Industry News Briefs

June 4, 2009 Headlines

Geothermal and Solar Energy Projects to Get $467 Million in Stimulus Funds
Nuclear Agency Calls for 12 New Reactors Per Year to Curb Greenhouse Gas
Health Care Construction Forecasts Brighten in 2010

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Geothermal and Solar Energy Projects to Get $467 Million in Stimulus Funds
U.S. Department of Energy (05/27/09)

The Obama administration has announced that more than $467 million from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act will be used to expand and accelerate the development, deployment, and use of geothermal and solar energy throughout the United States. "We have a choice. We can remain the world’s leading importer of oil, or we can become the world’s leading exporter of clean energy," says President Obama. "We can hand over the jobs of the future to our competitors, or we can confront what they have already recognized as the great opportunity of our time: the nation that leads the world in creating new sources of clean energy will be the nation that leads the 21st century global economy."
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Nuclear Agency Calls for 12 New Reactors Per Year to Curb Greenhouse Gas
New York Times (05/29/09) P. B1; Kanter, James

To speed up the construction of nuclear power plants, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is working with the industry to endorse reactor designs. But the schedule to approve Westinghouse's model has been delayed over concerns of its ability to sustain damage from an airplane collision. In addition, the NRC has not yet approved the "EPR" (European Pressurized Reactor) model now being built in Finland by Areva and in Flamanville, France. Both projects have gone overbudget and behind schedule even though construction was supposed to have been streamlined by the plants' standardized modules. The Nuclear Energy Agency predicts that if nuclear power plants are to significantly help curb greenhouse gas emissions, an average of 12 reactors would need to be constructed each year globally by 2030. A total of 45 reactors are now being built worldwide, of which 22 have experienced construction delays, according to energy analyst Mycle Schneider on behalf of the German government. The bulk of the new construction is taking place in China and Russia, whose central governments have made nuclear energy a national goal. In the United States, state authorities in Florida and Georgia are modifying state laws to allow ratepayers to finance the construction of new power before building begins. Millions of customers of Florida Power & Light, for instance, will soon be charged several dollars each month to fund four new reactors.
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Health Care Construction Forecasts Brighten in 2010
Modern Healthcare (05/25/09) Vol. 39, No. 21, P. 32; Galloro, Vince

Healthcare construction spending has grown each year since 2000, but Reed Construction Data economist Jim Haughey expects the situation to change in the current year. He says that on an annualized basis, healthcare construction spending was $47 billion in March versus $46 billion in March 2008 while construction spending overall was $969 billion in March compared to $1.09 trillion in March 2008. Haughey projects that healthcare construction spending could dip 3 percent to 5 percent in 2009, but he expects 2010 expenditures to more than make up for the loss. One possible highlight in this forecast could be in building healthcare facilities for the federal government. The Veterans Affairs department says it has received $601 million in stimulus funds for nonrecurring maintenance projects, $399 million on energy-efficiency projects, and $150 million toward its share of the costs of obtaining or constructing long-term-care facilities. The Defense Department reports that the Military Health System will get about $1.3 billion in stimulus funds for hospital construction, and the plans include a $563.1 million replacement for the 66-bed Naval Hospital at Camp Pendleton, Calif., and $621 million for the first phase of a replacement for the 109-bed Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center at Fort Hood, Texas. Haughey forecasts that growth in government construction spending may overtake private sector construction spending for the next year or two, but "the extra money coming from Washington for healthcare in the VA and the Defense Department is relatively small to the rest of the market." Walton Construction's David Pinson notes that the Defense Department is predicting that medical spending will rise to $64 billion yearly by 2015, and it has reserved $20.5 billion to boost Army and Marine personnel. "One of the biggest keys, and one of Walton's strengths, is that you really have to buy into the process of partnering with the government," says Pinson. Graham Group President George Milligan says that the psychology of healthcare construction is well aligned with the rest of the economy right now. "Everyone is reluctant to take on inordinate risks," he observes.
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NIST Announces Competition for Research Construction Grants
NIST News (05/27/09)

