No, things are different now, said Lisa Margonelli, director of the Energy Policy Initiative at the New America Foundation. “We’re advancing toward a kind of tipping point” where solar will move from being a minor energy source to a major one. Although the government remains mired in a 30-year-old argument about whether it should subsidize solar power, the technological and financial reality has advanced far beyond this one issue. Look to California for proof: since 2005, the state has scaled up its production of solar power by a factor of 10, from 225 Megawatts to 2.5 Gigawatts, or roughly the amount of energy 2.5 nuclear power plants produce.

The City of Los Angeles has also bought into solar energy, said Ron Nichols, general director of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. The city is working on a number of different financial models, from solar incentive plans in which customers install their own panels to power purchase agreements in which a third-party developer operates panels. It’s also testing the commercial viability of bigger projects through smaller ones for now in order “to get a feel for different types of business models, sizes, scales, and locations.”

UC Berkeley’s Daniel Kammen, founder of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, spoke to the speed at which the technology is developing and the potential for solar power to become still cheaper and more efficient. Laboratories all over the world are competing to create better, less expensive technologies–and the Gigawatt scale California is currently operating on has the potential to scale up once again by a factor of 10.

Installation, too, is growing more efficient, said Jim Cahill of the consumer solar energy company SolarCity–and it’s creating jobs. Cahill’s company has grown from 20 to 300 employees in Southern California over the past few years. “The good news about solar installations is all the labor has to be from here,” he said. He predicted that installation costs would continue to drop and that the model might become similar to that of cell phones, in which the companies give away the phones but charge for the contract.

Financial innovations need to catch up to technological ones, said Kammen, pointing to Germany, where solar power has taken off, thanks to a new system of feed-in tariffs. Mandated by the government, feed-in tariffs allow solar panel owners to sell their power to utilities. We have the technological capacity to get the price of solar power down to one dollar per watt before 2020, said Kammen.

Margonelli agreed, adding that we still need to figure out the utilities, the government, and our legal framework as individuals. Solar energy changes our entire model, making “a house is analogous to a power plant now.”

Before opening the floor for questions from the standing-room-only audience, Olney returned to his opening gambit. The panelists seemed confident that California’s solar gold rush was not destined to fail, he said–but they hadn’t yet answered outright.

California has the capacity to meet its ambitious solar energy goals, said Nichols.

“It’s destined to fail if we don’t take advantage of the opportunities,” added Kammen. We do need to find a way to build solar panels for those who can’t pay for them themselves and to make the system for democratic and progressive. But there’s “no question we can make the California gold rush work,” he concluded.

Audience members asked the panel to talk economics and to look further afield at the solar equation around the globe. Why was Germany able to install three times as many solar panels in one year as the entire state of California? The answer, said Kammen, is that we have more red tape and Germany has a better economy.

Should the U.S. try to manufacture less expensive solar panels here instead of buying them from China? Not really, said Cahill. Prices have dropped thanks to competition from China. “We’re way further along than I ever thought we’d be at this time,” he said. “I see the light at the end of the tunnel, where five years ago I didn’t even see the tunnel.”

In response to a question about whether solar panel prices can go down any further–and if solar energy still makes sense after rebates go away, both Cahill and Kammen were bullish. We’re still operating “in startup mode,” said Kammen.

“What we need to do is build [solar energy] and grow it so it’s not a flash in the pan,” added Nichols. We need to balance the costs with the ability to grow it more.

“This is not Ayn Rand’s capitalism,” said Margonelli. Utilities are a regulated industry, and public participation is needed to integrate solar energy into the grid–and to increase access. “It needs to be something everyone participates in and not just something for the people who can afford it.”

Watch full video here.
See more photos here.
Read expert opinions on the future of solar power in California here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

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The sun has been shining brightly on solar power, but can it last? California has seen a lot of booms and busts, and solar power has been among them. Solar power boomed in the late 1970s and busted in the decades that followed. Today, it’s looking bright again, and solar panels blanket the state. But how far can we take it, and how much can the sun really do for us? In advance of the Zócalo event “Is California’s Solar Gold Rush Destined to Fail?“, we asked several solar supporters and skeptics for their take on whether the sun has a shot at becoming California’s primary source of energy.

