In search of “local energy projects”

In doing a Google search for “local energy projects,” I unearthed a wealth of information that is relevant to my blog topic. In this link-style post, I share with you three links to organizations that are supporting local energy solutions on a county or state-wide level.

Cook County is in northern Minnesota, the state in which I grew up. The county seat, Grand Marais, is located on the chilly north shore of Lake Superior, near the U.S. boundary with the Canadian province of Ontario. Washington state is where I have lived for 27 years. And New Hampshire? I have no connection with this state other than the fact that I went to college not too far away in Boston, love New England, and admire New Hampshire -- a small state with big political influence.

Washington Local Energy Alliance
http://localenergywa.org/about/
“Washington Local Energy Alliance is a coalition of real people and organizations seeking solutions to energy challenges at the community level. Some of our members are private citizens, nonprofits, developers, contractors, consultants, financiers, and manufacturers. All of us have a stake in a future where every county in Washington State participates in the financial benefits of our energy grid’s ongoing diversification from big central plants and passive consumers to a wider mix of clean production & efficient consumption.”

NH Community Energy Project
http://nhenergy.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
“NHEnergy.org was created to provide a gateway to information and resources that promote local energy solutions. It is intended to empower NH's folks on energy committees, in municipalities and schools, and in their businesses and homes to tackle the complexities of reducing our reliance on fossil fuel energy.”

Cook County Local Energy Project
http://www.cookcountylep.org/new/Home.html
“The Cook County Local Energy Project or as we say CCLEP (pronounced “see-klep”) is a non-profit local citizen group focused on energy issues in Cook County, Minnesota.”

Community Energy Discussed at Net Impact Conference, Portland, OR

I went to the Net Impact conference in Portland, OR a couple of weeks ago. Net Impact is a “new generation of leaders who use our careers to tackle the world’s toughest problems. We put our business skills to work for good throughout every sector. By doing so, we show the world that it’s possible to make a net impact that benefits not just the bottom line, but people and planet too.”

I volunteered for two four-hour shifts, which meant that I missed several breakout session time slots. I was, however, able to catch the last half of a session titled: Clean Technology Through Smart Policy.

Many of the ideas presented by two panelists and the moderator were very much in sync with the premise of this blog. (Panelists: Tom Osdoba, director, Center for Sustainable Business Practices, Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon, and Michael Jung, policy director, Silver Spring Networks. Moderator: Bryce Yonker, director of business development, Clean Edge.)

Here are a few examples:

Policy

• China and Europe all have energy policies. We don’t. There is no leadership from the top. Leadership is happening at the state and local levels.
• We need new policies and new service models for energy delivery.
• We have to change the conversation – we need to have green energy purchases be automatic for all consumers unless they decide to opt out. Right now people are only given the choice to opt in, and many don’t understand the short and long-term benefits of doing that.
• How do we create an environment where new, innovative, clean technology models can be successful? Most of us want to do the right thing – the challenge is to educate and engage consumers. We need to work through organizations that already exist and that consumers already trust to influence this change.
• Utilities are fighting change, but of all the utilities across the country, there are only about 100 big ones. We CAN influence 100 big companies!

Neighborhood Energy

• We need to redefine how we ask utilities to deliver – they need to do the same things, but on a smaller scale, for example, by creating neighborhood district utilities.
• We need to create whole energy systems, allowing savings from creating renewable energy and conservation through retrofits.
• Distributed generation — the generation of energy from many small energy sources — is scary to the utilities: Two-way power flow is scary. Yet point of consumption storage is much more affordable than storing electricity far from the customer. Why shouldn’t a consumer who is generating electricity at his house or commercial building purchase energy at an average price and sell it at peak prices?
• By the year 2020, 45 percent of renewable energy in this country will come from distributed sources.
• We need to create neighborhood-scale, clean-energy services. Give them an unfair advantage in the market. Help them aggregate and build to scale.
• Washington state is considering legislation that would create Climate Benefit Districts that would do just that — aggregate at the local level and build to scale, creating a different platform and putting the cities back in charge.

