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America’s First All-Renewable-Energy City
By Colin Woodard/Nov 16, 2016
Burlington's decades-long commitment to sustainability has paid off with
cheap electricity—and some pretty great homegrown food.
To understand what makes Burlington unlike almost any other city in
America when it comes to the power it consumes, it helps to look inside
the train that rolls into town every day. The 24 freight cars that pull
up to the city’s power plant aren’t packed with Appalachian coal or
Canadian fuel oil but wood. Each day 1,800 tons of pine and timber
slash, sustainably harvested within a 60-mile radius and ground into
wood chips, is fed into the roaring furnaces of the McNeil Generating
Station, pumping out nearly half of the city’s electricity needs.
Much of the rest of what Burlington’s 42,000 citizens need to keep the
lights on comes from a combination of hydroelectric power drawn from a
plant it built a half mile up the Winooski River, four wind turbines on
nearby Georgia Mountain and a massive array of solar panels at the
airport. Together these sources helped secure Burlington the distinction
of being the country’s first city that draws 100 percent of its power
from renewable sources. The net energy costs are cheap enough that the
city has not had to raise electric rates for its customers in eight
years. And Burlington is not done in its quest for energy conservation.
Add in the city’s plan for an expansive bike path, a growing network of
electric vehicle charging stations and an ambitious plan to pipe the
McNeil station’s waste heat to warm downtown buildings and City Hall’s
goal to be a net zero consumer of energy within 10 years starts looking
achievable.
The environmental sustainability revolution has spread to other sectors
of civic life. Outside the gates, farmers, community gardeners and
food-minded social workers tend fields and plots spread out over 300
acres of once-neglected floodplain just two miles from the city’s
center. Together the agricultural enterprises in the valley—working land
controlled by a non-profit that partners with the city—grow $1.3 million
in food each year, much of it sold at a massive, member-owned
cooperative supermarket, its own origins traced back to City Hall.
How did this former logging port on the shore of Lake Champlain
transform itself over the past 40 years from a torpid manufacturing town
in the far corner of a backwater state to a global trendsetter in
sustainable development and green power? The answer carries particular
resonance at a time when the United States’ commitment to environmental
issues and addressing climate change is suddenly less certain than at
any time in a decade. Cities like Burlington, the largest city in a
state whose tourism and agriculture dependent economy is vulnerable to
climate change, have had to craft their own solutions to address global
warming and to insulate themselves from the vagaries of global energy
markets. In Burlington, however, these solutions were not spearheaded by
civic or corporate leaders, as is now often the case when cities tackle
urban issues. Instead, Burlington is achieving its energy independence
almost entirely through initiatives developed by its municipal
government—a government that has been decidedly left-leaning for
decades. In fact, one of the people most responsible for setting in
motion the chain of policies and programs that now distinguish
Burlington was a ground-breaking social democratic mayor with unruly
hair, a thick Brooklyn accent and a message that would many years later
carry him deep into the 2016 presidential campaign.
“There’s nothing magical about Burlington,” says Taylor Ricketts of the
University of Vermont’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics. “We
don’t have a gift from nature of ample sun or mighty winds or powerful
rivers, so if we can do it, so can others.”
***
Founded by the raucous revolutionary bad boy Ethan Allen and his
brothers in the 1770s, Burlington grew from village to city in the
mid-19th century on the strength of the timber trade. The forests of
Quebec, the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks were close at hand by
lake and river, the markets of Montreal and New York City were reachable
by canals and the St. Lawrence river. By 1870, the Burlington waterfront
was a tangle of lumberyards, warehouses and furniture factories. Dams
and woolen mills were popping up along the fast moving Winooski River,
attracting waves of immigrants, first from Ireland and later Quebec.
Early 20th century Burlington was a working class city of 25,000 with a
college on the hill, the future University of Vermont.
But by the middle of the 20th century Burlington’s growth had plateaued.
That’s when an ad campaign that branded the state as “the Beckoning
Country” of unspoiled natural and civic beauty began to attract
disaffected city dwellers looking for an escape from the turbulence of
an era defined by the Vietnam war, political assassinations, urban
unrest, Watergate and gas shortages. Some of these newcomers were “back
to the landers.” Some who were eligible for the draft liked northern
Vermont’s proximity to Canada. Not a few, lacking the cash to buy one of
Vermont’s rundown dairy farms, pooled resources with friends and
established communes. Thousands more were satisfied with bourgeois life,
but wanted to do it in a safer, healthier environment.
