INDUSTRIAL LAND IN A POST-INDUSTRIAL CITY District of ...

District of Columbia Industrial Areas Study DC Office of Planning
Prepared by Phillips Preiss Shapiro Associates, Inc.
4.6.4.2 Distributed Generation
Distributed generation (DG) refers to using local sources of energy production and distribution
for power, rather than large, centralized facilities like fossil fuel plants. While DG can utilize
conventional fuels, its real potential lies with easily obtainable energy from renewable sources
like solar, wind, biomass, and tidal currents. DG facilities can generally be installed on buildings,
meaning that no additional space is required. Because power is generated close to its where it
will be used, transmission losses are minimized. Further, DG eliminates the need for gigantic,
highly secure power plants, like the peaking plants found at Benning Road and in Buzzard
Point. Instead, these vast swaths of industrial land could be made now available for
employment-generating PDR uses.
Municipal landfills and sewage plants are man-made sources of methane, or natural gas. Some
municipalities have looked at the potential for generating electrical power from methane evolved
from landfills. The same potential may exist for a methane-driven power plant capitalizing on
waste gas from the Blue Plains water treatment facility. The benefits are twofold—capturing a
“free” source of energy, and combusting a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide.
This alternative energy source could further reduce the need for large “dirty” power plants.
4.6.4.3 Green Buildings, Green Planning
Green building and planning standards and technologies are aimed at finding low-energy, more
natural solutions to the problems common to all development: heating and cooling, disposing of
liquid and solid wastes, managing stormwater flows. While this topic may seem unrelated to
industrial land, it does in fact address directly issues related both the efficient deployment of
municipal resources and the ability to accommodate future growth without overstressing the
District’s infrastructure.
As more and more people live and work in the District, demands on the District’s sewers and
Blue Plains wastewater treatment plant will grow. Blue Plains has the capacity to absorb this
demand, but large rainfall events flood the District’s older combined sanitary/storm sewers and
runoff pours, untreated, into rivers. To alleviate this, WASA is retrofitting its system to separate
water and storm sewers in the few areas where they are still combined, but additional storm
water management and retention strategies should be pursued, especially in industrial areas
where runoff tends to be toxic.
The Office of Planning guidelines for “green” development in NoMa are important steps in the
right direction. Recognizing that intense development could have considerable environmental
impacts, OP notes that certain strategies should be investigated to reduce demand on an
already overburdened water management system. Strategies could include rainwater collection
and reuse (which has the potential to decrease costs for water-heavy PDR businesses),
increasing permeable surfaces and decreasing hardscapes like parking lots (car sharing and
transit would reduce auto use and space lost to parking lots), and using bioswales and green
roofs and other buffers to control, channel, filter, and mitigate runoff. These strategies not only
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