Transcript - State Climate and Energy Technical Forum
Contents
1. unfortunately I can t click on them but they are basically help text to guide you along as you are going through the calculation They will give you answers to some general questions that you may have regarding this tool And all of them have a little bit of language to them depending on which part of the screen they are located So once I have populated all of my information fuel volume the vehicle miles and idling hours I can save my group You ll notice the color scheme here the brown is for the vehicle and the green is for the technology just to make it visually pleasing Here you can see that your vehicle group has been saved If you need to edit or go back at any time you can click Edit Group to modify what you ve already entered Here I can add a new technology This screen will populate and you will be able to choose technology type Here I ve chosen idling control strategies and my technology is a direct fired heater The number of idle hours that are reduced per year I have chosen 200 And I m going to apply it to all 10 of the school buses You can also change this number So for instance if I was only going to have five heaters on five out of the 10 school buses I can change the number to five And then I can add the other five to something else That is another option when you have a lot of fleets in one vehicle group And then here we have the percent reduction by pollutant for heaters f2. Do you want to estimate the total cost effectiveness of the project Yes or No If you pick No this area that you see at the bottom will disappear But if you pick Yes this automatically appears and you can populate the cost basically of your project Usually this part is used for grantees grant competitions or grant proposals For instance if EPA is giving out 100 000 for a particular project and DOE is giving out 20 000 And then you can fill in these other ones if you have private matching or your own matching or if your state is putting in more money as well as other money What the DEQ will do is add up all these numbers and calculate a final cost effectiveness value that I will get to once we get through this calculation So after you enter in this information you can click Save Fleet The second step as you can see here s a bar here at the very top that shows you where you are in your calculation a Fleet Entry Vehicle Group Entry Technology Quantify Results and Health Benefits So this is basically the structure that I presented earlier Now that we are at the second step we get to add a vehicle group This is what your vehicle group will look like I gave it a group name I called this School Buses Test I have 10 school buses I have chosen on highway The target fleet is school bus And the class of equipment is also school bus I ve chosen default model year of 2000 And the year of retrofit acti
3. s implicit in Denise s answer But BenMAP would let you elaborate more complicated air quality tools So if you re running an air quality modeling tool that s a little bit more sophisticated than the short or the reduced form source receptor matrix that s embedded in COBRA then BenMAP would allow you to take advantage of that and run your air quality through BenMAP and again as simple or as complex a way that you d like and see the benefits Thank you I think there is there is this other question that may also apply to all of our speakers But we came up while you were talking David about the how the economic values for health benefits are determined Yes I think Denise touched on this a little bit when she was talking about it Can you add anything here I would mention that when EPA performs a rulemaking we go through an exhaustive process and include a lot of information in our regulatory impact analyses And all of that information is in there and much bigger than Pd be able to tell you But essentially EPA relies on the best economic information that s available And in some cases depending on the health outcome we will use actual estimates of hospital cost and multiply an incidence of hospital admission avoided by the average hospital cost for that outcome and some of those In Catherine Morris EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 34 other
4. I know we re a couple of minutes behind schedule So if we can just wrap up EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 13 Julie Wang Hawkins Thanks very much Yes Julia Miller OK Great Thanks Julie Wang Hawkins Thanks Catherine Morris OK So the wrap up the very last thing just going through this really quickly the health benefits Like I was saying before you get to choose five counties And they don t all have to be in the same state For a project in Maryland I chose three counties in Maryland one in D C and one in Arlington Virginia And the percentages refer to how much benefit each of these counties will get For these school buses they will be in Baltimore 20 of the time So I gave Baltimore 20 and then 15 10 25 and 30 All this has to add up to a hundred And then you can click on Calculate Benefits and it will reprint the PM 2 5 reduction and then the benefits in dollar amount And you can also download this at the very bottom And the very last thing I won t have time to go through this But this is very easy You can save your run by creating a user account All you have to do is click on the upper right hand side There s a place called Login or Create An Account And all you will need is your e mail your name you don t even have to keep your organization of your phone But a name and an e mail is basically all
5. To start off well what is it COBRA is a user friendly screening tool where you as a user enter a criteria air pollutant emission reduction So you enter a particulate matter your SOx your NOx your VOCs your ammonia And COBRA will give you the first order or approximate estimate of air quality impacts that are likely to occur from those changes in emissions and then the subsequent health effects that are likely to occur from those emission reductions and then it calculates the economic value of the health effects Where we are now is that policymakers typically just consider the economic cost of policy choices But that s just part of the story And what COBRA does is enable you to estimate the economic value of the health benefits and to provide more balance than your comparisons of the cost and benefit So with COBRA you can better understand and communicate the potential for health and economic benefits from clean air costs these are policies that reduce these emissions and determine which options warrant further analysis with a more sophisticated tool So it is a screening tool similar to the DEQ EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 17 So how does COBRA work Well COBRA is based on rigorous methods that EPA uses for our own benefit assessment We ve adapted it for use as a screening tool to make it more available to other folks on the outside And this is a s
6. as far as I know right now one of the things that we like about BenMAP is its ability to take in air quality modeling from anywhere So as far as I know we re not looking at pairing it up specifically to an atmospheric dispersion model or any air quality model And Denise the question for you was is there a plan to integrate technology and fuel use related changes so that you can calculate the emissions changes like DEQ into COBRA Denise Mulholland Within COBRA you can pick from your emission categories that Catherine Morris come from the national emission inventory the EPA hub So certainly you can pick specific types of vehicles For example you could select highway vehicles you could select off highway transportation types And there are different degrees of specificity that you can get into with COBRA I just gave fossil fuel combustion electric utility But there certainly are options where you can look at fuel use You can adapt it to your analysis to figure out what are the emission changes My guess is that you re coming in with the emission reduction It s what you really need So if you come in with the emission reduction associated with a technology or a fuel use change and we just mapped it into the appropriate place If you have the emission reductions from a specific technology or a fuel change then you could put it into COBRA You can add it into the right spot that you d bring that information
7. re actually using it It s certainly not as visually pleasing as the DEQ But it is pretty easy to use The windows on the right there basically show you what it looks like where you would tell BenMAP where your air quality files are and what population area you want to use On the last is a menu of the different health impact functions that are already included in BenMAP You could select those Or again you could download configuration files that are already set to go with EPA standard inputs The final step of BenMAP is reporting the results I don t have as much detail here as I probably should But again similar to the DEQ you can output data Catherine Morris David Risley Catherine Morris David Risley EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 31 in tables you can present data as maps You can basically do anything you can imagine with the data Finally Pll leave you with some links to more information about BenMAP I almost wanted to lead with this because the BenMAP Web site has a lot of great information on it It has training materials It has presentations It has the user s manual which is really comprehensive and it answers a lot of questions And then in addition to that there are BenMAP trainings that you can find And there are two different providers of that training right now So d be happy to answer any questions Great You just answ
