Projecting Energy and GHGs for General Plans and Regional Transportation Plans

Robert A. JohnstonMike McCoy

Information Center for the EnvironmentUniversity of California, Davis

Attorney General's Workshops, 2008

Background

• We will cover not only GHG assessment methods for land use and transportation projects, but also for General Plans, Regional Transportation Plans, and Climate Action Plans.

• In all cases, a model must cover No Action Alt., the Proposed Project/Plan, and at least one Environmentally Superior Alt. Also, various mitigation measures.

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Project Assessment

• Urbemis, or similar method, adequate for estimating emissions from travel. Floorspace or workers generate trips.

• Average trip lengths X trips gives Vehicle Miles of Travel (VMT). EMFAC2007 gives GHGs.

• Difficult to estimate VMT from any land use project, due to uncertain mix of tenants (small sample size).

• Easy to project energy use and GHG emissions from buildings, as they are fixed and we already do Title 24 calc's, for most buildings.

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Project Assessment

• Urbemis covers No Action Alt., but you must define what this means (no project, or similar project elsewhere in jurisdiction).

• Environmentally Superior Alt's will generally be smaller buildings, or tighter buildings, or more mixing of land uses, or site closer to transit.

• Urbemis can handle these, as well as a few mitigation measures. Other mitigation measures can be represented by factoring, based on data.

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Plan Assessment

• A Regional Transportation Plan can be evaluated, as is, since it has a buildout for a certain year. A local General Plan, however, needs to be modeled, to get buildout for any year.

• We suggest using UPlan, our simple urban growth model, in rural counties. It is currently being used by 18 California COGs and RTPAs for Blueprint planning.

• It takes your demographic inputs and assumptions about proportions of land use types and your General Plan. It then maps likely land development for the future year.

• Uses 50m gridcells and any desired land use types.5

Example: San Joaquin County, Base Year

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San Joaquin County, 2050

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Can Capture Buildings and Travel

• UPlan will project floorspace for households and workers, for each land use type. So, get energy use and GHGs for buildings.

• UPlan may be run with your county travel model, so that you can get Vehicle-Miles of Travel.

• EMFAC2007 then projects GHGs for on-road vehicles.

• Has been run with a travel model by the Merced Co. Assoc. of Govts. Amador and Calaveras counties soon. Then, the San Joaquin Valley regional travel model.

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The Energy and GHG Impacts Module

• We recently added a module to calculate Energy and GHG Impacts.

• It takes acres of each land use type for new development and translates those into floorspace area for 6 basic building types

Residential attached, detached small lot, detached large lot Commercial low-density, high-density

Industrial

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Energy Use and GHG Calculations

• Estimates energy use in buildings, based on California Energy Commission data on electricity and NG use per sq. ft., by climate zone and major utility area.

• So, it is sensitive to land use density, a major determinant of energy use per household and per employee.

• Then, it translates end use electricity (in buildings) to electricity generation mix, by utility.

• Finally, we convert kWh of coal-elec. and kWh of NG-elec. into GHGs, using standard data (GREET model, Argonne Lab). NG use in buildings is directly converted to GHGs.

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Climate Zones

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Policy Sensitivity

• This approach is sensitive to density within each land use type and to the mix of land uses. A higher proportion of attached residences will reduce GHGs per capita, as will higher commercial densities.

• The travel model will also show lower VMT and lower GHGs for compact growth and mixed-use scenarios. So, it has the correct basic policy sensitivity for city and county land use policies.

• MPO's can use some of our calculations with their own land use models. SANDAG and SACOG using the PECAS land use model, for example. ABAG already has their own GHG model.

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Policy Sensitivity.....

• UPlan will work for the No Action Alt., as well as the Environmentally Superior ones.

• It should also work for critical mitigation measures, such as higher new building standards. There will be a box where you can enter an energy efficiency factor for each land use type to represent "Percent More Efficient than Title 24."

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Transportation Policies

• For transportation policies, such as more transit service, the travel model represents these in its networks.

• Charging for workplace parking, adopting higher fuel taxes or carbon taxes, and other pricing policies can also be represented in a travel model (cost per vehicle-mile, terminal costs).

• Neighborhood walkability/bikeability, land use mix, and TODs and other land use policies can be represented directly by the travel model, or VMT can be factored down, using the "4-Ds" methods.

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Technical Issues

• All data are defaults that the user can overwrite, if better local data are obtained. Our CEC data are ave. energy use in new and old buildings and so overproject energy use in new buildings. We will fix this, when we find data for new bldgs.

• UPlan only covers "operational" energy use and resultant GHGs. Travel models also only cover operational energy use. A better method is to also include "embodied" energy, that is, the energy it took to make the capital involved (buildings, roads, vehicles). Large literature on this.

• This is complex, but we will seek funding to do it. Will then include nuclear, hydro, geothermal, central solar, PVs, and wind, as they are not clean, in this more-complete analysis.

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Current Status

• We are currently testing the Energy and GHG Impact module on several counties. We will release the new software by June.

• UPlan is free, open-code software running in ArcGIS9.2, and has a Users Manual. Most counties use ArcGIS9.2. We recommend training and support through the Information Center for the Environment at UC Davis.

• Counties currently trained to use UPlan in their Blueprint projects will receive additional assistance in using the Energy and GHG module.

• Funded by the Caltrans Division of Transportation Planning.

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