Moscow City Council and the community partner to find ways to deal with climate change

A look at how the Moscow community and city government partner up to find local solutions to climate change

Steam Plant at Univeristy of Idaho. Daniel Ramirez | Argonaut
Steam Plant at Univeristy of Idaho. Daniel Ramirez | Argonaut

Moscow City Council specifically highlighted Avista Utilities in its resolution to power Moscow with clean energy by 2045. Though the resolution’s commitment date is well into the future, Avista has already begun to encourage the adoption of sustainable energy practices through its “My Clean Energy” program.

Avista’s Sustainability Efforts

“‘My Clean Energy’ is a way for customers to offset all of the carbon emissions associated with their electric usage,” Avista’s Regional Business Manager Paul Kimmell said. “We also work with customers, both commercial and residential, on reducing their own energy consumption through energy efficiency. This can include rebates for appliances that are more energy-efficient or advice on how to best weatherize your home or business.”

The “My Clean Energy” program allows Avista customers to offset emissions by finding Renewable Energy Credits that go towards funding alternative sources of energy, building a larger financial base for the infrastructure to be implemented in the future. According to the program’s webpage, enrollment in the program costs just 1 cent per kilowatt-hour.

The energy company has additional short-term plans to ensure ample progress is being made towards its 2045 goals, including a Clean Energy Implementation Plan.

The plan, which has outlined a course of action from 2022-2025, specifically looks at managing the transition to clean energy within disadvantaged communities, as well as those who are “sensitive to health effects.” According to Kimmell, Avista is working directly with communities to ensure the transition to clean energy is as equitable as possible.

The implementation plan comes after Washington passed its own Clean Energy Transformation Act in 2019, which requires electricity to be carbon-free by 2045 like the Moscow City Council’s resolution does. According to Kimmell, Avista is currently striving to supply carbon-neutral electricity by 2027, in addition to its carbon-free goals for 2045.

Carbon-neutral results in a state of net-zero emissions. Emissions released are balanced with the removal of emissions from the environment.

Beyond powering homes and buildings, Avista is also pursuing infrastructure projects for electric vehicles, having already partnered with cities throughout Washington to install electrical vehicle charging stations.

“Although we do not yet have a program available in Idaho, we have also provided consultation to help the cities of Sandpoint and Coeur D’Alene to install public EV charging,” Kimmell said. “These partnerships have helped establish the early backbone of public EV charging infrastructure in the Inland Northwest, a key enabler of more widespread EV adoption.”

UI’s sustainability efforts

On a smaller scale, University of Idaho’s own Sustainability Center has worked to push for a transition to sustainable energy solutions, with the current goal of being carbon neutral by 2030. According to Sustainability Coordinator Olivia Wiebe, the foundation for the goal dates back to the center’s 2010 Climate Action Plan.

“This was developed to outline the steps the University of Idaho needed to take to become climate neutral by 2030,” Wiebe said. “Energy conservation, higher performance-built buildings, decreasing fossil fuel use—quite a few different areas are addressed to try to bring down our carbon emissions and become climate neutral.”

Wiebe added that the Sustainability Center is also looking to address other areas on campus, including transportation, solid waste and food procurement.

“The big push this year is on solid waste recycling and other sustainable waste management,” Wiebe said. “Campus recycling was suspended, so bringing that back and being able to divert materials from landfills… really helps with that energy footprint that we’re talking about.”

The Sustainability Center has seen previous success towards a carbon-neutral agenda by playing a central role in fundraising for the Integrated Research and Innovation Center’s solar array.

Kimmell stated that, having previously supported the work to bring solar power to the IRIC, Avista remains open to partnering further with UI for additional work towards sustainability.

“I joined (the Sustainability Center) about a year ago … and just in the time I’ve been here, we’ve seen an increased response to sustainability on campus,” Wiebe said. “Not only are students requesting this and saying it’s their priority, but all the way up through the administrative chain we’ve seen sustainability start to grow.”

Updating climate plans

Wiebe said the most pertinent issue for the UI campus is updating its prior 2010 Climate Action Plan and getting a recommittal from its participating university partners, adding that generating further awareness of the issue and approaching it with improved technology would bring “exponential improvements over the next couple years” in the university’s work towards its own sustainability goals.

Moscow City Council has been working since 2010 to reduce carbon emissions that focus on sustainability in the city.

Deputy City Supervisor Tyler Palmer and Environmental Education & Sustainability Specialist Kelli Cooper discussed what the city had done before and the climate action plan that will be presented to the city next spring.

“The city had established the first measurable goal in the entire state of Idaho for local governments related to climate change and carbon emissions, with our 20% by 2020 goal that was established by the council in 2010,” Palmer said.

After reaching that goal, the next step was to begin drafting new plans to involve both the city and the community in climate action.

“The council decided that they wanted to set some community-wide goals and not solely focus on to the operations,” Palmer said. “But also initiate programs and projects that would encourage members of the community residents throughout the community to take action on the climate crisis.”

“When we look at our community inventory, it’s something like 3% of the entire community emissions is what the city can actually directly control,” Cooper said. “So, we have to educate our community, that’s really the only way to go. Because a lot of climate action actually comes down to personal choice.”

Both Cooper and Palmer discussed the impact of UI helping to find solutions and members of the community being involved.

“The City of Moscow is actually very fortunate that we have the university here, and we have people in the community, they’re invested in this process a lot, because the city doesn’t have the resources that some larger cities do to be able to have enough staff to actually do all of the legwork,” Cooper said. “It gives me a team to have those people that are willing to put in that work, whether they retired or whether they’re still working.”

The other part of building a plan has been to look at other cities’ drafts on how to reach net zero. As a larger city, Boise is involved in many plans like “Race to Zero” and “Ready for 100.”

“Everyone has been so willing to share resources, and to help each other out, any good idea that we have, we want to share because it’s something that we all benefit from, Palmer said. “Carbon put in the air anywhere in the world impacts all of us.”

Changing the present to change the future

In Avista’s role in helping the city emission rates, the group helped the city reach its 20% goal by changing streets lights to LEDs.

“The city’s ability to participate in the ‘My Clean Energy’ program for our city emissions is an enormous help,” Palmer said. “It’s a program that can help our residents also bridge that gap and help fund those renewable resources that we need to bring online so quickly, in order to head off a lot of the carbon that would otherwise be emitted.”

The city is currently using new technology to lower emissions with the involvement of hybrid and electric vehicles in Moscow’s police force.

“To my knowledge, we are the very first community in the state of Idaho to transition our patrol fleet over to hybrid vehicles,” Palmer said.

A goal of the proposals in the city’s emission workshop was to establish vehicle charging stations.

“We have the money in the budget this year to continue our rollout of charging stations at city facilities and we are purchasing more and more hybrid and fully electric vehicles every year,” Palmer said. “We’ll actually purchase our first full-electric pickup truck this year.”

Spring is the goal for the adoption of a climate action plan. After its adoption, the end goal is to continue to update and monitor possible new programs.

“It will be a living document. Meaning that it’ll have a plan and some actions that we can go about that will add to it or subtract from it depending on what we can feasibly do in the future,” Cooper said.

Royce McCandless and Daniel V. Ramirez can be reached at [email protected] or Twitter @roycemccandless @DVR_Tweets

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