“They’d advertised the state as pristine and untouched, and there was a
public perception that true democracy still lived in Vermont, with its
town meetings,” says Amanda Gustin of the Vermont Historical Society.
“It didn’t necessarily match the reality, but people had the perception
that this was a place where people could get away from the problems of
wider society and get back to the land.” Because many who came were from
college-educated middle class and upper middle class backgrounds—and had
engaged in social justice organizing before their arrival— they would
have an outsized effect on the state’s political trajectory generally
and its largest city in particular.
One of the tens of thousands who put down roots in Burlington in this
era was a struggling 29-year-old Brooklyn native named Bernie Sanders,
who’d cut his teeth in social activism fighting housing discrimination
at the University of Chicago. Sanders had first come to Vermont in 1964,
spending two summers with his first wife in a converted maple sugar
shack near Montpelier. They divorced and he spent the next three years
in a hamlet in the state’s remote, idyllic Northeast Kingdom with the
mother of his only child. In 1971, Sanders was campaigning for one
public office after another, living in a bleak Burlington apartment,
surviving by writing freelance articles for an alternative newspaper and
on electricity he borrowed with an extension cord from his neighbors. He
ran for the U.S. Senate and governor in 1972, again for Senate in 1974
and governor in 1976. His message— the same one you heard on the 2016
campaign trail—never got him more than 6 percent of the statewide vote,
but at some point Sanders noticed he was doing best in Burlington
itself. He decided to run for mayor in 1981 and, buoyed by an 80-percent
share of voters under 36, he defeated the five-term conservative
Democratic incumbent, Gordon Paquette, by 10 votes. “It was a coalition
that included students and professors, but also working class people,
neighborhood activists, and environmentalists,” recalls Peter Clavelle,
who joined Sanders’s administration and succeeded him as mayor. “And the
fundamental basis of it was that government can better serve our needs
and respond to the challenges of our community.”
In 1983, voters re-elected Sanders by 22 points in a three-way race and
turned many of his council adversaries out of office. That’s when
planning for what we’d later come to call sustainability got underway
through a new government department, the Community and Economic
Development Office, which focused on developing the city’s assets, from
local small businesses to the natural environment. “It’s not rocket
science,” says Bruce Seifer, a founding staffer who moved to Burlington
from New York in 1973 and would later run the department. “We asked the
community what they wanted and then we gave it to them.”
***
Self-sufficiency and environmental protection were key goals, and the
Sanders administration came into office with a head start. Under
Paquette, the city-owned Burlington Electric Department decided to
replace its aging coal-fired power plant on the lakefront with a
wood-fired one in the Intervale, a neglected stretch of Winooski River
floodplain where the last dairy farmer was surrounded by junkyards.
Completed during Sanders’ first term, the McNeil biomass plant could use
local wood to generate nearly all of the city’s needs (though half the
power—then and now—is owned by the plant’s minority stakeholders and
winds up in other towns.) The Burlington Environmental Alliance opposed
it with pen-and-ink posters of a clear-cut landscape under the words
“The Wood Chip Plant is Coming.” But the plant opened with a staff of
full-time foresters charged with developing green rules and protocols
for their suppliers. “To this day there are no sustainable harvesting
standards in the State of Vermont except for ours,” says Burlington
Electric’s chief forester Betsy Lesnikoski, who has been monitoring
harvests at the plant for 33 years. “We invented the wheel.”
The city’s development office pushed forward on multiple fronts, helping
establish a non-profit corporation that promoted energy savings in the
city’s public and commercial buildings; bike paths along the previously
inaccessible waterfront to reduce automobile use; curbside recycling
pick-up well ahead of its time; and restoring buildings as business
incubators.
“A lot of communities are ‘whale hunters,’ they think the answer is to
business recruitment is to go after the big fish,” Seifer says. “Instead
we created a loan fund and helped local businesses and non-profits get
started, places that would reinvest their time and effort locally, hire
from within, serve on boards, and when times are tough not move out of
state because they live here.” Ironically, much of the money supporting
many of these 1980s initiatives came via federal grants awarded under
Ronald Reagan’s administration.
