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Planning to Combine Business and Leisure Travel? You’re Not Alone.
As employees increasingly add leisure time to their business trips, companies are trying to figure out where their duty of care obligations begin and end.
By Amy Zipkin
- April 7, 2024 New York Times
On a Sunday in late January, Melinda Buchmann, who lives in Florida and supervises client relations for RevShoppe, a 30-person remote company advising organizations on sales techniques and strategies, arrived in Banff, Alberta, to help set up a four-day company meeting.
The last day of the event, her husband, Josh, a director of strategic partnerships for the delivery company DoorDash, who also works remotely, joined her. They spent two leisurely days hiking in Banff National Park and visiting Lake Louise.
“I take advantage, because I don’t know when I’m going to return,” Ms. Buchmann said of the decision to combine downtime with a business trip.
As postpandemic work life has changed, and arrangements now include full-time office attendance as well as hybrid and remote work, so, too, has business travel. The phenomenon known as bleisure, or blended business and leisure travel, was initially embraced largely by digital nomads. But such combined travel is now also popular with people outside that group. Allied Market Research, a subsidiary of Allied Analytics, based in Portland, Ore., estimated that the bleisure travel market was $315.3 billion in 2022 and would reach $731.4 billion by 2032.
As employees increasingly add leisure time to their business trips, companies are struggling to determine where their legal obligation to protect employees from harm — their so-called duty of care — begins and ends. And workers may think that because their trip started with business, they will get all the help they need if something goes wrong on the leisure end. Instead, they should generally consider the leisure part of a trip as a regular vacation where they cover all expenses and contingencies.
Companies are responsible for knowing where their employees are during a business trip, covering expenses if an accident or emergency occurs, securing new lodging if a hotel is damaged, even swapping out a broken down rental car. Still, it’s not entirely clear if that coverage ends completely after the conference or the last client meeting.
Companies recognize that threats are increasing, said Robert Cole, senior research analyst focusing on lodging and leisure travel at Phocuswright, a market research company. They are trying to figure out how to take care of a valuable company resource, the employee, without leaving themselves open to financial risk or potential litigation.
“Crafting a comprehensive policy that balances business objectives, employee well-being and legal considerations can be challenging,” Nikolaos Gkolfinopoulos, head of tourism at ICF, a consulting and technology services company in Reston, Va., wrote in an email.
Employees may be on their own without realizing it and may be surprised by out-of-pocket expenses if they require hospital care abroad or evacuation, said Suzanne Morrow, chief executive of InsureMyTrip, an online insurance travel comparison site in Warwick, R.I.
Ms. Morrow said medical coverage provided by a company “is generally only for the dates of the actual business trip abroad.” If travelers are extending the trip for personal travel, she added, “they would want to secure emergency medical coverage for that additional time abroad.”
Employers and employees are left to figure out when the business portion of the trip ends and the leisure segment begins, a significant detail if an employee has a medical emergency. “Where does the corporation liability end?” said Kathy Bedell, senior vice president at BCD Travel, a travel management company.
Companies have varying policies to deal with the new travel amalgam. The chief executive of RevShoppe, Patricia McLaren, based in Austin, Texas, said the company provided flexible travel options and allowed employees to work anywhere they choose.
Even so, there are constraints. The company requires all employees, including executives, to sign liability and insurance waivers when they are on a voluntary company-sponsored trip, such as an off-site meeting. Such waivers typically place responsibility on employees for their own well-being. And if they bring someone, they are responsible for that person’s expenses.
Employees are responsible for requesting the paid time off and notifying their managers of their whereabouts, although that part is not a requirement. Managers have to ensure adequate staffing, Ms. McLaren said.
Elsewhere, employees may not bother to mention the leisure portion of their trip. Eliot Lees, a vice president and managing director at ICF, said he had been on trips as a child with his parents when they combined business and leisure. His parents were academics, who would piggyback vacations onto conferences.