8. cases like for our premature mortality it s a little bit more complicated Essentially what we do is we review the peer review letter on this But what people do is they talk about what their willingness to pay would be for a reduction in risk and then aggregate that risk up There are different methods that are used depending on the health outcome that we re talking about And there is more detail that s available in EPA s regulatory impact analyses Great We ll let s go ahead and open it up for all our speakers And the next set of questions really are targeted at all the tools One question that came in was how if at all these tools could be used with greenhouse gas emissions Who wants to take the first shot at that Denise Denise Mulholland Sure I can take a crack at that Greenhouse gas emissions CO2 carbon dioxide are not in COBRA We include criteria air pollutants because they are directly linked to health effect through our concentrations response functions Julie Wang Hawkins For the DEQ we have CO2 emissions in both baseline as well as David Risley Catherine Morris initial reductions for the on highway on site idling and other technologies that have fuel economy benefits That s really the only place in the DEQ where you ll find it if you re doing a run with technologies that give you fuel economy benefits For BenMAP it s certainly flexible enough to allow a user to use
9. equipment as well as some stationary and rail So this is basically everything from school buses to transit buses to construction equipment to stationary generators as well as three different kinds of trains The second one is for marine vessels which only includes C1 and C2 category vessels which are between 700 to 11 000 horsepower and less than 30 liters in displacement So the only one that s been excluded are oceangoing vessels And we are currently not able to include that right now because their operating cycles tend to be very inclusive And I think further research needs to be done before we can quantify this These are the types of calculations and so the next step once you pick your calculation you get to design your fleet and your vehicles groups So this is just terminology You don t have to memorize this But just have an understanding that a fleet is your collection of vehicles or engines and equipment So for instance your state or your local area might have 100 school buses and 200 bulldozers And that would be your fleet A vehicle or engine group on the other hand is a subset of your fleet And they should be similar in terms of vehicle type and age For instance model year 2007 school buses Ideally a fleet will have many vehicle groups EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 7 Once you are able to design your fleet and vehicle groups you get to
10. idle reduction project So here Pm going to present a series of screenshots This is basically the home page of the Diesel Emissions Quantifier sort of zoomed in to show you what we have available The link is at the bottom in huge letters Here we have a box to the upper right hand side with a frequently asked questions document a default value a user s guide and health benefits methodology My recommendation is that unless you really want to learn more about the tool itself including the back end modeling the frequently asked questions is probably enough to answer most of your questions and give you an idea of what the DEQ can and cannot do without getting you too much into the modeling and the back end equations It has three tabs This will likely be updated with a slightly different format But the same tabs will apply We have the Overview Use the Quantifier and My Account We re going to start with the Use the Quantifier tab So first like I was talking about before the structure of the DEQ the first thing you have to do is you have to define your fleet So here I typed in School Bus for the fleet name You can name your fleet anything you want Make it something that is descriptive of your calculation The fleet type is on highway or non road And the state ve chosen Maryland EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 9 And here we have a question
11. that have already downloaded your presentation before the webinar and noticed that there were some changes in the slide that we did not get posted immediately before So we will post your final presentation afterwards Denise Mulholland OK Catherine Morris People keep asking The website for that is www epatechforum org and you just need to click on to the next page which will take you to the 2012 materials because this has been ongoing for a number of years You can look back at all the different topics we ve covered at that page In any case a question that came in one was regarding the discount rate that you mentioned as an input Are there plans for giving users a broader range of discount rates There is not agreement that 3 should be the lower bound Denise Mulholland That s a great question For the COBRA model no again because we have this hard wired into how EPA does it But that would be a great question that I would ask David when he talks about BenMAP because he might have that option I don t know But you might have that option in Catherine Morris EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 25 BenMAP I refer to COBRA as this sort of mini BenMAP where it takes a lot of the BenMAP flexibilities and hard wires them into an inflexible tool for folks that maybe don t know what the difference is in terms of discount rates or what the real economic v
12. to it OK Thank you very much Thanks to all the speakers We are out of time for questions and I do apologize we have to leave some of them unanswered But you do have access to the contact information for our speakers And this presentation is up on the website that I mentioned www epatechforum org And we definitely Julia Miller EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 37 encourage you to go to the links that are provided there to test out some of these tools And then you might actually ask more questions So with that we re going to go ahead and close the webinar And again you will see some exit poll questions There s about five or six of them It shouldn t take you very long to answer them But the results would be very helpful to us So please take a second after you close out And look for additional information about the future our next webinar which should be in the next month or two And we ll get that to you by e mail for all those of you who attended and those of you that are on LIST SERV Thanks very much Thanks Catherine Thanks everyone END
13. to the BenMAP model is air quality changes change in air quality That s your starting point And then it offers you a lot of flexibility It offers you the option to take those air quality changes and just run them through a very simply approach like COBRA and get similar types of results Or it enables you to make a lot of changes if you are more knowledgeable about specific functions that you care about or economic values that you feel strongly about You can change these here But if you do not have air quality modeling changes if you don t have air quality changes you can use COBRA if your David Risley Catherine Morris David Risley Catherine Morris David Risley EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 33 starting point is emission changes And what it will do is do the air quality modeling for you and then apply the same equations that are in BenMAP or it should be trying to get as updated as possible the same equations in BenMAP to get you your results If you come to the table with air quality modeling or you come to the table with a desire to be able to change the functions and the assumptions within the model like the discount rate or something I m not sure if that s an option in BenMAP If you start with emissions it would be COBRA And COBRA is a simpler tool It s much more basic in that way Yes I would only add to that that it
14. CO2 or what have you if have a concentration response function that you re interested in You could use it But currently EPA does not use BenMAP to estimate any health impacts of CO2 and as Denise said with COBRA we use it for co pollutants and criteria pollutants Great This question is more directed at Denise Are you aware of policies or programs that have been informed by COBRA results Or is it just for internal screening assessments EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 35 Denise Mulholland That s a great question Actually Catherine I have folks who ve Catherine Morris David Risley Catherine Morris David Risley Catherine Morris used it for both purposes We have seen for example there was just a study that Duke put out recently looking at the health advantages of their Clean Smokestacks law that they had passed a number of years ago So they used COBRA to figure out what the health benefits are of that There are a number of studies that we the Department of Energy is another one that has looked at what are some of the health impacts of different technologies renewable technology programs that they have been investing in And there are certainly a number of states out there that have done both screening level and analysis with COBRA We link to several on our website and we have some within the presentations that are on our website And
