Energy Affairs

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

By Henry Sweets

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Jackson Hole requires an increasing amount of power to light and heat the large homes and hotels that have proliferated as long as the valley has been a resort community. 

But there’s a big local energy issue looming that a power company spokesman called an “800-pound gorilla in the room.”

In 2011, Lower Valley Energy, the community’s power providing co-op, will have the electricity it currently buys cheaply from the Bonneville Power Administration capped. LVE will then have to buy power on the energy market at triple the cost.
Local municipal and energy leaders have already asked the federal government for $10 million in federal funding to help it enter the homes and daily lives of all Teton County’s residents – and help them use less energy.

More than 330 Wyoming homeowners have already taken $2.25 million in federal stimulus for residential renewable energy projects, the Casper Star-Tribune reported on Monday.

If all goes as planned, every home and business in Teton County will be getting at least one, and in some cases all, of the following: better insulation, new thermostats, photovoltaic solar panels, high-efficiency appliances and – with any luck on the government’s part – a new mindset. 
 
Challenge and Response
Last year James Wolfensohn, a part-time Teton County resident and former president of the World Bank, publicly challenged local leaders to become carbon-neutral by the year 2020, and offered the intellectual and financial help of the Wolfensohn Family Foundation to assist them in doing so.

The Town and County were already doing things to reduce their own energy consumption for altruistic and practical purposes, and Lower Valley Energy had begun offering rebates and free energy audits to homes and businesses for another reason: the more energy Teton County uses, the more that energy is going to cost, regardless of any environmentally conscious edict.

So the Town, the County and the power company signed a historic agreement stating that the three entities would work together to answer that challenge.
The Energy Sustainability Project was born.
 
Green = Green
Teton County residents currently buy cheap, clean electricity that comes from hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest. The power is sold by a federally sponsored entity called the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), which ensures that Jackson gets some of the cheapest power in the country - about $3 per kilowatt hour.

But the amount of cheap electricity Teton County can buy from BPA will be capped at the end of this year, and every kilowatt hour it consumes beyond its 2011 mark will have to be bought off the market – at a price around three times what is currently purchased by LVE, spokesman Brian Tanabe said. Electrical rates will go up, and continue to go up, as long as Teton County’s consumption increases. Though the rate increases will come slowly Tanabe said they will be significant.
“Lower Valley Energy projected an addition of 30 megawatts to Jackson’s current demand load in the next 20 years,” Mayor Mark Barron said. “They estimated that would cost an additional $135 million over the next 20 years.”

That adds a fiduciary and social imperative to the altruistic motives of the government, provoking them to extend the scope of their efforts beyond just their own facilities, and throughout all of Teton County.

“We will be very effective with taxpayer money in Town and County facilities, yet we wont reach the community-wide benefit that we feel is our potential (without including private and commercial buildings), and that’s where the ESP comes in,” Barron said. “It creates the opportunity for all businesses to reduce energy bills and reduce energy demand, and if we’re successful then we won’t need that full 30 megawatts of energy per year, maybe we’ll only need two megawatts. What a huge community saving that will be, and what an effective game plan for reducing our carbon footprint.”

By establishing energy efficiency as a public good, the town and county government now have a legal and political leg to stand on when they try to fund improvements to all private buildings. It will also help sell the idea to those who would consider the ESP another form of government intrusion.

But the stickiest wicket right now isn’t how to get people to accept money, it’s whether the money can be legally given.
 
Roadblock?
In the state of Wyoming, taxpayer money can’t go to a private individual, unless they are living below the poverty line. And even though the proposed $10 million is coming from the federal government, the program must be perpetuated once the money runs out - if the municipal government can administer the money in the first place.

At a December community meeting at St John’s Episcopal Church, various entities involved in the ESP and some members of the public gathered to discuss the game plan. Keith Gingery, an assistant county attorney and state representative, was among those in attendance. He said many conflicting ideas were being tossed around. For instance, some people suggested one-time grants to homeowners, while others wanted to see loans built into the program. But one issue emerged as the most immediate hurtle for the ESP to overcome: it might be illegal to do either in the state of Wyoming.

“We thought it was ‘Oh, they’re taking federal funds and going into people’s houses to fix them up’... but they said, ‘Oh, it’s a little more complicated than that, the feds are giving it to us on an understanding that it gets us going, but we will keep it going with state and local money,” Gingery said in a recent interview. “But in the state constitution, there’s a prohibition against using state or local money for private individuals.”

Gingery said there are solutions, which he outlined in a memorandum for the ESP.
“Maybe you go to the state legislature and get them to pass a statute that says energy conservation is a public benefit,” he said.

But he’s not sure if that will be enough. The airtight method for legally enabling the ESP would amend the state constitution, which would require a statewide vote. That means the rest of Wyoming would have to get behind an initiative that began in Jackson – a town whose problems many Wyomingites might be as concerned with as, say, Manhattan’s. It would require a lot of buy-in with other state legislators.

Gingery, a Republican who is typically eager to introduce new legislation, suggested they contact Jim Roscoe, a Wilson Democrat, to see if he’d be willing to introduce it.

Barron affirmed that the ESP would seek both routes, but was unsure of the timeline and exact tactics.

“We’re going to take a two-prong approach, one to seek a judicial declaratory judgment that would say that conserving energy is a public benefit,” Barron said. “The second would be a legislative amendment that would say the same thing, that would make an amendment to that clause and say energy conservation would be a public benefit.”

