Energy / Seattle, Washington: 2010 Smarter City - Energy

 

Door-to-Door Upgrades

With a relatively small geographic focus on the Central District and parts of Southeast Seattle, the Neighborhood WEB (Weatherize Every Building) Initiative “allows us to reach a saturation level that we haven’t had the resources for before,” says Jill Simmons, Acting Director for the Seattle Office of Sustainability and Environment.  Made up of a handful of programs designed to supply the financing, information and work-force needed to upgrade as many buildings in the area as possible, the initiative is expected to create up to 2,000 green jobs and to save the city roughly 70,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

The area encompasses an economically and racially diverse part of the city, says Simmons, where issues like language barriers, limited mobility and low incomes, may in the past have limited residents’ access to the city’s energy conservation programs. The Powerful Neighborhoods program eliminates those barriers by deploying field staff—equipped with compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), low-flow showerheads, faucet aerators, smoke detectors, energy conservation information and a translator when needed—to knock on the doors of 20,000 homes in 2010 and replace old and inefficient products at no cost to the resident.

 

Beyond light bulbs and showerheads, Seattle City Light and Puget Sound Energy have partnered to provide subsidized energy audits for up to 5,000 homeowners. Typically valued at $400, participating homeowners will receive a rebate for $305 along with an Energy Performance Score and recommendations for upgrades. Through the Office of Housing’s HomeWise program, low-income homeowners and landlords with low-income renters can sign up to receive the service for free, along with financing for weatherization retrofits. The city is aiming for an efficiency improvement of between 15 and 45 percent for each building participating in the WEB initiative, says Simmons.

Neighborhood-to-Neighborhood Upgrades

Though the geographic scope of the project is limited, the level of saturation the city hopes to achieve is high. The project will be funded by the city’s recent $20 million “Retrofit Ramp Up” award through the 2008 Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant (EECBG) program. “We were one of only 25 communities to get this grant,” says Simmons, “so it is rare to have these resources.” But after the initial kick-start, which will create jobs and spark demand for retrofits, Simmons says the city intends to take the same program to other neighborhoods, where “the hope is that it will be self-sustaining,” and continue to bring the city closer to its 2050 goal, one block at a time.