glenn college

The capstone paper that almost wasn’t

During Spring 2019 I took the final required course for my Master’s in Public Administration at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs – PUBAFR 7900, the capstone research paper. In this course, students write a structured capstone paper on a project of their choice. Although the projects vary a lot, the papers all follow the same format:

    • Title Page
    • Executive Summary
    • Table of Contents
    • Introduction
    • Background, including Stakeholders
    • Literature Review
    • Methods
    • Data
    • Results
    • Conclusions
    • Appendices
    • Works Cited

As chair of the Sierra Club’s Ready for 100 Columbus campaign, I wrote my paper on how three cities that have committed to 100% renewable energy are getting there. At the time of my writing, 120 cities had made this commitment, including Cleveland and Cincinnati in Ohio, as well as several other major cities. I wanted to figure out a possible road map for Columbus.

Although I wrote about a topic I am extremely involved with — how cities can get to 100% renewable energy — the amount of rewriting and frankly unreasonable demands from the professor almost led me to withdraw from the course. No matter what I produced, it wasn’t right. If something was in a bulleted list, she wanted it in a table, but if it was in a table, she wanted a bulleted list. Even when I made the revisions asked for, it seemed she didn’t read them and said I hadn’t done the work. Halfway through the semester, she wanted me to change my topic!

Exemplary Community Service Award

I got the Exemplary Community Service Award from the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at its pre-graduation ceremony in May.

But after encouragement from my Glenn College advisor, I stayed in, earning barely enough points to pass with a B, but I did get the B. And it’s a good thing because I not only learned a lot despite the difficulties, I also was able to graduate. Even better, during the Glenn College pre-graduation ceremony, I was given the Exemplary Community Service Award.

In writing the paper, the first thing I had to do was identify which cities I was going to look at. I got a list of all cities that had made the commitment, then identified which ones are in the top 100 cities in the United States by population. Those included San Diego, San Francisco, Denver, Washington D.C., Portland, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Cleveland, St. Louis, Saint Paul, Cincinnati, Orlando, and Madison, Wis. Of these, most had made the commitment within the past year, and only about half had published energy plans for how they would get there.

Of the cities with published energy plans, I picked three: San Francisco, the first city to make a commitment to 100% renewable energy in 2010; Atlanta, the only city to include a full consideration of policy alternatives in its climate plan; and Cincinnati, which has the most comprehensive plan of all large cities that have committed to this transition.

I also consulted the academic and think tank literature. On the academic side, I found that most people who study this question believe cities, states, and countries can transition to 100% renewable energy, but there’s a debate between those who think it can be done using only sun, wind, hydro, and geothermal, and those who believe it must include nuclear energy. The 100% renewable energy side is led by Mark Jacobson of Stanford University, founder of the Solutions Project who mapped out how states, cities, and countries can get to 100% renewable energy.  The critics include 21 scientists who published an evaluation of Jacobson’s work in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The dispute was covered by David Roberts in Vox here and here.

I also found a lot of think tank and advocacy group literature on how cities can transition to 100% renewable energy. The two best sources were the Carbon-Free City Handbook, published by Rocky Mountain Institute, which looked programs cities could implement by sector such as buildings, transportation, and energy supply, and Pathways to 100, a primer for how cities can use legislative, financial, and structural practices to transform their energy supplies.

I found that by instituting best energy practices on the city level, rather than depending on state or federal action, cities could take control of their energy supplies and significantly lower their carbon emissions. San Francisco, which has been working on programs to get to 100% renewable energy since 2011, has significantly lowered its emissions.

I was also able to put together a high-level blueprint for how cities can get to 100% renewable energy:

STEP 1: ENERGY EFFICIENCY
Buildings are the top source of carbon emissions in most cities. Making energy efficiency upgrades helps by reducing the amount of energy being used, which both lowers emissions and saves money. Also called retrofitting and weatherization, energy efficiency includes activities such as installing LED lights and EnergyStar appliances, adding insulation, sealing windows, and using low-flow plumbing. This needs to be done on both the residential level, particularly in low-income areas where housing is often very inefficient, and in large commercial buildings, financed through the Property Assessed Clean Energy program. Cities can also require or incentive new builds to be LEED-certified or net zero, and they need to address the split incentive in which which tenants pay for energy, so landlords don’t want to pay for upgrades. This can be done by requiring landlords to list energy costs with rent or by providing incentives for landlords to make needed upgrades.

STEP 2: RENEWABLE ENERGY
To run on 100% renewable energy, we need more renewable energy! This includes building out solar generation on city property, and helping residents and businesses to install more solar. Cincinnati is building 25 MW of solar to run its water treatment plans, and Cleveland has a solar farm on a capped landfill. San Francisco has incentives for purchasing solar equipment as well as a solar equipment leasing program, which has lowered costs and spread solar panels on homes and businesses across the city. In Ohio, Solar United Neighbors runs bulk purchasing programs.