Hold On To Your Hats: Solar’s Just One Good Source

Solar’s potential is obvious: a report by the California Energy Commission found that solar photovoltaic panels could ultimately generate 17 million megawatts of power in the state. Even with the relatively low efficiency rates of solar power, that adds up to roughly 40 times more power than the state is projected to require in 2020.

But solar power is also one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity. and without innovations load balancing and energy storage, solar will prove difficult to scale at the pace required to avert the risks of climate change. Even with all the new solar energy infrastructure erected in recent years, California’s two nuclear power plants still provide more than 25 times as much power as all the state’s solar energy sources combined. So California cannot rely on solar alone.

Instead, California should pursue all options for low-carbon power generation, including solar and other renewables like wind, advanced biofuels, zero-emissions nuclear power, and carbon-capture technologies. Above all, California’s priorities should be to drive innovations and cost declines in the broad portfolio of clean energy technologies, so that clean tech can compete with fossil fuels without relying on federal or state subsidies.

The potential of solar energy is high, and a landmark study from the California Council on Science and Technology projects that it will play a significant role in California’s electricity mix by 2050. But in order to combat the effects of climate change properly and transform California’s energy system, we need to invest in all reliable low-carbon power technologies, not just one of them.

Alex Trembath is Policy Associate at the Breakthrough Institute.

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Solar Will Rule–If Politicians Don’t Flake Out Again

In 1980, America spent more money on solar energy and employed more PhDs than the rest of the world combined. President Jimmy Carter revealed a detailed plan to obtain 20 percent of America’s total energy budget from renewable energy sources by 2000. California, under then-governor Jerry Brown, led the first wave of this revolution.

However, in 1981, Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President, and within six months he had dismembered Carter’s solar initiative. In 1983, George Deukmejian replaced Jerry Brown as Governor, with similar results.

Japan picked up the solar torch with its “Sunshine Project.” Then, solar leadership passed to Germany, where an innovative “feed-in tariff” made Germany the renewable energy capital of the world.

Five years ago, China accelerated its entry into the solar field. The OECD now expects China to have nearly three times as much solar generating capacity installed by 2020 as the United States.

Nowhere on earth (definitely not China, Germany, or Japan) does solar make more sense than in California, with its abundant sunshine and expensive conventional power. Third-party installers like Sungevity will install a solar system on California homes with no money down and lease it back or less each month than the homeowner saves on his electric bill. The homeowner makes money from day one.

California is home to numerous solar startups exploring new technologies, some of which appear to hold great promise.

There will be consolidation in the industry in the years ahead, as powerful foreign companies with deep pockets (Samsung, Foxconn, Total) enter the field. California, with a supportive citizenry and Jerry Brown back at the helm, is America’s best hope to be a viable contender as solar energy evolves into the world’s cleanest, safest, cheapest source of electricity.

Denis Hayes, president of the Bullitt Foundation, headed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory under President Carter. He was formerly a professor of engineering at Stanford University.

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Solar Is Definitely Going to Be Number One

Definitely. Solar is the most abundant renewable energy resource, and numerous regions in California receive some of the most intense solar irradiance in the world. Californians consume around 260,000 gigawatt hours of electricity per year. With today’s technologies, you could meet that need with around 200 square miles of solar panels. As photovoltaic and thermal technologies improve over the next few years, we expect that even less collector area will be required to meet the state’s electricity needs.

Improving collector efficiency and affordability is what we are working on at the University of California Advanced Solar Technologies Institute (UC Solar), which is headquartered right here at the University of California, Merced. In partnership with faculty from the UC’s Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Davis and San Diego campuses, our cross-disciplinary research is leading to innovative systems that can be deployed for applications such as electricity generation, process/industrial heat, solar air conditioning and desalination. We are working to make solar energy the best choice for the people of California and the world, while at the same time educating tomorrow’s solar energy leaders and entrepreneurs.

Solar energy not only can be California’s leading energy source; it will be. And sooner that most people think.

Roland Winston is director of UC Solar and professor of engineering and natural Sciences at UC Merced.

