Greensburg, Kansas: Lessons Learned and Steps Forward (text version)
Below is the text version of the Webinar titled "Greensburg, Kansas: Lessons Learned and Steps Forward," originally presented on January 12, 2010. In addition to this text version of the audio, you can access a PDF of the slides (PDF 13.8 MB) and a recording of the Webinar (WMV 18.4 MB). Download Adobe Reader.
Operator:
Welcome, and than you for standing by. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Today's conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. Now I will turn the meeting over to Mr. Anthoney Perkins. Sir, you may begin.
Anthoney Perkins:
Thank you, Andrea. My name is Anthoney Perkins, and I'd like to welcome you to the Greensburg, Kansas: Lessons Learned and Steps Forward webinar presented by the Building Technologies Program at the U.S. Department of Energy. This is the third and final webinar in a series on Greensburg. We're excited to have with us today four speakers to share their experiences with helping Greensburg rebuild green. But before we begin, I want to go over a few housekeeping items.
First, I want to mention that everyone today is on listen-only mode, as you just heard. We'll have "Question and Answer" session at the end of the presentation. You can participate by submitting your questions electronically throughout the webinar. To submit a question, just click on the "Question & Answer" link at the top bar of your screen, type the question in the box, and click "Ask." Please be sure to click "Ask," and not the symbol of the raised hand. Our speakers will address as many questions as time allows after the presentation.
Also, I wanted to point out the URL on the screen, www.buildings.energy.gov/webinars.html. On that webpage is a link to see today's slides, presentations from past webinars and information on upcoming webinars. Also, today's presentation is being recorded, and a video of the presentation will be posted in the near future. Finally, we have a few questions to ask of you before we get started to help us learn more about the audience and target our future presentations.
We'll start with two questions now and then have two questions at the end of the presentation before we go into the Q&A session. Please just click on your answer on the screen to indicate the appropriate response.
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The first question should be on your screen now. Please review the question, and the answers, and click the appropriate response. "How many people at your site are participating in today's webinar?" I'll give you another moment to go ahead and choose your answer. We're getting ready to close, so please vote now.
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Okay, thanks. We're gonna go on to the next question. We're looking for information about what best describes you, your organization or your affiliation. So if you can go ahead and review the questions and review your options and vote now — I'll give you another moment. Still have a few coming in, so we're getting ready to close, so please vote now.
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Okay, thank you. I appreciate your participation in that. And now I'll introduce Lynn Billman. Lynn is the Senior Analyst and Section Supervisor at the Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or NREL. During her 23 years at NREL, Lynn has worked in all technology and mission areas in support of executive management, state and local deployment and analysis. She led NREL's efforts to provide technical assistance in all areas of energy during the rebuilding of Greensburg. So now I'll turn the presentation over to you, Lynn.
Lynn Billman:
Hi, thank you very much. I'll be your emcee for the next hour and a half, and I'd like to introduce our first speaker, John Holton. John and I worked many months together in Greensburg, and he led our efforts on the ground in the areas of residential energy efficiency. So John's going to summarize the work and results from that effort. John, go right ahead.
John Holton:
Thank you, Lynn.
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I'm getting the images up here. Oops! Also learning how to use this thing for the second time — thank you. With an eye toward energizing their future, the citizens of Greensburg, very early on, made a decision to rebuild their community in a sustainable way. And this is really an eye toward keeping their young people involved in the community. And I think it set the stage for all the work that we did subsequently.
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In support of that, very early in the whole process, the team at NREL developed a few guidelines for energy efficiency in residential construction, which you can see here are energy saving levels of 30, 40 and 50 percent. They also describe the various characteristics of the building packages — envelope mechanical systems, lighting, appliances and so forth.
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What was key to this — in this is that these made economic sense. Using the cost for construction in Kansas and the local utility rates the analysis showed that all the way up to the 50 percent level you're actually money ahead by doing this type of construction, and I think this was an important consideration in people's minds as we talked to them about energy efficiency — efficient construction.
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Our first move was to develop an office there onsite — here you can see it's a trailer not in very good condition, but used as the DOE NREL office. We used that as a location for onsite talking with homeowners and builders, also on the building site with the building contractors. We also had a supply of energy-efficient design guidelines and fact sheets. And we included a small demonstration of high efficiency, good quality fluorescent lighting.
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In addition to this, some of the early efforts to get information out to builders and homeowners was a series of training sessions and also the construction of this representative mock-up. The key factors here showed the exterior insulation, which we were recommending, and good window flashing and waterproofing, corner construction conditions and so forth. We held a primary training session for builders in November of 2007, and a number of smaller ones with various groups after that.
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In addition to the training sessions and the mock-up, one of our partners in this Building Science Corporation solicited from their contacts — the industry contacts a very generous package of donated materials. And this included insulation for the walls, foam sheathing, cellulose insulation and also some offsets to support the use of high efficiency mechanical systems. The key factor in this was that the builder had to agree to do the whole energy efficiency package. He could not pick and choose and cherry-pick little things.
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A further part of this was the development of a standard plan set that represented a high performance house for Greensburg for that climate zone. It's a very efficient house, and the envelope HVAC systems. It was an integrated design, and it had many of the durability provisions that we were promoting for the housing in Greensburg.
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The companion to this — a series of fact sheets were developed for important factors in constructing an energy efficient house. These covered things — duct insulation and sealing, ventilation systems with HRVs, ERVs, exhaust and supply ventilation system, radon venting, tankless water heaters, basement insulation and vapor retarders.
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Another very important support activity that DOE and NREL provided to the community was a HERS Rater to work with them, with the builders and with the homeowners. This was a local man who was trained to do blower door testing and HERS Rating and consultation. He was an excellent choice because being a local person, he was someone they had a lot of faith in, and he and I worked together in many, many instances working with the builders and homeowners. We did over 100 ratings were performed on new construction.
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Another major activity that went on in the early term of the reconstruction were the community recovery plans developed by FEMA, and the master plan prepared by BNIM Architects for the full recovery of the community.
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The FEMA plan was finished in August of 2007, and one of the key factors that we were able to contribute to that was the dedication of a Greensburg Green Certification Program. And this set the stage for these planning activities and the community development activities. In the master plan document that was prepared — this was done by January of 2008 — we instituted the 40 percent saving level target for residential buildings and 30 percent on commercial buildings. So both of these set very good documentary precedence for the activities that we got into a little bit later.
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Another area of support and communication with the homeowners and builders were the Community Reconstruction Fairs, and there were a number of these, and here you see a typical table set up here by NREL where we had documents and plans. We were there talking to people about their rebuilding ideas, and then we could follow that up after that with meetings in the office or onsite.
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We also supported the activities right from the offset of the City Council and the Planning and Zoning Board. We would attend meetings there, and as issues came up where there would benefit to support from support of the NREL team, we were there to contribute and to define what our programs would support. So we did it both there in the city level.
