Burlington, Vermont. (photo: Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine)
America's
First All-Renewable-Energy City
By Colin Woodward, Politico
20 November 16
To
understand what makes Burlington unlike almost any other city in America when
it comes to the power it consumes, it helps to look inside the train that rolls
into town every day. The 24 freight cars that pull up to the city’s power plant
aren’t packed with Appalachian coal or Canadian fuel oil but wood. Each day
1,800 tons of pine and timber slash, sustainably harvested within a 60-mile
radius and ground into wood chips, is fed into the roaring furnaces of the
McNeil Generating Station, pumping out nearly half of the city’s electricity
needs.
Much
of the rest of what Burlington’s 42,000 citizens need to keep the lights on
comes from a combination of hydroelectric power drawn from a plant it built a
half mile up the Winooski River, four wind turbines on nearby Georgia Mountain
and a massive array of solar panels at the airport. Together these sources
helped secure Burlington the distinction of being the country’s first city that
draws 100 percent of its power from renewable sources. The net energy costs are
cheap enough that the city has not had to raise electric rates for its
customers in eight years. And Burlington is not done in its quest for energy
conservation. Add in the city’s plan for an expansive bike path, a growing
network of electric vehicle charging stations and an ambitious plan to pipe the
McNeil station’s waste heat to warm downtown buildings and City Hall’s goal to
be a net zero consumer of energy within 10 years starts looking achievable.
The
environmental sustainability revolution has spread to other sectors of civic
life. Outside the gates, farmers, community gardeners and food-minded social
workers tend fields and plots spread out over 300 acres of once-neglected
floodplain just two miles from the city’s center. Together the agricultural
enterprises in the valley—working land controlled by a non-profit that partners
with the city—grow $1.3 million in food each year, much of it sold at a
massive, member-owned cooperative supermarket, its own origins traced back to
City Hall.
How
did this former logging port on the shore of Lake Champlain transform itself
over the past 40 years from a torpid manufacturing town in the far corner of a
backwater state to a global trendsetter in sustainable development and green power?
The answer carries particular resonance at a time when the United States’
commitment to environmental issues and addressing climate change is suddenly
less certain than at any time in a decade. Cities like Burlington, the largest
city in a state whose tourism and agriculture dependent economy is vulnerable
to climate change, have had to craft their own solutions to address global
warming and to insulate themselves from the vagaries of global energy markets.
In Burlington, however, these solutions were not spearheaded by civic or
corporate leaders, as is now often the case when cities tackle urban issues.
Instead, Burlington is achieving its energy independence almost entirely
through initiatives developed by its municipal government—a government that has
been decidedly left-leaning for decades. In fact, one of the people most
responsible for setting in motion the chain of policies and programs that now
distinguish Burlington was a ground-breaking social democratic mayor with
unruly hair, a thick Brooklyn accent and a message that would many years later
carry him deep into the 2016 presidential campaign.
“There’s
nothing magical about Burlington,” says Taylor Ricketts of the University of
Vermont’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics. “We don’t have a gift from
nature of ample sun or mighty winds or powerful rivers, so if we can do it, so
can others.”
***
Founded
by the raucous revolutionary bad boy Ethan Allen and his brothers in the 1770s,
Burlington grew from village to city in the mid-19th century on
the strength of the timber trade,. The forests of Quebec, the Green Mountains
and the Adirondacks were close at hand by lake and river, the markets of
Montreal and New York City were reachable by canals and the St. Lawrence river.
By 1870, the Burlington waterfront was a tangle of lumberyards, warehouses and
furniture factories. Dams and woolen mills were popping up along the fast
moving Winooski River, attracting waves of immigrants, first from Ireland and
later Quebec. Early 20th century Burlington was a working class city of 25,000
with a college on the hill, the future University of Vermont.
But by
the middle of the 20th century Burlington’s growth had
plateaued. That’s when an ad campaign that branded the state as “the Beckoning
Country” of unspoiled natural and civic beauty began to attract disaffected
city dwellers looking for an escape from the turbulence of an era defined by
the Vietnam war, political assassinations, urban unrest, Watergate and gas
shortages. Some of these newcomers were “back to the landers.” Some who were
eligible for the draft liked northern Vermont’s proximity to Canada. Not a few,
lacking the cash to buy one of Vermont’s rundown dairy farms, pooled resources
with friends and established communes. Thousands more were satisfied with
bourgeois life, but wanted to do it in a safer, healthier environment.