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Solar Is Going Swimmingly–And We’re Just Getting Started

California law requires that 33 percent of our electricity come from renewable energy resources by 2020. The good news is that we are well on our way to meeting that goal. California investor-owned utilities have signed over 8 gigawatts of contracts for solar power. Even better news: the cost of solar panels has come down over 70 percent the past three years, which has resulted in parity with fossil fuels. Over half of those contracts are at prices, on a kilowatt hour basis, lower than the 20-year levelized cost of energy of building a new combined cycle natural gas plant. That’s right–solar cheaper than the fossil-fuel alternatives.

With over 20,000 Californians employed in the solar industry, solar represents a major source of economic opportunity. There is a lot of good news for home and business owners as well. Over 100,000 utility customers have installed a solar system, representing over 1 gigawatts worth of generating capacity. At peak levels, that’s twice the output of an average coal plant. With new financing models, it is cheaper for many in the state to go solar than to buy their electricity from the grid. As an added benefit, the price of sunshine today is the same as the price of sunshine in 20 years. The sun never asks for a rate increase.

What could upset this good-news story? By state law, customer generation is currently capped at five percent of peak load, and utilities are working overtime in Sacramento to keep that cap from being lifted. And the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which has traditionally relied on antiquated, polluting coal plants, needs to do a lot more to accelerate its solar procurement. Solar is delivering as promised. With scale has come greatly reduced costs. But there is still a long way to go. The best is yet to come.

Adam Browning is executive director of Vote Solar, a non-profit public advocacy organization working to bring solar energy into the mainstream.

*Photo courtesy of vaXzine.

The post Here Comes the Sun King appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California recently approved 11 separate solar power plants, big installations of mirrors and equipment that can concentrate the sun’s heat to produce power. If built, those 11 plants will have a capacity of 4.2 Gigawatts. The cumulative impact of all of this building–driven by federal investment tax credits and state mandates to generate a third of the state’s power from renewable sources by 2033–is astonishing. In short order, solar could lose its tinfoil-hat-California-dream aura to become the Golden State’s new normal.

This is a stunning triumph of all the things we Californians hold dear: idealistic bureaucrats, an action-hero governor, starry-eyed inventors, entrepreneurial environmentalists, venture capitalists, and thousands of big and small businesses and homeowners who want to be part of the future.

But will it last?

California has been on the solar cutting edge before. In the 1980s, the state produced 95 percent of the world’s solar power. One company, LUZ International, designed solar thermal power plants and managed to reduce the price of generating a solar kilowatt hour of power by two-thirds between 1984 and 1989.

But by 1991, LUZ was bankrupt. The problem wasn’t the technology: LUZ’s plants are still gleaming away in Kramer Junction and Harper Lake for the utility NextEra Energy Resources. What did LUZ in were falling energy prices, unpredictable political support for the tax incentives that kept investors in the game, and the lack of a big-picture push to make solar a fundamental pillar of energy security.

Unfortunately, the things that killed LUZ are still around. Forecasts of falling natural gas prices would make solar energy less competitive. Solyndra has ensured dwindling political support. And we still don’t have a national greenhouse gas policy or a carbon tax that would ensconce solar as a core of our electric portfolio.

Is there a cautionary tale here? Or is LUZ just an artifact of the past?

The first person I called was Michael Lotker, LUZ’s former VP of Business Development. He wrote a report on the demise of LUZ published by Sandia National Laboratories in 1991. For a report, it’s a ripping yarn of how high energy prices–combined with an activist California Public Utilities Commission and government initiatives–helped make room for solar entrepreneurs in California’s energy markets. Investors were attracted by federal “Energy Tax Credits” while state property tax exemptions helped reduce costs. LUZ’s power plants looked vaguely like space stations or Martian landing pads. Big circles of mirrors concentrated solar heat, while extensive pipe systems carried hot fluids to the generators. Although the engineers managed to reduce the cost of solar power, energy prices fell even faster: fossil-fuel prices dropped by 78 percent between 1981 and 1991.

Meanwhile, the political support for solar power evaporated. Congress started dragging its feet on the yearly renewal of the Energy Tax Credit, and 1990’s renewal lasted only nine months. This made financing perilous. Then, in 1991, California’s governor vetoed the property tax exemption. Although it was ultimately reinstated, the credit was labeled “controversial.”

