The climate crisis will have a major impact on coastal communities such as Dartmouth. What exactly is the town doing to slow its effects?
More than most citizens may realize.
For example, 80% of the energy used to power Dartmouth’s municipal buildings, schools, and facilities comes from renewable sources. Through net metering agreements, the town purchases energy from privately owned, ground-mounted solar arrays across southeastern New England.
This is according to Dartmouth’s energy manager Kathleen Stanley. As energy manager, one of her main responsibilities is improving the efficiency of these buildings. Not only does this reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it lowers energy bills and extends the lifespan of utility systems.
During her tenure in Dartmouth, Ms. Stanley has overseen a range of projects. One of them involved converting the town’s indoor and outdoor lighting to LEDs. Another installed brand new lighting controls in the high school, Potter, DeMello, Cushman, and the town hall. Additionally, the town hall and the Council on Aging each received a pair of Level 2 EV chargers.
Every project comes with a great expense, but Dartmouth is always looking for incentives to cover the cost. The Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources designated Dartmouth as a Green Community in 2016. As a result, Dartmouth receives grants to implement energy efficiency and decarbonization projects.
Recently, the police station installed Level 3 EV chargers as a part of Chief Brian Levesque’s efforts to electrify his fleet. Level 3 chargers can charge a car in 15 to 30 minutes. This makes them much more expensive than Level 2s, which take 12 hours to charge, Ms. Stanley explained. “We have a very fortunate situation this year where we had substantial incentives available from the utilities to buy down the cost,” she said. Installing the Level 3s “was even less expensive than [installing] a Level 2 charger because we had so much incentive money available.”
However, the process isn’t always that simple. Many factors need to be taken into consideration before embarking on a project.
Decarbonizing Dartmouth’s schools “is a very complex topic,” Ms. Stanley said, where age is a continuous issue. “None of our buildings are new, so none of them were designed to work on heat pumps.” Heat pumps move the air outside of a building to the inside, where it is cooled or heated. Thus, they’re more efficient compared to boilers or heaters, which generate new heat rather than utilizing existing heat. Plus, that new heat often comes from fossil fuels.
“There are substantial changes to the [school] buildings that would need to be made in order for them to be successfully heated and cooled with heat pumps,” Ms. Stanley said. Those can include weatherizing and insulating the buildings, updating the existing electric infrastructure, and ensuring the school can stay online during an emergency power outage. On top of all that is, of course, cost.
Dartmouth has started powering certain areas of its schools with heat pumps “to help with reducing the use of fossil fuels,” Ms. Stanley said. “We continue to install a few every time we get the grant money to do it.”
Similarly, Dartmouth can’t install solar panels on their schools’s roofs because they weren’t designed to hold such a load. But, when discussing Dartmouth’s net metering agreements, Ms. Stanley noted that “just because you can’t see [renewable infrastructure] doesn’t mean our energy isn’t coming from renewable sources.”
The older the infrastructure, the more reason to replace it with sustainable alternatives. As Massachusetts aims to reach net zero by 2050, the state is adding more incentives for systems like heat pumps rather than gas fired boilers. “As things fail and age, it’s going to be in our best interest to look for ways to move towards heat pump systems,” Ms. Stanley said, especially in schools.
The easiest time to implement sustainable infrastructure is when the building is initially being constructed. There’s talk of building a new high school, but the discussions haven’t gotten to the point where HVAC is being discussed. In Ms. Stanley’s experience working with new schools (she works for four other municipalities in Massachusetts, as well as two in Rhode Island), she’s seen that they have very low energy use, regardless of whether they’re designed to be net zero or not.
“To give you an idea, a net zero school is a school that’s designed to operate at an energy use intensity (EUI) of 20,” she explained. “A brand new school that isn’t net zero, but is designed to be energy efficient, routinely operates under 40.”
“What happens is,” she continued, “the closer to net zero you get, the more expensive the building becomes. How much do you want to spend to go from 39 to 20? These are very serious discussions that you need to have, because you’re going to have to go to the taxpayers, and they’re going to have to pay for it with a tax increase.”
The town is currently working with Eversource, its electricity and natural gas utility, to identify which schools are the priority for decarbonization projects.
Although the state is attempting to reduce the economic demands of decarbonizing, “it’s not an easy problem to solve,” Ms. Stanley said. “I don’t want to color it as, ‘Oh yeah, all we have to do is just change everything to heat pumps.’ That’s very expensive. We’re going to do the best we can and see how we do and move forward as best we can.”
Despite the numerous challenges, Ms. Stanley knows the town has her back. “I think of the Dartmouth community as being sort of practical. If I can put together a project that makes sense, I’m going to get a lot of support,” she explained. “I’ve always had a tremendous amount of support in my projects here, so I count myself very fortunate. The [town] administration’s been great.”