Prioritizing Energy Efficiency in Municipalities

摘要

Local governments often hold a wide range of facilities in their portfolio, all with unique and different end uses. The list of facilities for city or county governments can include swimming pools, office buildings, educational facilities, and water and wastewater treatment plants. There is great potential to reduce energy costs in these facilities by focusing on retrofitting inefficient systems, instituting behavioral and operational policies, and creatively encouraging energy efficiency in building occupants. Even with this immense opportunity to save energy and other resources, municipalities often lack the budget, staff and focus to make energy conservation a priority:Facilities managers are frequently occupied with day-to-day building operations and are unavailable to focus on capital improvements until a system failure occurs. Tight municipal budgets discourage early replacement of energy-intensive systems and often limit the ability to implement more efficient products when replacement is necessary. Life-cycle cost considerations are trumped by immediate budget shortfalls. Behavioral and operational-based energy consumption is often ignored by facilities operators due to the level of attention that tracking this consumption requires. Also, municipal staff often lacks an understanding of how to best achieve meaningful behavioral and operational changes. Puget Sound Energy's Resource Conservation Manager (RCM) Program is designed to provide coordination and leadership for effective and efficient management of all utility resources and focus on energy efficiency through behavioral changes, operational improvements, maintenance activities and capital improvements. Through the combined use of these programs, cities and counties can invest in energy-efficient improvements across the spectrum of their facilities. It is the intent of this paper to explore a specific case study, the City of Bellingham, WA, to provide an example of how a city-utility partnership can gain the budget, staff and focus necessary to make energy efficiency a priority.