I reached Lotker, who’s left solar power to become a rabbi, while he was helping with a funeral. He remembered the days of trying to secure political support. “It was two emergencies every year,” he told me. “The first was getting the new plant online. The other was getting the credits. It was always life or death and it made our costs much higher.”

Lotker described many barriers to the company’s success. There was “false confidence” in the availability of renewable energy–and a lack of commitment to taking the steps to make solar competitive with other forms of power, including putting a price on pollution or the hidden costs of conventional power generation.

“I always thought support for these [steps] was a mile wide and an inch deep,” he said. “Everyone loved them but no one would fight to the death.” Thirty years ago, Lotker and his compatriots at LUZ looked at bombing ranges in Nevada and imagined powering the whole U.S. with concentrated solar thermal power from them, but “inch deep” support cut their small effort off at the knees.

Today Rabbi Lotker drives by the old plants occasionally and says he feels “like a father” to them, but without a carbon price solar power will lack enough support to become a major part of the grid.

In the usual discussions of solar power in the media, we focus on whether the technology “works” or whether it’s too expensive to compete. Sometimes we talk about poor management, boondoggles, or the proper role of government in helping renewable energy. Rarely do we talk about how politics invades a business model, making a risky proposition more risky. If we learned anything from the past, it should be that the dumbest thing we could possibly do is to support a technology, get companies going, and then yank the support so that taxpayer investments go to waste.

Some of LUZ’s founders started a company called BrightSource, which designs, develops, and sells solar power plants that use banks of precisely angled mirrors to concentrate heat on a central tower to generate steam and electricity. BrightSource has contracts for 2.4 Gigawatts of generation with California utilities and plans to design and build several plants. BrightSource’s senior vice president of government relations and communications, Joe Desmond, was formerly chairman of the California Energy Commission and has held positions in the public and private sector. He is a springy intellectual with an encyclopedic enthusiasm for solar.

To Desmond and those on the inside of the energy business, it’s obvious that the entire utility sector is the product of government regulations, incentives, and goals. But that can also be risky for a technology. Regulators sometimes get enamored of a technology with hidden barriers–hydrogen for example–that then falls out of favor. And no one will forget the starkness with which the tricky relationship between politics and the grid was laid bare during the California blackouts of 2000-2001, which cost Governor Gray Davis his job. “There are high consequences for the failure to manage risks,” Desmond said.

Desmond mentioned two ways that risk is already embedded in the solar energy landscape. First, as in the ’80s, federal tax credits are an important part of getting investors to pony up money for solar projects. The “Investment Tax Credit” has been extended to 2016, a solid timeframe that allows entrepreneurs a predictable future. But a provision called Section 1603–which allows those tax credits to be monetized early–must be renewed every year, and it was not renewed at the end of 2011. With shades of LUZ, the shuttering of 1603 is likely to cut private financing for solar significantly. Solyndra’s bankruptcy is driving the debate around renewing programs like 1603, even though the loans the federal government made to the start-up are very different from the tax credits made to solar producers. “It’s difficult to communicate the difference in a sound bite,” said Desmond.

But, in many ways, the problem with tax credits is old-school. The newer, more interesting, more futuristic risk is the one posed by the restructuring of the grid itself. The old grid was hierarchical, with centralized power plants dispatching power at will. The new grid is a two-way flow of information and energy. “We’re moving from centralized to distributed decision making,” said Desmond. “How do we manage these risks?” Regulators often play catch-up to the technology. A partially solar-powered grid will have benefits and risks we don’t yet understand, and these will be combined with the risks of wind, cheap and plentiful natural gas, and a “Smart Grid” that makes consumers and their usage part of the conversation.

As the grid gets more complicated, so does the regulation. BrightSource and other power companies have been working on ways to store energy so it can be dispatched on the grid when it’s needed. BrightSource stores heat, and then uses it to generate electricity after the sun has set. Hydroelectric plants often pump water back behind a dam so they can send power onto the grid when it’s needed. But as energy storage evolves, regulators need to decide philosophically what it is. Is it like electricity, which is a product? Or is it more like natural gas, a fuel that can be stored? Recently the California Public Utilities Commission has had seven proceedings on energy storage. The consequences of the commission’s obscure decisions on this issue may suddenly become visceral some screaming hot afternoon in 2015. And no one wants to be the next Gray Davis.