Now he does the same. “I don’t think I ever asked for approval,” he said. (ICF has no formal business-leisure travel policy. It’s allowed as part of personal time off.) After a conference in the Netherlands last year, he spent four days hiking in the northern part of the country.
“I go anywhere, and take more risks than I should,” he said. He said he didn’t carry personal travel or accident insurance.
Any nonchalance may quickly evaporate if a threat emerges. Security experts say even low-risk locations can become high-risk for a few days or weeks of the year.
“Companies are concerned about losing visibility into a traveler’s whereabouts if they booked flights and hotels outside their corporate travel management company,” Benjamin Thorne, senior intelligence manager in London for Crisis24, a subsidiary of GardaWorld, wrote in an email. “The company may think the traveler is in one city when, in reality, they could have booked a holiday package to another nearby city. This lack of visibility by the company makes it difficult to support travelers when a disaster occurs.”
He also raised the possibility that “a traveler with bleisure travel reservations and expectations may find their work trip canceled due to changes in the risk environment or company policy, disrupting their leisure plans.”
Will a company step in off hours if there’s a problem? “That depends on how you are booked,” Mr. Cole, the senior research analyst at Phocuswright, said. A rule of thumb is the further you get from corporate control, the greater the gray area gets.
Half of GoldSpring Consulting’s clients take the responsibility for the entire trip, said Will Tate, a partner at the consultancy based in Cross Roads, Texas, and a certified public accountant. They don’t want the reputational risk. The other half say: “The business trip ended Friday. That’s when we end our duty of care.”
Some companies are trying to define and narrow the gray area. “If you are clearly on personal time, there is no legal requirement for your employer to provide for you,” said Nicole Page, a lawyer whose practice includes employment law at Reavis Page Jump in New York.
Uber provides employees with advisories before a trip, travel assessments, safety tips while traveling and emergency travel assistance, including medical aid, airport travel support, urgent and emergency assistance, and lost or stolen personal property insurance whether they are on business or pleasure travel or a combination.
And at DoorDash, Chris Cherry, head of global safety and security, wrote in an email that “while personal travel is not something we track, we have received requests to extend our travel support capabilities to personal travel.” Mr. Cherry said in those cases, the company has manually added employee leisure itineraries to its travel risk management system and “provided the same level of overwatch that we do for regular business travel.”
The Buchmanns plan to travel this month to Barcelona, Spain, for the McDonald’s Worldwide Convention. DoorDash will have a booth, and Mr. Buchmann will work on the exhibit floor and also entertain clients.
Ms. Buchmann will accompany him. She plans to go sightseeing in the morning, and work in the afternoons and evenings Barcelona time. She will also take three days of paid time off and has shared her plans with Ms. McLaren, the RevShoppe chief executive.
They will stay a day after the conference and plan to visit the Dalí Theater and Museum in Figueres. “I’m sure there will be no shortage of tapas and window shopping along way,” Mr. Buchmann said. He expects to be back at work the next Monday.
Smaller, Versatile Concert Halls Step Out of the Shadow of Stadiums
As live entertainment rebounds, developers are using midsize venues to anchor their projects and energize the surrounding neighborhood.
By Amy Zipkin for The New York Times
April 18, 2023
As the summer concert season approaches and marquee acts like Beyoncé, Metallica and Taylor Swift fill stadiums around the country, developers are casting their eye on a smaller type of entertainment venue: the concert hall.
With state-of-the-art design that allows for flexible configurations, these midsize auditoriums can accommodate 1,000 to 6,500 patrons, helping promoters broaden the definition of live entertainment to include concerts, D.J. sets, e-sports and raves, as well as launch parties and trade shows.
The versatility of concert halls has led developers to use them to anchor their projects and energize the surrounding neighborhood, a trend that is revitalizing many moribund markets, said Aaron Jensen, who heads commercial and mixed use at HKS, a design firm.
“The concert venues are part of a broader mix, conveniently located to transit and residences,” he said.
