By Natalie Mims
As the “going green” trend grows,
local, state, and big-city governments
are joining the movement that smart
developers and forward-thinking corporations
have been leading. Regional
and city climate-change initiatives are
mounting, and efforts to cut energy
use and greenhouse-gas emissions have
become as varied and individualistic as
the communities themselves. Recently,
RMI worked with one Massachusetts
city on its energy and greenhouse-gas
reductions efforts.
In March 2006, the City of Cambridge,
Mass. announced an ambitious
goal: to reduce electricity demand by
50 megawatts and to reduce fossil-fuel
consumption by 5 percent in five years.
Following the announcement, the City,
the Barr Foundation, the Kendall Foundation,
and Rocky Mountain Institute
began preparing a Design Workshop
in which the four organizations could
brainstorm ways to meet those goals.
One of the first steps the City took was
to establish the Cambridge Energy Alliance
(CEA), a new non-profit organization
to create and implement a cuttingedge
program to significantly reduce
energy use in Cambridge. The CEA
then announced that it would use a new
financing model to fund the massive
energy-efficiency retrofits necessary to
achieve the 50-megawatt peak energy
reduction goal.
This innovative financing model relies
heavily on the New England Independent
System Operator (ISO-NE).
The ISO-NE’s job is to ensure that
adequate electricity supply exists to
meet customers’ needs. It does so by
monitoring the purchase and sale of
electricity on the wholesale electricity
market. In June 2007, the ISO-NE
announced that it would begin offering
payment for measures that reduce
demand. Th is will, for the first time in
ISO-NE history, allow energy efficiency
measures to compete with supply-side
resources for capacity payments. The
ISO-NE decided to allow demand-side
resources to participate in the capacity
market because they cost less than
traditional supply-side resources. By
allowing efficiency into the capacity
market, electricity costs to consumers in
the ISO-NE region could decline as the
cost of the procurement per megawatt
decreases (or the value of a negawatt
increases). The CEA is poised to earn
some of this revenue from the ISO-NE’s
capacity market through its planned
energy-efficiency programs. The CEA
plans to fund the energy-efficiency
programs 80 percent through private
funding and 20 percent through existing
energy-efficiency programs.
The City chose to reduce energy
demand by 50 megawatts to bring
its peak electricity demand down to
approximately 300 megawatts. This presented
an interesting challenge because
in order to reduce the last 50 megawatts
of peak demand, the City needs to focus
on energy consumption in the summertime,
when system demand is highest
(see Figure 1).
In addition to the peak energy and
fossil-fuel reduction goals, the Barr
Foundation also thought it would be interesting
to explore what kind of energy
challenges could be solved by means of
a community competition. The Boston
Innovation Challenge, developed by
the Foundation, is a new initiative that
offers a prize to stimulate the development
of new ideas and efforts (rather
than reward existing efforts).
After much planning and coordination,
a Design Workshop was held in
Boston last November. Participants
from the Cambridge Energy Alliance,
the Kendall Foundation, the Barr Foundation,
and RMI, as well as various
experts from local institutions met
to
develop strategies. The Workshop
produced many creative and practical
ideas as to how the City can meet its
energy reduction goals, as well as ideas
for other Boston Innovation Challenge
topics.
Following the Workshop, RMI compiled
the all of the ideas generated, and
offered a portfolio of solutions that
could be used by the City. RMI recommended
that the Cambridge Energy
Alliance simultaneously pursue all available “low-hanging
fruit” while working with
energy service companies
(ESCOs) to implement as
many advanced energyefficiency strategies as
possible.
ESCOs develop, install,
and arrange financing
for projects designed to
improve energy efficiency
and maintenance costs for
facilities over a seven- to
twenty-year time period.
Some of the specific
recommendations
included:
- Residential electricity
metering and education
efforts,
-
Energy Star appliance replacement,
-
High efficiency central and window
air-conditioning units,
-
Comprehensive light upgrades,
-
High-performance glazing,
-
Solar hot water heaters, and
-
Boiler or furnace replacement.
While these recommendations are not
particularly cutting edge, the challenge
for the City of Cambridge will be to
implement them widely. For example, if
all the residential sector recommendations
are implemented at a 7 percent
penetration rate, or 35 percent over five
years, the City will achieve a 42-megawatt
peak energy reduction. Th is level
of penetration is ambitious, but not unachievable,
and it will require the City
to get more than a third of its residents
to adopt significant efficiency retrofits.
Most of RMI’s analysis focused on
aggressive, comprehensive energy
efficiency in the building arena, notably
the residential and commercial sectors,
but the Design Workshop also generated
many ideas for the transportation
sector, from closing streets to displaying
vehicles’ tire pressure. The report is
available on the Cambridge Energy
Alliances’ website for review and
comment at (http://ceic.cambridgeenergyalliance.
org/).
Many other interesting ideas for the
Boston Innovation Challenge were
discussed, including:
- Creating super-efficient rooftop airconditioning
systems for smaller commercial
applications in
humid climates; and
-
Retrofitting all buildings
in the city with
real-time energy consumption
information to
allow consumers to make
their energy use decisions
based on real-time
information.
Technology breakthroughs
and products
were mentioned many times during the
Innovation Challenge, and while some
of these ideas offered great opportunities,
the lead-time necessary for implementation
may be beyond the City’s
five-year goal. RMI recommended that
the first Boston Innovation Challenge
be based on behavioral,
financial, or
social changes to
encourage a high
penetration of
energy efficiency.
Moving forward,
future Boston
Innovation Challenges
could build
on ideas generated
at the workshop or
they could develop
new technology
challenges.
The Cambridge
Energy Alliance
has already begun
chipping away at
energy consumption and plans to move
forward aggressively to achieve its goals.
The CEA is hoping the example they
set will ultimately become a model
that other cities can use to reduce their
energy consumption without taxpayers
bearing a financial burden.
Natalie Mims is a Consultant with RMI’s
Energy & Resources Team (www.rmi.org/
sitepages/pid48.php).