STEP 3: TRANSPORTATION
Transportation is the second large source of carbon emissions in cities. Cities have a lot of options for tackling transportation emissions, such as converting their own fleet to electric vehicles, encouraging residents to drive EVs, rolling out charging infrastructure, supporting biking, walking, and scooters, offering bike share and car share programs, and building bus rapid transit and light rail. City form is also important. Channeling development into the city center rather than urban sprawl lowers emissions from cars and makes getting around by public transportation, biking, or walking easier.

STEP 4: ENERGY SUPPLY
The most effective way to lower carbon emissions from energy use is to ensure that the energy supply is generated from renewables. This can be done in two ways: building more utility-scale solar and wind generation, and using renewable energy certificates to offset fossil fuel use. In Ohio, we have a third option: Aggregation. This is when a city pools together its customers and uses them to bargain with utilities for more renewable energy at a lower price. Cincinnati is aggregated for 100% renewable. Aggregation is legal in only eight states, and we are lucky Ohio is one.

STEP 5: FINANCING
Whenever renewable energy comes up, the first question is usually “But how will you pay for it?” Fortunately cities have lots of financing mechanisms to choose from, including programs like Property Assessed Clean Energy, bulk purchasing, power purchase agreements, green banking, and more. For example, Los Angeles allows low-income residents to “rent” their rooftops to the city electric utility, which installs solar panels that put clean energy on the grid. Atlanta offers a “round it up” program for people to pay a little extra on their utility bills; the money funds energy efficiency upgrades in low-income areas. New York has a Green Bank that works with private-sector banks to fund clean energy developments.

Here’s a link to my Glenn College capstone paper: Getting to 100: How Cities are Transitioning to 100% Renewable Energy (pdf)

Here’s a link to my capstone presentation: Getting to 100: How Cities are Transitioning to 100% Renewable Energy (ppt)

 

Summer internship with Ready for 100 Columbus

ENR 7191 is the required internship course for the Master’s in Environment and Natural Resources. Students can fulfill this requirement through their jobs in an environmental field, through a formal full-time internship, or through part-time volunteer opportunities.  I chose the third way to do this by working on the Sierra Club’s Ready for 100 campaign in Columbus.

Although I have been working on the Ready for 100 Columbus campaign for the past 1.5 years, I had not made it the center of my activities due to work and other courses. This summer I had the chance to spend my coursework time on the campaign. It was a great experience, and I learned that I love doing this kind of work.

Tom Foley, sustainability manager for Cuyahoga County, speaks at the Clean Energy for All Ohio Training on June 2, 2018.

Mike Foley, director of sustainability for Cuyahoga County, speaks at the Clean Energy for All Ohio Training on June 2, 2018.

The objectives I had for the summer were:

  • Hold a successful 100% Clean Energy for All Ohio training on June 2. We achieved that goal, training about 50 people who heard from energy leaders in Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Oberlin, as well as Tom Foley, sustainability manager for Cuyahoga County. As a result, five new Ready for 100 campaigns got started around the state.
  • Restart the grasstops part of the campaign by doing power mapping of the mayor and members of city council, and community mapping in neighborhoods of Columbus. We got this done with the help of two other interns for the campaign.
  • Identify and start a new communications chair. We promoted Brittany Converse, a longtime volunteer who works for the city.
  • Speak about Ready for 100 at community and neighborhood events. I spoke at the Clean Energy for All Ohio training, a projection art event at Flowers and Bread in Clintonville, and led the panel discussion following a showing of Reinventing Power. I was also invited to be part of the city’s application for the Bloomberg Climate Challenge Grant, pulling together information about tax abatements for sustainability.
  • Hold tours of several renewable energy facilities in Columbus and Ohio. I was not able to do this. But I did make it to the Growing Local Solar workshop on August 1 at Denison University, where I learned about aggregation in Ohio, the carbon tax in Athens, how to overcome barriers to solar, and toured the Denison solar array.
We held a showing of Reinventing Power with a panel discussion on August 9, 2019. About 45 people attended.

About 45 people attended our showing of Reinventing Power with a panel discussion on August 9, 2018.

One of the best things about the summer was getting to work with two other interns for the campaign, one from the Glenn College and one from School of Environment and Natural Resources. Suddenly work that we had been wanting to do for months, like power mapping and community mapping, got done. We couldn’t pay these interns – we could only offer course credit – but it was amazing to have them on board. I wanted to get more interns in the fall, but national Sierra Club changed its policy and now requires paying interns $15 an hour. We don’t have money for that.

It is not an exaggeration to say this summer was pivotal to the direction of the Ready for 100 Columbus campaign. When we started, we were trying to get sign-on letters from local businesses in Clintonville and the Short North. It was a disaster. Employees couldn’t sign, managers were never there or too busy, and most were hesitant about signing. Quickly we realized that approach was not working and switched to gathering signatures on our AddUp petition to the city. We got 300 signatures at Comfest alone, about 1600 during the summer.

We also did some serious campaign planning work, identifying our theory of change, targets, tactics, partnerships, and budget. This laid the groundwork for our campaign moving forward.