“They’d
advertised the state as pristine and untouched, and there was a public
perception that true democracy still lived in Vermont, with its town meetings,”
says Amanda Gustin of the Vermont Historical Society. “It didn’t necessarily
match the reality, but people had the perception that this was a place where
people could get away from the problems of wider society and get back to the
land.” Because many who came were from college-educated middle class and upper
middle class backgrounds—and had engaged in social justice organizing before
their arrival— they would have an outsized effect on the state’s political
trajectory generally and its largest city in particular.
One of
the tens of thousands who put down roots in Burlington in this era was a
struggling 29-year-old Brooklyn native named Bernie Sanders, who’d cut his
teeth in social activism fighting housing discrimination at the University of
Chicago. Sanders had first come to Vermont in 1964, spending two summers with
his first wife in a converted maple sugar shack near Montpelier. They divorced
and he spent the next three years in a hamlet in the state’s remote, idyllic
Northeast Kingdom with the mother of his only child.
In 1971, Sanders was
campaigning for one public office after another, living in a bleak Burlington
apartment, surviving by writing freelance articles for an alternative newspaper
and on electricity he borrowed with an extension cord from his neighbors. He
ran for the U.S. Senate and governor in 1972, again for Senate in 1974 and
governor in 1976. His message— the same one you heard on the 2016 campaign
trail—never got him more than 6 percent of the statewide vote, but at some
point Sanders noticed he was doing best in Burlington itself. He decided to run
for mayor in 1981 and, buoyed by an 80-percent share of voters under 36, he
defeated the five-term conservative Democratic incumbent, Gordon Paquette, by
10 votes. “It was a coalition that included students and professors, but also
working class people, neighborhood activists, and environmentalists,” recalls
Peter Clavelle, who joined Sanders’s administration and succeeded him as mayor.
“And the fundamental basis of it was that government can better serve our needs
and respond to the challenges of our community.”
In
1983, voters re-elected Sanders by 22 points in a three-way race and turned
many of his council adversaries out of office. That’s when planning for what
we’d later come to call sustainability got underway through a new government
department, the Community and Economic Development Office, which focused on
developing the city’s assets, from local small businesses to the natural
environment. “It’s not rocket science,” says Bruce Seifer, a founding staffer
who moved to Burlington from New York in 1973 and would later help run the
department. “We asked the community what they wanted and then we gave it to
them.”
***
Self-sufficiency
and environmental protection were key goals, and the Sanders administration
came into office with a head start. Under Paquette, the city-owned Burlington
Electric Department decided to replace its aging coal-fired power plant on the
lakefront with a wood-fired one in the Intervale, a neglected stretch of
Winooski River floodplain where the last dairy farmer was surrounded by
junkyards. Completed during Sanders’ first term, the McNeil biomass plant could
use local wood to generate nearly all of the city’s needs (though half the
power—then and now—is owned by the plant’s minority stakeholders and winds up
in other towns.) The Burlington Environmental Alliance opposed it with
pen-and-ink posters of a clear-cut landscape under the words “The Wood Chip
Plant is Coming.” But the plant opened with a staff of full-time foresters charged
with developing green rules and protocols for their suppliers. “To this day
there are no sustainable harvesting standards in the State of Vermont except
for ours,” says Burlington Electric’s chief forester Betsy Lesnikoski, who has
been monitoring harvests at the plant for 33 years. “We invented the wheel.”
The
city’s development office pushed forward on multiple fronts, helping establish
a non-profit corporation that promoted energy savings in the city’s public and
commercial buildings; bike paths along the previously inaccessible waterfront
to reduce automobile use; curbside recycling pick-up well ahead of its time;
and restoring buildings as business incubators.
“A lot
of communities are ‘whale hunters,’ they think the answer is to business
recruitment is to go after the big fish,” Seifer says. “Instead we created a
loan fund and helped local businesses and non-profits get started, places that
would reinvest their time and effort locally, hire from within, serve on
boards, and when times are tough not move out of state because they live here.”