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And also in the community programs — there were several of these that were organized. For example, this is the Kiowa County Redevelopment Board, which was supported by the Chamber of Commerce. There was also the Public Square Recovery Action Teams. These were citizen action teams. And once again, as with the Planning and Zoning Board, we were there to offer what the DOE NREL program could do to support their sustainability redevelopment efforts.
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In addition to that, one of the good ways of showing people the benefits of energy efficient construction is to actually do some houses, and that's where the Model Home Program came in. These are two examples of it. On the left is a modular house from Wardcraft Homes. They're up in northern Kansas. And this is a very high performance house, well insulated with good air sealing, mechanical systems, and then it was trucked to the site and constructed as a model home. On the right is the first home of the Greensburg GreenTown's Chain of Eco-Homes. This is an idea they had. They're continuing with it, but this is the first house. It was a reinforced concrete house with internal insulation.
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Not infrequently, the DOE NREL team was actually interviewed by the various medial sources. The Discovery Channel actually set up a new channel on this called Planet Green, and we were interviewed many, many times on various aspects of the reconstruction effort. One of these actually was up in the Wardcraft Plant where they spent the entire day looking at the nature of the construction that was being done there. We were also interviewed by NPR, Time Magazine, USA Today — things of that sort.
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Now, from the standpoint of results, one of the first things that one looks for is actual measured performance, and here you see the setup that was started at the Mennonite Homes in Greensburg where we actually went in and did instrumentation on both gas use and electricity use — total house gas use, furnace gas, other gas and the electricity use for total electricity, the air handler and the outdoor unit. And with those kinds of measurements, it's possible to get a pretty good understanding of the performance of the homes. On the right you see the temperature and humidity monitoring station.
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A number of houses can be looked at as really representing the best of what we were able to accomplish in Greensburg.
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First is that of Farrell Allison, a larger — one of the larger houses. It had insulating concrete formed walls, ground-source heat pump, well insulated attic, good windows, and it tested out at HERS 42.
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Now, the Mennonite Housing, I mentioned before, used that high performance building package. It also employed the donated materials that we mentioned, and they test out at a HERS 56.
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One of the earliest construction projects underway was a series of 36 townhouses from the Manske people — the Prairie Point Townhomes. These actually were planned as LEED certified homes. We participated in those sessions. They came in as one of the early LEED Platinum projects and tested out as a HERS 67. It would have been better but for a little bit of air leakage over the mechanical room.
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Here's the Chain — the Eco-House we mentioned before, also had a high efficiency heat pump, came in at a HERS 47.
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And the Wardcraft Model House here onsite tested out as a HERS 50. The principal concern that once it gets here is how good the site construction is — the basement, basement insulation, mechanical system connections and so forth.
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One of the houses using the donated plans by the Commercial Group also had nice performance rating of HERS 60. It also used the donated materials package that we mentioned before.
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The HERS record is now — is quite extensive. Over 110 houses have been rated. The average HERS rating is 62. That's a 38 percent reduction. I mentioned Allison's house at 42. The lowest one was actually 39, and the best air leakage was 0.04 ACH natural, which is very good performance.
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What characterized these better houses in the HERS record — all these houses in Greensburg — virtually every one of them will have a basement because of the tornado shelter requirements. Those need to be well insulated. They need to have good insulation both in the wall and the roof. Mechanical system has to be good. Many use condensing gas furnaces or high efficiency air conditioners, heat pumps or ground-source heat pumps. A tank — the use of a tankless water heater was also one of the factors that helped along with good windows and air sealing.
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And finally, what we see is some influences that our work there has led to with some of the other participants. For example, the Manske people who did the Prairie Point Townhomes have actually used these same specifications for several of their projects: one in El Dorado, Kansas, and the other in Manhattan, Kansas. The Wardcraft people have incorporated many of these features into their product line.
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The Mennonite people have used these specifications in some of their projects now that they're constructing in Wichita.
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Our final activity right now with the community is the continuation of the move in the direction of a sustainable development. And what they've decided to do is to adopt the National Green Building standard. This is one developed by NAHB and then by ANSI and the ______ groups. And this is being fostered through the Memorandum of Understanding —
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— that was signed between KBIA, the NAHB local chapter and the city where KBIA will support them in training and in verifier — producing verifiers for these projects.
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Just to wrap up here with a few instrumented results from the Mennonite Homes. I'd like to point out the gas use on the left-hand side. This is for the month of March for space heating.
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And the same month of March, again, on the left-hand side on the domestic hot water — virtually the same amount of gas use, and I think what this points out is the value of a high performance building envelope and mechanical systems — these houses had standard hot water heating systems, and you can see that that really makes a difference.
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And here you see some of the tabulated results on the two instrumented houses. They're doing pretty well so far on space heating. Space cooling is outstandingly low in its energy use. And there's the hot water that stands out. And the lighting , appliance and the ventilation ones are — at this point are not resolved values.
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In conclusion, I just wanted to say the importance of the discussion and the decision early on to rebuild in a sustainable manner. Secondly, up to 50 percent of the energy use reductions are easy to achieve, and they're cost effective. Thirdly, residents are now experiencing greatly reduced energy bills, robust construction which is in support of good energy efficient design. The two-by-six framing, the ICF framing and so forth all lead to very good insulation levels. And finally, the builders are somewhat reluctant to move in the new directions. We were fortunate to be able to work with a few that were able to innovate with us.
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These are some references that you'll have to draw further information from. Thank you, and I'll turn it back to you, Lynn.
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Lynn Billman:
Thank you very much, John. Next we have Chuck Banks, and Chuck works in Greensburg as the Kansas Director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development office during this time, and he was very influential with us in finding and solving some financing problems for these kinds of projects. He's currently the Principal and Founder of Chuck Banks Associates. So Chuck —
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Chuck Banks:
Lynn, thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be a part of today's webinar. What NREL has asked me to talk about during this webinar is to talk about how all resources cooperated together both in the planning, the design and, as Lynn mentioned, the financing of these projects.
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Greensburg, Kansas, was very typical before the disaster of many rural communities in the central and high plains of the United States.
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It's very rural in nature, very rural located. This map shows where Greensburg is located. It's about an hour and 45 minutes west of Wichita, Kansas, which you can see to the east. So it's in a very rural area, and many times in these rural locations you don't have the resources for economic and community development that you'd have in an urban area.
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So yet Greensburg was certainly a beautiful town prior to the disaster. I had traveled through it on many occasions, both on business and pleasure. It's known for the largest hand-dug well in the world, and, of course, the meteorite collection also in the community. But a beautiful town, as you can see; many huge, large trees located throughout the community, wide streets —
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— just an incredibly nice town. Of course, it was hit on May 4, 2007 by an EF-5 tornado —
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— in excess of 200-mile-an-hour wind speed and, of course, just essentially devastating —
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— the community. Pictures like this just show the total destruction of the community as highlighted by — you can see the few items of the elevator and a couple of other structures built in maybe the early 1900s survived.
