The Lowell Sustainability Council made a presentation to the City Council at the March 22, 2022, City Council meeting. In that week’s newsletter I wrote that because so much else had happened at that meeting, I would revisit the Sustainability Council’s presentation at a future date. With no City Council meeting this week and with Earth Day falling on Friday (April 22), now seems like a good time to return to the Sustainability Council presentation.
The Lowell Sustainability Council was created by city ordinance on April 5, 2016. It consists of up to ten members who are appointed by the City Manager and confirmed by the City Council. Terms are two years long. Members must live in Lowell or be affiliated with a Lowell-based business. (The Sustainability Council grew out of the Green Building Commission which was established almost a decade earlier).
According to the ordinance, the mission of the Sustainability Council is to “promote and advocate for ‘green’ design, construction, and development practices in the City of Lowell, through research, identification and implementation of policies, programs and education that will increase the sustainability and reduce the environmental impacts of building and other development activity.”
The ordinance also lists the following “guiding principles” of the Sustainability Council:
1. To target carbon emissions, waste reduction, recycling, building materials and techniques, energy efficiency, air quality, site and building design, etc.;
2. To identify successful models and practices from other communities;
3. To propose programs and policies to the Lowell City Council and City Administration;
4. To work with UMass, MCC and Lowell Public Schools to develop education and outreach programs;
5. To identify opportunities for funding public and private green building and energy conservation programs.
6. To raise and direct funds to support the projects and priorities of the Sustainability Council, and accept money, gifts and services for these purposes.
The Lowell Sustainability Council usually meets monthly. Its agendas and meeting minutes are online. The Sustainability Council’s meetings are not televised but the City Council recently requested the City Manager to find a way to televise them in the future.
The March 22, 2022, City Council meeting video is available on demand at the Lowell Telecommunications Corp (LTC) website. The Sustainability Council’s presentation begins at the one hour, 17 minute mark of the video. There was a PowerPoint presentation displayed. The slides were mostly generic so I’ve not captured them but the comments made by Sustainability Council members were important. I just re-watched the video and made a rough transcript of what they said. Here it is:
Jay Mason, the chair of the Sustainability Council, spoke first. He said eight of the nine members were present (the ninth had to work).
The mission of the Sustainability Council is to propose sustainable policies and encourage innovative solutions. The Council has existed for 13 years. It has made recommendations, held summits, done outreach to inform the public. Unprecedented challenges. Climate change harm is more extensive than predicted. November and December flooding in Pawtucketville and Centralville and last summer’s heat wave adversely affected Lowell residents.
Highlight urgent opportunities regarding energy efficiency and transportation.
Lowell’s poverty rate is nearly twice that of the Commonwealth. More than half of Lowell residents are renters. As the state shifts to sustainable energy, Lowell’s already disadvantaged residents face greater challenges as wealthier towns embrace electrification which causes the cost of other energy sources to increase. Failing to do anything will be unjust.
The Sustainability Council asks the City Council to make improving energy efficiency a priority. For every dollar a resident of Lowell has invested in Mass Save, the city has gotten back in return less than 59 cents while places like Andover have gotten more than $1.80 for every dollar invested.
The transportation sector is the leading emitter of greenhouse gas emissions. In Massachusetts, it’s more than 40 percent. It’s also the largest contributor to air pollution. Federal and state funding opportunities are becoming increasingly available to a city like Lowell.
The Sustainability Council encouraged City Council action in these four areas:
Invest in public transport including electric buses.
Enhance pedestrian and bike mobility in the city
Electrify city fleets and where possible due to contracts, school buses.
Add charging infrastructure in convenient and visible areas
We can’t rely on state or feds to protect us from climate change. Lowell must act to protect its own future. In 2017, this city made a unanimous commitment to rely on 100 percent clean energy by 2035. While the city has made some progress, we will have to redouble our efforts to meet that goal.
That last thing mentioned was the City of Lowell Road to 100% Renewable Energy which was a non-binding resolution passed by the City Council with a goal of using 100 percent clean and renewable energy in Lowell by 2035. I found a January 17, 2019, motion response updating the City Council on the progress of this plan. Here are some of the efforts highlighted in that document that will help the city on the “Road to 100%: effort:
Municipal solar projects – these directly offset on-site energy usage, for instance, solar panels on top of a school provide electricity used by the school.
Energy efficiency upgrades – installing LED lights, more efficient heating and hot water systems, automated thermostats, improved insulation, among other things.
Community choice aggregation – In 2014, the City Council adopted a Community Choice Power Supply Program. This was renewed by the City Council in 2019. A “community choice aggregation” program allows the city to procure power on behalf of residents and businesses from an alternative supplier while still receiving transmission and distribution service from the existing utility provider.
Municipal fleet replacement – replace gasoline/diesel powered vehicles with electric models where feasible and develop strategies to reduce the fuel usage of remaining non-electric vehicles.
Installing public electric vehicle charging stations – Providing ample electric vehicle charging stations will encourage people to shift to electric vehicles.
Promoting and participating in community solar projects – A Community Shared Solar (CSS) project allows one entity to host a solar system on its property with the system paid for and used by multiple other entities.
Prioritizing public transportation – promote the use of Lowell Regional Transit Authority and also make it easier for residents to use bicycles or walking as a means of transportation.
Like so many other formal plans commissioned by city government, this one looks good on paper but it seems that its goals often become secondary to other issues that seem more urgent. In some ways, that’s understandable. I experienced something like that myself last summer when my home heating system, an older natural gas fueled forced hot water system, needed replacement.