Three miles north of downtown Denver, in a former industrial area known as the River North Art District, acts like Billy Idol and the Roots draw crowds to the Mission Ballroom, a concert hall adorned with psychedelic murals and a gigantic disco ball hovering over the dance floor.
The auditorium, which has a movable stage and can accommodate up to 3,950 guests, is an integral part of North Wynkoop, a complex stretching across three blocks of former warehouses that was redeveloped by Westfield, a Denver developer, and now includes artists’ studios and shopping. Every month, 50,000 visitors go to the Mile High City hot spot.
“The right location, a cultural ethos, brings people,” said Chris Crawford, a senior managing director at Hines, a real estate investment firm that is planning two residential towers in North Wynkoop.
AEG Presents, the operator of the Mission Ballroom, is using it as a blueprint for venues in Atlanta, Boston, Nashville and the Raleigh-Durham area in North Carolina. And other concert halls are popping up in cities around the country.
For example, the Anthem, with a capacity of 2,500 to 6,000, is the centerpiece of the Wharf, a waterfront reclamation project in Washington, D.C. YouTube Theater, a 6,000-seat venue, shares a roof with SoFi Stadium, home of the Rams and Chargers, in Los Angeles’s Hollywood Park. And in Anaheim, Calif., the City Council in September approved a $4 billion entertainment district with a 5,700-seat concert hall called ocVIBE, which is expected to break ground this year.
“In the U.S., the top 10 markets like L.A., New York and Chicago are doing more shows than ever, yet the next 40 cities collectively have been adding even more growth — which just shows how much opportunity there is for midsize venue developments,” Jordan Zachary, a co-president of U.S. concerts at Live Nation Entertainment, wrote in an email.
After a bumpy recovery in 2022, when many venues struggled with rapid inflation and labor shortages, live entertainment is expected to rebound this year. Revenue from U.S. events is expected to climb to $65 billion in 2023, from $58 billion last year, according to IBISWorld, a market research firm.
“Artists make money from touring, not recording,” said Armen Shaomian, a professor of sports and entertainment management at the University of South Carolina.
Promoters say concert halls, which cost $50 million to $150 million to build, fill a void in the market between clubs, which can hold up to 1,000 patrons, and arenas, which have a capacity of 5,000 to 20,000.
And many offer features that make them attractive to performers, including spaces with flexible seating for standing or dancing, said John Storyk, the director of design at WSDG, an architectural acoustical and design firm.
Some venues use curtains to camouflage empty space for smaller events. Technology allows for flat or raked seating or a combination that creates levels. Other features include advanced projector techniques, wall videos and lighting and special effects.
And acoustic predictive software allows sound engineers to know how sound behaves. “Engineers often use the first song of a set or an opening act to ‘tune/adjust’ a system in a performance venue,” Mr. Storyk said. “Acoustics can often change dramatically as audience fill up seats, particularly in larger halls.”
And acoustic predictive software allows sound engineers to know how sound behaves. “Engineers often use the first song of a set or an opening act to ‘tune/adjust’ a system in a performance venue,” Mr. Storyk said. “Acoustics can often change dramatically as audience fill up seats, particularly in larger halls.”
“There’s a variety of offerings, reflective of the community,” said Jason Gannon, managing director of SoFi Stadium and Hollywood Park, a former racetrack that now includes retail and office space and a 12-theater cinema.
As part of the contractual agreement to name the theater, YouTube can livestream events. The theater also features an interactive digital wall to showcase YouTube creators and artists and interactive video screens throughout.
E-sports venues require steeper seating to bring fans closer to the action and broadband to interact with devices of a technologically sophisticated fan base, said Larry Miller, the director of the music business program at New York University Steinhardt.
But “frothy pandemic-era forecasts on the sustainability of livestreaming have not panned out,” he said, adding that “2023 is looking like the biggest year ever in touring, and livestreaming has become a rounding error for most acts.”
Developers prefer new construction over old theaters, which pose retrofitting challenges. Acoustics that worked perfectly for opera and musical theater may not work for today’s music, Mr. Storyk said.
