Climate and Community: Solarize, Mosaic, and Economies of Scale

“Economies of scale are a good thing. If we didn’t have them, we’d still be living in tents and eating buffalo.”

-- Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO, J.P. Morgan, 2010

This weekend, the Globe highlighted Solarize, a pilot program that encourages development of residential and business solar arrays by taking advantage of economies of scale to drive down cost.

Since Beverly High School installed solar panels in 1981 (see image), the North Shore has been at the cutting edge of renewable energy installation. It comes as no surprise, then, that Round 2 of Solarize includes the North Shore communities of Salem and Swampscott, which together have signed up so many people that they have reached “Tier 4” (of 5) status, meaning additional savings for participants in the program and an even greater snowball effect to encourage neighbors to join the movement. Other cities and towns across the Commonwealth are also taking part in the current round, from Andover to Egremont.

In 2011 and 2012, Solarize Mass led over 900 residents and business owners in 21 communities to install over 5.6 megawatts of solar electricity. The 10 cities and towns that participated in Round 1 of 2013—including my beloved Lee, Mass.—added another 3800 kilowatt hours of solar capacity.

This type of community-oriented green energy strategy has emerged with force in recent years. In particular, Mosaic, an investment platform that uses a crowd-funding model to finance solar farms across the country, has showcased the incredible potential of leveraging the pent-up demand for renewable power by bringing individuals together.

From the installation of 47 kWh of solar through Oakland, California’s Youth Employment Partnership (6.38 percent yield) to powering New Jersey’s Wildwood Convention Center (4.5 percent yield) and creating a solar roof on a school in Connecticut (5.5 percent yield), Mosaic has already provided a mechanism for thousands of Americans to directly invest millions of dollars in solar projects in their backyards and across the country.

The uptick in community-based economies of scale is not only spurring green energy (and in turn, reducing carbon emissions), it is also being used by Google to promote high-speed fiber Internet connectivity in cities across the country. Google Fiber expands to “fiberhoods” if/when communities secure enough signups to make the construction of the infrastructure economically viable.

Of course, this model has its pitfalls, particularly when it comes to ensuring access to new technologies across the income spectrum. As Newsweek noted last month, when Kansas City’s fiberhoods were unveiled in 2012, “the online map of fiber-hoods was largely divided by lines like Troost Avenue,” a street that for generations has separated affluent white families to the west and poor families of color to the east.

This outcome was not for lack of trying on Google’s part. As Newsweek stated, the company offered lower-speed broadband service on a monthly payment plan, partnered with community organizations on outreach, and hired people to canvass poor neighborhoods, sometimes with free ice cream. And yet, the divide remained.

This fact should not dissuade us from using community-based economies of scale to nudge neighborhoods toward taking up innovative technology. Rather, it simply highlights the fact that the State must do even more to subsidize the use of green tech in poor communities, many of whom stand to benefit disproportionately from its effects (such as reduced emissions).

In Massachusetts, this means expanding Solarize from the relatively wealthy communities that it has targeted thus far, to communities across the income spectrum—from Lawrence and Lynn to Springfield and Southbridge. It also means changing regulations to allow individual investors to pool resources through platforms like Mosaic.

While Congress dithers on climate policy (and tries to block the President’s historic regulatory efforts related to power plant emissions), communities across the country are hungry to support grassroots efforts to rid America of dirty energy and do their part to make the U.S. a leader in the green tech economy of the 21^st century.

Smart Gun Technology—Saving Lives and Affirming the 2nd Amendment

Between 1999-2010, over 364,000 people in the U.S. died from firearms. 4,698 of those victims were aged 0-14 and 30,940 were teenagers 15-19. 1,880 were unintentional deaths.

-- Centers for Disease Control

In the Supreme Court’s landmark 2010 ruling District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), the Court held, by a 5-4 vote, that a prohibition on handguns in the home violated the Second Amendment (the Court later extended its ruling to the States in McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U.S. 3025 (2010)).

While this interpretation of the right to bear arms was hotly contested, Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, stressed that the Second Amendment left room for reasonable gun safety regulation. “We are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country…The Constitution leaves the District of Columbia a variety of tools for combating that problem, including some measures regulating handguns.”

To that end, in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, Massachusetts legislators commissioned a report on ways to improve the Bay State’s already tough gun laws. That report, from the Committee to Reduce Firearm Violence, was released last month. It includes 44 steps the Commonwealth can take to strengthen gun safety, including enrolling Massachusetts in a national mental health database for screening potential gun buyers, improving firearm training, and strengthening oversight of secondary market transactions.

However, with the exception of floating an idea to offer a tax credit for the purchase of gun safes (Massachusetts law requires safe storage of guns in the home), there is nary little mention of the role technology can play in common sense gun regulation.

In recent years, technology has made our cars, homes, drugs, and heavy equipment safer. And it is high time that we exploit technology to make our guns safer, too.

