Turn off the lights

• Port and Harbor cuts $15,000 through energy conservation, correcting billing errors

By Naomi Klouda
Homer Tribune

Ever wonder what can be done if a certain street lamp just won’t shut off in the middle of the day? Or how much it costs for the lone electrical outlet at WKFL Park that only gets used a few times a year – such as plugging in the community Christmas tree?
Apparently, sorting through the answers to those questions is a relatively lengthy process. But now, thanks to a 193-page report resulting from an expansive study by Deerstone Consulting, the city has the answers.
The study scrutinized dozens of utility accounts under the City of Homer’s name to check for validity. One was charging the city $3,600 a year for merely having an account, even if no electricity was being used. Harbor Master Bryan Hawkins and his staff noticed they were being charged $150 a month for each of the East and West Shore Ties for the Pioneer Dock.
These are large capacity outlets, “something the Tustumena could plug into if she ever needed to,” Hawkins said. “However, we haven’t seen them used since 2003 when the dock was built, and we were charged for those meters just by having them open and accessible.”
That Homer Electric account is now closed.
Another $1,243 in annual savings was found by shutting off the Ramp 6 street light, which duplicated the work of a larger street lamp. That account charged for six lamps on two poles.
“They were unnecessary and so we had them removed,” Hawkins said.
These were some of the findings in the Homer Climate Action Plan Implementation Project by Deerstone Consulting and Joel Cooper. It showed how a collaboration between data collectors and city employees helped uncover mysteries behind energy usage. The idea is to shrink the city’s carbon footprint down to a size that creates the least waste and the most conservation.
But first, they needed to tally the watts of electricity and gallons of fuel.
Under Cooper’s scrutiny, another issue came to light regarding Hickerson Memorial Cemetery getting billed $24 a month for electricity it wasn’t using either.
Looking at three years’ data helped determine the longer trends, and in this case, that’s how long the electricity had gone unused. In some cases, Cooper found HEA benefitted. In other cases, the city did. For example, the water treatment plant wasn’t being billed fully for its wattage.
Even before the Deerstone recommendations were released at the Dec. 14 Homer City Council meeting, Hawkins was on top of finding the energy leaks or costs, Cooper said. The harbor building has been identified as priority No. 3 for replacement in the city’s Capital Improvement Plan. In its 40-year history, heavy winds have wracked the structure, it has caught fire twice, and at some point, someone made the questionable decision to install in a radiant ceiling heat system.
“It’s the way a town like this has evolved. Even so, I encourage the city to maintain their buildings because the goal is to have an energy efficient town,” Cooper said. “Don’t hold off on retrofitting a building just because you will eventually replace it. No one knows when it will be replaced.”
Since his building is one of the more problematic to keep warm, Hawkins said he wanted to look at energy costs even before the study was done. “We found every electric service we were being billed for, and looked at it to see if it was a valid bill,” Hawkins said.
Along the way, he learned a few other things as well, including an understanding about lights in the harbor that mysteriously come on at noon.
“These are high mass lights, and one day, we noticed they came on in the middle of the day right after an ice storm. The photo cells got covered and that turned on the lights,” Hawkins explained. “We looked at different options and found that if we replaced the photo cells, the result is a two-hour cut in use per day. The lights have a plastic cover that degrades with UV rays and needs to be replaced periodically, so we put the lights on the preventive maintenance schedule.”
Identifying the “low-hanging fruit” is discussed in city circles now that both the Deerstone report and a conservation guide (released last year) has city workers changing the way they use fuel and electricity.
“We need to learn and pay attention, focus on our costs and track those costs,” Hawkins said. “What Deerstone is able to do is help us with tracking these costs. We coordinated all the systems so that we are all talking about the same thing.”
Tracking energy use for all city facilities and equipment types was no easy task, even for small government buildings. Cooper described how it required not only the cooperation and help of city staff in several departments, but also necessitated help from the staff at the energy companies. At times it was difficult to tell what account matched what building, light pole or parking lot.
“Duplicated naming, different naming of the same account, facility or equipment within departments and the utility providers; pooling of fuel delivery data and electric meters measuring multiple facilities and equipment made it challenging to create accurate lists and to associate energy use with the appropriate facility or equipment,” Cooper’s report reads. “In several instances, we found that hundreds, even thousands of gallons of fuel associated with the wrong facility due to name mislabeling.”
Now that the study is finished, the program to help track data will be turned over to the city, with Public Works engineering technician Mitch Hrachiar, placed in charge of tracking the process.
“We’ll continue recording information to identify where savings could be had and to measure successes,” said Public Works Director Carey Meyer.
Homer is in good company across the nation as cities conduct energy audits to figure out what they use and how they can cut back. The Obama Administration – as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulus program – is offering municipal funding to help. Funneled through the Alaska Housing Finance Corp., $18 million is being made available. Wasting no time, Homer city officials met with AHFC’s Scott Waterman this week to find out how to apply for the funds.
Even the country’s biggest cities are concerned about how to cut back. In New York, a project on the 77-year-old Empire State Building is hoping to reduce energy costs by $4.4 million a year. Upgrades to accomplish this are estimated to run $20 million.

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Posted by Newsroom on Dec 23rd, 2009 and filed under Headline News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.