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Total destruction —
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— through most of the community, including infrastructure, like the water tower —
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— and the water system, public services like fire and police protection —
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— the hospital. Of course, the businesses were struck. This is the John Deere dealership that was located on the west side of town —
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— on the fringe of the tornado, whereas the downtown district was —
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— essentially totally wiped out. But as you can see also housing was destroyed —
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— throughout the community. I have worked in probably about 15 —
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— natural disasters during my professional career in both banking —
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— and public service, and I have never been in a community —
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— where I saw such total devastation. Of course, the housing is —
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— a critical aspect for recovery because following a disaster getting affordable housing built back in the community is one of the key components of recovery. Once the debris was removed from the community, you could see how — the devastation. You could almost look completely through the community and see nothing but just bare ground for almost a two-mile width —
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— throughout the entire community. Now, FEMA came in real close quickly to build some residential trailer park very close to town just south of the community. But that's just temporary housing.
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And we knew that a housing redevelopment plan was gonna be one of the essential components for the recovery of the community. While I was State Director of USDA Rural Development, housing is a key component of the agency's mission. And so working with a number of other organizations, we worked closely with the community, the public officials, the residents, building professionals to figure out a redevelopment plan. And of course, the key component of that plan was to try to figure out how were we going to finance this recovery.
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And those meetings really started almost on day two, day three, and this was a meeting with community leaders and FEMA and the National Guard and USDA and other officials were at that meeting just within about four or five days following the disaster.
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At the one-week mark, there was an all-community meeting, and representatives from state and federal agencies came to visit with the residents explaining what options —
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— would be available to them. And a number of organizations at the local level came about, including this — the South Central Tornado Recovery Organization, which helped the agencies figure out what each individual family or resident might need.
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Through this whole planning process, with the support of FEMA and a number of other agencies, as John mentioned, the city came together and put together and long-term recovery vision with goals covering a wide range of areas.
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And that helped through this planning process that, again, John mentioned — the establishment of a comprehensive master plan, which helped the city and the county —
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— get a blueprint in the recovery process. This planning was essential because in any disaster financing is gonna be a challenge. If you're going to build back in a comprehensive, sustainable manner, unfortunately, there's gonna be gap financing. Typically, private insurance — most folks, the city, the businesses, the county — they don't carry enough insurance. And the FEMA and state entities, they don't have adequate funding to fund full recovery. So there's going to be a gap in financing both to replace preexisting assets and any new assets that are going to be rebuilt. So that's gonna cover financing options that you're going to have to look for at the external level.
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And what we did was we created a number of new relationships to help fill those gaps. And this was one with the United Way of the Plains. It's the United Way Organization out of Wichita. They were the recipient of a number of donations, and so —
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— we were able to tap into their money. There's also technical assistance that's going to be required from the outside, and a good example of that is NREL. They came forward and provided much needed assistance from a technical standpoint.
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Other organizations was — you heard the comment from John about the Mennonite Housing Group. We recruited them to be an active partner in helping replace housing in Greensburg.
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The Community Housing Services, which is a nonprofit out of Wichita — we also felt like they could be playing a role in the recovery process.
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By bringing a number of both financing and technical assistant partners together, we were able to create the Greensburg Self-Help Housing Program.
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And that was a collection of over 25 partners that came together to help in the recovery process of the affordable housing.
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The goals of this — of the affordable housing was to not only rebuild affordable housing in a timely manner, but also to rebuild that housing that was high quality and energy efficient. And John talked a lot about that housing in his comments about the Mennonite Homes.
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This process was taking existing lots —
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— that were available and working with these multisector —
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— partners to help rebuild back what essentially —
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— is, I would say, the greenest, most affordable housing —
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— we have ever seen in rural America. And especially the fact that it came together after a disaster —
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— is pretty remarkable. And of course, using labor from other groups — from faith-based organizations — we were able to build —
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— back this housing in a very —
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— timely manner. In fact, the first group of ten homes were dedicated in November of 2008.
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So pretty remarkable. I think that this model of leveraging resources and working with NREL to build back this housing in such a green manner also helped stimulate other housing that was non-Commmunity Self-Help Housing, but just privately constructed also —
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— to rebuild back in a green manner.
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And I think —
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— it just was a good stimulating factor to see —
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— such a recovery process —
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— in such a great manner. And by May of 2009 —
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— all the FEMA trailers —
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— in Greensburg were removed. And as John mentioned, there was also some pretty innovative —
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— green housing through Greensburg GreenTown —
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— that were also constructed. John referenced the Prairie Point —
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— housing. That's the same housing here, and that took a collaboration of —
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— state and federal and private sector funding to finance that housing in a way that's never been financed before.
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So it's just a great example of collaboration and leveraged financing that brings all these resources together from the private sector, the public sector, the faith-based organizations and other resources —
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— that has really helped stimulate, I think, Greensburg's recovery as fast as it has.
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Here's an aerial photograph from the water tower showing how fast the residential housing has been built back.
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And this same model has been used on other efforts. This is a public sector private business incubator facility —
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— built to help stimulate the private sector's rebuilding — the economic recovery of the community. Of course, the John Deere dealership, which you'll hear more about that was built back LEED certified.
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The County Courthouse and other public structures have been —
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— built back LEED. It's just a great example —
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— of the recovery of the community. And I think the city and county recognizes that. They've been so appreciative of all the outside resources —
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— that have come together to help rebuilt the community back to —
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— hopefully this being their future vision. So, Lynn, I appreciate the chance to share this success story of collaboration and leveraging financing for the recovery of the community.
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Lynn Billman:
Thank you very much, Chuck. Next we have Haley Estes, and we asked her to speak to a quite wonderful economic development success story that began in Greensburg. So she's going to speak to a new wind company that has come out of this experience. And Haley is the Director of Business Development and Marketing. Thank you very much, Haley.
Haley Estes:
All right, thanks, Lynn. And I just want to take the opportunity to thank everyone for —
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— letting me speak today about BTI Wind Energy and telling our story. I am the fourth generation of a John Deere dealership that actually —
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— resided in Greensburg, Kansas, on May 4, 2007. And I love the opportunity to talk a little bit about how the wind is what tried to take us down with that massive EF-5 tornado.
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But, you know, the interesting thing, and the resilience of people in Kansas is the wind might have taken us down, but the wind is what's helping us rebuild much stronger.
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And so here's a little bit about what we saw on May 5th, the morning after the tornado of 2007. And, you know, we walked into an absolute nightmare and saw our dealership just completely destroyed. And the thing that I like to talk about is, you know, the opportunity that we saw with this. And my dad often says that, "Out of something so bad can come something so great."