Ironically, much of the money supporting many of these 1980s initiatives came
via federal grants awarded under Ronald Reagan’s administration.
One
day in 1987, an idealistic entrepreneur called on City Hall. Will Raap moved to
Burlington from the San Francisco Bay area the week Sanders had been elected
and had spent the previous six years building Gardener’s Supply, which sold
people the things they needed to grow their own food at home. While planting
vegetables at his plot in the city-owned community gardens in the Intervale,
Raap discovered how remarkable the floodplain soil wasand decided to move his
business to an abandoned pig slaughterhouse across the road from the new McNeil
power station.
“I’d
asked myself: Could we be a big catalyst for food being grown in farms in
Burlington for Burlington?” recalls Raap, whose company began testing various
crops outside their new digs. “There was no demand for local food then—you
could grow it but you couldn’t sell it—so the question was how could you create
a hub that could take this abused land and put it in production to educate and
support the next generation of farmers while simultaneously building a market
place?” That, he told Sanders’s officials, required a partnership with the
city. “We gave Bernie three choices: use waste heat from McNeil to heat 100
acres of greenhouses; start a market garden and see if it makes sense
financially; or help us make 100,000 tons of compost to restore fertility to
the valley,” he recalls. “Bernie chose the third one and gave us a $7,000
loan.” Tens of thousands of tons of yard and leaf waste started flowing to
Intervale fields instead of the landfill.
Two
decades on, the non-profit Raap set up presides over 350 acres of reclaimed
agricultural land that’s home to a dozen farms, from established growers to
novice farmers taking advantage of low-rent farm “incubator” land. There’s the
community gardens, a 600-member community-supported agriculture operation (the
kind where you buy shares and get weekly boxes of harvested food in exchange),
a nursery for growing riverfront buffer trees, and the Intervale Food Hub,
where b oxes are loaded for delivery to people at their place of work or to 150
families identified by social service agencies as being in need. Together they
produce $1.3 million in foodstuffs for the Burlington market annually and
provide 30,000 pounds of fresh food to families in need. “If we’re going to
make the world a better place, if you can get food right, then you can get the
environment and economic development and human health right,” says executive
director Travis Marcotte, who grew up on a dairy farm a few miles south of the
city. “Burlington would be very different if we hadn’t had this here, creating
opportunity and familiarity with sustainable agriculture.”
Sanders
stepped down in 1989 to run for Congress, and voters replaced him with the
development office’s head, Peter Clavelle. A native and former city manager of
the neighboring mill-town of Winooski, Clavelle’s administration would push the
sustainability drive to a new level. In his first term the city instituted
mandatory recycling, fought off big box stores at a proposed mall, and got an
$11.2-million bond passed to pay for insulation and other energy efficiency improvements
in homes, businesses and public buildings. This initiative prevented the need
to buy power from Hydro Quebec, whose dams were controversial because they
flooded tribal lands in Quebec’s far north, all with public support. “The
beautiful thing is that we do as a general rule see the common good as a
fundamental component of life here,” observes Jennifer Green, the city’s
sustainability coordinator. “We all have to give a little for everybody to get
some.”
But
Clavelle got ahead of the electorate on another front—extending benefits to the
domestic partners of city employees—and it cost him. “Today it’s hard to
imagine it was an issue, but in 1993 it was,” he recalls. Conservatives turned
out to vote in huge numbers; Clavelle’s coalition complacently stayed home. “So
I lost an election and at the time I said, ‘I’m done with politics, I’m done
with Burlington.’ I packed up my family, and we moved away for a voter-inspired
sabbatical,” he says. They ended up on Grenada, the Caribbean island nation
with a comparable surface area and population to metropolitan Burlington. “When
you’re on an island, you really see what practices are sustainable and what
practices aren’t,” he says, recalling ships unloading frozen chicken and orange
juice while island chickens had little access to the market and citrus fruit
rotted in the groves. “That was a transformational moment for me.”