15. Julia Miller EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 1 EPA Moderator Julia Miller October 11 2012 2 00 p m ET Hi This is Julia Miller from EPA State Climate and Energy Program Thank you for joining us for today s webinar on Estimating the Health Impacts of Climate Change and Clean Energy Programs For the purposes of today s webinar when we talk about climate change programs we mean the clean energy programs that reduce greenhouse gas emissions which include energy efficiency renewable energy and combined heat and power These programs reduce criteria pollutants which in turn directly enhance air quality improve public health and help people avoid expensive illnesses and sick days that can affect their spending productivity and quality of life On the webinar today we re going to take a look at three different tools that EPA offers to help state and local governments calculate the health impact and the related economic value of programs that reduce these criteria air pollutants such as energy efficiency renewable and clean transportation programs Generally today the order of the presentations will go from the most basic tool to the most sophisticated tool We re going to start with Julie Wang Hawkins from EPA s Office of Transportation and Air Quality She is going to give us an overview of the Diesel Emissions Quantifier tool Then we re going to swi
16. OBRA BenMAP s results can be mapped for ease of presentation This is a list of a couple of the policies that BenMAP has been used to evaluate And to me one of the things that this demonstrates is flexibility EPA has used BenMAP to look at national scale air quality programs But it has also been used on local level analysis like the New York City Department of Health federal level assessment And EPA has also partnered with some international organizations to do evaluations in other countries So really you can use BenMAP for almost anything So the way that BenMAP estimates benefits is by combining population exposure with air pollutants baseline incidence rates for things like asthma heart attacks things like that and concentration response functions And by combining those three things it estimates health benefits Denise referenced this as well It s the concentration response functions These are based on epidemiological studies that relate pollutant concentrations and incidences of health outcomes and you can use that function to estimate the benefits of your air quality improvement programs So BenMAP could be used to estimate the benefits based on almost any concentration response function But these are the ones that EPA publicly reports and uses So similar to COBRA we look at mortality heart attacks asthma attacks et cetera BenMAP relies on data from different sources to perform its calculations And esse
17. actually look like in COBRA And so top right these is your tables of results You can sort them here as health effect tables And you can pick and choose if you want by economic value or by a certain incident But you can see them on a tabular form You can export them so you can manipulate them in your own Excel file At the bottom left you can see that it s a map of the different health benefits and it s color coded You can even change the color coding to show you the degrees of where the biggest impacts are And this has been a really nice tool Catherine Morris EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 24 that folks have been able to use to help them copy these maps into PowerPoint presentations and visually show people where these benefits are likely to occur That was just a snapshot or a quick walkthrough of the tool You can get more information from our website There you can get lots of information about how it works why you d do this and specific examples The one that I walked you through is a renewable example There is an energy efficiency example that s on there as well And then you can download at the bottom the overview the documentation And you can always contact me There s my contact information And I m happy to answer any clarifying questions now or any other questions later Thank you very much Thank you Denise There are some folks
18. add your technology On the technology entry you can apply one or more technology options to your group These options include filters catalysts alternative fuels and more The thing to keep in mind here is that not all technologies can be put onto one vehicle at once A classic example of that is if you re already putting on one filter it s unlikely that you can put on a second filter There s usually not enough space So the tool would tell you if you cannot or if you are not able to put on a second technology Once you add your technology you can quantify your results and you can view the results and download them in spreadsheet form This final part of the DEQ calculation this was added maybe two years ago It was one of the more recent additions to this tool It is the monetary health benefits calculation based on the tonnage of PM reduced As of right now we only have health benefits for PM We are working to get health benefits for NOx and hydrocarbon But for the time being the DEQ can only calculate health benefits for PM which is particulate matter 2 5 So after you ve fully quantified the emission reduction you can choose to quantify the health benefits for up to five counties in the United States They don t have to be in the same state or in the same state as your fleet because given the nature of these on highway vehicles and even rail and marine a lot of times these engines and vehicles travel acros
19. alue is Another question was regarding the population census data that s in there What is the population base and the census year And then what is the base year that you re using in general Denise Mulholland For the emissions of 2017 I know we just ended up getting updated Catherine Morris baseline data so I have to get back to you on that one I know it s the latest greatest possible data that we could get OK Denise Mulholland But I don t exactly what year that is But that s the latest and Catherine Morris greatest data If you downloaded COBRA up to this point it s outdated data whereas the population data that s in the new version for today is as current as we can possibly get it Great There were a number of questions that came in for Julie and then similar ones for you which is what methods are used to translate the emissions reductions into specific health benefits for heart attacks Can you talk a little bit more about that part of the program And then in Julie s case she was also talking about calculating the actual cost And yours as well The cost savings associated with that Denise Mulholland In COBRA there is sure I d be happy to answer that I d be happy to follow up if I can t get into enough detail given the time that we have here today So COBRA starts out with emissions But it has a built it air quality model a reduced form air quality model in it t
20. based off of the annual So for the annual for instance we have NOx PM 2 5 hydrocarbons carbon monoxide carbon dioxide and the diesel equivalent These are your five pollutants And then this is how much fuel you would save And this diesel equivalent is based on the CO2 emission factor On this side we have baseline The Diesel Emissions Quantifier calculates the baseline emissions for your fleet and then the percent reduced and then the amount reduced So you can kind of just eyeball if this is what you start out with This is how much is reduced the percent that it was reduced and this is how much is actually reduced We have that in again annual daily lifetime And at the bottom we have some cost effectiveness calculations There s two different types of cost effectiveness Unfortunately I don t have time to Julia Miller EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 12 get into this on this particular webinar The frequently asked questions document covers this in detail Feel free to refer to that But there are two different ways of calculating cost effectiveness This total cost effectiveness is the one that is used by the numbers that you enter at the very very beginning And the capital cost effectiveness is used with the installation cost and the unit cost for each individual technology That s the biggest difference The remaining life that s ca