I knew that a heat pump was the environmentally-preferred method of heating and cooling a home but I didn’t know much about heat pumps so I did some research in my usual manner, by watching some videos on YouTube. I found an 8 minute video from the This Old House television show that explained how heat pumps work. Prior to watching this video I would have said that I’d never knowingly been in a house that had a heat pump. But it turns out I have, because a heat pump is essentially an air conditioner.
The way the guy explained it, an air conditioner places the refrigerant gas under considerable pressure. As the gas is pressurized, it becomes a liquid and it cools down a lot. That cool liquid flows through tubes inside a warm house. A law of thermodynamics is that hot goes to cold so the warm air in the house is drawn to the cool refrigerant which causes the refrigerant to warm and the interior of the house to cool. The warm refrigerant is circulated to the outside of the house where the heat bleeds away and the refrigerant is once again compressed and cooled and circulated back into the house in a continuous cycle. I kind of get it, but even if I don’t fully understand how air conditioners work, I know they do work because I’ve experienced air conditioning for most of my life.
But what about heating a house with a heat pump? The This Old House guy said the air conditioning process is reversed. In the winter, the compressed, cooled refrigerant circulates through the tubes outside the house where the refrigerant can drop to a temperature of -30 degrees (that’s thirty degrees below zero). As long as the outside temperature is warmer than that, the higher temperature of the outside air gets drawn to the lower temperature of the refrigerant (“heat goes to cold”) which warms the refrigerant. Once it’s warmed to a high enough temperature, the refrigerant is circulated through the house where it releases its heat and warms the house. In theory, at least, if the air temperature outside the house is just zero degrees, the heat pump can capture heat from it as long as the refrigerant gas is cooled to a temperature lower than that.
I confess to being skeptical about this. Intellectually, I understand how it’s supposed to work, but since I’ve never seen or experienced a heat pump warming a building in the winter, I don’t have any experience with it. I don’t mind having a slight chill in the air inside the house, but I’ve lived in New England all my life and know what zero degrees feels like. I also know how a temperature extreme like that can tax your home heating system regardless of the technology in use.
My skepticism was reinforced by the fact that the original heating system we had when we first moved into the house was all baseboard electric heat. Using that to keep the house at a habitable temperature in the winter was hugely expensive – we replaced it with the gas/forced hot water system after the first winter – so when the modern heat pump videos talk about using electric heat to supplement the heat pump in winter, it reminded me of the $700 per month winter electric bills we once had with baseboard electric heat.
So last summer I declined to install a heat pump and opted for a new natural gas boiler. It is a high efficiency model that’s the size of a small suitcase hanging on my basement wall. It also provides our hot water although it’s not a “combination boiler” which seemed to have its own challenges. In the process, I got a generous rebate from MassSave and also had a MassSave crew come into the house and do a full weatherization of the house with most of the cost paid by MassSave.
With this past winter serving as a test of the heating system, I’m not disappointed by the choice I made although I feel a bit guilty about reupping with natural gas. Maybe as heat pumps become more common, the type of “will it heat sufficiently” skepticism I felt might be dissipated which I think is a necessary precondition to broader acceptance.
As my experience choosing a home heating system shows, educating the public is a big part of sustainability. So is developing public confidence in new heating technologies. Fortunately, we in Lowell have a committed, active Sustainability Council which, along with University of Massachusetts Lowell and other educational institutions and nonprofits, can provide that much needed public education component.
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Have you seen the 2022 edition of The Lowell Review? The electronic version of the full magazine is available for browsing on my website and there’s a link there that will let you order a traditional paper copy of the book from our print-on-demand publisher, Lulu.com.
On Saturday, May 7, 2022, from 11 a.m. until 1 p.m. at lala books at 189 Market Street in Lowell, you can meet the editors of Lowell Review (Paul Marion and me) and also meet some of the contributors. We’ll have print copies available for purchase through lala books for $15 apiece for as long as the supply lasts.
We will have a (very) short speaking program at 11 a.m. but mostly we’ll just hang around and talk with anyone who shows up.
Both editions of The Lowell Review contain essays, poems, stories, criticism, opinion, and visual art from a variety of writers from the Merrimack Valley and across the world. The 2021 edition contains a section dedicated to the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2022 edition has one dedicated to Jack Kerouac’s 100th anniversary.
Our intended theme for the 2023 edition is the environment, so if that’s a topic of interest to you, please come and talk with us. We are always looking for new contributors. Typically, pieces first appear on the richardhowe.com website throughout the year and then selected items are published in the annual edition of The Lowell Review.
That 2019 report includes the savings due to various sites that the City uses for solar panels, however, when accounting for the duration of time the site has been operating and the size of each site, there is a wide variation in the energy yield from site to site. Some appear to be operating as intended, but others are yielding a much lower power output. Could this be another unaddressed maintenance issue?
Every home or residence needs to be offered a free blower door test. No matter what power source you use none of it matters if you’re house is leaky. The passive house standard is set to .6ACH50 (.6 Air Changes per Hour at 50 pascals). Most homes built before 2000 are 12 to 15ACH50. Even after weatherization most homes will only be 4 to 5ACH50. To give you an idea a leaky house with 15ACH50 with a blower sized to a 5ton compressor covering 4000 sq feet of living space will operate 9 hours out of the day to maintain a temperature. At 4ACH50 it will operate 3 hours out of the day. At .6ACH50 it will operate for 14 minutes once every 16.5 hours. Even at 4ACH50 it cost about $300 a month to heat or cool that home. If that same home was .6ACH50 it would only cost 33$ a month! Passive house standards needs to be the new weatherization target. Do that one thing and everything else follows. It’s how you make a net zero home into a net negative; so if you got solar, you’ll always produce more power then you consume.