A master plan for the energy mecca
Oakland’s high usage and massive facilities make it a prime location for sharing emission-reduction targets and modeling future demand in Pittsburgh
In the words of Megan Zeigler, Oakland is Pittsburgh’s energy mecca.
“It’s the largest energy user in the city,” said Ms. Zeigler, vice president of planning and policy at the Green Building Alliance.
For the past two years, she has been meeting with those massive energy users — the universities, the hospitals, Phipps Conservatory — in a first-of-its-kind effort to jump-start the Oakland Energy Master Plan.
Just as neighborhoods have comprehensive plans for land use and development — in fact, Oakland is going through that process right now — the city of Pittsburgh decided energy planning should have the same kind of consideration.
Too often, energy features aimed at reducing emissions or generating renewable energy are tacked on to the end of development projects, said Grant Ervin, the city’s chief resilience officer.
“When they go to develop something, they assume that the plugs and the pipes are going to be there,” Mr. Ervin said. “And when they get to the end and ask, ‘Could we make this a more sustainable decision,’ they’re often 12 to 24 months too late.”
In the spring of 2020, the city put out a call for consultants that could help craft a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase resilience, and accommodate the rapid institutional and private development in Oakland. Ms. Zeigler and the Green Building Alliance are facilitating the process.
They are finalizing a contract now and expect the first phase to launch next month.
Learning from Uptown
The decision to tackle an energy
master plan for Oakland stands on the shoulders of the work done in Uptown, where the city and other stakeholders worked to establish an eco-innovation district, with a shared district heating and cooling system.
“Uptown was the first time that we asked the question: as we’re developing a neighborhood plan, what are the energy impacts?” Mr. Ervin said.
Oakland was a natural next step. It has the city’s first district energy system, a steam distribution network that runs from the Bellefield Boiler Plant, aka “the cloud factory,” to nearby university buildings, hospitals and the Carnegie Library, among others. It is run as a cooperative, and its members are also some of the city’s loudest voices on sustainability. The University of Pittsburgh, Phipps, Carnegie Mellon University and UPMC, for example, all have sustainability plans with emission-reduction targets.
“They’re already on a shared system,” Ms. Zeigler said. “They should be brought in on a shared solution.”
Phase one involves doing a baseline study: putting together current energy use and modeling future demand with the institutional master plans in hand. That should take about eight months, Ms. Zeigler said.
The next phase will be about figuring out a strategy and setting goals. Phase three is implementation.
Some goals might require legislation. Part of the energy plan might be to lobby for certain policies to be changed. Community solar is one obvious example. Currently, it’s not possible for customers’ electricity bills to
be linked to solar array not on their property.
The plan might call for setting aside land for energy parks to facilitate the creation of microgrids.
It might require changes to the municipal code or building codes. Ms. Zeigler expects that in the near future the city will advocate to change the building code to require all new developments to be net-zero energy, which means that with renewable generation and efficiency
improvements, they would consume no more energy than they produce.
“The intention is really to start pushing for higher quality development now,” she said.
The stakeholder group that she has been meeting with monthly has kicked around some ideas.
“There has been talk of how can we use the rivers. Do we use that for the cooling towers or use that for energy source? How much
geothermal is an option?”
They discussed how to incorporate renewable energy and what that means for energy storage needs.
“At this point we have not been prescriptive about what the solution will be,” Ms. Zeigler said. “Technology is changing all the time. We’re trying to be very agnostic how to get to net zero, but the goal is net zero.”