The Nitty-Gritty On Cars + Free Parking

How green is my free parking structure? Not very.

By Joe Cortright      18.7.2017      

Why does the National Renewable Energy Lab give its employees free parking?

Source: http://cityobservatory.org/how-green-is-my-free-parking-structure-not-very/

OOOOps! ...All the feel-good right stuff, except for just one thing

The researchers at the National Renewable Energy Lab are hard at work on a lot of cool ideas for reducing pollution and promoting greater energy efficiency. They’re figuring out ways to improve photovoltaics and increase the efficiency of wind energy generation, and are a research leader in integrating these renewable energy sources into utility scale energy systems. The staff are also developing biofuels that could one day replace fossil fuels in transportation and other uses.  They have an entire program dedicated to transportation:

NREL research, development, and deployment (RD&D) accelerates widespread adoption of high-performance, low-emission, energy-saving strategies for passenger and freight transportation. Dedicated to renewable energy and energy efficiency, NREL and its industry, government, and academic partners use a whole-systems approach to create innovative components, fuels, and infrastructure for electric, hybrid, fuel cell, and conventional vehicles.

ALL THIS IS JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING POLITICALLY & ENVIRONMENTALLY CORRECT....BUT READ ON > Net zero, provided you ignore what its used for.
But there’s one big environmental (and energy) problem with this shiny new structure:  It’s an 1,800 space parking garage.  
Not only that, but (if you’re Don Shoup, please don’t read this) they don’t charge employees anything to use the garage.  

The whole thing strikes us as utterly tone deaf and a flat contradiction to the organization’s mission statement. So, in addition to the lab being located in a suburban office park on the fringe of the Denver metro area, its employees are strongly incentivized–nay, subsidized–to drive their private cars to work.  And that’s exactly what an overwhelming majority of them do.

A giant, free garage encourages energy consumption and pollution

We contacted the Lab to learn more about commute patterns and parking policies.  They shared with use the mode split from their latest (2014) commuting survey.  

We asked about parking prices for commuters.  Lissa Myers, who is the Lab’s Sustainable Transportation &  Climate Change Resiliency Practice Leader told us:

Parking is free on our campus and we have an abundance of it.

That’s the problem, really.  We have an abundance of proven technologies that are “high-performance, low-emission, energy-saving strategies”–they include dense cities, cycling, transit, walking and car pooling.  But technologies don’t work, or don’t work well if we subsidize people to use energy-wasting alternatives and locate large concentrations of workers in places where they have few alternatives but to drive single-occupancy vehicles.

Location, location, location

And because the lab is located on the urban fringe, rather than in a central, transit served location (like say, downtown Denver) its employees have few nearby housing options that would let them bike, walk or take transit to work.

TAKE-AWAY: Promoting renewable energy is (and energy conservation and greenhouse gas reductions) is a matter of both technology and incentives. An agency that’s supposedly dedicated to these tasks ought to do a better job of aligning its policies with its mission. There’s little hope that people will use a non-polluting bicycle or take transit to work, for example, if they have free use of parking.

The claim that a parking garage can be “zero net energy” requires casting a blind eye to the structure’s central purpose. It’s only zero net energy if you completely ignore the energy used by the cars it’s designed to store, and that you ignore how building garages and subsidizing their use prompts more driving, more energy consumption and more pollution