One day in 1987, an idealistic entrepreneur called on City Hall. Will
Raap moved to Burlington from the San Francisco Bay area the week
Sanders had been elected and had spent the previous six years building
Gardener’s Supply, which sold people the things they needed to grow
their own food at home. While planting vegetables at his plot in the
city-owned community gardens in the Intervale, Raap discovered how
remarkable the floodplain soil wasand decided to move his business to an
abandoned pig slaughterhouse across the road from the new McNeil power
station.
“I’d asked myself: Could we be a big catalyst for food being grown in
farms in Burlington for Burlington?” recalls Raap, whose company began
testing various crops outside their new digs. “There was no demand for
local food then—you could grow it but you couldn’t sell it—so the
question was how could you create a hub that could take this abused land
and put it in production to educate and support the next generation of
farmers while simultaneously building a market place?” That, he told
Sanders’s officials, required a partnership with the city. “We gave
Bernie three choices: use waste heat from McNeil to heat 100 acres of
greenhouses; start a market garden and see if it makes sense
financially; or help us make 100,000 tons of compost to restore
fertilityto the valley,” he recalls. “Bernie chose the third one and
gave us a $7,000 loan.” Tens of thousands of tons of yard and leaf waste
started flowing to Intervale fields instead of the landfill.
Two decades on, the non-profit Raap set up presides over 350 acres of
reclaimed agricultural land that’s home to a dozen farms, from
established growers to novice farmers taking advantage of low-rent farm
“incubator” land. There’s the community gardens, a 600-member
community-supported agriculture operation (the kind where you buy shares
and get weekly boxes of harvested food in exchange), a nursery for
growing riverfront buffer trees, and the Intervale Food Hub, where b
oxes are loaded for delivery to people at their place of work or to 150
families identified by social service agencies as being in need.
Together they produce $1.3 million in foodstuffs for the Burlington
market annually and provide 30,000 pounds of fresh food to families in
need. “If we’re going to make the world a better place, if you can get
food right, then you can get the environment and economic development
and human health right,” says executive director Travis Marcotte, who
grew up on a dairy farm a few miles south of the city. “Burlington would
be very different if we hadn’t had this here, creating opportunity and
familiarity with sustainable agriculture.”
Sanders stepped down in 1989 to run for Congress, and voters replaced
him with the development office’s head, Peter Clavelle. A native and
former city manager of the neighboring mill-town of Winooski, Clavelle’s
administration would push the sustainability drive to a new level. In
his first term the city instituted mandatory recycling, fought off big
box stores at a proposed mall, and got an $11.2-million bond passed to
pay for insulation and other energy efficiency improvements in homes,
businesses and public buildings. This initiative prevented the need to
buy power from Hydro Quebec, whose dams were controversial because they
flooded tribal lands in Quebec’s far north, all with public support.
“The beautiful thing is that we do as a general rule see the common good
as a fundamental component of life here,” observes Jennifer Green, the
city’s sustainability coordinator. “We all have to give a little for
everybody to get some.”
But Clavelle got ahead of the electorate on another front—extending
benefits to the domestic partners of city employees—and it cost him.
“Today it’s hard to imagine it was an issue, but in 1993 it was,” he
recalls. Conservatives turned out to vote in huge numbers; Clavelle’s
coalition complacently stayed home. “So I lost an election and at the
time I said, ‘I’m done with politics, I’m done with Burlington.’ I
packed up my family, and we moved away for a voter-inspired sabbatical,”
he says. They ended up on Grenada, the Caribbean island nation with a
comparable surface area and population to metropolitan Burlington. “When
you’re on an island, you really see what practices are sustainable and
what practices aren’t,” he says, recalling ships unloading frozen
chicken and orange juice while island chickens had little access to the
market and citrus fruit rotted in the groves. “That was a
transformational moment for me.”
He returned to Burlington, got re-elected in 1995, and oversaw the
process of developing the Legacy Plan, a citizen-sourced vision for how
Burlington could become a sustainable community. “What is sustainable
development? Is it the most overused buzzword of the 1990s or is it the
most important concept for the survival of our planet and our
communities,” he says. “I decided a long time ago that its both, and
that we need to go beyond the branding and rhetoric and create actual
examples that will resonate and make a difference in people’s lives.”