In older structures, air-conditioning systems cannot be moved, steel beams on the roof may not accommodate heavier equipment, and loading docks may require expansion, said Ryan Knutson, president of Brown Note Productions in Thornton, Colo., who worked on the Mission Ballroom.
Technological advances can make renovating older theaters a little easier, but the costs can be high, experts say.
“Older buildings are a constant source of repair and maintenance and can get quite expensive,” said Seth Hurwitz, chairman of I.M.P., a concert promoter that operates the Anthem. Even newer facilities require an acoustician to prescribe solutions; the Anthem required soundproofing that cost $3 million, for example.
The latest technology and design features matter to musicians and fans, said Michal Dalal, a research analyst at IBISWorld.
“Companies that offer performers and spectators the best facilities, such as strong acoustics, backstage amenities, private changing rooms, bars, restrooms and catering services, will likely be favored over promoters that provide substandard facilities,” she said.
A correction was made on
April 18, 2023
:
A previous version of this article misstated the location of a planned office building being built by the developer Hines. It will be near the North Wynkoop complex, not in it.
The military draft ended 50 years ago, dividing a generation
By Amy Zipkin
For The Washington Post
January 27, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EST
On Jan. 27, 1973, with the Paris Peace Accords signed and U.S. involvement in Vietnam over, Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird announced the end of the military draft, after 25 uninterrupted years of conscription. “I wish to inform you,” he declared, “that the Armed Forces henceforth will depend exclusively on volunteer soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.”
The announcement, 50 years ago Friday, brought immediate relief to American men ages 19 to 25, who were eligible to be drafted during the war. It also created an arbitrary but lasting divide between the nearly 2 million men who had been drafted and those who would avoid conscription by celebrating their 19th birthdays after January 1973.
Jerry Prater, who was born in 1943, returned home from his honeymoon in late 1966 to news from his mother. “There’s a letter from the president,” she said.
Two weeks later, he was on a bus from Texas to Louisiana’s Fort Polk, whose mock Vietnamese villages used in infantry training were known as Tiger Land.
Prater served as a combat infantryman in Vietnam from May 1967 to May 1968. He was wounded by enemy shrapnel, and a physician told him, “You could have lost your leg.” The pain has never gone away.
He traveled home in uniform. At the Seattle airport, protesters shouted, “How does it feel to be a murderer?”
Cliff Hackel, born 11 years after Prater, registered as a conscientious objector when he turned 18. “You didn’t have to give proof until you were drafted,” he said. He entered George Washington University in 1972 and participated in impromptu antiwar demonstrations at the White House.
His first semester, he thought about going to Canada and studied French, in case he needed it north of the border. “It wasn’t really a well-thought-out plan,” he said. “I was naive about how the draft worked.”
Laird’s announcement ended his fears of being sent to war and his contingency planning. “It was a relief to go on with my life and just be a kid,” Hackel said.
Some men who served said they bear no animosity toward those who avoided the draft because the rules changed; Prater said he reserves his negative feelings for people who dodged the draft before 1973. But Richard V. Reeves of the Brookings Institution, author of the 2022 book “Of Boys and Men,” said that during a time of social upheaval, changes to the rules can stoke grievances.
The first peacetime draft in U.S. history began in 1940, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Selective Training and Service Act. The country entered World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor a year later. That draft lasted until 1946. A second peacetime draft was instituted in 1948.
That regulation was still on the books when, in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson authorized a large-scale buildup of American ground troops in Vietnam and relied on the draft to carry it out.
He was America’s most famous pediatrician. Then Dr. Spock attacked the Vietnam draft.
The draft was hugely controversial — and unequal. Students and people in professional and graduate programs could receive deferments; others could not. The war justifiably scared many young Americans. About 58,000 Americans would die in the war, and about 150,000 would be injured.