21. chematic that shows you how it works Up at the top left you have the user input This is what you need to bring to the model And what you bring are the emissions changes the reductions in PM SOx NOx VOCs et cetera You enter those into the model for the year 2017 and you pick a discount rate And we offer you two options You ll see PI walk you through an example and explain the differences But that s basically what you bring here emissions changes and you pick a discount rate In some other models we ll hear from David in a bit where the input starting point is a little bit different It s air quality modeling And this is just emissions data So it is the year 2017 in the model And I just wanted to propose today that we have just released a brand new version today that is current through the year 2017 So for folks that have downloaded it previously we will send out an update notice But otherwise you can get it off our Web site which is at the end of my presentation COBRA takes these emission changes and it has a reduced form or simple air quality model embedded in the tool It converts these emission changes into changes in air quality And then based on population as well as concentration response functions which are epidemiological equations that EPA uses in our regulatory analyses it comes up with changes in health incidences that occur changes in illnesses deaths that sort of thing And what it do
22. different tools and methods to come up with these emission reduction and that location And then you bring them into COBRA With COBRA you enter them into the model you select the discount rate and then you run the model and review the result I m just going to walk you through an example quickly in the interest of time where we will walk through a hypothetical case so you can see how it works So what we re going to do here is evaluate the health benefits or the potential health benefits of a renewable portfolio standard or some sort of renewable standard that a state or a locality might be interested in implementing What a renewable portfolio standard or a renewable standard does would be to require the utilities to switch to a particular percentage of electricity generation that they are doing now to renewable resources if it s not renewable already So if what you re switching away from has been generated with fossil fuel then this new renewable standard is going to achieve criteria air pollutant reduction which is then going to result in health benefits That s what we re going to look at here in COBRA in this example today I picked Michigan arbitrarily It has established a renewable portfolio standard that says that 10 of their electricity generation must be from EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 21 renewable resources by 2015 to 2017 You can also likewise d
23. e minutes doing that And then we reserved about 20 minutes at the end of all of the speakers time so that we can open it up for more involved questions and some interaction between our speakers So you ll see again we re going to launch a poll throughout a couple of different questions throughout the webinar after each of our speakers And we re also going to ask you some questions at the end of the webinar When EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 4 you are about to sign off you ll see some questions pop up on your screen And please take a few minutes if you would just to complete those It really helps us to plan for future webinars and to be able to customize them to your responses I think that s about it One other thing I should show you is that your control bar is a floating control bar You can move it around your screen But you can also minimize it so it doesn t obstruct your view of the screen You do that by clicking on the red arrow on the tab on the left side of your control panel And that will get it out of the way for you And then you just click it again to bring it back up so that you can hit it and enter your questions So with that let me now introduce our first speaker and tell you a little bit more about her Julie Wang Hawkins has worked with EPA s Office of Air since 2008 And specifically she has been working on retrofit techno
24. e program The types of projects that this tool was designed for include exhaust aftertreatment technologies such as catalysts filters SCR systems as well as other devices engine repowers and replacements fuel upgrades such as biodiesel and natural gas and idle reduction technologies such as APUs or auxiliary power units heaters and shore power Now I will mention that when this tool was first designed it was primarily geared towards exhaust aftertreatment technologies The other three were EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 6 added later on So I will say it s probably most powerful for that very first one So what the DEQ is not I think it s pretty obvious The DEQ does not currently provide estimates for light heavy duty or non heavy duty engines or non diesel engines or vehicles or any that are pre 1980 or oceangoing vessels for ports The DEQ may also not be used for State Implementation Plans and conformity We ve heard stories the people use the DEQ to estimate for SIPs But primarily I believe for SIPs you are instructed to use MOVES Motor Vehicle Emission Simulator So consult your regional office regarding the SIP and conformity guidance So now we re going to go into the DEQ structure And there are two types of calculations The first is on highway and non road This category includes all the medium and heavy heavy duty diesel engines and
25. ealth Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 30 data which EPA uses models like the CAMx and CMAQ which are pretty sophisticated air quality models but if you have any modeling data you could import that into BenMAP to serve as your basis for your air quality data On slide 11 you can see how BenMAP is used to basically combine the air quality data that you specified with the built in population data to estimate population exposure So essentially it just overlays those two maps and tells you what your population exposure would be This slide covers steps two and three out of the four step process that BenMAP uses And it s pretty simple Before I even get into it I would just mention that on the BenMAP website you can download the standard data that EPA uses to perform these steps If you didn t want to you wouldn t even have to alter that at all Step two consists of the first two bullets You would select your health impact functions and choose an analysis year And that would be used to estimate the incidences in the year you re avoiding So that number of asthma attacks that your air quality improvement would result in Steps three and four basically you re telling BenMAP how you would want to evaluate those results using you know different methods that are already included in BenMAP and then how you would want to aggregate your results These are some screenshots of what BenMAP looks like when you
26. ed whether or not you can use this at a neighborhood scale or a specific road corridor scale Could it be applied in those situations Yes That s a really good question Essentially it would depend on the richness of the datasets I would say yes you probably could But you would need to provide a shapefile or something that BenMAP could read to figure out how or where those corridors are because something like that is more of a complicated assessment that BenMAP certainly has all of the tools and the functionality to do but it requires a little bit more input from the user And maybe this is somewhat related Can you also use it to estimate health impacts from different transportation scenarios I m not sure what or what scale they re considering here But Yes that s absolutely what BenMAP is for Again the only thing that BenMAP needs as an input is change in air quality So if they are able to provide that to show the change in air quality for their project then absolutely Can you talk a little bit about in what circumstances you should be using COBRA instead of BenMAP And is one preferred based on the user type Or is it the type of available data Denise Mulholland Well Catherine maybe David and I can both answer that one This is Denise They both start at different points and essentially get you to the same place They start at different points As David was saying the starting point that you bring
27. ee the next question 1s For what purpose would you primarily like to use these health estimation tools And you have four choices So if you d quickly make your appropriate choice Then we ll see the results OK Quantifying economic benefits of emissions reductions and Make the case to others about the benefits of these programs are the two highest reasons for actually needing these tools Thank you for responding That s our last polling question But just to remind you you ll see some more when you leave the webinar And let s now turn it over to our final speaker David Risley who works in the Clean Air Markets Division at EPA s Office of Atmospheric Programs David Risley EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 27 He uses the benefit assessment message to evaluate the benefits of EPA s current and prospective emission reduction programs and he s going to describe the Benefits and Mapping Analysis tool which as we mentioned is the most sophisticated tool And again we don t expect everybody to walk away being able to use these out of the box But certainly this should whet your appetite David Yes Thank you It s probably the most sophisticated But I also would not be scared by it It comes with a lot of information that you would need preloaded and actually isn t overly difficult to use I m just going to walk thro