Truth is that safety technology has been part of the gun industry since the 19^th century, when Springfield, Mass.-based Smith & Wesson pioneered the grip safety—a lever that the user would depress in order to make the trigger operable. Think of it as the firearm version of the childproof pillbox. Indeed, as the company’s 1895 marketing manual put it, “One very important feature of this arrangement is the safety of the [fire]arm in the hands of children, as no ordinary child under eight years of age can possibly discharge it.”

Today, smart gun technology is more advanced than ever, with companies using radio frequency identification (RFID) and finger/palmprint technology to create “personalized guns” that can only be fired by authorized users. This innovation promises to save the lives of children who unintentionally get a hold of a poorly-stored weapon as well as law enforcement, who could no longer be harmed if an assailant stole the officer’s service weapon.

And yet, while it would seem that technology designed to reduce the hundreds of unintentional deaths by firearms annually (including many children) would engender consensus among gun control advocates and Second Amendment enthusiasts alike, that is no longer the case, as the National Rifle Association (NRA) has radicalized.

In the aftermath of the Columbine High School shootings in April 1999, the NRA went apoplectic at the mere idea that Smith & Wesson would invest in smart gun technology—stating that the company had raised “the white flag of surrender.”

Just this month, when a California gun store became the first in the nation to market personalized weapons (technology that has been in use abroad for years), backlash from “gun rights” activists was so furious that the store dropped the product.

This fear of government overreach has played out even in deep-blue Massachusetts, where applications for Class A firearm permits (a “license to carry”) are rising in communities throughout Essex and Middlesex counties (including double-digit increases in Billerica, Burlington, Middleton and Rowley).

But common sense gun safety measures can save lives and protect the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans. Supporting promising personalization technology is one way to do just that. Indeed, just as the government and the auto industry invested billions of dollars to transform safety on our highways (see chart from Bloomberg)—from seat-belts and airbags to anti-lock brakes and improved lighting—so the private and public sectors must make similar investments in smart gun tools.

Specifically, government should subsidize business investment in smart gun technology (including through competitive grants/contests, as tech venture capitalist Ron Conway has recently done) as well as offer tax incentives for the consumer purchase of these new devices.

North Shore Taxis Must be Accessible to All

“With today’s signing of the landmark Americans for Disabilities Act, every man, woman, and child with a disability can now pass through once-closed doors into a bright new era of equality, independence, and freedom.”

-- President George H.W. Bush, 1990

This week, as reported by the Salem Evening News, the Peabody City Council unveiled a compromise for new taxi licenses, dividing the 15 new permits equally among three cab companies. However, the article buried a truly distressing piece of news—none of the new taxi licenses would be for accessible taxicabs. 

Peabody Councilor Tom Walsh rightly grilled taxi owners on their failure to provide this service, saying that if restaurants and hotels can do it, certainly a critical element of the North Shore’s transportation network should be able to as well. Nevertheless, North Shore Taxi’s lawyer, James Mears Jr., described the accessible taxis as “cost-prohibitive,” requiring not only a special vehicle but also a trained driver.

This is a completely insufficient excuse for failing to provide service to people with disabilities on the North Shore (not to mention thousands more who do not technically qualify as disabled, but whose limited mobility makes the features of accessible taxis essential to comfort and accessibility).

Indeed, when Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act nearly 25 years ago, it was indicative of a commitment made by the American People to share the costs of making our society—its public institutions, places of accommodation, and, yes, transportation networks—available to all users. Just as we pay slightly higher property taxes to retrofit our schools and Town Halls, so our transportation system must absorb the expense of full and complete access into the cost of doing business.

(as a sidebar, let’s not forget the groups who lobbied aggressively against the ADA—the same groups that have continued to fight landmark legislation to improve conditions for workers and their families, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Businesses)

Furthermore, technology offers several ways of making the system less expensive for business and more convenient for users.  As I noted in a letter to the Boston Globe last year, cabs in Massachusetts should embrace tech-savvy services such as Accessible Dispatch, which serves New York City and allows people to digitally hail accessible cabs through mobile apps or over the phone.

London has a 100 percent accessible taxi fleet. Given the density difference between the North Shore (where a significant portion of cab service is by pre-arrangement) and cities like New York and London (where most cab service is by hail), having a 100 percent accessible fleet may not be necessary to ensure an equivalent level of service for all users in our area.

However, I believe it is essential that every cab company operating in the Bay State have at least one accessible cab on the road 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (or whenever the cab company is serving customers). Taxi passengers, taxi operators, and taxpayers should share the costs associated with this service. For instance, in New York, which recently agreed to adopt regulations requiring that half of the City’s yellow cabs be accessible to people with disabilities within six years, the City and State are providing tax credits to aid companies in converting old cabs to accessible cabs or purchasing new vehicles. 

In the end, if the ADA’s eternal promise is, as President Bush declared, that “people with disabilities are given the basic guarantees…[of] independence, freedom of choice, control of their lives, [and] the opportunity to blend fully and equally into the rich mosaic of the American mainstream,” surely we can do better on the North Shore of Massachusetts than to simply throw up our hands and say that honoring this promise is too expensive.