Articles / American Cities Get Smart about Energy

These are tough times for cities as they struggle to find the funds to maintain basic services. Interestingly, economic necessity was a driver for Columbus, Ohio, a 2010 Smarter City for energy, as it put together a plan to increase energy efficiency and reduce city government expenditures over the next 10 years. Quality of life mattered too. Columbus is not alone; cities across America are looking at their municipal energy production and use and asking can we do this better, more responsibly, considering the impacts to budget, health and environment, and fairness and livability concerns.

Energy is just one of a dozen "sustainability factors" that the Smarter Cities project team plans to analyze in the hopes of identifying those leader cities that for a specific factor are putting in place best practices, testing innovative new programs and passing model legislation.

"We wanted to start with energy" says Paul McRandle, research project director, "given the links between our energy production and consumption patterns and harm to health and the environment." Half of all the electricity produced in the U.S. is derived from coal, the burning of which releases heat-trapping pollutants, mercury, sulfur dioxide, particulates and other health-threatening smog pollutants.

To assess the efforts to limit municipal demand of energy and provide clean energy, Smarter Cities surveyed city governments about the city's aggregate kilowatt hour consumption, top three fuel sources, whether it had completed a greenhouse gas inventory, energy conservation programs (including targets for reduced consumption) and processes to measure energy conservation. The Smarter Cities team sought advice from experts both in and outside of NRDC to develop its plan. "It was important to establish a clear and reasonable description of the factor by which the Smarter Cities team would compare cities' performance—a description that was researchable, meaning there was comprehensive, pertinent and reliable data to collect," says Brandi Colander, an NRDC attorney with NRDC's Air and Energy programs and a Smarter Cities project advisor.

The team deliberately left out transportation from this analysis, even though as a sector it makes up a very large portion of our fossil fuel use. "Since it's so significant, we thought we should treat transportation as its own sustainability factor." McRandle noted, "Our plan is to look at it next with the hopes of having our evaluation complete some time in the fall of 2010."

 

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

- OUTREACH TO CITIES

To begin our work we created a database of all United States municipalities with populations greater than 50,000, drawing from the U.S Conference of Mayor's website. These cities were broken down into three distinct categories—those with populations of 50,000 to 99,999 (referred to in this document as “small cities”), those with populations of 100,000 to 249,999 (referred to in this document as “medium cities”), and finally cities with populations of 250,000 and more (referred to in this document as "large cities"). The total number of cities contacted was 655.

All cities in our list received an invitation via email in February 2010 to participate in this study by filling out the survey described below. Emails were directed to the individual in each city’s government who was most likely to be able to discuss energy issues; in many cases this was an environmental specialist, manager or planner. When we were unable to find a specific individual to contact, it was sent to the mayor’s office and we asked them to introduce us to the appropriate party.

-IDENTIFYING HIGH PERFORMING CITIES

- External data collection

While all 655 cities received an invitation to fill out the survey, we did not anticipate all would respond. To be sure all high performing cities for this sustainability factor provided feedback, we did a comprehensive literature review to identify all existing city-specific information on energy consumption and production. These external data sources are as follows:

Smarter Cities 2008

We reviewed the information we collected in the 2008 version of the Smarter Cities study. In that year, cities were ranked on energy performance in three areas (top three fuels used for power generation, energy conservation incentives offered, green power offered by utility), and chose to include the top 20 cities in each population category (see above) in our 2010 research.

Project Vulcan (Purdue University)

Project Vulcan, funded by both NASA and DOE, provides the most comprehensive analysis available of rates of carbon dioxide emissions for cities of various sizes throughout the country.

The Project Vulcan data (which is for the year 2002 only) is in the form of tons per person. It is also provided data only on the county level, so our researcher assessed the location of each city and entered the carbon dioxide emissions data for each county in which a city’s boundaries extend (for some cities, this included five counties). For each city with multiple readings, the measurement used is an average of the data for each of its counties. For more on Project Vulcan, click here.

EPA Green Power Communities

As of the time we were compiling data for our survey (February 2010), the EPA listed 27 cities in its Green Communities program, ranking them by the percentage of green power consumed as a portion of the municipal government's total electricity consumption. Green power as defined by the EPA includes solar, wind, geothermal, biogas, biomass and small hydro. Communities may include the purchase of Renewable Energy Credits towards their total green power consumption. For more on green power communities, visit the EPA site.

Rappaport Institute Report: “The Greenness of Cities.” Edward L. Glaeser and Matthew Kahn. March 2008

This study sought to characterize the emissions of cities in different areas of the country, paying close attention to the way emissions rates change as one moves away from the core of any city. One particularly unique component of this study was their effort to report on cost associated with greenhouse gas emissions. The information on cost presented in this work is characterized as the total social cost for an additional ton of carbon dioxide emissions—this is priced at $43 in this study. The researchers ranked their 66 metropolitan areas across their criteria which included transportation (driving and public transit), home heating and electricity consumption. Only the rankings and data for the top ten metropolitan areas are currently available and included in this analysis. The report may be downloaded in full here.