28. ered one of our first ones which is what are the training opportunities in using BenMAP I wanted to let folks know that these links are not only in these presentations which you will find up on the EPA Tech Forum site But they are also in the on that page You don t have to go into the presentation to get them They are posted right there on the page So a couple of other questions David on BenMAP can it be used to calculate PM 2 5 emissions as well PM 2 5 I m sorry PM 2 5 emissions or concentrations Pll leave that I can answer I can answer either way So BenMAP is not an emission tool You would have to use another tool for whatever you re trying to estimate emissions from And as far as air quality BenMAP also is not an air quality tool Remember one of the differences between BenMAP and models like COBRA and the DEQ is that BenMAP starts with air quality That s really the key input that the user needs to provide The only thing I would mention there is that there is monitoring data that is already included in BenMAP It comes in the initial download And if a user wanted to use some of that monitoring data as their air quality input then they got it Catherine Morris David Risley Catherine Morris David Risley Catherine Morris EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 32 Well that leads to another question A couple of people have ask
29. es is it applies an economic value to those changes again using the numbers the EPA uses in our own regulatory analyses when we re estimating benefits And so then the outputs of the tool are changes in air quality changes in health effects and the economic value of those changes in health effects EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 18 Here is a list of the different health effects that are estimated in COBRA and it also estimates the related economic value of these So what we have we have mortality incidences that s death we have heart attacks hospital admissions respiratory illnesses emergency room visits for asthma cases restricted activity days What that is those are code red days if folks are familiar with daYS where the pollution level is just so high that activity is restricted and they tell the elderly or people that have compromised immune system or have asthma to stay indoors These are the minor restricted activity days as well as work loss days If you re sick obviously many times you ll end up missing work So those incidences are estimated in COBRA and monetized in terms of the value So what are the strengths of the model Well what COBRA does is it really beefs up the benefits side of the cost benefit equation and helps to support balanced decision making It s a tool that enriches this discussion of benefits and helps us look at thi
30. hat is called a source receptor matrix You can find out more about it in the user manual But essentially it s based on air quality modeling runs that have been done in the past And we figured Catherine Morris EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 26 out the relationships between what s admitted in one state and what the air quality changes are and other places and how it goes around So we have a reduced form air quality model in the tool It s nota sophisticated air quality model which is why it s not appropriate for SIP But with this we do it from a source receptor matrix which is what EPA has done in the past for all this sort of quick and dirty analysis to come up with air quality changes And then we apply certain equations that are from the epidemiological community that are health functions And these are equations that relate to these specific air quality changes and health incidences So it s mathematical equations And then come up with the health incidences And we apply specific economic values that are all detailed in the user manual And so it s health incidences avoided times certain economic value equals the economic value Does that help Yes Thank you OK So we re running a little bit late So first we ll do a poll And then we ll move to David s presentation We re going to launch our poll question As you can s
31. ing questions as we can on the call as well as a few of the discussion questions at the end of the webinar However if we don t get to your question we will be following up afterwards The Diesel Emissions Quantifier does publish a frequently asked questions document So feel free to check there And all of these links and information will be presented at the end of my presentation So to begin this is called the Diesel Emissions Quantifier or the DEQ for short It s the national clean diesel campaign in the Office of Air for the Environmental Protection Agency So here in my overview I will start with what is the DEQ a general definition the overall structure the types of inputs you will need to do a calculation an example calculation and the results and interpretation So what is the DEQ The DEQ is a web based interactive tool that evaluates retrofit projects for medium and heavy heavy duty diesel engines by estimating pollutant emission reductions cost effectiveness and health benefits Mostly this tool is used by fleet owners grantees non profit as well as state and local governments which is you guys So types of project for DEQ calculations This tool was originally designed back in 2005 for the Diesel Emissions Reduction Act otherwise known as DERA which is a cooperative grant competition for diesel retrofit projects Some of you might be familiar with it through either the national competition or the stat
32. ity modeling tool built into DEQ Julie Wang Hawkins Pm not a 100 sure That s kind of the background of the DEQ Catherine Morris So the DEQ uses MOVES and non road Those are both models And we use the numbers from those two tools to serve as the back end So yes as we go through each calculation for all the on highway vehicles you re essentially using the MOVES numbers And for all the non road you are using the non road model numbers OK In one of your slides early on you mentioned that this is not a tool that you should be using for calculating emissions for the State Implementation Plans or conformity determinations Can you talk a little bit more about that and why it s not appropriate for that use Julie Wang Hawkins Unfortunately I don t have a lot of knowledge on the State Implementation Plans and conformity What I do know is that there is very specific guidance on which tool should be used And this tool unfortunately is not one of them because it is not detailed enough All the estimates that we do here are not really for planning purposes but more for smaller projects on a much much smaller scale EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 15 Catherine Morris Let me try to sneak one more question in This is I think a pretty quick one Could you explain the difference between the fleet capital cost effectiveness and the total cost effecti
33. lculated based off of an algorithm that we use depending on which kind of vehicle you have For school buses that were produced in the year 2000 in 2012 they have 17 more years left And this 17 is used to calculate the lifetime emissions So most of the time you probably don t want to stare at your computer screen for too long So we give you the option to download your results We have two reports that you can download The first one is called the detailed report And this one contains all of your inputs and all of your outputs The importance of this report is that is you ever want to redo your calculation this one has all of your inputs So you will know exactly what you used which numbers and where you put them So this is a very valuable report for replicating any future calculations The summary report most of our grantees are familiar with this one because we ask for this one with their grant proposals If you are a grantee you might want to consider getting this one because it is asummary It has only some of your inputs but all of the outputs So and both of these reports are available for both Microsoft Excel as well as comma separated values CSV Whichever one you prefer sometimes I advise people to download both versions because once you download the Excel if you wish to convert it to CSV it doesn t always work So downloading all the reports when you re able is probably a good idea Hey Julie
34. lity and climate change that are of interest to state and local governments So if you have any ideas please submit suggestions There s going to be a feedback form at the end of the webinar So you can submit suggestions there Or if you can t stay till the end of the webinar you can always type in suggestions you can use the chat box or the question log Now I m going to hand the webinar over to our facilitator Catherine Morris from The Keystone Center And she is going to cover some of the logistics and get us started Thanks Julia First we are going to launch a poll to give us a better indication of the type of listeners we have the attendees You should see a poll in your screen right now with a question about what best describes your agency or organization We d ask you in the next couple of seconds to please click on your response on your screen and hit Submit once you ve hit that response Our panelists will not be able to respond This is only for our attendees But we re going to EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 3 launch a number of questions like this throughout the webinar and I ll bring your attention to it as it happens And it s going to help us again gather some information about your experience with these tools or your knowledge of them and different ways you might find them helpful in applying them to your day to day work ll give