I left the conversation with Desmond thinking that while the energy cognoscenti have learned the lessons of LUZ, the rest of us have not. We’re enjoying the same pointless debate about the government’s proper role in energy markets that we had in 1991. In the meantime, the grid and the power markets have evolved from the punch-card world of 1981 to the day-trading Internet of today We need to up our game.

In some ways, reality has overtaken the moribund conversation. A day or two after I interviewed Desmond, a tree fell across a power line near my house and left me without power for almost 24 hours. I hadn’t lost power in five years, and the last time it happened I was miserable. I had just a few battery flashlights, the battery in my laptop only lasted two hours, and the phone was dead. Not this time. Now my laptop’s battery lasts seven hours, my cell was fully receptive, and I had a cheap solar-powered LED light from Ikea. With my gas stove and the IKEA lamp I made dinner, called the utility to report the wire, and did an evening’s work on the computer. I even watched a movie on it. Between the batteries, the 3G network, and the solar light, my evening was not too different from a night on the grid-just darker.

It made me wonder if maybe we were missing the whole point about solar. I called John Perlin, a solar historian and author of From Space to Earth: The Story of Solar Electricity. Perlin is now involved in the installation of solar photovoltaics at UC Santa Barbara. He believes we’ve gotten too wrapped up in trying to make solar power compete with fossil fuels, distracting us from its real advantage, which is that it’s right on the roof, independent of the grid. You don’t need wires, or power plants, transformers, or dispatchers. “Doing away with high-voltage lines is not a Luddite view,” says Perlin, “It’s a futuristic one. The revolution will come as we cut down the utility lines and up with the rooftops.” We’ve put decades of effort into making solar conform to the grid–even down to converting solar panels from DC power to AC power and then turning that AC power back to DC power for our TVs, computers, and electronics. House by house, we’ve created redundant costly equipment. Perhaps what we need instead is a more contrarian viewpoint. “All our appliances are DC, trapped in an AC world,” said Perlin. “The history of technology is full of these discontinuity stories.”

If we’re going to take advantage of the discontinuity of our times, then we (the public, policy makers, and the media) need to start talking about what power means now.

Lisa Margonelli is a fellow at the New America Foundation, the publisher of http://energytrap.org, and author of Oil On the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank.

*Photo courtesy of Walmart Stores.

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Phoenix has over a million inhabitants, and its metropolitan area has over four million inhabitants. That’s a lot of water, a lot of driving, and a lot of air conditioning. How long can a desert community of this sort, dependent on all sorts of imported resources, keep the party going? In advance of “Can Phoenix Become Remotely Green?”, a Zócalo event, several economists and environmentalists offer their thoughts on the potential greenness of Phoenix. Can Phoenix ever be made sustainable?

Sure, Phoenix can become sustainable–if it collapses and we start all over again

Can a city ever become sustainable? Ever is a long time. The question really is: Can cities like Phoenix become sustainable before they collapse? Can any of our cities become sustainable in time? Given the direction of the vast majority of our political and business leaders, the answer is easy to deduce: No, not a chance.

Phoenix has collapsed before. Sometime around the 14th or 15th centuries, when the Hohokam were the primary residents, a decades-long drought struck the region, and their civilization fell apart. When the rains and water levels returned, Phoenix rose up to become a small agricultural community. Then, in the mid-1950s, came the common use of air conditioning making the heat of the desert more bearable for more people. Later, in the 1990s, with the completion of the Central Arizona Project bringing water to the desert, the seeds of over-development and collapse were sown once again. After this coming collapse, who knows? Perhaps we will have learned something, and we’ll create a sustainable community where over-consuming Phoenix once existed.