The Brookings Institute Report: Shrinking the Carbon Footprint of Metropolitan America

In this report, Brookings Institute provides an overall emissions change percentage between 2000 and 2005 for the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. This effort provided a very useful parameter for our study.The full report may be downloaded here.

- Establishing thresholds – external data sources

Using the data gathered from the external sources listed above, we made a first cut to the list of 655 cities and followed up with a smaller set to make sure they filled out our survey. We selected thresholds that would bring the list down to a manageable size while not eliminating any cities that demonstrated leadership in the area of green power and energy conservation and from which we wanted to get more information. These thresholds and the cities that met them are listed in the chart High Performers from External Studies.

- IDENTIFYING TOP PERFORMERS

- Survey data collection

Given the limits to the data available from external sources, we developed a survey tool to help fill in the gaps. Though 655 cities as noted above received an invitation to fill out the survey, we wanted to make sure the 61 cities identified through the external sources as high performing cities actually did. The survey (available in its entirety here) requested information about the following:

Electricity consumption (kWh) per capita: Pursuing this figure for each city was an exciting step forward in understanding city level energy use and behavior. However, obtaining these numbers proved to be highly complicated. Because metropolitan area population data were not available for all cities in this study, and because reporting on consumption was bounded differently by different respondents (government use only vs. total city use, municipal boundary vs. metropolitan boundary vs. county boundary based on data availability), this figure is a first cut estimate of per-capita consumption only. City population, rather than metropolitan area population, was used to create the figures presented.

EPA Defined Green Power: Building from the EPA definition, cities were asked to report on the percentage of their power that is generated using solar, wind, geothermal, biogas, biomass and small hydro capability.

Distributed Generation Policies: This question probed cities' progress in encouraging innovative decentralized power generation strategies through policy tools. Cities provided a wide variety of responses ranging from landfill gas collection to solar powered parking meter pilot projects. City policies were totaled and that total number was used to establish the threshold for this category.

State Legislated Energy Reduction: Also focusing on policy, cities were asked whether state level policies exist that mandate reduced energy consumption. Cities that had this type of policy in place were less numerous than those cities that had a greenhouse gas reduction in place (some reporting/reading error may have occurred here).

Greenhouse Gas Inventory: A measure of a city government's awareness of the importance of understanding its city's greenhouse gas footprint is the presence of a greenhouse gas inventory. It is important to note here that these inventories varied significantly, and thus the data we gathered on tons of GHG/capita can be used descriptively only, and were not utilized in establishing a threshold. Until a standardized methodology is developed and fully adopted, these numbers will remain uncertain. Variation exists in system boundaries (as with energy consumption numbers) and inventories were completed in a wide variety of years, some as old as 2002 and some as recently as 2009.

City-Level Targets and Policies for Reduced Energy Consumption: Similar to the question about state level energy reduction policies, this question asks whether city-level standards for energy consumption reduction are in place, and if policies exist to support these standards.

Conservation Incentives: The variety of conservation incentives offered by a city speaks to the creativity it brings to the challenge of encouraging behavior change. Respondents were asked to indicate from a list of options which incentives were offered, and were also given the opportunity to offer additional incentive choices via the “other” category. The total number of incentive types was used to establish the threshold for this category.

Energy Services: The availability of resources to support energy saving upgrades also reflects a community’s depth of commitment to energy conservation. In this category respondents were asked to indicate from a list of possible responses as well as an open response field whether they had policies to encourage utilities to offer them. Thresholds were based on the total number of affirmative responses.

Tracking Progress: Cities were asked to report how they tracked their progress against energy goals they had set. In addition, they were asked if their energy consumption had decreased in the last five years. These two questions combined to create a picture of what type of change is taking place in each city and how rapidly.

Innovation: Finally, cities were asked to share any innovative approaches to energy management, consumption and production they had developed. For this category, no threshold was developed because of the wide variety of responses. These data will help inform the final picks for top performers.

- Identifying top-performing cities

Again, we created thresholds in order to sort the data we received through the survey tool and to identify the top-performing cities in terms of their commitment to green energy production and reducing energy consumption. These thresholds and the cities that met or exceeded them are summarized in the table High Performers – Survey Data.

2010 TOP ENERGY PERFORMERS

The Smarter Cities/Top Energy Performers of 2010 listed in the sidebar above include large and medium sized cities which met or exceeded six thresholds, and small cities that met or exceeded four thresholds. These results represent the cities that did the best among those who responded to our survey.They exhibit great promise as leaders in moving toward a more energy-conscious society. By sharing the lessons they can offer through this analysis, Smarter Cities hopes to be able to encourage comparable efforts among their peers.