Page 25 - Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

2 Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

turn of the 21st century, a number of energy efficient and conservation
programs were created including Flex Your Power, which still exists. My first
book, Agile Energy Systems (AES; Elsevier Press, 2004), was written with
Professor Ted Bradshaw, while I served Governor Davis as his Renewable
Energy, Emerging Technologies, and Finance Advisor.
The updated AES is now with a global perspective (not just California) and
was published in August 2017. Chapter 3 in this book covers AES briefly,
which is the combination of central power grids along with on-site distributed
energy systems (such as solar, wind, and geothermal) that were the answer to
the energy crisis in California plus much more. The California government
programs and subsequent actions were led by the California Energy Com-
mission and the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC), which were
able to establish the state as a world leader in energy conservation and
renewable power generation then and now even more so today. In the cases
presented in this book, there is one from CPUC with specific areas of focus in
order to define what sustainable communities are. My last three books helped
do this with one the Green Industrial Revolution (GIR) from Elsevier Press in
2014 and an earlier shorter version of that book in Mandarin that was
published in 2015. The last one in 2016 was Smart Green Cities from
Routledge Press. However, there have been very few cases in these books.
Now there are many cases in this second Sustainable Cities and Communities
Design Handbook (SCCDH). And hopefully there will be more, even annual,
editions of the book.
Meanwhile, the US government had established programs (e.g., Energy
Star) that both ranked the energy output (hence savings from conservation) of
appliances and equipment and the national energy laboratories (e.g., National
Renewable Energy Laboratory) for establishing the ratings or electric power
derived from sunshine, wind, geothermal, and other renewable energy re-
sources. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratories along with another national research labs,
universities, and companies have moved ahead with other national research
labs like Sandia, Oakridge and NASA (https://www.nasa.gov/ames/facilities/
sustainabilitybase).
Chinese President Jinping Xi said repeatedly since his talk at the UN G20
Summit, sponsored by China in Hangzhou, China (September 2016) as “Green
Development for China and other nations in order to reverse climate change”
(http://g20executivetalkseries.com).
Today China has the largest solar farm in the world, which covers a coal
mine, as part of China’s 13th Five Year Plan (see Case on this and China
communities too) which removes it from depending on fossil fuels and nuclear
power into what is known as “green energy” (https://www.dailydot.com/
debug/largest-floating-solar-farm-china/).
International organizations have been formed for doing similar rankings
and scores for the EU nations and globally. See the cases in the book as well as