Last month, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) unveiled their list of America’s “2010 Smarter Cities”. In the end, 22 US cities made the cut, based on their “investment in green power, energy efficiency measures, and conservation.” The impetus behind the Smart Cities list was to illustrate how—even during tough economic times—cities around the country have found a way to invest in, and encourage, energy efficiency.
In the NRDC announcement of the list, research project director Paul McRandle explained that the NRDC’s Smarter City team hopes eventually to analyze a dozen or so “sustainability” factors to determine which urban regions are leading the charge towards best practices, innovative projects, and future-focused legislation. The first logical step, according to Randle, was to focus on energy.
“We wanted to start with energy, given the links between our energy production and consumption patterns, and harm to the health and environment.
The list criteria included an assessment of the following:
• The City’s aggregate kilowatt-hour consumption
• The City’s top three fuel sources
• The existence of a greenhouse gas inventory
• The prevalence of energy efficiency programs (including targets for reduced consumption)
• Processes to measure energy conservation
Choosing the 22 cities involved consultations with experts in the field, including professionals within the NRDC and knowledgeable third parties.
The research methodology employed by the smart cities team followed the following trajectory:
• Outreach to Cities: A database of all US municipalities with populations larger than 50,000 was created and then broken down into smaller categories, with 655 cities eventually invited to participate in the study by filling out a survey.
• Identifying High Performance Cities: External data was collected and compared to the 2008 smart cities list, and combined with tools provided by Project Vulcan; the EPA’s Green Power Communities; the Rappaport Institute report, “The Greenness of Cities”; and the Brookings Institute Report, “Shrinking The Carbon Footprint of Metropolitan America”.
• Identifying Top Performers: Determined using survey data, electricity consumption per capita, EPA-defined green power, distributed generation policies, state legislated energy reduction, greenhouse gas inventory, city-level targets and policies for reduced energy consumption, conservation initiatives, energy services, tracking progress, and innovation.
For our purposes, it’s the distributed energy policies and demand reduction aspects of the list that are the most relevant and interesting. In order to land a top 22 spot, cities had to demonstrate “progress in encouraging innovative decentralized power generation strategies through policy tools. Cities provided a wide variety of responses, ranging from landfill gas collection to solar-powered parking meter pilot projects. City policies were totaled, and that total number was used to establish the threshold for this category.” Energy use reduction included both state legislation—defined as “state level policies [that] mandate reduced energy consumption” and city-level standards for energy consumption reduction. Cities on the list also successfully employed conservation incentives and meet the EPA definition of “Green power” that includes a percentage of power generated using solar, wind, geothermal, biogas, biomass, and small hydro capability.
So what do you think? Are there lessons to be learned from the cities that made the list, or is it just more backslapping self-congratulation? Does the fact that the cities were self-selecting (and, therefore, choosing to participate in the survey) effect the validity of the final report? And will this list encourage other cities to follow in the “winners” footsteps?