He
returned to Burlington, got re-elected in 1995, and oversaw the process of
developing the Legacy Plan, a citizen-sourced vision for how Burlington could
become a sustainable community. “What is sustainable development? Is it the
most overused buzzword of the 1990s or is it the most important concept for the
survival of our planet and our communities,” he says. “I decided a long time
ago that its both, and that we need to go beyond the branding and rhetoric and
create actual examples that will resonate and make a difference in people’s
lives.” The plan, completed in 2000, created the guiding vision that has been
followed since: integrating local business development and farm-to-table
efforts, putting New Urbanist solutions ahead of sprawl and prioritizing
multi-modal transport over highways. The plan also had a major environmental
component that emphasized recycling, energy conservation and investment in
non-polluting transportation and renewable power. “This was the visionary
document,” says Green, who was hired to implement it. “It got the big city
departments all focused on taking this on.”
And without
even quite noticing itself, the city built its way toward a sustainability
milestone that would turn heads worldwide.
***
Jon
Clark has one of the more unusual offices in town. The exterior door is a
gasketed bulkhead, the windows are the sort you’d find at a city aquarium and
it’s underwater for large periods of the spring, submerged by the roaring river
falling over the dam barrier outside. Here, at computer terminals nestled above
the dam’s turbines, but two stories beneath the dam pond, Clark has monitored
and maintained the 7.5-megawatt Winooski One hydroelectric plant since it was
constructed in 1994. Visitors clamber down a long flight of metal stairs and
through the foyer to the humming generator hall to reach the room, , where
Clark is often the only person on the scene. These days he can keep atop of the
station’s vitals with a smart phone app, and there’s a guy who covers for him
two nights a week and every other weekend. “I probably spend more time here
then I do at home, so I treat it as such,” Clark says. “I try to keep it as
tidy as possible.”
Tidy
it is, and also financially effective. Built by private developers on
Burlington-owned land in neighboring Winooski, the city exercised a onetime
option to buy the facility in 2014 via a $12-million voter-approved bond. The
plant was, in a sense, free. The bond payments were about the same as the cost
of the power the Burlington Electric Department would otherwise have had to
purchase elsewhere. The cost of the power was now insulated from the fluctuations
in oil and gas markets, prompting the Moody’s credit agency to raise the
utility’s credit rating. And it made the city the first in the nation to obtain
all of its power from renewable sources, a distinction that went almost
unnoticed at the time, relegated to the third paragraph of the Burlington
Free Press’s story on the city finalizing the dam’s purchase. “This was the
product of a long term vision and a sequence of mayors,” says Ricketts at the
Gund Institute. “It kind of snuck up on us.”
Indeed,
because Burlington owns its own utility with its own citywide grid, the city
could theoretically close its three connections with the wider world and
generate all of its power combining McNeil, Winooski One, wind turbines and
solar panels. This led a visiting writer for Orion magazine to
declare this was where she would move to wait out a zombie apocalypse. This
would only be an apocalyptic measure, as half of McNeil’s power is actually
owned by the plant’s minority owners. Burlington makes up for this by buying
hydro power from further afield, but it is still able to operate a renewable
grid without asking rate payers to pay extra for it. “The conventional wisdom
is that you have to pay more for renewables, but it’s not true,” says
Burlington Electric’s general manager, Neale Lunderville. “We haven’t raised
rates in eight years.”
One of
the reasons rates are low is that the city and its co-owners eight years ago
invested $11.5 million in a state-of-the-art air scrubber that qualified the
plant to earn the highest value renewable energy credits. They’re able to sell
those to out-of-state utilities (who need to meet their standards but lack
clean generating stations of their own) and then—to meet their own renewable
standards—buy back cheaper credits to cover the power. The net profit—$6 to $9
million a year—is used to offset the rates Burlington Electric charges
customers. “It’s a terrific model for cities across the country,” says Sandra
Levine, senor attorney at the Conservation Law Foundation’s Montpelier office.
“With the challenges of climate change, we should be looking to our electricity
sector to move away from fossil fuels and this is a good way to do it.”
Current
mayor Miro Weinberger, a Democrat elected in 2012, was inspired by the
international attention Burlington has received since achieving the renewable
energy milestone. “It’s really pushed us to think hard and big about where we
go from here,” he says. “That’s when we started looking at what net zero would
look like.”
