Energy Commission 7/30
The Energy Commission met tonight and discussed a number of issues.
The consultant's report for the "electric heating system" retrofit at CHS was commended, unlike the pool consultant's report which was a waste of $20,000.
Performance contracting was discussed. It's an issue that's been discussed before by the EC. And it could help the town avoid a cash outlay of millions of dollars by paying for energy equipment through future savings.
Energy benchmarking was discussed. Hopefully we've gotten a commitment from town staff at this point to make this happen. But since this seemed to be taking so long, I asked for details on what is involved in maintaining the benchmarking database. And the answer I got was that we have about two dozen buildings, many of which can use three energy sources (electric, heating fuel & natural gas... and the database also allows you to record water consumption) and some buildings which have more than one meter for energy sources. So that's probably anywhere from 50 - 150 different data fields that need to populated on a monthly basis after being taken from a few dozen utility bills. So it's not something that should really take much time to maintain, but will probably take some time to update from where we left off last fall or so. Anyway... the benefit of this is that we will then be able to use this data to better direct capital funds to places that stand to benefit the most. Boring, huh? Well... it's interesting to me... but then... I'm a bean counter. lol.
The 20% by 2010 clean energy campaign was discussed. We now have 226 households using clean energy. That's about 2.5% of households in town... and that's higher than most surrounding towns.
The south end fire house was discussed. Then the CL&P "Summer Saver Rewards Program" (conserve electricity in the summer and you may get a discount on your electric bill in November), the legislature's new "smart meters" and the Chamber's Fall Festival were also discussed.
Tim White
Town Council, liaison to the Energy Commission
3 comments:
So what was the solution presented for the high school heating retrofit?
If I recall the conversation correctly, it was more a matter of acknowledging that the process was moving forward... the EC (Bill Kunde & Marty Roach) was involved during the beginning of the process.
Then the conversation moved to getting Dave Gavin (replacement after Bill Kunde resigned) "appointed" as the EC user member of the Public Building Commission.
As for the "solution," I think the consultant's report was about 100 or so pages long.
Another good person leaving. Hard to replace people like that. Good luck and hope you keep giving us some new ideas.
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