Barron pointed out that six Wyoming State Legislators have already participated in an ESP-related conference, and added that it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
“If we get that $10 million and we can’t invest it in private homes, it’s going to be a challenge,” he said. “But it will be a happy problem.”
 
Game Plan
Conceived in Berkeley about three years ago, municipal grant programs for improvements like solar panels spread through California like wildfire, and similar programs have taken root in cities like Boulder, Colo. and in several other states across the country. In those programs, the low-interest loans are sponsored by the local government and then repaid alongside property tax payments. The money saved on homeowner’s energy bills are intended to offset most of the cost of the improvements – something that seems realistic in an energy-intensive climate like Jackson’s. In Palm Springs, homeowners purchase $50,000 solar panel arrays to cool their home, and save multiple thousands of dollars a year on their electricity bill.

In order to get these programs going, California and Colorado passed legislation allowing these grants, and most recently New York State passed a bill that allows for new doors, windows, and insulation as well as a variety of renewable energy projects to be funded by municipal funds.

Many of the projects in other communities have had massive buy-in from the public, but not nearly on the percentage scale that Jackson seeks.

“The goal is to integrate energy efficiency into every single building in the community, dividing the community up into these kind of logical districts, and from those districts we are counting up the number of units and working on how we are going to go about getting people to participate,” Town and County Energy Affairs Coordinator Wendy Koelfgen said in a December interview.

Changes would mean new thermostats that can communicate with Lower Valley Energy, and other “smart grid” technologies that shave off peak-load demand. Already, a project in the county is regulating 50 hot water heaters, turning the temperature down during the middle of the day and middle of the night, and only heating water during morning and evening hours when most people take showers. But to achieve the bold goals that ESP members espouse, the program would affect every appliance in your home.
 
Writing on the Wall
Of all the local sustainability initiatives the government’s “Ten by Ten,” intended to reduce energy consumption by 10 percent by the end of the year 2010, was perhaps the most successful. By the end of the year, the local governments will likely have achieved this goal just changing their behavior alone – flipping off light switches, timing thermostats and running more efficient routes, Koelfgen said.

But as the changes happened, there were growing pains (or shrinking pains) in the government. Last February, a municipal worker called the JH Weekly office saying the higher-ups were making unrealistic demands on him, and it angered him to the point of calling a newspaper to complain. Imagine what would happen if the government asked him to flip off all his light switches at home, too.

Energy efficiency is not just installing insulation, but it is asking people to change their behavior.

Jonathan Schechter, who has been a voice for sustainability in Jackson Hole for the last two decades, wonders where all that convincing is going to come from.
“If it is a top-down kind of thing, I think they will risk not having it reach its potential because it’s just going to be viewed as just another government thing,” Schechter said. “It’s asking people to actively change their lives, and I don’t see how you can get people to actively change their lives if they’re just sitting back and watching, and not getting involved.”

Schecter is still waiting to see what will be done with a community-wide energy audit that the organization he founded, One Percent for the Tetons, helped to fund last year.

Others are waiting with bated breath to see how the ESP is going to act on their goals.

“I think they need a big dose of reality, as far as practically how they are going to go about it,” said Jesse Stover, a Teton County building inspector and outspoken proponent of energy efficiency in buildings. “If you’re going to use somebody else’s money to retrofit someone else’s house, you need a lot of community buy-in, so I think the community end of this whole deal is huge. It needs to get out there with a positive spin and it needs a lot of people behind it or it won’t get off the ground.”
Stover has been intimately involved in a program called the Energy Mitigation Plan (EMP) that is not a part of the ESP, but is already motivating builders to make their over-sized homes more efficient.

To avoid or offset fees, builders can follow Leadership in Energy Efficiency and Design (LEED) or other energy efficiency standards, or install photovoltaic systems, solar water heating systems, super-insulation or other energy saving devices.
In the county, the EMP goes into effect on Jan. 21, but has already collected two $5,000 fees for fireplaces, and motivated one second-homeowner to install enough photovoltaic solar power to enable his house to “idle” without taking much, if any, power from the grid - no small feat for a 4,000-foot home that needs to stay warm enough that pipes don’t burst.

The people affected by the EMP are building multi-million dollar houses, but even they balk at having someone fine them, or tell them what to do with their homes.
“It’s not the money thing; it’s the principle of it,” Stover said.

The EMP must not be confused with the ESP – they are completely separate projects – but its successes, and its struggles, are indicative of those which the ESP will run into.
 
Moving Forward
Right now the ESP has a request for proposals out for a six-month, $35,000 contract that seeks a firm to become the communications arm of the project.
“It’s important that you create a big public buy-in as quickly as possible so that you can get that buzz going on in the community that everyone feels like they’re a part of this,” Barron said.

And the ESP’s policy goals that will be promoted are as-of-yet unclear.
“We are still debating some of the implementation strategies so that you get the biggest bang for your buck - utilizing funds as efficiently as possible, and as effectively as possible,” Barron said.

He also added a bit of realism that might appease some of the doubters who think the government is biting off more than they can chew.

“Our goal is to get a penetration rate in excess of 65 percent, and to create jobs in the process of getting buildings and homes up to speed with efficiency and the improvements they need,” he said. “My personal goal would be higher than that, but we have to be realistic.”

The improvements would begin with an intensive energy audit for each home or business participating. The when and how for that plan is, for now, a big unknown. JHW
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