EC Environmental Policy

The U.S. Department of Energy recently released its ranking of the leading utility green power initiatives, and for the 10th year PacifiCorp — the parent company of Rocky Mountain Power and the Oregon-based Pacific Power— was named among the top five programs nationally.

For just a $160 price increase, GM is boosting the fuel economy of its 2014 midsize car, the Chevy Malibu, by 12 percent.

liquid ammonia leak from a frozen storage and logistics business in Shanghai sent stinging fumes into a nearby residential area, killing at least 15 people and injuring 25 others, reports China’s Xinhua News Agency.

Liquid ammonia, a colorless chemical, was used in food refrigeration at Shanghai Weng’s Cold Storage Industrial, a business that imports, exports, stores and processes seafood.

company says. Bio-Tec has also received a US notice of allowance for an

recycling most materials from municipal solid waste saves on average three to five times more energy than does burning them for electricity.

As it turns out, countries with the highest rates of garbage incineration — Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, for example, all incinerate at least 50 percent of their waste — also tend to have high rates of recycling and composting of organic materials and food waste. But zero-wasters argue that were it not for large-scale incineration, these environmentally Zero-waste advocates say a major problem is the long-term contracts that waste-to-energy plants are locked into.conscious countries would have even higher rates of recycling. Germany, for example, incinerates 37 percent of its waste and recycles 45 percent — a considerably better recycling rate than the 30-plus percent of Scandinavian countries.

(In the United States, more than half of all waste is dumped in landfills, and about 12 percent burned, of which only a portion is used to produce energy.)

cooling towers typically use 28 percent of their daily water for cooling

The Building Water Efficiency toolkit is the result of data and lessons from pilot projects that ran across the US during the summer and fall of 2012.

For its own operations, AT&T says it identified water savings opportunities of 14 percent to 40 percent per pilot facility and did so in a way that also made business sense.

SCE customers lease or own more than 12,000 plug-in electric vehicles (PEV), which represent about 10 percent of national EV sales. Because California leads the nation in EV adoption, other utilities and stakeholders in the auto industry may find the information from the white paper useful.

The Southern California region and SCE’s service territory in particular is seeing significant uptick of early plug-in vehicle adoption,”

removal of 158 oak trees

Planning and the Environment

We’re considering our options.”