And so on May 5, 2007, we went in, and we rolled up our sleeves, and we decided that as a community that we wanted to get back and rebuild that community and rebuild it stronger. And so how were we gonna do that? And so there was a lot of people that came together, and we, as a family, were fortunate that our — everyone in our dealership were — they were safe. Yeah, they lost their houses, but they were all ready to come together, and they wanted to rebuild and have a place to go back into work.
And so we knew that our family — we were going to come back and rebuild. And the neat thing is after the storm — I was actually, at the time, living in Kansas City, and after the storm I went back for a week, and I was fortunate that my company let me do that. And I helped all of these — we had 36 people that lost everything. And so I wanted to do something to give back, and so I started a nonprofit fund for our employees and the people of Greensburg that lost everything.
And the neat thing about that was there were people from around the world — literally the world — that wanted to donate, wanted to help, wanted to come and roll up their sleeves and put in some elbow grease and help out as well. And the neat thing was they were all very sincere. So the people of our nation and the nations across the world all helped out. And so with that, I was actually working in a corporate job and working in New York City, and I got moved — transferred from Kansas City to New York City.
And we were starting to rebuild our dealership, and my father and my uncle, the leaders of our dealership there, they — when they started rebuilding the dealership —
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And here's where we're at today — I'm gonna show you a picture of this — they rebuilt to a Platinum LEED level. We never do anything just a little bit. If you know my family, we do something — if we put our minds to it, we're gonna go all out. And so I'm really happy to say that we were awarded Platinum LEED, and in doing that, you'll notice here on the left-hand side, there's a small turbine — a wind turbine. And to power the site — our construction site — we actually were donated that turbine by Endurance Wind Power, and that turbine powered our construction site, since the town itself had no power from May to November.
And so it was kind of neat because that enabled us to be one of the first dealerships — or one of the first buildings rebuilt back into Greensburg, and one of the first Platinum LEED. And this wind turbine was fantastic. It was able to provide us a lot of power and kind of spear-headed our project. And my father and my uncle, they did a lot of research on a lot of different renewable energy sources that went into our building. And they found that small wind has a lot of opportunities, and it has a lot of opportunities within rural America, where Greensburg is.
And so they decided that they wanted to look into actually selling wind turbines. And so that's what they did.
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And that's actually why we started BTI Wind Energy. So back to — I was working in New York City, and my dad asked me if I'd like to come back —
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— and start BTI Wind Energy with him and develop a network because it was going over so well in Kansas that the opportunity wasn't just in Kansas for renewable energy. It was nationwide. And so I decided that, you know, after that storm and seeing the way that my family all pulled together to encompass our entire family, which is what we call BTI. They are our family, and so I wanted to be a part of that. And so I came back and started the dealership — not the dealership — started the wind network.
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And this is a little bit about where we started. We started in Kansas, and then we worked with our friends to the south. The great thing about being a John Deere dealership is that it's also a big family. I use that word a lot, but it truly is a big family, and so we know our partners to the south within John Deere. And we partnered with them, and they are a dealership there, and they decided that they, too, wanted to sell the wind turbines. And so from there we kept going. And I'll just go really quickly here.
But we kept going, and we worked with all these different dealerships, and we seeded what happened in Greensburg, and the way we were able to rebuild with renewable energy throughout the nation. And so —
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— today we are actually —
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— in close to 35 states — and this here hopefully will play really quickly. And these are some of the dealerships that we do have that sell the wind power. And we started mainly with rural wind power — small turbines — and we've grown into bigger segments of turbines because we've seen the need for bigger wind as if you were to go to Greensburg today, you would see just south of town the big wind farm there. And so there's all sorts of need for wind.
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And there you go — a little bit about our network demographics. We're in 35 states in the U.S. We're actually in 7 provinces of Canada as well. We have 27 dealer groups. We have 29 wind specialists, 58 trained service technicians with actually — it's kind of teetering to 60 right now — and then 20 installation crews of at least 3 people — 3-person teams per solution group. And so with that, I would like to just highlight the way that Greensburg started this entire movement of a town going green and what that's done for green jobs across the United States and what we've done with them.
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And then also — I mean, I'd just like to say a big thank you to NREL and the Department of Energy, and Lynn Billman — I'm gonna mention some other names real quick, and I can't hit everyone — there's just been so many — but Trudy Forsyth at NREL, Jim Johnson at NREL — the list goes on and on. But, you know, the great thing about NREL and the Department of Energy is that here in Denver, and I actually — I do live in Denver now. I chose to live here. One of the reasons was because they have a Wind Technology Center here in Boulder.
And the great thing about that is we did a lot of research on wind energy before we got started, and we were able to go out and to take a tour of the Wind Technology Field because we were part of Greensburg and learn a little bit about how wind energy works, how renewable energy works, and that it's a part of where we can go in our future. Homes can have wind power that helps kind of hedge against the cost of utility bills but also is good for the future of our environment.
And so with that, you know, we — not only myself, but the entire team that I showed you — that demographics — earlier, we've all been touched by the training and the teaching and the education at NREL and the people there.
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So a big thanks to them. With that, we also started our own little education center in Greensburg. The building I showed you earlier sits right next to our John Deere dealership there, and we actually have one of our manufacturers, Endurance Wind Power, has a training room there that they sponsor. And we have multiple trainings that we bring in different professionals in wind to teach our people about the appropriate way to site a turbine and to say "no" if there's not enough wind, and to maybe offer up different renewable energy ideas like solar and — to provide them some different opportunities that way.
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And around the country, some of the things that we've learned in Greensburg that we need to make sure that we do and we teach around the country is, you know, making sure that all of the customers that are going to do anything with renewable energy have local support. We have certified installers, and service and warranty on our turbines and definitely a quality product —
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— that we can consult our customers on as we've had so much help from NREL and the Department of Energy to consult us on the right types of renewable energy for that Platinum LEED building that we have in Greensburg. The exposure of Greensburg — many of the speakers before had mentioned that it's just been fantastic. You know, we've been on CNN, and we've been on Planet Green, and we've had those opportunities to really reach out to the entire nation and to tell them a little bit about what Greensburg's doing —
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— but to also be able to showcase our business. Some other things that, you know — for those of you on the phone that are looking at getting into different types of renewable energy businesses, you know, it doesn't just stop with the word-of-mouth. It's everywhere. You know, it starts with the word-of-mouth, and there's LinkedIn. There's Twitter. There's Facebook. You wouldn't think about it, but we really truly are everywhere.
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And as is Greensburg — Greensburg has their own Facebook page as well. The customers that we deal with — it started — and we were just talking to farmers. Obviously, that's what we do. We're a John Deere dealership, and then it grew from there. We're putting up a turbine at the school in Greensburg, the hospital in Greensburg. We just put up a big 50 kW there. It's almost finished. And other public buildings — there's a farmer in Greensburg that we're actually also putting a turbine just north of town.
