Kittery residents are organizing yet another “lose to win” campaign, but instead of reducing waistlines, this time volunteers are targeting energy use.
By signing on to EPA New England’s Community Energy Challenge, Kittery has pledged to reduce municipal energy use by 10 percent or more.
Kittery town manager Jonathan Carter said town officials were already looking at ways to reduce energy use when they heard about the challenge, and the 10 percent goal seemed reachable.
“The Energy Challenge was something the town council thought we could do,” Carter said.
In the past year, Carter and members of the town’s energy committee adopted a variety of efficient practices that already are realizing reduced energy costs. Some of the measures are small, but realize big savings, like using a device that powers down vending machines until someone approaches to use them. Other steps include more high-ticket expenditures, like retiring older gas-guzzling cars in favor of newer subcompact models for town use. Carter said the payoff of the vehicle trade-out has been worth the initial investment in many ways.
“Just in attitude, just in gas savings, just in overall appearance,” Carter said.
The Kittery campaign is one of a wave of energy-saving initiatives sweeping the southern coastline, said Dylan Voorhees, clean energy director for the National Resources Council of Maine.
“There are lots of examples,” Voorhees said. “So much so I just can’t keep track of it all.”
Many southern and midcoast towns have joined an energy-efficiency campaign called Cool Cities (or in Maine, Cool Communities), including Belfast, Biddeford, Boothbay, Kennebunk, Freeport, Portland, Saco, and Yarmouth. These communities, along with 700 more across the nation, have pledged to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to 7 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2012.
The program was born from the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement in 2005. Started by Seattle mayor Greg Nickels, participating mayors must agree to follow the greenhouse-gas reduction guidelines of the international treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol. Ratified by 141 countries, the Kyoto treaty was blocked in the U.S. by the Bush administration, a move that made the mayors take matters into their own hands.
“Since we don’t seem to get anything out of Washington, let’s do it [ourselves],” said Joan Saxe, an energy and Cool Communities coordinator for the Maine chapter of the Sierra Club, summing up the mayors’ thinking.
With technical support and resources provided by the Cool Communities program, these communities are taking energy-saving steps similar to those undertaken in Kittery. Saco, considered the leader in the energy-saving charge, has switched to compact-fluorescent light bulbs in all municipal buildings, replaced older municipal refrigerators with more energy-efficient models, and installed a wind turbine at the local wastewater treatment plant. The town has allocated $300,000 to its energy committee to carry out efficiency measures, but has already realized some $100,000 annually in reduced energy costs.
Such savings are luring some less environmentally-minded communities to look into energy efficiency for the sake of the bottom line, said Voorhees.
“Electricity costs in Maine are continuing to rise,” he said. “Towns are looking at how to save a buck…or at least sort of stem the bleeding.”
Bucksport town manager Roger Raymond said his town is looking into energy-efficiency mainly because of common sense and fiscal responsibility.
“We’re not pursuing this because of greenhouse gases,” Raymond said.
Among other measures, the town recently installed a timer to switch off unused waterfront lights during winter nights. The streetlights previously would stay on all night, but the timers will click off the lights after 11:00 p.m. during winter months. Bucksport paid a little over $1000 to install the control switches, but plans to reap between $4,000 and $5,000 in savings annually.
“Why should we have 40 lights on…when people aren’t using the waterfront walkway?” Raymond asked.
Saxe said interest in energy-efficiency is reaching a tipping point as word of reduced energy costs has spread between communities.
“Belfast signed on without being asked,” Saxe said.
While Saxe often is contacted first by community officials about the program, sometimes her initial contact is with a small group of local citizens, as when two Yarmouth teenagers helped start the process in their community.
“It only takes one or two people to get things moving,” she said.
Until now, the Cool Communities coalition has targeted larger cities and towns in the southern coast, but Saxe said she plans to be working with smaller communities up the coast in the future, including island communities.
“Down the road, we will be talking to them,” she said.