto-dependency is there really for those kinds of trips though? If you look at Pakuranga for instance, almost the whole suburb is within walking distance of a primary school and a group of shops. If you look at how things were even in the 1960s and 1970s, children walked or cycled to school and mothers walked to the dairy, and developmental patterns haven’t changed all that much since then.

What has changed is attitudes. I suspect it was the murder of Teresa Cormack in 1987 (and the fact it took fifteen years to find her murderer) that changed everything – parents no longer felt safe allowing their children to walk to school, and started driving them. Then you had the start of stranger danger awareness and the like, and I suspect that it dealt another blow to the idea of children walking to school. Further to that, with women entering the workforce, you no longer had mothers who had time to walk their children to school – they also now had to commute.

If you want people to start doing things like walking to school again, then you need to make parents feel safer about the safety of their children – we are going to have to deal with the problem of crime. Urban design isn’t the issue in this case, it is a social problem.

The difference is quite clear when you look at travel patterns for those in the inner New York suburbs (high density, mixed use developments, low auto-dependence – with very low car ownership rates) with those in the outer suburbs (low density, decent use of commuter rail to work, but otherwise high auto-dependency).

The biggest difference between New York and Auckland would probably be the size of these items. Schools in New Zealand tend to be very small compared with what you find in the United States, and there would presumably be far more of them. I can immediately name three primary schools in the area bounded by Pakuranga Road, Ti Rakau Drive and the Pakuranga Creek – an 800m circle from them all would cover that entire area.

Obviously you missed this:

I didn’t miss it, but you must have missed the Wikipedia article on the Pacific Electric Railway

As the company’s major income source began to deplete, profitability required that the least-used Red Car lines be converted to cheaper buses as early as 1925.

In terms of in the United States, their transit systems were probably only kept going by the Great Depression and the Second World War, and would have been closed much sooner. All that National City Lines did was act as a mechanism for what would have happened.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scandal

Ah yes that was quite a tragedy really. And while the streetcars may have no longer been making a profit, what road makes a profit?

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Guys, its < blockquote > < /blockquote >, or to italicise, the much more convenient < i > < /i >. Important – take out the spaces.

The relevant help page seems out-of-order at the moment. Will have that looked at.

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Jeeza: I would like to know that trick, Is it a cut, copy and paste job from the Edit box? I would experiment if I could only be able to activate those boxes.

Cheers

Drak.

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