Conscription also took a toll in other ways. Prater had a degree in business administration, but he lost two years of civilian work experience while in the service. That challenge was common, said Joshua Angrist, a professor of economics at MIT who has studied the effects of conscription. “You are losing civilian labor market experience,” he said. His research found that veterans were still earning less than their civilian counterparts 15 years after their service.
The state of the labor market didn’t help. “The large numbers of baby boomers, the oil shock, and unexpectedly and unacceptably high inflation depressed the job market,” said Federico Mandelman, a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
Prater’s marriage also ended, in part because of his time away. But he said he “never for an instant considered not being drafted,” adding, “I came back a better person.”
Marc Leepson, 77, was less committed to joining the military. When he graduated from George Washington University in 1967, he lost his student deferment.
“All we ever talked about was the draft,” he said.
His efforts to join the Peace Corps and the Air Force Officer Candidate School were unsuccessful, so immediately after graduation, he asked his draft board to move up his induction. “I thought I may as well get the inevitable over with, rather than wait in a kind of limbo to get that induction letter from Uncle Sam,” he said.
Jan. 22, 1973: The day that changed America
After basic training at Fort Dix in New Jersey, he became a company clerk, spending a year in Vietnam processing soldiers coming home from the war. The assignment included hazardous guard duty.
Leepson was back in the States completing his first semester of graduate school when, to quell growing opposition to the war, President Richard M. Nixon issued an executive order in November 1969 instituting a new draft system.
Under this system, a draft number was randomly assigned to each day of the year, representing people whose birthdays fell on that day. Lower numbers meant a higher likelihood of being drafted. A man of draftable age whose birthday was given a number in the 300s was safe from being conscripted; one whose birthday drew a single- or double-digit number had a high chance of being sent to war.
At the first draft lottery in December 1969, Leepson drew number 360. The stakes were low for him, since no veteran would have been required to serve a second time. Still, it made him laugh. “If I had avoided the draft till then, I never would have been taken,” he said.
Leepson recalled, “Getting out of the Army was the happiest day of my life. We were pariahs.” Still, he called it “the ultimate rite of passage,” adding, “I served my country. Didn’t like the war, but you couldn’t choose your war.”
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Vertical Farms Expand as Demand for Year-Round Produce Grows
By Amy Zipkin
- April 6, 2022
A recently constructed 95,000-square-foot warehouse in Compton, Calif., ticks off all the boxes for the booming storage industry: 32-foot-high ceilings, a secure truck court and access to truck routes.
But it won’t be used for cargo or storage. Plenty Unlimited, an agricultural start-up, is using the site for an indoor vertical farm, expected to open later this year.
“It’s the ability to put production anywhere without considering climate,” said Arama Kukutai, the company’s chief executive. The lease terms were not disclosed. Vacancy rates in the area are about 0.6 percent, according to Kidder Mathews, a commercial real estate firm on the West Coast.
Plenty Unlimited supplies Albertsons grocery stores with lettuce varieties grown on a smaller-scale farm outside San Francisco. Walmart, an investor, will soon sell Plenty’s produce throughout California. And Plenty has aspirations beyond greens: Last month, it announced plans with Driscoll’s, a berry seller, to develop an indoor farm in the Northeast devoted to strawberries.
At a time when supply chain disruptions continue to slow distribution, consumers embrace healthy eating habits and climate change is expected to affect crop yields, a practice known as controlled-environment agriculture, including indoor vertical farms relying on artificial light and technology, is attracting venture capitalists.
But the industry faces challenges, including high costs for energy, technological limitations and the ability to scale production to keep expenses down.
Agriculture in a controlled environment has been around since the 1970s, said Gene A. Giacomelli, a professor of biosystems engineering at the University of Arizona. What made moving indoors possible was a drop in price in LED lights, which plunged as much as 94 percent in 2015 from 2008.
The term vertical farm was popularized by Dickson Despommier, a professor emeritus of environmental health sciences at Columbia University. Vertical farming is expected to grow to $9.7 billion worldwide by 2026, from $3.1 billion in 2021, according to ResearchAndMarkets.com, a data analysis firm. Pitchbook, a financial data and software company in Seattle, tracked 33 deals worth nearly $960 million in 2021, up from $865 million the year before and $484 million in 2019.