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Where are our turbines? They're everywhere! This is to date. They're growing more and more as we speak. They're going up right now — I just talked to a wind specialist that he's putting one up in Wisconsin as we speak. So it's unlimited. And I love this map, and I love that it kind of showcases that it started in Kansas, and it started with a tornado that was, yes, massive and devastating, and it was like walking through a nightmare.
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But look where we're going. And then just to highlight — the greening of Greensburg — it started there, but it's going everywhere. And this is an actual — this turbine here is — it's just a drawing, but it's — today it's real. And it's a 50 kW that's in Wisconsin. It's a building called the Green Leaf Inn, and it's going to be a resort there in Wisconsin, and it all started with Greensburg. And the neat thing is — is that —
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— you know, it's spreading everywhere. And so this is just a little bit of our crew back in September at Greensburg outside of our wind building. This is the first training that we did there. And we're continuing to grow, and it's really exciting, and so I'd just like to take the opportunity to say, "Thank you," and if there's any questions later, I'm happy to answer them.
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Lynn Billman:
Thank you very much, Haley. Well, now it's my turn. As I mentioned, I'm Lynn Billman, and I was the — was and still am the Project Lead for the Department of Energy on the work that we've done in Greensburg.
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And what I'd like to do is to — oh, wait a minute — I'm controlling my slides. Okay, now I'm ready.
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What I would like to do is to kind of give you a brief overview of the project from the viewpoint of the federal agency providing the assistance. And the purpose for the Department of Energy was — it's really twofold. It was to help the community of Greensburg, but it was also to find out what works most effectively in disaster recovery situations to help a community move towards more green and sustainable solutions. The Department — so a lot of what we did was geared towards learning what we could, and then trying to convey it as effectively as we can to the rest of the country.
We wanted to — in our goals, to affect their overall community plan with some key energy considerations. And we took the target of trying to help them achieve 30 percent less energy use than current building codes in the buildings that they rebuilt after the tornado. And we also hoped to help them maximize their use of renewable energy. Greensburg was certainly unique in that we had the opportunity to affect the community from the ground up. We found, of course, as in any community, the local leadership knew something about energy, but the level of knowledge varied, and in many cases that knowledge was limited, and they had very few funds to hire technical assistance.
So our goal was to provide technical assistance as opposed to physical hardware of any kind. And what we have found is certainly through the amount of publicity that Greensburg has had, through no effort on our part, but the interest of the country in the experience of Greensburg has certainly given us a great opportunity to share the story. And Greensburg is truly influencing hundreds of communities around the United States, and even across the world.
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Wow! This is taking time to come up. I need to acknowledge immediately the many other entities that worked with us in Greensburg in our projects. Discovery Channel, of course, as John mentioned, did a major series. USDA — Chuck worked with us very closely during this process — U.S. Green Building Council — I'll mention a few of these as I go through. I also want to mention Native Energy that came in in the latter part of our particular involvement, but I'll mention them again in conjunction with the wind project when I get there.
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I mentioned we did technical assistance. The total taxpayer investment in Greensburg was $2.5 million over the 3 years. That's the cost of the technical experts to work with the community. And we did cover all aspects of energy: planning, feasibility studies, policy recommendations, we reviewed green business proposals and outreach and communications as well.
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Once again, our work scope — I am not going to speak to the high performance homes, because John covered that today. And I will cover very briefly public and commercial buildings, because that was covered in Webinar 2. I'm gonna give a little bit of information that was covered in Webinar 2 on the wind farm, just to make sure that's well covered. And then you can see the other areas here that I'm going to be talking about.
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The Community Master Plan was done by BNIM Architects out of Kansas City, and they did a very excellent job on this and won an international award for their work. And our role in this was providing the energy-specific — most of the energy-specific information and goal setting for the community. There was a lot of great community involvement in the development of this master plan.
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And again, skipping over the residential, commercial — we gave presentations, we provided training on energy modeling to local firms, we reviewed many and consulted on many, many business designs. And then for four or five high profile projects we provided a lot of in-depth assistance to the design firms that the city or entity had hired. We also got a lot of use out of these kinds of advanced energy design guides that are available to anyone for free download at the website shown on the slide here. And there's — oh, I've forgotten — six — yeah, six different building types for commercial applications that anyone can look at for their climate zone and how to achieve — very specifically, how to achieve 30 percent energy savings.
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So the results — it's quite impressive. It's been a wonderful community work with. You can see the list of buildings here that have gone for LEED certification. That's a certification process through the U.S. Green Building Council. A couple of major green restorations of two buildings that withstood the tornado —
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— and they're still works in process there. Now, I'd like to turn to a community generation of electricity by renewable energy; and first, I'm going to cover wind. When we were asked to work in Greensburg, one of the first questions was about their electricity. And we know from all of our work here in NREL that Kansas is one of the premier states for wind resources. The wind resources are excellent from the north Texas — Texas panhandle — north Texas area all the way up through the Dakotas, and Greensburg did indeed turn out to be just as good or even better than we expected. One of our consultants said it was a screamer because their average wind at — throughout the year ranges from eight to nine meters per second.
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So some of our activities, again, was giving presentations, sharing information with people. We prepared wind resource data specifically for Greensburg for them. We did a lot of work on technical feasibility studies where wind could be used at small scales or at a community scale in the community. And we brought together the key stakeholders at the request of the city when they began considering using wind energy at a community level.
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We organized a visit for them to a couple of similar communities in Colorado so they could talk to their counterparts and learn the — oops, I forgot to turn off my thing — sorry. We helped with a business strategy. We helped them find a different power purchaser who was very enthusiastic about wind energy. And John Deere Wind was not really interested when I first approached them early in the process because of the small size, but the size of the wind need began to grow as we found a different power purchaser, and John Deere Wind began to be interested.
And we both were developing proposals. Ours was a little bit of a different business model than John Deere, but when we were informed of what they were offering the city of Greensburg, we said that they have a bit of a better proposal. They had turbines in-hand and a little bit lower cost they could offer under their business model. So we supported the John Deere proposal to the city of Greensburg.
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And that has gone forward, I'm very happy to say. The Greensburg Wind Farm has ten Suzlon turbines, and John Deere Renewables is the owner and operator, and the financing has come through USDA Rural Development and through Native Energy. Native Energy is the exclusive marketer of available renewable energy credits. And Native Energy invests in a project and then sells renewable energy credits to recoup their investment. And so anyone of you can purchase renewable energy credits, which gives you a claim to being also an investor in a sense in this wind farm for Greensburg. And if you need to know how to get in touch with them send an email, and I'll help you out.
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Okay — so it powers enough electricity to provide power for 4,000 homes. There's about 200 or 300 homes — or 800 people or so — in Greensburg, and the rest of that is for the other cities that are part of the Kansas power pool. And Greensburg gets all — a special deal they have to support them is that they own the renewable energy credits for all the electricity in their community, and commercial operation is expected in the spring this year.