The plan, completed in 2000, created the guiding vision that has been
followed since: integrating local business development and farm-to-table
efforts, putting New Urbanist solutions ahead of sprawl and prioritizing
multi-modal transport over highways. The plan also had a major
environmental component that emphasized recycling, energy conservation
and investment in non-polluting transportation and renewable power.
“This was the visionary document,” says Green, who was hired to
implement it. “It got the big city departments all focused on taking
this on.”
And without even quite noticing itself, the city built its way toward a
sustainability milestone that would turn heads worldwide.
***
Jon Clark has one of the more unusual offices in town. The exterior door
is a gasketed bulkhead, the windows are the sort you’d find at a city
aquarium and it’s underwater for large periods of the spring, submerged
by the roaring river falling over the dam barrier outside. Here, at
computer terminals nestled above the dam’s turbines, but two stories
beneath the dam pond, Clark has monitored and maintained the
7.5-megawatt Winooski One hydroelectric plant since it was constructed
in 1994. Visitors clamber down a long flight of metal stairs and through
the foyer to the humming generator hall to reach the room, , where Clark
is often the only person on the scene. These days he can keep atop of
the station’s vitals with a smart phone app, and there’s a guy who
covers for him two nights a week and every other weekend. “I probably
spend more time here then I do at home, so I treat it as such,” Clark
says. “I try to keep it as tidy as possible.”
Tidy it is, and also financially effective. Built by private developers
on Burlington-owned land in neighboring Winooski, the city exercised a
onetime option to buy the facility in 2014 via a $12-million
voter-approved bond. The plant was, in a sense, free. The bond payments
were about the same as the cost of the power the Burlington Electric
Department would otherwise have had to purchase elsewhere. The cost of
the power was now insulated from the fluctuations in oil and gas
markets, prompting the Moody’s credit agency to raise the utility’s
credit rating. And it made the city the first in the nation to obtain
all of its power from renewable sources, a distinction that went almost
unnoticed at the time, relegated to the third paragraph of the
Burlington Free Press’s story on the city finalizing the dam’s purchase.
“This was the product of a long term vision and a sequence of mayors,”
says Ricketts at the Gund Institute. “It kind of snuck up on us.”
Indeed, because Burlington owns its own utility with its own citywide
grid, the city could theoretically close its three connections with the
wider world and generate all of its power combining McNeil, Winooski
One, wind turbines and solar panels. This led a visiting writer for
Orion magazine to declare this was where she would move to wait out a
zombie apocalypse. This would only be an apocalyptic measure, as half of
McNeil’s power is actually owned by the plant’s minority owners.
Burlington makes up for this by buying hydro power from further afield,
but it is still able to operate a renewable grid without asking rate
payers to pay extra for it. “The conventional wisdom is that you have to
pay more for renewables, but it’s not true,” says Burlington Electric’s
general manager, Neale Lunderville. “We haven’t raised rates in eight
years.”
One of the reasons rates are low is that the city and its co-owners
eight years ago invested $11.5 million in a state-of-the-art air
scrubber that qualified the plant to earn the highest value renewable
energy credits. They’re able to sell those to out-of-state utilities
(who need to meet their standards but lack clean generating stations of
their own) and then—to meet their own renewable standards—buy back
cheaper credits to cover the power. The net profit—$6 to $9 million a
year—is used to offset the rates Burlington Electric charges customers.
“It’s a terrific model for cities across the country,” says Sandra
Levine, senor attorney at the Conservation Law Foundation’s Montpelier
office. “With the challenges of climate change, we should be looking to
our electricity sector to move away from fossil fuels and this is a good
way to do it.”
Current mayor Miro Weinberger, a Democrat elected in 2012, was inspired
by the international attention Burlington has received since achieving
the renewable energy milestone. “It’s really pushed us to think hard and
big about where we go from here,” he says. “That’s when we started
looking at what net zero would look like.”