35. logy verification for heavy duty diesel vehicle and aerodynamic devices for tractor trailers So she has a lot of experience on the types of technologies that she s going to be talking about and when she s describing this tool She s been actively managing the Diesel Emission Quantifier for the last two years and has been spending quite a bit of time making sure that it s usable for you So the first thing she s going to do is just give you an overview of that tool and then walk you through an example of it With that we ll turn over the presentation controls to Julie so she can begin her presentation Julie Wang Hawkins OK Thank you Catherine Just giving it a second for the Catherine Morris presentation to switch over Excuse me Julie I see we have a new poll that s been launched And this is again just a preliminary question to get some feedback from you on which of these tools that we re going to be talking about today that you re aware of before we actually explain them all to you So if you can quickly answer this question And then we ll get on to Julie s presentation Julie Wang Hawkins OK Thank you Catherine EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 5 Once again I will be going through this tool in about 10 15 minutes And if you do have any questions please type them into the chat bar And we will try to address as many of the clarify
36. n And then we figured out how much generation already comes from the state of Michigan And so we pulled that out of eGRID and we now are left with 10 minus the 3 1 that we figured out And there we re left with 6 9 of reduction We want to reduce 6 9 of our current generation That turns out to be 6 million megawatt hours And we re going to apply the emission factor that eGRID tell us about to figure out what the SOx and NOx reductions would be from that reduction in megawatt hours EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 22 Now we have our estimates We have our emission reductions estimate And there s a number of ways you could do that That was just one illustration But what we re going to do now is enter them into the tool This is a screenshot of what the COBRA model looks like when you first open it up And so you would pick that you want to do something for an individual state You would select the state You could also select multiple states We re just going to do one state But if you wanted to do counties certain counties within a state it will take you to the next step and you can select only a handful of counties within a certain state But we re just going to do statewide for this example The next thing you have to do is figure out what emission category your reductions will come from These emission categories are labels that come fr
37. ngs on a more balanced playing field or level playing field That s one of its strengths There aren t many tools out there that do that It s really easy to use You just bring a couple of inputs to the tool itself It has canned equations and approaches within it that are consistent with what EPA does And we have a user guide that walks you through step by step how to use the tool It s very flexible in terms of how you can enter the data geographically You can enter it in county level state level regional level You can do it groups of counties groups of states You have a lot of flexibility there And you can enter reductions in either as a percentage like a percentage reduction that you re achieving or for a particular emission or an absolute reduction like for a certain number of times It s free which is a benefit over the more sophisticated air quality modelS which can be expensive What we talk about with COBRA is that COBRA is really useful to help you to trim or narrow a long list of policy options down to a shorter list and help you identify those options which might warrant further analysis with a more sophisticated and expensive air quality model Julia Miller EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 19 It s really quick It just takes a couple of minutes to generate results And it presents your results in easy to visualize map You can copy these ma
38. ntially what it does is it combines air quality and population data to come up with a population exposure So if you re thinking about an emission reduction program that would be a reduction in exposure to a pollutant that a certain population would experience And then it combines that information with the concentration response functions and the baseline incidence and prevalence rates to estimate adverse health effects And that has functions embedded in it that allow you to put an economic value on those adverse health effects that are avoided EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 29 One way to visualize this a little bit is to go through an example Let s say you re interested in pursuing a program that would improve air quality in a given region So you would have on the top left graphic there your baseline air quality Coupled with that is the policy air quality And BenMAP would take those two air quality grids and basically do a subtraction and calculate the improvement in ambient air quality Next BenMAP would overlay that improvement in air quality with population data that s already in BenMAP You don t need to provide that And it would combine that with the background incidence rates which are again already in BenMAP and then the concentration response functions to give you a health benefit So if you were to use BenMAP you would open the tool and
39. o this for a county So what you do first is to figure out where your emissions are going to take place where the reductions will be In this case it will be national county state or regional level If you know the plants that are going to be affected you can put them in that particular county Or you can use a very sophisticated model to try and figure out where these reductions will take place So there s a variety of ways you can do this But for this example we re just going to assume that the emissions are going to occur statewide And that is just a simplification for the purposes of this example So now what we can do is either estimate the reductions as a percentage or we can estimate them in absolute time So for this just assume 10 is switched So we are reducing 10 of our fossil fuel related electricity emissions or we can actually calculate the number using an emission factor approach which is a simplified approach or a more sophisticated modeling approach if you have one So what we did in this example was we take an emission factor approach and we used EPA s Emissions and Generation Resource Integrated Database eGRID and followed the number of steps here you can see on the slide We figured out what the net electricity generation in Michigan typically is So we figured out the output emission rates from eGRID Now what are the emission factors that eGRID tells us occur with that electricity generatio
40. om EPA s National Emissions Inventory And there s a bigger description of what is it and where it comes from in our user manual But essentially you re trying to pick where these emissions are typically organized in our emissions inventory and in our baseline and you re going to affect that This is an electricity related scenario We re going to focus on fossil fuel combustion electric utility We click on that tab And then we enter our emissions reduction that we just calculated previously So the next step after we hit Apply Edit And then it ll ask you to name it Then select the discount rate And so what the discount rate does people would rather have benefits today than have them in the future If the benefits are going to be in the future you have to discount the value of that So what we do is we follow EPA guidelines We re consistent with how EPA chooses to discount their future benefits And we offer you the option of 3 or 7 There s more description in the user manual and here even in the text box that tells you what the implications are But essentially you re discounting it by 3 You re discounting the future benefits less so this benefit will be worth more than if you discount it at a seven percent rate But again there s much more EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 23 information about that in the user manual And what we rec
41. ommend that you do is to do it both ways do one with 3 and then go back with 7 do it again and then compare the results so you can get a bounded estimate That s how EPA does it You run the model and you output some results And are the outputs of COBRA It s what they look like when they come out But this is organized in a table The portfolio emissions reduction that we entered for his hypothetical case in Michigan the results would be that in the year 2017 you would avoid between 119 and 300 deaths This again is how EPA does it It assumes different functions as to the range in terms of the estimates that you get This number of deaths would be avoided over a 20 year period So it s not all in one year for the deaths But it is over a 20 year period from these reductions in the year 2017 The other impacts that are listed there like asthma attacks heart attacks hospital admissions asthma emergency room visits those are all avoided incidences in that year So in the year 2017 you will avoid you know 3 200 asthma attacks 16 to 146 heart attacks 60 asthma visits These are the outputs of COBRA On the right hand side you can see the economic value associated with those incidences And these are again documented in the user manual what the values are But we calculated the instance times the economic value and then you get your dollar value My next to last slide will give you a visual of what the outputs