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Okay — moving on — we did look at combined heat and power concepts for the downtown district, but we found that in Greensburg the uncertainty of how the community was gonna build back, which owners — it was not a good situation to get a group of people together to do a district-wide CHP project. We did look at solar energy with a very thorough feasibility study. Solar is more expensive than wind, but we recommend its specific applications like outside signage and things of that nature that they could pursue and how to properly and most effectively go about that. We did provide some technical assistance on the streetlight question.
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And a couple of results out of this — ground-source heat pumps proved to be quite attractive in this community in several commercial buildings and also a couple of residences. The photo on the left shows some drilling by the courthouse. And geothermal or ground-source heat pumps work by drilling wells into the ground, either vertically or horizontally, and then cycling a fluid through that so that the heat of the earth helps mitigate the amount of extra energy you have to spend on either heating or cooling your building. Three buildings did end up with some sizable photovoltaic arrays. I think it was 7 kilowatts on the business incubator, and 2 kilowatts on the GreenTown Eco-Silo Home and some on the Art Center, and 50 kilowatt wind turbines from Endurance are planned for the school and the hospital.
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And Greensburg has opted all LED streetlights. They didn't have enough budget to afford the PV, but the operating cost savings to the city was well documented at this level, and they're providing very attractive light, which is all faced downward so that there's minimal light pollution as well.
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We did a study of alternative transportation opportunities, and that included certainly planning for walkability, which the master plan did, using an electric car for the city because they have short distances to run in much of their work, and then just organizing the buying power of the fleet owners in the community so that they could bring in E85 or biodiesel. They did receive some donations of advanced vehicles, which you see here. Especially Schofield Honda in Wichita has afforded the city.
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And the city is considering these options at this time. We were asked by the Department of Energy to look for opportunities for producing ethanol — corn ethanol, cellulosic ethanol or biodiesel in the area, but the markets just would not support that, so we did not do in-depth studies. That was pretty much a no-brainer. There's also a cellulosic ethanol plant 150 miles away, which was pretty close. So we did look instead at very thorough assessments of using biomass agricultural residues for heating pellets — compressing them into heating pellets.
Currently, there's a good strong market for wood heating pellets all over the country, and what we found in our work and in consulting with one company that was just trying this at the time that we were beginning — a company in Missouri — is that the biomass residues unfortunately burn with very high ash, which gives you problems in your boiler or whatever you're using. And so we recommended that if it was possible it needed to be mixed with wood pellets — with wood resources as well to give better burning characteristics.
So we left the city and the 11 counties we were working with with a study that is publicly available to anyone about the resources of those 11 counties and what we recommended about using biomass residues for heating.
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And, of course, to have changes last, the city policies need to be in agreement. Since this was the first effort by the city in having distributed wind or distributed solar — that means individual owners of small systems — we helped them with the policies you see listed here. And these policies help to define how systems are connected to the city utility, how the financial benefits of having a no-fuel system can be shared between the homeowner and the city for the utility, and how to safely install and operate these systems.
We also are working with, as John mentioned, the Green Building Program, and you see some of the key points here. The most important here has been the ability that we had to help the city get connected with the National Association of Homebuilders and their Kansas branch of that — Kansas chapter, I should say. And there's a formal partnership in place now. They've done some training, and we're discussing with the city about changing their building codes to actually adopt a mandatory energy efficient code, and they're considering that at this time.
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As I mentioned at the start, we were very interested in sharing information all during this project, and the first thing I'd like to mention here is kind of "in-reach," actually. I shouldn't have said outreach; it's actually in-reach to the city. We had a major Green Day that we organized with Greensburg GreenTown. I want to mention a little bit about GreenTown. That is a nonprofit that we've established by local leadership. They have a board of directors made up of citizens, and they began as a citizen focal point — the local focal point for interest in sustainable development.
And as us federal agencies have kind of come and gone — now we're two and a half years after the tornado — Greensburg GreenTown remains the organization where there is still a strong focal point for green development in the town of Greensburg. So we celebrated the green successes at this point. This was done about — oh, about nine or ten months after the tornado, we brought in our van, which travels around the country to show exhibits about renewable energy. And we brought in a couple of trainers and worked with the students all the way through high school and showed them how to make little kits of wind turbines and solar cars to help teach them about that.
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And we held a community meeting and had presentations — here's a few more pictures — where we shared information in paper form, and the leaders of Greensburg on the right talking about the different projects each of them was behind, and our Renew Van on the lower right there. It was quite a popular day.
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Now, in the sense of outreach, I want to mention several things. The Greensburg GreenTown is an excellent website to keep up with what is going on in the city on green projects.
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Greensburg GreenTown was one of our partners, by the way, as a subcontractor to us and a helper on the local scene. This is our website that we maintain with the Department of Energy, and you can find here a lot of — well, all the webinar information, such as this one, and links to other places, and documents that may be of interest to any and all of you.
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Let me point out this one in the upper center, "Going Green from the Ground Up," is about a 16-page document that is written to city leaders and/or helping agencies, and it covers things as why — if you're involved in a disaster recovery situation, why and when you should think about energy-related issues and takes you through all the steps that Greensburg went through in their rebuilding concerning energy.
There are fact sheets to give information on rebuilding residential, commercial, use of renewable energy and resources all geared towards disaster recovery situations, and — as you can see, quite a few different brochures there. This one in the lower center, dark blue, is the case study for the work that we did here covering a lot of what I'm talking about today.
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We also have a sustainable building database that has details on about 25 different projects in Greensburg.
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Major lessons — and I'll just highlight a couple here — a strong champion because every community has diverse political agendas, being flexible in all situations because it's quite tumultuous to deal with disaster recovery, communication is critical, and we found it useful to be aware of and tap into all the local groups, even the Boy Scouts, the business community, the schools —
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— all important people to contact when you're working in a community. As Chuck mentioned, financing assistance is critical, and cultural change has is not an easy thing —
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— and we had a lot of assisting agencies.
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The rest of these slides are details of our work that you're free to look at again when they're — as they're posted on the website. And I think, yes, I am at the end. So, with that, I will turn it back to Anthoney. Thank you, Anthoney.
Anthoney Perkins:
Thank you very much. Thank you to all the presenters. What we're gonna do now is go through, as I mentioned, and we're gonna have two additional polling questions before we go into the Q&A session.
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So the first question should be coming up and asking you about what you were hoping to learn today. We'll go ahead and leave this up for a few seconds so you can go ahead and choose your option. Okay — we're going to get ready to close this, so please choose your answer.
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Okay — now we're going to go ahead and close it. Thank you. And we're going to ahead and do the last question regarding today's training, and we'll give you a few minutes to look that over. Basically, "Based on your expectations, how satisfied were you with today's webinar?" Okay — so we'll go ahead and close out that question.