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced the availability of approximately $120 million in competitive grants for the construction of new or expanded scientific research buildings at higher education institutions and nonprofit organizations. Potential projects include laboratories, test facilities, measurement facilities, research computing facilities, and observatories.
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EPA Announces Almost $279 million in Recovery Act Funds for Water Infrastructure Projects in Ohio
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (05/27/09)

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has awarded almost $279 million to Ohio Environmental Protection Agency through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to help the state and local governments finance improvements to water projects. Approximately $6 billion dollars will be awarded to fund water and wastewater infrastructure projects across the country under the Recovery Act in the form of low-interest loans, principal forgiveness, and grants. At least 20 percent of the funds are to be used for green infrastructure, water and energy efficiency improvements, and other environmentally innovative projects.
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Agriculture Secretary Vilsack Announces $143 Million for Rural Water Projects
U.S. Department of Agriculture (05/28/09)

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced the selection of nearly $143 million in water and environmental projects that will be funded immediately through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The projects will help provide potable water and improved wastewater treatment systems for rural towns and communities in 21 states. "President Obama's investments in these projects will ensure that residents have reliable drinking water in addition to helping local economies thrive as a result of the improved infrastructure," says Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
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Treasury and HUD Announce $419 Million in Recovery Act Funds to Provide Affordable Housing
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (05/22/09)

The U.S. Department of the Treasury has announced that more than $330 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act) funding will be used to spur the development of affordable housing units in Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Puerto Rico. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD, meanwhile, has announced $83 million for housing development in Ohio. "Today's announcement of housing funds is an example of how President Obama's Recovery Act is setting our nation back on the path to economic stability, one community at a time," says Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. "The construction and development created by this initiative will help the private sector to create much needed jobs and increase the availability of affordable housing for families around the country."
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Biomass Power Generates Traction
Wall Street Journal (06/01/09) Gold, Russell

Some places are turning to trees and grass as their best bet for producing renewable energy, leading to a new building boom in biomass power plants. Electric utilities may soon face new rules requiring them to generate 20 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020. While the cost of generating solar and wind power is declining, making them increasingly attractive options, not all places have enough wind or sunshine to make power generation practical. Utilities in the Southeast and parts of the Midwest are now beginning to build industrial-scale plants that burn wood and other plant material -- or "biomass." The utilities also stand to get significant federal tax credits for producing renewable energy. Southern Co. says it will build a $135 million biomass power plant, while Progress Energy Inc. recently agreed to buy power from a separate $135 million biomass power plant in Hartsville, S.C. Oglethorpe Power Corp., a power cooperative based in the Atlanta suburbs, recently bought land to build at least two 100-megawatt biomass power plants, costing $400 million each. "In Georgia, trees are plentiful," says Greg Jones, an Oglethorpe spokesman, "but wind is not abundant." U.S. energy forecasters predict that by 2030, biomass will generate 4.5% of the kilowatts consumed in the U.S., versus 2.5 percent for wind, with solar coming in behind both. Biomass is deemed more dependable than wind, as it can be continuously fed into a furnace to provide a steady flow of juice. While greenhouse gas is released when biomass is burned, the process is considered nearly carbon neutral because the plants only emit the carbon they absorbed while they were growing. Many of the new biomass power plants are using wood scraps left over from the region's timber industry, but some companies are considering planting crops such as energy-rich grasses designed to be burned in power plants. While the practice of burning biomass to generate power has been used in Scandinavia for decades, growing crops specifically designed for biofuel is a new development. FirstEnergy Corp. said in April it would spend $200 million retrofitting two units of a coal plant to run on briquettes made of crops grown specifically to burn in combustion boilers to make electricity.