In the meantime, could Phoenix, as it now exists, become sustainable? It would require a complete change in culture and a significant reduction in population. To be sustainable, a community has to live within the carrying capacity of the local environment. Phoenix and most major cities import just about everything to meet their needs, including food, water and energy. While Phoenix does have resources to meet all of its energy needs and more (except current modes of transportation), it does not have the local resources to meet its food or water needs for such a large population. Staving off collapse would require a population that uses far less water per person. It would also require local agriculture that uses very little water to grow vast amounts of food. This is not impossible. Will that happen? Given our misplaced priorities, what do you think?

John F. Neville is president of Sustainable Arizona.

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Sure–because any city is sustainable as long it’s sustained

Phoenix is not the least sustainable city. The least sustainable city is the next city whose population will go to zero.

The movement for “sustainable” cities has hijacked a good English word and redefined it to mean stagnant. Proponents of sustainable cities seem bent on creating terrariums for people. That is not what cities are about.

Here are some cities that have proven pretty sustainable, as measured by years of continuous habitation:

• Damascus, ~10,000 years
• Athens, ~6,000 years
• Delhi, ~5,500 years
• Thebes, ~5,000 years
• Rome, ~2700 years
• Sao Paolo, ~500 years
• New York, ~400 years

To be sustainable, a city must offer something that residents cannot get outside the city. Most cities have done so by being nexuses of commerce, convenience, and security. To be sustainable, a city must be vibrant and adaptable. The New York of 1650 might make a quaint diorama, but it isn’t a place where 10 million people could live–even if they cared to do so.

In their histories, cities have had to overcome an endless series of challenges involving water supply, sanitation, transportation, etc. While the solutions have often been very forward-thinking, they were not bound by a constraint that the solution only works if it will work forever.

Times change, challenges change, and solutions change. High energy use per capita is sustainable if the energy can be supplied. If a particular form of energy supply is not infinite, it will not be used infinitely. So what?

An ironic problem with the sustainability movement is that it threatens the attractiveness of cities by raising costs and imposing inconvenient lifestyle regulations. As it does so, it shifts development to the suburbs and beyond. That seems like an odd environmental goal.

Here’s what a city should do to be sustainable: Be an affordable and pleasant place to live and work. Plant trees along avenues–not because of the carbon dioxide they may consume, but because shade is nice in the summer. Don’t make people walk by imposing costs on driving. If you do, they will live and drive someplace else. Get people to walk by making walking convenient. Run good schools. Keep crime rates low. Let businesses flourish.

David W. Kreutzer is a research fellow in energy economics and climate change at The Heritage Foundation.

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Phoenix is getting more sustainable all the time

The city of Phoenix was leading the way in sustainability decades before “green” was cool. People may associate the color brown with our desert region, but “green” has saturated our policies for more than 30 years.

In the 1960s, Phoenix developed rubberized asphalt made from recycled tires; we adopted water conservation and energy-efficiency programs more than 30 years ago; our alternative-fuel program is now one of the largest programs in the country, with more than 50 percent of the city’s fleet running on alt fuel; and we were one of the first places in the nation to adopt a co-mingled, single stream residential recycling program. 20 years later, that recycling program remains a national model that other cities follow.

But that is our history. Today, we are focused on the future. The city has adopted an aggressive set of goals that we are well on the way to achieving. By 2025, 15 percent of the city will be powered by renewable energy. By 2015, we will reduce greenhouse gas emissions for city operations to five percent below 2005 levels. Our city will achieve 25-percent shade canopy coverage by 2030. And we continue to make great strides on our 17-point Green Phoenix Plan to become the most sustainable city in America.

This past year, Phoenix provided almost $1 million in incentives to homeowners and businesses to build “green” and adopted one of the first green construction codes in the nation. The city is rapidly installing solar power on city buildings–20 buildings so far. Today, Phoenix generates nearly one megawatt of renewable energy from solar. By 2012, that number will increase to 12 megawatts.

Our country’s largest desert city faces sustainability challenges not faced by other cities, but we see this as a challenge more than a liability. We are named for the mythical Phoenix bird, after all. We continue to rise to new challenges, and when it comes to sustainability, soar beyond anyone’s expectations.

Carolyn Bristo is sustainability officer for the city of Phoenix.

*Photo courtesy of Tony the Misfit.

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