The conversation was really interesting and gave me hope that innovative solutions at the local level can eventually lead us to develop a nationwide patchwork of tens of thousands of local grids run primarily by clean, renewable energy sources.

Nearly 1,800 Seattle homeowners benefit from low-cost home energy audit program

A friend and colleague, Peggy, was at a business networking event a couple of months ago where a gentleman introduced his home energy auditing business. He was promoting a $400-plus value audit for $95 to homeowners. Like me, Peggy owns an old Craftsman home in Seattle, and so she found the offer too attractive to pass up. Here’s what she told me:

Bob was in my house for about four hours, and went all over the place — the attic, the crawlspaces — taking pictures with his heat-sensitive camera. He took pictures of places where there were only boards! Some places I thought were well-insulated weren’t. He even found a gap in the roof and evidence of rats.

He told me where to add weather stripping and that insulating the garage ceiling and crawlspace would really warm up the living room. I have knob-and-tube wiring so blowing in insulation would be really expensive, but he offered other ways to add insulation. He answered a lot of questions that I had, and replaced all my light bulbs that weren’t on dimmer switches with CFLs.

Bob recommended taking certain actions and then calculated what the payback period for those projects would be. At the top of my list are a new furnace, a new water heater, and insulation. I plan to do the insulation pretty soon. I think the audit is a great value. It’s affordable, you get important information that you can use as a homeowner, plus it’s an environmentally responsible thing to do.

In 2009 the City of Seattle’s electrical utility — Seattle City Light — created and launched a program to subsidize home energy audits for its customers. The Home Energy Audit Program contracts with the Portland, OR nonprofit Earth Advantage Institute to provide the measurement tool for the audits — the Energy Performance Score (EPS) — and to train auditors.

The EPS provides a standardized estimate of a home’s energy use and associated carbon emissions, and the auditor provides the homeowner with a report detailing steps to reduce energy bills. Homeowners can also use the tool to compare the energy use of their house now with what it might be like after energy upgrades. The auditor informs audit customers about home retrofit incentive, loan and grant programs, and how to find local contractors if they want to move forward with some of the projects.

The Seattle program is funded by federal funds and the City of Seattle’s energy conservation budget. According to the Earth Advantage Institute, auditors have conducted 1,780 EPS home energy audits in Seattle and another 1,055 in other communities across the state of Washington. Meanwhile, the National Association of State Energy Officials is contracting with the institute to provide EPS-based audits in four states in four different climate zones — parts of Washington plus Massachusetts, Alabama and Virginia. Growing numbers of communities are expressing interest in developing programs using the EPS auditing tool.

To sign up for a home energy audit in Seattle, visit the Seattle EPS website. (Something I plan to do very soon!) To determine whether there is an EPS program in your city or county, visit the Earth Advantage EPS website.

What's this blog about?

As a student at Bainbridge Graduate Institute in Seattle, I have been increasingly frustrated as I learn more about our federal government’s inability to show leadership in the development of energy and climate change policies. We are well behind Europe and China in this area, and this may be the first time that out nation is not the international leader of a new industry and its innovation and development.

Federal policies, programs and incentives to create a green/clean tech economy — ones that would lower greenhouse gas emissions, build energy independence and employ hundreds of thousands of people — are largely missing. Certainly, federal stimulus money and incentive programs have, in some cases, helped local governments and communities to build local programs, but much of the creativity, initiative and leadership is being generated locally.

In this course-required blog, I will explore a variety of locally generated programs across the nation that conserve energy or create and use clean, renewable energy. Who generated, funded and implemented these programs? What partners are collaborating to make it successful? Who benefits? Why is it successful? And, finally, is it financially and politically sustainable and replicable in other communities?

This introductory posting launches my first-ever blog. I look forward to sharing what I learn.