FCC Develops Strategy for Rural Broadband
CNet (05/27/09) Reardon, Marguerite

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has released a broadband strategy for the rural United States that cautions against relying on a single technology. "Rural broadband likely will include a variety of different technologies that together can support the state-of-the-art, secure, and resilient broadband service that should be our goal for rural America, just as it is for the non-rural parts of the nation," acting FCC chairman Michael Copps says in the report. Existing issues involving universal service fund, network openness, spectrum access, special access reform, intercarrier compensation, access to poles and rights of way, and video programming need to be resolved. Federal, state, local, and tribal organizations need to work together to collect data and determine where broadband is available and who is using it. The agency also needs to develop initiatives to drive demand for broadband services. High network cost is another issue, and the Obama administration has provided $7.2 billion in stimulus money for broadband. The report will serve as a foundation for developing a national broadband policy, which is due by February 2010.
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Will Stimulus Funds Put Transit-oriented Development Back on the Fast Track?
CoStar Group (05/20/09) Drummer, Randyl

The stimulus dollars making their way to states and municipalities have been rekindling the discussion of transit-oriented development (TOD) to help create sustainable cities. In addition to the $10 billion for public transit in the stimulus and the planned funding for high-speed rail, there is also public money available for design, engineering, environmental analysis, land acquisition, relocation, and demolition, as well as brownfields reclamation and other kinds of site preparation. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan has said that HUD will be working with the Department of Transportation to reduce Americans' transportation costs, with transit-oriented development being part of that. "Careful data collection in the cities and suburbs has demonstrated that the cost savings associated with living near transit are significant," Donovan said in congressional testimony. However, even the billions proposed so far are a small amount of what is needed for infrastructure, and in the near term the recession will dampen all sorts of development, says Marcus & Millichap Managing Director Hessam Nadji. "The problem is, the prime areas for transit-oriented demand are those where development costs are incredibly high. It’s not plug and play—it’s more expensive and difficult development." Right now, three urban areas in the United States seen as leaders in building TOD are Seattle, Denver, and Charlotte. Seattle, which already has seen high-density mixed-use development in the past few years, is also seeing a number of developers looking to build multifamily housing and mixed-use projects along the new light-rail line opening in July. Denver, meanwhile, is seeing the biggest expansion of any U.S. transit system in its $7 billion FasTracks program, and is expecting 50 TODs to be built in the next 10 years. Finally, Charlotte has been developing its LYNX light rail for the past 14 years, and Mayor Patrick McCrory says TOD helped renew a decades-old urban corridor; he has also successfully persuaded the fiscally conservative residents of the area to fund public improvements and accept a rise in sales taxes.
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Developers See Opportunity in Car-Dealer Lots
Boston Globe (05/26/09) Ross, Casey

With a myriad of car dealerships in Massachusetts and elsewhere scheduled to be closed, commercial property developers are readying plans to replace them with hotels, office buildings and retail stores. One such opportunist is Bierbrier Development President Len Bierbrier, who states, "This potentially represents a sea change in the availability of commercial real estate. You never see this many terrific opportunities to acquire usable land." General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC have both announced plans to close dealerships because of declining vehicle sales. Many of the large lots they occupy are considered prime locations for other types of businesses. Bierbrier is working from a list of 35 Eastern Massachusetts dealerships alone, trying to find locations that could support mixed-use developments or shopping centers. His plan is to acquire some of the properties after they are shuttered. The next year or two will spent securing permits for such redevelopment plans. Bierbrier reasons, "The point is to have the inventory [of properties] ready to go by the time the recession is over." In some cases, the dealers own the lots on which their dealerships have sat. In other instances, the carmakers own the land, while other lots are owned by third parties. Some dealers have vowed to oppose the automakers' planned closings. As a result, it is not clear just how many properties will become available for redevelopment.
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More U.S. Airports Add Rail Service to Downtown
USA Today (05/26/09) Yu, Roger

As part of efforts to reduce roadway congestion, passenger rail links between airports and city centers are becoming more common across the United States, with projects under construction at Seattle-Tacoma's airport and Dallas' Love Field as well as forthcoming projects at Salt Lake City, Phoenix Sky harbor, Miami, Dallas/Fort Worth, and Oakland. Right now, only eight of the largest 20 U.S. airports have a rail service that drops people off within walking distance of terminals, but a combination of economic and operational issues have brought the idea to the fore. This includes a push for lower carbon footprints, the search for an easier way to handle growing passenger traffic than building more parking lots and highway lanes, and an increased ability of federal rail funding. The most popular such systems in the United States now, say experts, are the Metro service from Washington Reagan National to downtown Washington, D.C.; the Bay Area Rapid Transit link to San Francisco International; and the AirTrain link between John F. Kennedy Airport and the New York subway. There are several ways that other metro areas are adding rail service to their airports. These include expanding on existing public rail systems, as in the case of Seattle and Salt Lake City, as well as adding automated people movers to get people from an airport to the nearest existing transit station as is being done in Phoenix and Miami. Meanwhile, there have been some arguments against such projects, including uncertainty over funding sources as well as the question of whether airport ridership demand is enough to justify the cost of constructing the system.
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Span of Control
Economist (05/20/09)

