Voices of 100%: Des Moines Commits to Clean Electricity Around the Clock — Episode 142 of Local Energy Rules

So I’d only been on the council for six months when we had a major, and it probably went under the radar, major climate event. We had flash floods on June 30th, 2018. We got the amount of rain that you typically get in the wettest month and a half of the year, we got that amount of rain in about six hours. And so we saw floods in places that you hadn’t seen water before, and we saw the consequences, the impact on people’s lives. And I’d love to say that that’s the only severe weather event that has happened in my short time here on council, but it’s not. Last summer, we had the Derecho with severe winds that took out a significant number of our trees. We had parts of our community that were without power for almost a week. And then this summer, we’re seeing the convergence of climate change and our water quality problems in the state. We’re having a severe drought that’s threatening our water supply at the same time. We’re dealing with ongoing water quality issues that that threaten other sources. And so in my short time on council, we’ve seen the impact of climate change in lots of different ways. And so that’s just provided additional urgency to apply, but I already knew was a problem to get solutions in place.

Could either one of you explain kind of what the city has committed to and by what date, so we can kind of place that in the constellation of the other cities that are also trying to act urgently around climate and energy?

And, you know, from there we really kind of pushed a lot. We started meeting with council members, having coffees with council members, meeting with the mayor. The mayor was in favor of it. So they voted to create our task force officially we’re officially recognized, but we were not, we didn’t have to do the application and apply, but we were officially recognized and kind of went through a process of continuing to push the city to do a number of different things. At the time this first started happening, we didn’t really have the votes on the council, but then that fall of 2016, I think it was in 2016 you were first elected. Is that correct, Josh?

So we went from basically where we thought we had enough votes, but we had two that were probably not going to vote in favor of it to getting a unanimous vote in favor of this resolution. And prior to that, there were several other things that Josh was also involved in – an energy and water benchmarking resolution that was passed or ordinance that was passed. We were able, our sustainability committee was pushed for and got the city to hire its first full-time sustainability manager and other things like that, setting goals. They’re now in the process of hiring a consulting firm to start the process of a climate action plan. So we’ve been kind of there as the grassroots push behind Josh’s efforts on the council.

The city has also started doing more from a renewable energy perspective on its own. So it’s done benchmarking is part of pushing the private sector to do benchmarking. We’ve done our own benchmarking. We’re implementing energy efficiency. We’re also adding distributed solar in more buildings. So now one of the things we’ve changed if we were building a new building, which we’ve got a couple that we’ve built in recent years, we added a new fire station. There’s solar on that building. We’re building what we’re calling municipal services center too, which is we hadn’t for almost 50 years replaced the buildings where our vehicles are stored. We’re adding solar there. And we’re even looking at a, a larger array in a neighboring field or plot of land that the city owns because that’s also going to help as the city looks to transition to electric vehicles, we’ll be providing our own renewable energy for some of those electric vehicles, but it goes beyond that. We’re also thinking now for the first time and requiring, we provide economic development incentives, that any entity that’s getting those incentives, be energy efficiency standards and go above and beyond our code and build sustainably for the future. So we’re starting to take a lot of different steps. There’s a lot more that the city needs to do, but we’ve been incorporating that enterprise wide. And I think it’s a big change from the way the city operated even four years ago.

And so I have confidence that we can innovate and that we can continue to push forward, but we’re going to have to be pushing the utility. They don’t necessarily want to do it on their own, but we also know that they’re capable of doing it. They’ve figured out how to do it with wind. We’ve got tremendous opportunity. We’re starting to see solar added as a compliment to wind. We’re starting to see additional talk of battery storage. And then you have to think about the other range of things from a distributed perspective, the energy efficiency, the demand response. What do we do all of a sudden, as we get more electric vehicles, and that provides an even greater opportunity with vehicle to grid technology and thinking about all of those pieces? So it’s all coming together, but we’re going to need to keep pushing our utility to be a partner in all of this. And while we don’t control Mid-American, we do have connections to them. I mean, we do have a franchise agreement and I expect this to be at least a part of the discussion as our franchise agreement is up for renewal next year. And I think there will continue to be conversations with MidAmerican and there will continue to be tensions with MidAmerican, but we recognize the best path forward is to have the cooperation of the utility, but there are also solutions that we can pursue outside of that too.

But we’re also looking at on many ways now the work we’ve been doing in Des Moines, we’ve been using that as a model in some of the other communities, especially in the greater Metro area. So we now have both Urbandale and Johnston who’ve been looking at what’s happened here in Des Moines and are starting to move that direction as well. Both Urbandale and Johnston are starting on their first greenhouse gas emissions inventories that they haven’t done before the Polk county, just, we were able to get them to pass a climate resolution two weeks ago. And part of that, they’re going to be doing an energy audit into greenhouse gas emissions inventory, and kind of putting together some kind of a document to bring back to the supervisors with the goal of hiring a sustainability manager for the county as well. So we’re definitely looking at other areas to bring in ideas. And I think inclusive financing right now is one of the biggest ones, but we’re also using what Des Moines has done as an example now for around the state.

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The other thing is use the experience that other communities have had there often are going to be people who are willing to go and talk. And we did some of that, the nonprofit partners, that advocacy partners organized a panel where, where they had different pieces of what other communities were doing from a sustainability perspective, it wasn’t necessarily the 24/7 one hundred percent, but it was all things that would need to be part of our broader package of solutions and getting that in front of policymakers so that they understood the range of things that were possible is a really helpful piece of this. So use what others have done as an education piece.

And then lastly, don’t forget about the jobs piece of this. Energy efficiency jobs, or local jobs, but I can tell the story just in my little slice of Des Moines, I only represent a ward that’s a quarter of the city, but I’ve had just in my four years here, two companies make significant expansions or relocate headquarters. One is Waldinger company and they have an entire energy services division that the work they do is they help other businesses implement energy efficiency and manage their energy better. Those jobs are exactly the type of jobs that policies like this are designed to help create. And then there’s another company [inaudible] product. They make wind turbine components. They are part of the clean energy economy. So even if those wind turbines are not in Des Moines proper, we have people in my district working on building components for those turbines that are part of the supply chain, because we are driving additional, renewable energy with our policy. We’re also creating local jobs. And that’s an important piece of the story that it’s floating around out there. But we don’t always take advantage of telling that I’ll give another just small example because I happened to be up for reelection. So I’m knocking a lot of doors. And the other weekend I was out knocking doors and there was a proud union sign on the door and which is always, uh, a nice conversation leading. And so I was asking this person what he did, uh, what union he was a part of and what, what type of projects he built. And he was an operating engineer and he’s retired now, but the last few years of his career, he was operating cranes building wind turbines, lifts in Des Moines. Those turbines are all over the state, but he was helping build that. And we know that people go to work and you’re building our economy by implementing these policies too. And we need to tell that piece of the story as well.