AppHarvest, a greenhouse grower, recently went public via a merger with Novus Capital. And in August, BrightFarms, another greenhouse operator, was acquired by Cox Enterprises in Atlanta.
Scientists caution that technology has limitations, with LED lights, sensors and operating systems adding to utility costs. “They don’t want to be warehouses, they want to be food production facilities,” Professor Giacomelli said. “And food production facilities have never had this kind of money.”
The money is creating demand for warehouse space. Kalera, a vertical farm company based in Orlando, Fla., harvests greens and culinary herbs there and in Houston and Atlanta. Farms in Denver, Seattle, Honolulu and St. Paul are opening later this year, and one in Columbus, Ohio, is planned for 2023. Farms are also open in Munich and Kuwait.
Details are hard to come by because the farms closely guard their intellectual property, growing system designs, material and structures.
“Everyone has their own secret sauce,” said Brent de Jong, chairman and chief executive of Agrico Acquisition Corporation, which in January announced a merger with Kalera.
But as long as the building being used as a vertical farm meets height criteria and avoids high utility costs, “there’s no limit where I can put a farm,” said Austin Martin, Kalera’s chief operating officer.
The basic requirements for vertical farm warehouses include access to major highways, a one-day drive to major population centers and an educated work force that understands automation and plant science.
“The factory for leafy greens and micro greens production is similar to a semiconductor factory providing a controlled environment to predictably manufacture on an automated basis its products,” Mr. de Jong said in an email.
Plants are stacked in vertical rows reaching heights of 30 feet or more, said Neil Mattson, a horticulture professor at Cornell. Additional space is reserved for aisles, harvesting and packing, but there are no common metrics or industry standard.
One example of how controlled-environment agriculture is transforming industrial space is evolving in Pennsylvania, which serves markets from Boston to Richmond, Va.
Bowery Farming, which is based in Manhattan, is outfitting a 150,000-square-foot farm on the site of a former steel plant in Bethlehem, Pa., that is scheduled to open in May.
Bowery also has three farms in Kearny, N.J., two of which are for research and development. The third is a commercial operation serving grocers and e-commerce companies in the Northeast. Another facility, in Nottingham, Md., runs on hydroelectric energy. And the company has announced plans to expand near Atlanta and in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
“It’s all about speed to market,” said Hans Tung, a managing partner at GGV Capital, formerly Granite Global Ventures, an investor in Bowery Farming.
Darren Thompson, Bowery’s chief financial officer, said he expected Bowery’s new farms to be similar in size to the one in Bethlehem. “Having too many differences from farm to farm hurts my ability to drive costs,” he said.
The Bethlehem site has heavy power support, sewer and water capacity and fiber-optic cable, said Peter Polt, an executive vice president of J.G. Petrucci Company, which built the shell of the building and office space. “But the tenant outfitted the building for the grow process,” he added.
Developers also request proximity to food distribution centers to save on transportation costs, said Brent Vernon, executive director of the Pennsylvania governor’s action team, which works to bring businesses to the state. And he said state funding and grants are evaluated based on factors including brownfield redevelopment, unemployment rates and the potential for job creation.
Bowery will create and retain at least 70 full-time jobs within the next three years and pledged to invest at least $32 million, Pennsylvania officials said.
Upward Farms, a start-up based in Brooklyn that blends vertical farming with aquaponics and uses fish waste as fertilizer, is building a 250,000-square-foot warehouse on six acres in Luzerne County, Pa., about 100 miles from Manhattan.
Local production is better because it brings leafy greens closer to the retailer and the consumer, said Jason Green, the chief executive and a co-founder of Upward.
Further west, in Selinsgrove, is a 280,000-square-foot greenhouse that belongs to BrightFarms. That company has begun developing five new greenhouses that will be 10 times that size, said Steve Platt, the chief executive of BrightFarms.