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Now we'll go into the Question and Answers. As we mentioned, we've asked everybody to submit their questions online, and we'll answer as many questions as time allows. So I'm going to turn it back over to the speakers to address the questions which they've received.
Lynn Billman:
Oh, hi — thank you very much. We'll start the Q's and A's with you, John, and we have about 20 minutes for the 4 of us to handle our Q's and A's.
John Holton:
Okay — well, I've got about six questions. That's three minutes a question, so I'll read them — no! First question, "How did you ensure that builders built for the specs that you required?" Well, first, we didn't require any specs. We suggested them. We recommended them. But the best check that we had on that was the activities of our HERS rater, because he was out there all over the community going with builders who built new houses, assessing them from the first planning stage and then finally in the after-construction stage.
The best way for the HERS rater is to be able to do it in a two-step basis. And he also did that with renovation projects as well. Another way in which we did that was the packages that I mentioned that were provided by Building Science. These were the high quality integrated designs for the homes, of which several were built, and then also the packages of materials that were used in the Mennonite Houses and in the ones by other builders. So that was a good way of quality control.
Second question, "Are you saying that the housing floor plans and outside look for all houses is the same throughout the town?" Absolutely not. There was quite a wide variety of that, and I think you saw that in the pictures that Chuck had and that Lynn had. The town did rebuild largely as a one-story town, and I think prior to that it was a large — mix of two-story and one-story houses. All of these houses — virtually every one does have a basement because of the tornado safe rooms that are constructed there. But many very different looks — as you can see the Silo Eco-House does not look like any house that you've seen around in that part of town or that part of the community.
"Are the manufactured homes by Wardcraft a lot more cost effective than building onsite?" No, they really aren't. They're similar, and there was a variety. There were a number of modular home manufacturers that provided products to Greensburg. The principal advantage is that they can do them a little bit faster. And another advantage — and this is kind of one that's I think peculiar to a reconstruction situation — they, being built in a factory, they have the facilities to do it and the labor workforce.
One of the big problems in Greensburg was getting construction labor to come in and do the reconstruction. Where do they live? Where do they stay, and so forth? So modular housing in that regard was a help. You still have to do your foundations and basements and so forth, but in terms of cost and performance, both kinds of houses — stick-built and modular — can be very comparable, they can be very good, and they can be somewhat disappointing.
"Blower door testing you described, and I am familiar with this, but could you explain the HERS rating system? Is that some sort of CFM loss scale, and what does a code house mean?" The HERS rating system is based on an examination of the house, a careful documentation of its characteristics. These are entered into a computer model, which is a well-accepted model for the performance of houses, and from that it generates a score based on its energy performance.
And the HERS score — let's say a HERS score of 80 means it's 20 percent better than a code house. Now, the comparison to the code house is the house that's being built in that community by the building code that they use. In our case it was the International Residential Code from 2003. So when we say that many of these houses were 60 percent — HERS 60, that means they were 40 percent better than a house that was being built to the IRC — its insulation levels, air sealing and so forth.
"Was there something unique about the NAHB standard that made Greensburg choose that one as a standard?" I think Lynn covered that to a certain degree. The thing about that standard is that it's a builder generated and accepted standard, and this is really important. And the other is that it's a consensus standard. It's now been adopted through the ICC, International Code Council, so it gives us a very robust basis for acceptance.
"In addition to HERS testing, was the HVAC system's performance evaluated?" Generally, it was not. We were not able to come in and do that level of assessment, other than the instrumented houses in the Mennonite Houses.
"How much emphasis does LEED put on energy savings, or does it focus more on overall sustainability?" LEED is a balanced sustainability standard, and it puts an important emphasis on energy, I would say. And the point scale on residential — I don't have it in front of me — but it's roughly a quarter to a third of the points are associated with the energy performance of the house. That's it on the questions I have. Back to you, Lynn.
Lynn Billman:
Okay, thank you, John. Chuck, do you have questions to address?
Chuck Banks:
Yes, I have two questions here. The first one is, "Did you find homeowners were more reluctant to rebuild at the efficiency levels recommended because it costs more?" No, we really didn't find a high level of reluctance. I think there was obviously a lot of questions when we first started talking about energy efficiency and building back more sustainable, but working with folks like NREL and other resources we were able to answer a lot of those questions, and I think that the folks who probably were more of a higher income homeowners, they understood the value of rebuilding back green because on the long-term their energy costs would be significantly less.
Now, the folks who were maybe in more of the lower-income standpoint they probably had some concerns because they had to figure out a way to figure out how to finance the rebuilding. But by what we did on the Community Self-Help Housing Program and some of the USDA and other financing options, we were able to offer them and bring the cost of that housing down, I think that helped address a lot of those concerns. And that kind of leads into the second question.
John Holton:
Could I also offer something on that?
Chuck Banks:
Sure.
John Holton:
Just as an adjunct — I mentioned in my comments that it was very common for them to build with two-by-six framing, and that just inherently — you know, they accepted it as a way to build, and it inherently gives you a well insulated wall. And when you go beyond that and you add another couple of inches of cellulose in the attic, you end up with quite a high performance house just as a natural house. You know, it's not something different. And they often chose from a robustness standpoint to build with insulated concrete forms, and that gives you an R25 wall just there. So some of those things I think contributed to its acceptance.
Chuck Banks:
And I think — John, you're exactly right. And the fact is the folks who lived out in that part of the country were already resilient minded to begin with. And so when you started tying in the resiliency of the building of their homes and becoming more greener, it's more sustainable in case of future storms, I mean, they were willing to accept it. There were questions, but I think once we answered those questions, then the acceptance level went up. It did connect, though with the financing question.
The second question I have is, "When homeowners get financial help from other organizations, are there any implications on title and ownership? I guess I'm wondering if it made it more complex?" For the individual homeowners, it really didn't make it more complex. Obviously, they had to work with the agency to provide certain documentation to make sure they qualified for some of the programs, especially if it was a low- and very low-income types of financing assistance. But probably the most work it required was on us at the assistance level.
For example, USDA helping the community put together the Community Self-Help Housing Program, which John referenced as the Mennonite Housing — bringing together all those 25 partners to provide that type of housing which was so green and so affordable for folks, it required work on our side as the technical assistance providers. But it really didn't adversely impact the homeowners. And when I make the comment about how green and how affordable it is, John has references how green that housing is.
If you were to actually build that housing on your own, it would be — those houses would probably cost out at about $145,000.00. We were able to keep the mortgage rates for those folks in the $65,000.00 - $70,000.00 range. So when I say the greenest most affordable housing you're going to come across, it was that.
Lynn Billman:
Okay, Chuck — thank you very much. Haley, would you like to take a few?
