The city is putting $300,000 into getting all of its electricity from renewable sources – a move the City Council supported unanimously Monday. It was a repeat of the unanimous support for the same concept more than four years ago, councillor Dennis Carlone noted with election-season vigor.
“We were told then a consultant was going to be hired. I’m glad we’re doing this, [but] I don’t know why $300,000 couldn’t have been spent earlier. Everything seems to take five years,” Carlone told City Manager Louis A. DePasquale.
He was referring to an order he filed that appears on the Feb. 2, 2015, council agenda asking then city manager Richard C. Rossi and staff to explore “entering into an agreement to obtain up to 100 percent renewable power for all municipal electricity needs.” His Oct. 7 order nudging the office for a response was because “there has been no response in over four years.”
Nor will the free cash approved for transfer bring results speedily enough to satisfy the environmentally minded on the council, who noted that such green issues are listed annually among the council’s goals. The $300,000 covers a year of consulting work that the City Manager’s Office expects to lead toward next steps, which will likely demand more consultant support.
“News to me”
Staff from city departments including community development, public works, finance, law and purchasing have been meeting regularly to talk because “to procure 100 percent renewable electricity supply is quite complicated,” councillors were told by Ellen Katz, fiscal director for the city’s Department of Public Works. For instance, it’s more expensive to buy renewable energy locally and “if we go outside of the New England electric grid, we might be able to get more bang for our buck.”
The city has also been “working closely” with other major property owners in the city that are making progress on renewable energy, Katz said, but if Cambridge becomes part of a nonmunicipal coalition, that would need special legislation for which “there may not be a clear pathway in state law.”
“We have really thought this through carefully and done a lot of research and got to the point where we feel like we’re asking the right questions now,” Katz said.
Still, under questioning from vice mayor Jan Devereux, it became clear from Katz’s testimony that the city hasn’t checked in with either the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, a regional agency, or with other Massachusetts cities.
Carlone issued another in a long, occasional series of suggestions from councillors to city staff that progress reports would be helpful, even annual ones. “If all this work has been going on, it’s news to me,” Carlone said.
Faster than a year, maybe
It struck councillor Quinton Zondervan that a potential four years and eight months of work had brought the city only to the point of hiring a consultant who would work for a year to then “move toward” bidding and procurement.
“Is there any possibility that it could happen sooner?” Zondervan asked of full renewable electricity procurement.
“Absolutely,” Katz said.
The city has discussed a target year of 2023 or 2026 for going 100 percent renewable on electricity and believed a consultant could advise more specifically, Katz said. Meanwhile, six U.S. cities already get 100 percent of all their energy from renewable sources, not just electricity, Zondervan told her.
That was not DePasquale’s understanding – at least within Massachusetts.
“There is no city doing this. We are far ahead of any municipality that we know of in the state,” DePasquale said. “Believe me, we’ve got some really strong experts in the city who eat, sleep and drink this, but this is really not our area … We are in truly uncharted waters, so we have to go slow, in sometimes slow is too slow. I understand that. But this is not something that we’re familiar with.”
“I don’t want to get into what was promised three and a half years ago,” DePasquale said, referring to the order from four and a half years ago. “I apologize that it took too long. It was recently brought to my attention is something we needed to get done.”
This post was updated Nov. 3, 2019, to remove a reference to a Canadian energy supplier.
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Dear Cambridge Day:
I am writing to correct a significant error in your Oct. 30 story “More than 4.5 years after order, city is ready to get expert advice on renewable electricity. Your story incorrectly told readers that the 2015 Policy Order “asked specifically for a look at getting the energy from TransCanada, which is, as the name suggests, based in Canada.” Precisely the opposite is true; the Policy Order specially asked the city of Cambridge to leave TransCanada as the source of its municipal energy.
Here I quote from the 2015 Policy Order submitted by Councillor Dennis Carlone:
IN CITY COUNCIL
February 9, 2015
COUNCILLOR CARLONE
WHEREAS: The City of Cambridge obtains electricity for municipal operations through a contract with TransCanada Corporation; and
WHEREAS: TransCanada is the driving force behind Keystone XL, a proposal to create a 1,179-mile pipeline to deliver tar sands oil from to the United States; and
WHEREAS: Jim Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has stated that the Keystone XL pipeline would mean “game over” for the environment, because exploitation of tar sands oil would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts; and
WHEREAS:
It has come to the attention of the City Council that our contract with TransCanada is set to expire at the end of the year; now therefore be it
ORDERED: That the City Manager be and hereby is requested not to enter into any future contracts to obtain electricity from TransCanada; and be it further
ORDERED:
That the City Manager be and hereby is requested to investigate the possibility of entering into an agreement to obtain up to 100% renewable power for all municipal electricity needs; and be it further
ORDERED:
That the City Manager be and hereby is requested to report back to the City Council on this matter.
The assertion in the Cambridge Day story about the 2015 policy order asking the City to seek renewable energy from TransCanada is extremely misleading. Just the opposite message was communicated by Councillor Carlone in his February 2015 Policy Order, which the City Council passed with the intention of having the City Manager and city staff start the process of switching all municipal buildings in Cambridge to 100% renewable energy. At this time, it was believed that an achievable goal would be for this switch to occur by 2018.
The urgency posed by scientific findings of the increasing speed at which climate change is occurring ought to find our City Manager and staff redoubling efforts to make this switch happen. Instead, we discover – under questioning by several City Council members ¬– that little to no progress has been made since the original policy order was passed. To excuse the lack of progress made on a matter of this urgent nature by saying that this is “complicated” would be humorous if the consequences of cities like oursdelaying action weren’t potentially so dire. What will be complicated is how this city will need to respond to the catastrophic events that will happen in our city if such measures are not taken promptly. We do not have until the mid-2020s for our municipal buildings to be powered by 100% renewable energy.
Mothers Out Front stood solidly behind Councillor Carlone’s original Policy Order. It was our mistake to assume that due diligence was applied by the city to achieve what this Policy Order requested the city of do. We are delighted that Councillor Carlone put through his recent Policy Order, and we will assure the City Manager that in moving our city buildings to 100% renewable energy we are not in “uncharted waters.” Several U.S. cities are already using 100% renewable energy to power their ENTIRE cities. To borrow a cliché, this is not “rocket science,” and even if it were, Cambridge minds ought to be able to make this transition to renewable energy happen.
Melissa Ludtke
On behalf of Mothers Out Front, Cambridge