We’ve come to the point where community
gardening is well understood – could community energy be far behind? Just
as many people don’t know how their food reaches their plate, many
aren’t plugged into where their power and heating originates.
“We
have been completely disconnected as consumers from our sources,”
says John Sorenson, the executive director of Portland-based Natural
Neighborhood Energy (N2E).
Chatting
over coffee last week about the all-volunteer N2E – a non-profit
focusing on developing “community energy” projects – Sorenson
described a recent conversation he had with an official in a small
Oregon city. Asked where natural gas comes from, the offical told
Sorensen “the pipe.”
“We
have a notion that someone else pays for electricity,” Sorenson
said. Changing that notion will require education. Sorenson
hopes that once more people better understand that importing
power takes money and accountability for environmental
impacts out of the community, they’ll take more ownership of it.
N2E
made headlines last year for proposing a thermal energy utility
based at Portland’s
Sunnyside Environmental School that would use excess heat from
the school’s boilers to serve its surrounding neighborhood. It has
also discussed a thermal energy system
for Portland’s toney Pearl District powered by waste mash from
the city’s breweries. Of course, Sunnyside and Pearl aren’t exactly economically
distressed communities, but the projects are examples of new interest
in “community energy.”
Community
energy could help the development of so-called “energy democracy,”
according to the Center
for Social Inclusion, which in June released a white
paper on community scale energy projects. The goal, the paper
says, is “transforming
neglected and isolated communities – often poor, and often
communities of color – into energy producers who contribute to the
nation’s overall capacity, add clean energy to the grid, enhance
their economic and political ties across the region, and supply their
own energy needs.”
Hundreds
of volunteer groups across the country are working on such projects
in communities large and small and defined in myriad ways, not just
by geographic, economic and demographic factors.
After
my post last week
highlighting the job worries preventing many communities from taking
more dramatic environmental stances, it’s encouraging to see efforts
to identify what common resources communities share that they can
deploy both for improved economic activity and environmental benefit.
Sorenson, who assisted the study, said there isn’t a single way to
make this happen. Instead, community energy is all about identifying
a given community’s specific energy demands and the resources within
that community that might be able to serve those demands.
The
challenge for N2E and other organizations is to figure out what
resources and opprotunities communities have in common. In a state
like Oregon where it’s legal to trade thermal power across property
lines, waste heat from a coffee roaster might be a resource. In
Mammoth, Calif., abundant geothermal
resources have value. Santa Fe is one of many communities
experimenting with getting energy from biomass.
“We’re not
saying we have a silver bullet,” Sorenson said. In
fact, in many communities, the “shared resource” might not be a
tangible fuel source. Another
nonprofit, Seattle-based Northwest
Sustainable Energy for Economic Development, promotes
weatherization and energy conservation as well as facilitating
financing for community solar and wind farms in its
own community energy project.
“When we’re
talking about community energy it’s definitely key to keep in mind
that we’re not just talking about renewable energy production,”
says Jessica Raker, a NW SEED project manager. “We’re also talking
about energy efficiency. That is the key area to hit as far as some
of the biggest impact.”
Northwest SEED
focuses on education and technical assistance for projects that keep
clean energy within communities across the region. One of the group’s
first projects brought 10 rural landowners together into a wind
cooperative that pooled its money to build a wind turbine which, in
turn, offset some of their electricity costs. The group – which has
helped communities get better financing and grants for projects and
worked with Native American tribes in Oregon and Washington to do
conservation training – tries not to strictly define “community”
and not to focus too much on energy production over conservation.
Instead,
self-defined communities approach Northwest SEED for assistance. In
turn, the group educates them on the best way to maximize the community’s economic interests while increasing
awareness about climate impacts from energy choices. Meanwhile, by
bringing different stakeholders together, developing community energy
has the potential to promote community involvement in general.
“When you look
at what’s going on in energy right now there are a lot of different
scales” Raker said. “Commercial projects are great because they
are certainly increasing the ammount of community energy within our
mix, but a lot of times most of the economic benefits are going to
companies that are not located in the community. We see our niche as
working with communities to participate in this sort of clean energy
future to keep those benefits within the community.”
Bill Lascher is a Portland, Oregon-based freelancer. He focuses
on the environment’s intersection with science, business, culture and
policy.
He got the name for his Web site, Lascher at
Large, from the legal column his father penned for 20 years
before his death. Lascher is currently working on a project with his
grandmother to tell the story of her cousin, Melville Jacoby, a foreign
correspondent who died in the early days of World War II.
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