Haley Estes:
Sure. I have four great questions here. The first is, "What constitutes small wind, and with that how much power will a small wind generator create for what type of building?" For that one, small wind is classified as 100 kW and smaller. However, you know, we really truly try to match whatever their — like, for instance, if there's a small company that's using a specific amount of kilowatt hours, then what we'll do is we'll match or just undercut a little bit what power we can produce from that turbine. So we try to match the production of the turbine to the power that they use so that we can help hedge against their utility bills.
With that, the second one here is, "What is the breakout of people that have purchased small turbines? Is it more commercial versus residential?" And for us nationwide, I guess I would say it's probably 50/50. It's a little bit different in different areas of the country, believe it or not. And so I could sit here for hours and tell you, you know, in specific states we see it's more commercial versus residential. So just as an example, in Colorado, we've probably seen more commercial than residential. So there's one example.
"How exactly does your network work? Are you selling just to distributors as representatives of turbines, or are you selling directly to customers?" For our network, we are — as BTI, we're the master distributor, and so we actually have dealers underneath us. So we work with our dealers, and my job and my role and responsibilities — which we have a team that also helps out the network — we are responsible for the Harvest the Wind Network, is what they're called — our dealers.
And the dealers across the country that are part of the Harvest the Wind Network have the privileges of utilizing some of our engineers and things like that that we have on staff and different project developers to be able to sell directly to customers. So it's kind of both on that one. You know, in BTI, we have the state of Kansas, and we — my cousin actually moved back from Las Vegas, and he's the wind specialist in Kansas and sells directly to the customers. And so it works both ways on that one.
The final question, which is a really great question — not that they all weren't, but this one is really awesome, and we deal with it a lot — is, "How is your experience in working on placing wind turbines in suburban and urban areas different than in rural areas?" And this person made a reference to New Jersey, which we actually have a dealer in New Jersey as well. But their question was, "In New Jersey, there seems to be a concern about the loss of property value and the aesthetic look along with the potential wildlife and environmental implications of placing a turbine in certain areas."
Yes, that is true. You know, the thing about urban and suburban areas — you know, there are a lot of permitting and zoning restrictions that we often have to work with the permitting and zoning committees and help write variances. However, I would ask you to first make sure that that site is a proper site. You know, is there too much turbulence even for a wind turbine to be placed in that area? Is it too close to other buildings to even put it in the urban and suburban areas? Can it be at a height where it actually does receive the amount of wind that it needs to actually power whatever it's trying to power — a building or an office — whatever.
And we've asked — or people ask us a lot, "Can we put these on top of roofs and things like that?" and our answer is, "No," on that one. We don't see that it actually makes sense. So there's quite a few answers to that, and whoever did have that question, I would encourage you if you want to call me, I'm happy to answer that one. So I believe that answers all my questions.
Lynn Billman:
Okay — great, Haley. Thank you very much. Okay — well, this is Lynn. I will — I have quite a few. I will answer what I can in the time I have, and then the rest I will answer in writing, and we'll figure out how to communicate back. It may be on the web, and it may be back to individuals. One of the questions is, "How did DOE decide to invest these dollars in Greensburg?" And that's a multipart answer. We were asked — informed by the state of Kansas, who was well aware of the Greensburg situation, and asked to participate by them.
We were also asked through the FEMA, Federal Emergency Management Agency. So we had formal requests, and we certainly — the Department of Energy is certainly very interested in how to help the communities adopt and use cost-effective, commercially available green technologies. So all of those came together and having had some higher funding in the past two or three years — the past year or so, I should say — we — the need and the opportunity came together, so that's basically how the decision was made. And DOE has done projects in New Orleans, as someone noted.
About six months before the tornado in May of '07, the Department of Energy had decided to try to help the city of New Orleans, which, as we all know, has had its disaster recovery concerns and challenges. And so there was a similar effort begun before Greensburg. Now, Greensburg and New Orleans are the only disaster recovery efforts, to my knowledge, that the Department has funded support to directly. The Department has done a lot of different outreaches primarily through the ARRA funding in making funding available to communities interested in renewable energy. So there has been some other work, but not specifically disaster focused.
Okay — another one was, "How did I prioritize NREL's work in Greensburg?" Most important to address — as I mentioned, the proper process for this for any community is first, planning; second, energy efficiency improvements; and then, third, renewable energy, whether it's electricity or transportation fuels; third is what renewable energy can you use. And those are the most effective choices to make, in that order. Now, being a disaster recovery situation, it wasn't really possible to do a real orderly step-by-step, so we began in each area that looked like the lowest hanging fruit for us as to where we could get the attention of the community officials.
So we actually began with wind energy and residential efficiency, and we worked quickly into commercial efficiency, and then the planning effort was begun because, obviously, you needed lots of community support for that. And so we jumped on that bandwagon as fast as we could get the — as the community became interested. So again, that's the order: planning, then efficiency, then renewable generation. But in a disaster situation, you just have to be flexible and work with the community.
Let's see, "Is — do you think a normal community that didn't have this kind of disaster could implement some of the changes Greensburg did?" Absolutely! If you jump on the website and start looking around about sustainable communities, green communities and so on, you will find energy plans and community plans and information on projects all over the country. So many cities are doing these kinds of things. The Department of Energy has, for example, a Solar America initiative where a city can have — well, this was done a couple of years ago, and the implementation is going on now — but where cities came up with ideas of how to use solar, and they bid for the dollars available.
But not just Department of Energy projects, but through their own city funding and other sources of funding many communities are improving. And again, they do follow the same process. Look at your overall community and energy use, and plan what's going to be best to do. Look for efficiency, code changes and educational projects to help people understand how to reduce use of energy, and then look at the renewable resources you have.
Okay — other — oh, one other — I got one minute, huh? Okay, "What other aspects of the town infrastructure were rebuilt to green standards?" The town started up a recycling program that was actually started by the high school youth — the Green Club at the high school. They put in these street lights. They have looked a lot at recycling of grass clippings. That's fairly easy to do in a small community. They are looking a lot at local production of food, because they're all farmers, and that has been encouraged. Eco-tourism —
John Holton:
Can I say something on that — the runoff control on Main Street.
Lynn Billman:
Oh, yeah — they redid a very nice landscaped rebuilding of Main Street down about four blocks of very nice plantings and better runoff control, and I think they have electricity plugs there for electric vehicles that may come in the future. So they definitely thought about that when they redid their infrastructure downtown. Okay — I think I am out of time at this point, and I want to thank you all for listening in, and I hope this has been instructive for you. Oh, Anthoney, now I turn it to you.
Anthoney Perkins:
Thank you, and thanks to all of our speakers today. We'd also like to thank all of you for participating today. Please visit www.buildings.energy.gov/webinars to get a copy of the slides. You can review the presentation slides and listen to the recording of all three of the Greensburg webinars by visiting the same webpage. Also, please check our webpage for information on future Building Technologies Program webinars. This concludes our presentation. Thank you, and goodbye.
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