A city is considered net zero when it generates as much energy as it
consumes, not just in the form of electricity, but heat and
transportation as well. Achieving such a state, Weinberger argues, would
further insulate Burlington from the volatility of fossil fuel markets,
saving money and luring more entrepreneurs and businesses with brands
linked to sustainability, such as Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, green
cleaning products maker Seventh Generation and climate change-conscious
Burton Snowboards. “We’ve got our own goals around eliminating our
carbon footprint completely, and being based in a city where that’s
easily possible is very important to us,” says Joey Bergstein, general
manager at Seventh Generation, which started in the early 1980s as an
off-shoot of Gardener’s Supply. “Our history here is very much driven by
the fact that the city and the state of Vermont are so aligned with our
values.”
Proposals to use the waste steam from the McNeil plant to heat buildings
and businesses have been kicking around for a quarter century, but ran
against an economic obstacle. Building the distribution system is a big
upfront cost, but attracting users from existing homes and buildings is
a slow undertaking. What was needed was the equivalent of an anchor
store at a mall, a big new user ready to buy lots of heat from day one,
preferably downtown so that additional users could be easily patched in
as their existing boilers reached replacement age. Now it looks like
that’s happening. On November 9, city voters approved a 14-story,
multi-use development that will replace a dying indoor mall, that now
cuts off several central streets, with a sidewalk-friendly restaurants
and retail and market and affordable apartments.
At the city-owned airport, they’ve reduced demand for heat and
electricity by replacing lighting and air conditioning systems and
properly insulating the terminal’s roof. There’s a 500-kilowatt solar
array that’s been providing enough power to supply 60 homesand a rain
garden on the roof of the parking garage. (A 10-megawatt wind farm from
which the city draws power can be seen on a nearby ridge.) “We’re a
small airport and we don’t have a lot of money, but what we try to do is
to introduce a greener way whenever we change a bulb, replace a window,
or repair our roof in a way that gives us a greater energy savings and
return on our investment over time,” says city aviation director Gene
Richards, who cut electricity usage at the airport by a fifth in three
years. Popular local restaurants have taken over the concessions in the
terminal as part of the buy local effort. “We’re tearing down the walls
in this community to leverage our assets and make it work.”
Achieving net zero in transportation is thornier than heating and power
because there are few big users to focus on and only a handful of users
have invested in all-electric vehicles. “There’s the range anxiety with
electric vehicles—can I go far enough?—so having enough well-placed
charging stations is really helpful,” says Lunderville of Burlington
Electric, which has deployed 10 multiple-outlet charging stations at
strategic locations around the city—parking garages, city hall, the
co-op grocery store and the University of Vermont campus—and plans to
add five to six annually. They’re looking at a pilot project for city
buses, while Mayor Weinberger’s office just released a detailed plan for
greatly expanding the bike path network with protected lanes. “The stats
show the existence of protected lanes increases usage by 300 to 500
percent because there are a whole lot of people who don’t feel safe
co-mingled with vehicles,” says Weinberger, who was inspired by a biking
weekend in Montreal, which has such a system. “Seeing what they’ve done
convinced me of the value of a more systematic approach.”
Burlington Electric is preparing for a challenge of its own: Its grid is
expected to shift from a “hub-and-spoke” system of power plants and
consumers to a distributed network with thousands of tiny producers and
storage sites. “The changes are being driven by the customers, who
didn’t use to have the option to do their own solar panels or start
storing their energy with a Tesla battery pack”—a home battery system
that allows users to bank electricity, says Lunderville. He envisions
creating a system by which the utility could pay customers to store
energy for the network at times when they don’t need it banked
themselves. To do that requires the grid to collect and process a lot
more data to coordinate the cacophony of demands, supplies and storage
opportunities. “Suddenly we need to know a lot more about how power is
being generated and used than you do today.”
The industry expects these changes everywhere, but Burlington is likely
to see them early—because of its green ethos and because Vermont offers
a variety of incentives for customers to invest in solar. But it’s also
the perfect sandbox—a small city that owns its own grid, power
generation and public fiber-optic data network— and the utility is ready
to pioneer the development of the technology and policies to make it all
work. “Having the fiber optics in place is really critical to moving
toward this bi-directional energy grid,” says energy consultant
Gabrielle Stebbins, who previously headed the state’s renewable energy
industry association. “We’re a small state and city, so we’re not
driving the bus. But the little motor car we’re driving can tell which
roads are possible and feasible.”
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