Palo Alto, Calif., learns lesson reducing carbon emissions

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About Cohn's Corner Veteran energy journalist Lisa Cohn offers her insight and commentary on the energy industry.

When the city of Palo Alto, Calif., became one of a growing number of cities to approve a carbon reduction policy, officials learned the hard way what not to do.

Prompted by input from residents and possible federal carbon legislation, the city committed to a 5% reduction in carbon emissions by 2009 and a 15% reduction by 2020, says Don Bray, president of New York-based AltaTerra Research Network, which recently completed a case study on the city's efforts.

Because Palo Alto, which has 60,000 residents, operates its own utility, fiber-optic, water and wastewater systems, the city's first challenge was figuring out how to ensure each of these departments contributed to reducing energy and other resource use.

"You need to bring resource use down to the level of departments and have them step up and be responsible for specific reductions in their areas," says Bray. "Different departments can address the resource use most relevant to them." For example, the police department is a big gasoline consumer, so it needed to be responsible for monitoring and setting its own gasoline reduction targets. The parks department, on the other hand, needed to keep track of its water use.

The departments committed to reducing resource use, but then realized it's one thing to make a commitment, it's another thing to make it happen.

Initially, city officials thought the departments could track and reduce resource consumption by manually entering data in spreadsheets. But that became a nightmare. Each department used its own spreadsheet and its own method of calculating energy and resource savings.

"It became unworkable. The city realized it needed a centralized capability," says Bray.

Part of the solution was carbon management software from Hara Software Inc., an automated system that tracks greenhouse gas emissions — based on energy, water and other resource use — at both the detailed departmental level and the citywide level. Such systems — part of a growing new trend in software — can monitor how well the city and its departments are meeting their carbon savings goals and can project future savings.

"As simple as it sounds, many organizations do not have this capability — which is fundamental to making the aspirational goal of 'conservation' measurable, actionable and profitable," Bray says.

With the help of this system, the city expects to hit its 5% carbon emissions reduction goal by this year, realizing $300,000 to $600,000 in resource cost savings, says Bray.

But carbon management isn't just about using software to track and measure carbon emission savings, the city learned. It's also about motivating people.

For cities and businesses interested in implementing their own carbon management programs, it's critical to begin with a commitment from the organization and its individual departments, says Bray.

In addition, organizations should employ some "friendly competition" among departments, rewards for meeting goals, a sense of humor and some creativity, he says.

For example, Palo Alto's canine unit needs to ensure the dogs in its cars aren't exposed to too much heat during the summer, which generally means leaving the engines running to keep the canines cool. After some investigation into solving this problem, the unit discovered a ventilation system that operates when the car is off, allowing for comfortable canines and reduced gasoline consumption.

Most of all, Bray says, make sure employees reap some enjoyment from a process that might otherwise feel heavy with ho-hum data about kilowatt-hours, therms, gallons and carbon dioxide.

"To hear the city tell the story, you have to keep it fun," Bray says.