The replacement for the interstate highway bridge in Minneapolis that collapsed in 2007 is outfitted with an array of hundreds of sensors intended to help warn ahead of time of structural failure, so as to avoid the surprising catastrophe that struck when its predecessor collapsed. The new bridge, which opened in September, includes wire and fiber-optic strain and displacement gauges, potentiometers and accelerometers, and corrosion sensors, all built in to help keep track of concrete corrosion, joint strain, and other signs of structural weakness. In addition, the bridge has temperature sensors that spray antifreeze when the road surface gets too cold, as well as a traffic-monitoring system that helps the Minnesota Department of Transportation manage traffic when the bridge is affected by an accident or congestion. Already, a new generation of sensors is on the way for future bridges, offering such advantages as wireless operation, making them easier to install by obviating the need for vast lengths of wire. Another idea being researched at the University of Michigan is a cement-based sensing skin that would be able to detect excessive strain better than an array of individual sensors could. Other concepts underway are adding sensors to vehicles that frequently cross a bridge, such as buses and police cruisers, which could measure the bridge's response to the vehicle and report any potentially problematic changes in this response.
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School Libraries to Benefit From Green Schools Bill
School Library Journal (05/09)

The U.S. House recently passed the 21st Century Green High-Performing Public Schools Facilities Act to provide $6.4 billion in funding for school repair and renovation projects with the goal of creating safer, healthier, and more energy-efficient learning environments. The bill, sponsored by House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) and Reps. Ben Chandler (D-Ky.) and Dave Loebsack (D-Iowa), would distribute funds to schools based on their state Title I funding and require that a certain amount be used for green improvement projects. According to House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Secondary and Elementary Education Chairman Dale Kildee (D-Mich.), "Many of our nation's schools are in disrepair, creating an unsafe and unhealthy classroom environment that makes it more difficult to learn. This legislation will modernize and improve our educational facilities, providing a healthier learning and working climate for our students and teachers. Not only will this benefit our local schools, but it will create good jobs in our communities while helping to clean up the environment." For more information on the legislation, click here.
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Engineering Careers Not Attracting Women
Investor's Business Daily (05/22/09) P. A4; Riley, Sheila

Even as the use of technology continues to grow, the number of women involved in technology and engineering has remained stagnant. "There has clearly been no progress in the last 10 years," says Purdue University engineering program dean Leah Jamieson. Only 20 percent of students in U.S. undergraduate engineering programs are women, according to the National Engineers Week Foundation. From 1994 to 1998, the percentage of women studying engineering rose from 18 percent to 20 percent, but since 1998 there has been no improvement. Jamieson says there is no one reason that more women are not getting involved, and there is no silver bullet to fix the problem. She says one major problem is that the image of engineering and technology careers conflicts with the goals of many young professional women who want to help society. Despite the glamour and press that companies such as Google and Apple receive, the technology industry is still considered to be uncool. "As a profession, we consistently talk about ourselves in ways that simply are not aligned with what young women are looking for," Jamieson says. Studies show that woman want careers that will make a difference and give them an opportunity to give back to society. The women who do enter the technology industry also do not have many female colleagues. Women accounted for 46.5 percent of the U.S. work force in 2008, but only 20.9 percent of software engineers and 19.7 percent of hardware engineers, according to the U.S. Labor Department. To attract more women, technology careers need to be seen as meaningful and enjoyable, and young women need to be shown that the can succeed and have fun in these careers. "Female leaders in very successful positions need to do more to share their success stories," Jamieson says.
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