Reaching a scale that will be sustainable for businesses may mean expanding the types of crops grown in vertical systems, from leafy greens to vine and fruiting crops, said Russell Redding, the Pennsylvania agriculture secretary. For example, Bowery Farming announced plans to distribute strawberries in limited release in New York.
But some scientists have doubts about the industry’s ability to scale and diversify given the limitations of current technology. Tomatoes take 60 percent more electricity to grow than lettuce, and strawberries take twice that amount, said Bruce Bugbee, director of the Crop Physiology Laboratory of Utah State University in Logan.
“LED lights are about 70 percent, close to their theoretical maximum” of efficiency, he said. The consumer is paying for the energy costs.
Morgan Pattison, president of Solid State Lighting Services in Johnson, Tenn., and an adviser to the Department of Energy, was more blunt. “LED’s are not going to go down much more” in cost, he said. “Where investors are going against physics, they are going to have a hard time.”
Airports Installing Clean Energy
What to do when land is scarce and you are a city with aspirations to become carbon neutral? Turn to a local source of unused land, the airport.
Seeking Space for Solar Farms, Cities Find Room at Their Airports
Airports around the nation are installing solar arrays on unused land, roofs and parking garages, helping them achieve self-sufficiency while also providing power to their communities.
By Amy ZipkinDec. 7, 2021, 9:00 a.m. ET
THE NEW YORK TIMES
When city commissioners in Tallahassee, Fla., passed a resolution in early 2019 to rely exclusively on renewable energy by 2050, one cornerstone was already in place: a 120-acre, 20-megawatt solar farm at Tallahassee International Airport.
The solar arrays had been installed just over a year earlier by a private developer in an effort to combat climate change and curtail emissions. An additional 330 acres producing 42 megawatts came online in late 2019, supplying solar power to more than 100 municipal buildings, including City Hall, the airport terminal and a sewage treatment plant.
“We were thinking we would do less, because land was limited,” said Reese Goad, the Tallahassee city manager. “It’s difficult to find land in an urban setting.” But the airport provided city officials with a parcel of undeveloped land that also allowed for connection to the grid.
As the country considers its carbon footprint and alternative energy sources, the nation’s airports are turning their unused land, roofs and parking garages into solar farms. Twenty percent of public airports have adopted solar power in the last decade, according to a study last year at the University of Colorado.
Despite the interest, challenges still remain: Adoption is limited and varies by location, and officials can encounter environmental and bureaucratic hurdles. But airports are required by law to be financially self-sufficient, and the prospect of earning extra revenue is a powerful draw for governments.
“It’s an addition to the power grid, a revenue generator and energy for the airport itself,” said Peter J. Kirsch, a lawyer at Kaplan, Kirsch & Rockwell in Denver whose practice focuses on regulation and transportation infrastructure. “Airports are enormous users of power, and any effort to rely on renewable energy sources in lieu of traditional carbon-based ones will create a positive community reaction.”
Community solar programs, which allow some utility customers to buy solar power instead of using traditional fossil fuel, are in place at airports in Tallahassee; Tampa, Fla.; and Austin, Texas, among others. At Kennedy International Airport, a planned solar array is expected to be the largest in New York State when it is completed next year. These efforts give renters and those with limited means the ability to shift to clean energy.
Some airports, like San Francisco’s, use municipal bonds to finance the installation of solar farms, but most typically enter into a power purchase agreement with a third-party energy provider, which owns and operates an energy system after it is installed on the airport’s property.
“The government incentivizes development of renewable energy, such as solar and wind, through the use of tax credits and accelerated depreciation,” said Miriam S. Wrobel, a senior managing director at FTI Consulting in San Francisco. “Often, public entities such as airports cannot utilize the tax benefits, so third parties own the assets and sell the energy generated to the airport.”
Prices are locked for 20 to 25 years, but the owner gets paid only when the energy is flowing.