A city
is considered net zero when it generates as much energy as it consumes, not
just in the form of electricity, but heat and transportation as well. Achieving
such a state, Weinberger argues, would further insulate Burlington from the
volatility of fossil fuel markets, saving money and luring more entrepreneurs
and businesses with brands linked to sustainability, such as Ben & Jerry’s
ice cream, green cleaning products maker Seventh Generation and climate
change-conscious Burton Snowboards. “We’ve got our own goals around eliminating
our carbon footprint completely, and being based in a city where that’s easily
possible is very important to us,” says Joey Bergstein, general manager at
Seventh Generation, which started in the early 1980s as an off-shoot of
Gardener’s Supply. “Our history here is very much driven by the fact that the
city and the state of Vermont are so aligned with our values.”
Proposals
to use the waste steam from the McNeil plant to heat buildings and businesses
have been kicking around for a quarter century, but ran against an economic
obstacle. Building the distribution system is a big upfront cost, but
attracting users from existing homes and buildings is a slow undertaking. What
was needed was the equivalent of an anchor store at a mall, a big new user ready
to buy lots of heat from day one, preferably downtown so that additional users
could be easily patched in as their existing boilers reached replacement age.
Now it looks like that’s happening. On November 9, city voters approved a
14-story, multi-use development that will replace a dying indoor mall, that now
cuts off several central streets, with a sidewalk-friendly restaurants and
retail and market and affordable apartments.
At the
city-owned airport, they’ve reduced demand for heat and electricity by replacing
lighting and air conditioning systems and properly insulating the terminal’s
roof. There’s a 500-kilowatt solar array that’s been providing enough power to
supply 60 homes and a rain garden on the roof of the parking
garage. (A 10-megawatt wind farm from which the city draws power can be seen on
a nearby ridge.) “We’re a small airport and we don’t have a lot of money, but
what we try to do is to introduce a greener way whenever we change a bulb,
replace a window, or repair our roof in a way that gives us a greater energy
savings and return on our investment over time,” says city aviation director
Gene Richards, who cut electricity usage at the airport by a fifth in three
years. Popular local restaurants have taken over the concessions in the terminal
as part of the buy local effort. “We’re tearing down the walls in this
community to leverage our assets and make it work.”
Achieving
net zero in transportation is thornier than heating and power because there are
few big users to focus on and only a handful of users have invested in
all-electric vehicles.
“There’s the range anxiety with electric vehicles—can I
go far enough?—so having enough well-placed charging stations is really
helpful,” says Lunderville of Burlington Electric, which has deployed 10 multiple-outlet
charging stations at strategic locations around the city—parking garages, city
hall, the co-op grocery store and the University of Vermont campus—and plans to
add five to six annually. They’re looking at a pilot project for city buses,
while Mayor Weinberger’s office just released a detailed plan for greatly
expanding the bike path network with protected lanes. “The stats show the
existence of protected lanes increases usage by 300 to 500 percent because
there are a whole lot of people who don’t feel safe co-mingled with vehicles,”
says Weinberger, who was inspired by a biking weekend in Montreal, which has
such a system. “Seeing what they’ve done convinced me of the value of a more
systematic approach.”
Burlington
Electric is preparing for a challenge of its own: Its grid is expected to shift
from a “hub-and-spoke” system of power plants and consumers to a distributed
network with thousands of tiny producers and storage sites. “The changes are
being driven by the customers, who didn’t use to have the option to do their
own solar panels or start storing their energy with a Tesla battery pack”—a
home battery system that allows users to bank electricity, says Lunderville. He
envisions creating a system by which the utility could pay customers to store
energy for the network at times when they don’t need it banked themselves. To
do that requires the grid to collect and process a lot more data to coordinate
the cacophony of demands, supplies and storage opportunities. “Suddenly we need
to know a lot more about how power is being generated and used than you do
today.”
The
industry expects these changes everywhere, but Burlington is likely to see them
early—because of its green ethos and because Vermont offers a variety of
incentives for customers to invest in solar. But it’s also the perfect
sandbox—a small city that owns its own grid, power generation and public
fiber-optic data network— and the utility is ready to pioneer the development
of the technology and policies to make it all work. “Having the fiber optics in
place is really critical to moving toward this bi-directional energy grid,”
says energy consultant Gabrielle Stebbins, who previously headed the state’s
renewable energy industry association. “We’re a small state and city, so we’re
not driving the bus. But the little motor car we’re driving can tell which
roads are possible and feasible.”
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment