Energy / Boston, Massachusetts: 2010 Smarter City - Energy

The City of Boston is the largest municipal purchaser of wind power in New England, and furthermore, it is tapping into its own renewable resources as one of the windiest cities in America. The Massachusetts Port Authority has already installed 20 small-scale turbines at Logan Airport, while the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority is developing a number of wind projects around Boston that will save its ratepayers $250,000 a year in energy costs. The city is promoting larger scale wind projects to be installed in Boston Harbor. Next up? The city hopes to erect a wind turbine on nearby Moon Island that will produce 1.65 megawatts of electricity a year. But because the NIMBY factor is high for turbine installation, and because the island is owned by the City of Boston yet falls within the city limits of neighboring Quincy, the two cities continue to work out an agreement. They also await grant funding to make the project more economically worthwhile.

In 2007, Mayor Thomas M. Menino proposed a goal of increasing the city’s solar power from one-half megawatt to 25 megawatts of electricity each year by 2015. Although Boston currently obtains just 1.9 megawatts from solar generation, the city was one of the inaugural Solar America cities, an initiative by the U.S. Department of Energy to promote solar power. From this came Solar Boston, which works with local and national partners to promote, advise and ease the implementation of solar. A database of its clean-energy installations can be found at the Solar Boston website, as well as a color-coded indicator of the amount of solar radiation available at a particular site, and zoning restrictions for solar installations.

This commitment to wind and solar power make it no surprise that Boston has recently increased its renewable energy use to a respectable 11.7 percent of its total—and growing. A crucial part of the importance of clean energy, of course, is to reduce climate-changing emissions, and Boston’s ambitious goal is to cut back emissions by 25 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050. The more solar installations and wind turbines it installs, the closer the city gets to its target. And Boston is demonstrably on the right track, since one of the reasons for its inclusion as a Smarter City is a reduction in city emissions since 2005. Another is the presence of a mandatory annual inventory on greenhouse gas emissions in the city and its communities. The updated progress reports are available online, so citizens can be sure Boston is fulfilling its commitment to the planet and its residents.