The bid for the Tallahassee project was won by Origis Energy, a Miami firm that offers clean energy storage solutions. Johan Vanhee, Origis’s chief commercial officer, said the airport project was a departure for the company. “We are a wholesale generator of renewable energy,” he said. “Ninety-nine percent of our plants are not on airports.”
But experts say the decreasing price of solar modules and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act allocating $25 billion to airports may alter the percentage.
A decade ago, a module alone cost around $2.50 per watt, and now an entire utility-scale photovoltaic system costs around $1 per watt, said David J. Feldman, a senior financial analyst in Washington for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a research center based in Golden, Colo., and funded by the Energy Department.
“Solar costs have come down significantly in the last decade,” said Alicen Kandt, senior engineer at the National Renewable Energy Lab. “It becomes appealing in areas that may seem less than ideal.”
One of those overlooked locations is Maine, where a solar project proposed for Augusta State Airport is expected to provide 7.5 megawatts of capacity, all of it returned to the grid.
“It’s open space, no hazard to anybody, the state owns it, and it helps taxpayers and the environment,” Paul Merrill, a spokesman for Maine’s Department of Transportation, said of the project, which is expected to save the state $6 million over 20 years.
But there is resistance. At a recent city meeting, several elected representatives expressed reservations about the impact the project would have on a city recreation area. Mr. Merrill said the state was working with the city to get approval for a local permit and easement.
And Evergy, the utility that serves Kansas City, Mo., scrapped plans last year for an airport solar array after an engineering study found design problems. A 5-megawatt array was proposed to be built atop a new parking garage, part of a terminal renovation costing $1.5 billion, but the garage is between the air traffic control tower and the runway, and at times glare obscured the view of air traffic controllers.
Now, Brian Platt, the city manager, has more ambitious plans. Approximately 5,000 acres of the 11,000-acre airport are undeveloped, and a feasibility study is underway to see how much can be used for solar arrays. “We’re looking to power the entire city,” he said.
The Federal Aviation Administration provides guidance for evaluating solar technology for airports. In May, the agency streamlined its process evaluating glint and glare, allowing airports to evaluate potential impact to a control tower.
Austin International Airport, which previously installed 84 kilowatts of solar power in the cargo area and 27 kilowatts in the taxi area, recently added more than 6,600 solar panels on a garage roof. Airport officials entered into a 25-year power purchase agreement with the North American subsidiary of the French multinational company Engie when they realized installing solar panels on the roof instead of steel would cost $2.7 million, saving the airport $1.5 million.
“Solar is cheaper than steel,” said Tim Harvey, a customer renewable solutions manager at Austin Energy, the city’s utility, which signed a power purchase agreement with Engie. A separate agreement between Austin Energy and the airport allocates 300 kilowatts’ worth of renewable energy credits to the airport.
Through a community program, the deal provides power for 425 Austin Energy customers, fewer than 1 percent of the utility’s base. But advocates say size may not be the point.
“Some of the solutions may not provide a large amount of energy but still show a responsibility by the airport to do what they can to mitigate the burning of fossil fuels if they install solar,” said Jorge Barrero, a regional design director in Chicago at HKS, a global design firm based in Dallas.
Happy New Year
What Price–Opting Out
This weekend in The New York Times Magazine Judith Warner, known for her book Perfect Madness Motherhood in an Age of Anxiety writes about a generation of women who want back into the workforce after leaving it a decade ago. Read the rest of this entry »
Why Did She Get Hired?
Didn’t get the job even though you were qualified? Wonder what happened? Perhaps someone else was more qualified. It could just be a case of ” fundamental attribution error. ” The hiring manager may have used erroneous information based on attribution to give the candidate an edge. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: career choice, employee attitudes
What’s an Unpaid Internship Worth Anyway?
With all the attention being paid in the last week to the value of unpaid internships, NACE, the National Association of Colleges and Employers set about to determine what the relative value of each is. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: career choice, Careers, job creation, job seekers, National Association of Colleges and Employers