42. on which is the year that I m actually going to do something to this bus will be 2012 Here is a little blurb about our modeling which is about the MOVES versus the MOBILE 6 2 emission factors The quick background on this is that the Vehicle Emissions Quantifier is based on MOBILE 6 2 up until model year 2010 And then from 2011 and forward we switched to the MOVES model which is when the MOVES model became the official EPA standard We chose to keep it in this format because it s easier for people who are doing back calculations to see the old numbers compared against the old numbers But if you want the better one MOVES is a more accurate model than MOBILE EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 10 If you want the better MOVES numbers we recommend that you select 2011 or later In this case we re selecting 2012 The type of fuel here is the regular ULSD with 15 ppm sulfur which is in use for all highway vehicles Down here we have some links for you And this is a link that will allow you to automatically populate your calculation with a default value if you don t have this data down here available Once again we recommend that you use exact numbers as much as you can If these numbers don t automatically populate here is a link to a document with all the default values laid out And you can consult that for looking up other default values These question marks
43. or this number of idle hours reduced And these numbers by the way you can EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 11 change You can you can click on this and you can change this 98 for instance to 90 if you want it to And I will only recommend that you modify these values yourself if you know for sure that your technology is going to give you certain benefits If you don t know for sure then you can just use whatever the DEQ already has here And then down here you can click in the Installation Cost and the Unit Cost This is optional But you can put these numbers in here also to help you calculate the cost effectiveness Once all of this is entered I can click Save Technology Now I have my fleet as well as my technology And you can add more technologies to your vehicle group if you would like to You can add more vehicle groups to this calculation as well But for now I have my fleet and I have my vehicle group So I m going to Quantify Emissions This is a screen that you will see This is the summary emissions results the first screen that you will see once the DEQ has finished calculating It looks like a lot of numbers It is but it s actually quite straightforward We have the calculation divided out into annual daily lifetime and cost effectiveness and remaining life The annual is what the DEQ really gives you The daily and the lifetime are
44. ps And Pll show you an example of it But it helps you really visualize the impacts by looking at it in a map as well as in a table There are limitations of course to COBRA It is a free screening tool and it is screening So it s not a highly sophisticated air quality model It is not appropriate for SIP planning Again you can use it sort of to narrow your list of what you might analyze with a more sophisticated tool But this is really just a quick and dirty screening tool For those of you who do want more sophistication COBRA can be somewhat limiting You re restricted to our own baseline emissions that are in there currently for the year 2017 Again you know the equations are canned so you may want to Can you explain really quickly what canned means Denise Mulholland I m sorry Canned means we ve hard wired it in there So you don t actually pick which equation you would use You don t have a choice It s just done for you We pick the ones that EPA s Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards says is the best one to use and that they use So that s what we do And the same thing with economic value You cannot change the economic values that are in the model You use what s there And also it does not address cap issues So if you live in an area where there are controls or caps on the emission if you reduce emissions under this capped area in one place unless your reti
45. re the allowance for that emission or for those emissions this is going to come up somewhere else COBRA does not address that And those are the things that you should be aware of as you re using the tool And there is a final limitation that really relies on inputs generated elsewhere that may be oversimplified So while there are limitations we found in the last 10 years of the tool that our peer reviewers and users found it to be a valuable model that really does help contribute to policy analysis as well as public dialogue on benefits EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 20 So how do you use COBRA Here are the steps to running an analysis And what I ll do is walk you through an example to illustrate this right after this slide But it s also detailed very well on our user manual as well as the presentations that are on our website or the COBRA Web site So the first thing that you do when you do this outside of COBRA is you figure out what emission reductions will occur and where will they occur These are your inputs And we do provide tips on our website in the user manual as to what types of tools and approaches you could use We have eGRID listed here There are some other tools P PEC Power Plant Emissions Calculator is a tool what we have listed in the survey that is one that we are looking to finalize shortly that can help you But you can use a variety of
46. re you go So you can see here that the greatest response was access to health benefits estimation tool So actually access to these types of tools is one of their biggest challenges And then understanding how to use health benefits estimating tools which hopefully this will give you at least a big jumpstart on that All right Let s go ahead then and introduce our next speaker Denise Mulholland who is the senior program manager at EPA State and Local EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 16 Climate and Energy Program She has been with EPA for nearly 20 years And over that period she has authored and managed the development of a number of guidance documents and software tools to help state and local government particularly in their effort to analyze climate and clean energy policies and to maximize the benefits of those policies to the environment health and the economy So she is going to walk you through the COBRA tool which is as Julia mentioned going to be a little more sophisticated in that it has more applications that you can use it for And then she will walk you through a specific example to show you how it works Denise Denise Mulholland Thanks Catherine And thanks everybody I really appreciate having the chance to talk to you all today and share with you some information about the COBRA model the Co Benefits Risk Assessment Screening Model
47. s state lines and the benefits can usually be found across several states I m going to briefly go over some of the inputs that you need to have for this type of calculation This looks like a lot But it s actually pretty simple once you get to it The state of your project number of vehicles type of fleet the class or equipment model year the year of the retrofit installation your current fuel type your fuel volume For on highway vehicles we ask for the annual miles per vehicle and the idling hours For non road engines we ask for the horsepower and annual usage rate EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 8 And then we ask for the technology details such as how many idling hours are being reduced as well as a new model year if you are replacing an existing vehicle or engine And then this doesn t have to be perfect It s very difficult actually to get the exact data for these many variables to do a calculation Most of the time if you don t have all these information we ask that you get you get as many as you can And then for the rest of it use an estimate or a default value We don t encourage that obviously But for the sake of estimates sometimes using a default can help you at least ballpark your emission And obviously the more accurate your inputs the more accurate your calculation will be Here I have an example for a school bus
