by Eric Richard

The following are notes from a presentation by Rob Pratt, a Senior Vice President of the Henry P. Kendall Foundation. The Kendall Foundation created the Cambridge Energy Alliance to try to demonstrate large scale energy reductions focused in Cambridge, MA.

What is the Cambridge Energy Alliance?

We can either be depressed by climate change or excited about what we can do.

In 1999, the trustees of the Kendall Foundation decided to make environmental issues and global warming their “big thing”.

When looking at making a difference, it is all about emissions. You have to figure out what the biggest contributors are to the problem and then figure out how you can reduce the most important problems.

If you look at the major contributors to global warming in New England, they are slightly different than the national average.

In New England, transportation is our biggest emitter. This is a very difficult problem to solve, but this is our largest problem. Electric power is our second biggest contributor in New England (first nationally). It is crucial that we have to make sure that coal becomes history.

Residential electricity consumption in New England is almost 3x the national average. In part this is explained because we are a cold region. But, there is also a lot of affluence and larger houses here. It isn’t all due to the climate.

With electricity being such a substantial piece of the problem, you can either focus on supply side (e.g., increasing green energy) or demand-side (reducing consumption of dirty energy). Energy efficiency is a very financially attractive way of addressing this issue. Every time you replace a window or a boiler, you get savings year after year.

We have to step up energy efficiency to a whole new level. Where can we start making a difference? What are the kind of things we can do?

We have established the Cambridge Energy Alliance which is a 5-year program to go after all sectors in Cambridge to reduce 50 MW of electrical consumption (14% of Cambridge’s electricity).

Our goal is to get a 50% participation rate among residents. This is a very high bar — most energy efficiency initiatives are lucky to get 3-4% participation. This level of participation has never been done before. People don’t even think that this level is imaginable. We believe that by using the City as the advocate combined with very large scale cavassing (like political canvassing) and visible publicity and peer pressure, we believe we can get there.

We want to show the world what can be done.

Our program is based on the ESCO model. We work with organizations to provide them money to make the necessary changes and then they pay back through their savings.

By fronting the money for energy efficiency, we believe that we will be able to demonstrate that energy efficiency programs can be very profitable and will drive large scale adoption.

What can people do in their local communities?

Continue to idenitfy and support clean energy opportunities. Solar hot water heating, as an example, is very effective.

Promote energy efficiencies. Use perfomance contracting for municipal buildings. Have your municipality contract with an ESCO. We have some of the best ESCOs in the country here in MA.

Mobilize the school and university students.

Reduce waste and increase recycling. If you can really build up your recylcing percentages, that is really big.

What can people do individually?

Transportation is a big one. A lot of this is life style. We need to be moving our population centers into more dense areas (smart growth). The most efficient building a long way out of the city is not as good as a moderately efficient building in the city.

Home energy efficiencies are very good.

Local food can help a lot.