48. tch to Denise Mulholland She is with EPA s State Climate and Energy Program She s going to go over the COBRA tool the Co Benefits Risk Assessment Screening Model Finally we ll hear from David Risley from EPA s Clean Catherine Morris EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 2 Air Markets Division He is going to give an overview of the Environmental Benefits Mapping and Analysis Program also known as BenMAP So Td like to thank all the presenters today Julie Denise and David for taking the time to be with us You ll see listed on GoTo Webinar and at the bottom of the agenda which should be up on the screen right now there s a Web link that you can follow to find all the presentations for the webinar There are also links to all of the tools and there will be a recording and a transcript of this webinar We will post those to this web site in a couple of weeks Upcoming webinars that we re going to be doing will be on topics such as key climate change measurements which we also refer to as climate indicators including greenhouse gas emissions heat waves drought precipitation and sea level rise We ll send out a save the date for that in the coming weeks And we re also planning to do a series of webinars on climate adaptation issues starting around the beginning of 2013 And as always we are looking for new topics for webinars related to energy air qua
49. this would be the first thing you would see And you can see on the left side here a split screen On the left side there is a one step analysis which allows you to basically use all of the defaults that are already in BenMAP All you re doing is specifying the air quality data that you re going to use we shall talk about it in a minute and then everything else would just flow from the default And then on the right side is the different steps you would use to perform a custom analysis Basically there are four steps here looking at your air quality data and then providing inputs to estimate the health benefits then telling BenMAP how you want to value and aggregate those benefits And then generating reports So it s just four pretty easy steps The first thing you would do step one you ll do this either as a one step analysis or as step one of the custom analysis is to specify your air quality data The goal here is to estimate the change in population exposure to the pollutant of interest And BenMAP even comes preloaded with a couple of things that you might find useful here It has monitored data that s preloaded And you could generate compare change in air quality from pollution in one year to pollution in another year and perform an assessment based on that Or if you have your own monitoring data you can import that into BenMAP Or if you have model EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the H
50. ugh and talk about the Benefits Mapping and Analysis Program which we all refer to as BenMAP And I m going to talk a little bit about what BenMAP is and how to use it And then I ll provide some links for additional information So what is BenMAP Essentially it is a tool that we can use to estimate the health impacts and associated economic value of changes in air quality And that s where this differs from some of the models or the models that we ve talked about to this point on this call When I say changes in air quality generally I m referring to changes in criteria pollutants like PM 2 5 and ozone And those changes could stem from emission reduction policies or efforts that are aimed at those pollutants or as co benefits from reductions of programs starting with greenhouse gas emissions for example Ihave to point out that BenMAP is really a flexible tool There is a version of it that you can use that is very simple All of the information that you need to run a simplified benefits assessment is existing in the tool But there is also the ability to manipulate all of the information in BenMAP So you can make it as simple as complex as you would like EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 28 One function of BenMAP is that it can estimate health impacts on any scale So at the city level census block level even our national policies And similar to C
51. veness Julie Wang Hawkins They can also refer to the frequently asked questions because we do Julia Miller go into detail there For their purposes the one takeaway for the cost effectiveness is that the total cost effectiveness is based off of these costs that you enter at the very beginning The capital cost effectiveness is based off of the installation cost and the unit cost of an individual technology I want to mention really quickly We got a comment in from Alan Powell while Julie was talking about the different ways to download files And Alan said that folks should probably download the CSV file if they re applying for grants so that they can include it in the work plan submittal so EPA can upload it into DRIVER So I thought I d mention that really quickly Julie Wang Hawkins And yes He is correct Catherine Morris OK A well a number of other questions have come in But I m going to put those on hold and launch our next polling question before we move to our next speaker So the question is What have been the biggest barriers for you in quantifying health impacts and lists a number of responses So I ll give you a second of two to read them They re a little bit more lengthy than the last poll question And if you would please just click on the most appropriate response And we ll give you a few seconds and then we ll tally up the results And we should see the results momentarily The
52. we plan to expand the list that s out there so that you can see how it s been used by others But certainly it s been used for both purposes Moving back to David can BenMAP be integrated with GIS programs such as ArcGIS I don t know if you re familiar with that But Yes It definitely can One way that EPA uses that is you can export all of the BenMAP results anything you would want to export And you can do that in a format that s pretty easily importable into ArcGIS Thanks Another question was regarding whether there are plans well let me stick with BenMAP For BenMAP have you actually gone back and compared actual health impacts based on some assessments that you did in the past to determine how close your model is to predicting the real results As far as I know EPA has not done that But I m certainly not the only one that performs these types of assessments So I probably couldn t speak for the whole agency on that OK Are there plans to integrate steps to calculate atmospheric dispersion models in BenMAP Is there a plan to integrate technology and fuel use related David Risley Catherine Morris EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 36 changes so as to calculate emissions changes like DEQ into COBRA These are two separate questions one for you David and one for you Denise We re certainly looking at updating BenMAP But
53. you need So with that that s the end of my presentation Do try the DEQ out for yourself And if you have any questions the frequently asked questions document is available as well Thanks Julie We have a number of clarifying questions that we wanted to see if we can answer before we move to our next speaker One was from someone in Kentucky who said that they are trying to estimate the savings from the use of hybrid school buses the conversion to hybrid school buses But they don t EPA Technical Forum Webinar Estimating the Health Impacts of Clean Energy Programs Page 14 have a full calendar year of data on these buses in large part because they re coming in to the fleet at different time frames So do you have suggestions about how they could adapt the tool to accommodate that problem with their data Or is there a different tool that they should be using Julie Wang Hawkins That s actually a more complicated question than one can answer on Catherine Morris the call I would advise this individual and if you have similar questions when your data is not complete or your data doesn t quite fit in with what we re asking for go to our main Web site That was the very first link that you see There is a link called Contact Us And you will be able to send us a specific e mail and somebody can walk you through your calculation with you OK Thanks That helps And another one Is there an air qual
54. you the chance to respond And then you ll see as we will hear the answers shown on your screen So you can see in this case we have quite a few people that are in the environment arena eight percent in transportation and 15 percent in energy and 18 we describe them as in the Other category So that is one of the logistics items that I do want to cover It s how this polling is going to work throughout the webinar And before I introduce you to our speakers in a little bit more detail I also wanted to explain to you what other tools you have at your disposal in order to interact with our speakers during the webinar We have over a hundred people on the webinar today So you ll have obviously noticed that your line is muted You aren t able to talk But we do want to you to be able to ask question and submit comments throughout the webinar To do that you re going to want to use the Question and Answer section of the control panel on your screen If you simply type in a question and we ve gotten a few already about some of the mechanics but if you type in a question there it will be sent to the organizers And that includes me as well as our speakers And we ll have the chance to look them over and try to answer as many of those questions as we can get to during the webinar We re going to pause after each of the speakers so that we can address some clarifying questions We ll only spend about fiv
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