Greensburg – America's Model Green Community in Their Own Words Webinar (text version)
Below is the text version of the Webinar titled "Greensburg – America's Model Green Community in Their Own Words," originally presented on November 23, 2009. In addition to this text version of the audio, you can access a PDF of the slides and a recording of the webinar.
Operator:
All participants are on a listen-only for the duration of today's conference. I confirm with all parties that the call is being recorded. Any objections to this, please disconnect at this time. I'd like to turn the call over to your host today, Mr. Anthoney Perkins. You may begin.
Anthoney Perkins:
Thank you, Joyce. My name is Anthoney Perkins and I'd like to welcome you to the Greensburg – America's Model Green Community in Their Own Words webinar presented by the Building Technologies Program and the U.S. Department of Energy. We're excited today to have Bob Dixson, mayor of the city of Greensburg; Darin Headrick, superintendent of Greensburg Schools District USB 422; Kelly Estes, president of the BTI Greensburg John Deere dealership; Mike Estes, vice president of BTI Greensburg; and Daniel Wallach, executive director of Greensburg GreenTown to talk to us about Greensburg today. I'd like to first introduce Daniel, who will be moderating and speaking during today's webinar.
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Daniel is executive director and founder of Greensburg GreenTown, a grassroots community-based organization that has worked side by side with city and county officials, business owners and local residents, to incorporate sustainable principles into Greensburg's rebuilding process.
Okay, now. Daniel, I'll turn it over to you. Daniel?
Daniel Wallach:
Hello. Thank you very much, Anthoney. I very much appreciate all that you and the Department of Energy NREL have done to make this happen today. We're honored to be able to put this webinar on. Before we get going, I just want to cover some of the basic housekeeping items. First, everybody should know that it's in listen-only mode, except for the speakers. You can participate in today's Q&A session at the end of the presentation by submitting your questions electronically. Actually, you can submit them at any point by clicking on the tab at the top of the screen. You see Q&A. Just click there and those questions will make it to us and we'll address those at the end of the presentation. When you type the question in the box there and click Ask, it will send. You want to be sure thought to click Ask and not the symbol of the raised hand. Our speakers will address as many questions as time allows after the presentation.
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I also wanted to point out the URL on the screen, www.buildings.energy.gov. On that web page is a link to see today's slides. 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 for you and the first question is coming up.
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You should see it on your screen now. If you would respond to that question at your location, what is the total number of people participating in today's webinar? We're about to close this question and move on so please vote.
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Okay. We'll move on to the next question. What best describes your affiliation or organization?
Great. Thank you for doing that and now we'll get started with our presentation.
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Okay, Greensburg, Kansas is a town right in the middle of Kansas 50 miles from the Oklahoma border, about two hours by car west of Wichita, Kansas. It was established in 1886. It's named for Cannonball Green, who was a man who was a stagecoach driver and established in 1886.
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A very typical main street. It was a beautiful little town, population of about 1,400 at the time of the storm. Lots of typical small town architecture. It had a lot of character.
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And then May 4, 2007, 9:45 in the evening, a gigantic tornado touched down really in full force at the beginning of the town, as you can see on this map, the purple shows the path that that tornado took right through the heart of town. It was 1.7-mile wide tornado. Now keep in mind, the average tornado is 75 yards wide. This tornado was 1.7 miles wide with winds of 205 miles per hour. At the right, you can see the radar. The good news on that night was the warning that folks had. Thanks to the meteorologists and the storm chasers, word got out this was a very serious storm.
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This is a satellite image of Greensburg before the storm.
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This is Greensburg after the storm. You can see pretty much complete devastation. Over 90 percent of the town was destroyed. Greensburg is 1.5 square miles.
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It's really unfathomable destruction. 11 people perished, which of course was a tragedy, but it was really, as you can see from these pictures, quite phenomenal that more people were not killed.
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It was a very, very intense week. Storms continued actually for two days following the tornado, a tremendous amount of rain. Nobody was allowed to stay in town. The federal government had cordoned off the town. People weren't even allowed to come get their belongings until a few days after the storm. It was a really very difficult time for people.
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Exactly a week after the tornado, May 11th, a town meeting was called in Central Park where a tent was erected that became the city's center for many weeks after the storm. It was really unknown how many people would come back to Greensburg. Again, there were 1,400 before the storm. Because of the devastation, folks were not allowed to stay in town. Really the closest people could stay was a community ten miles away and people were really just scattered throughout. Nobody knew how many people would come to a meeting, let alone stay to rebuild Greensburg.
So on May 11th, that Sunday, over 500 people showed up at this city park and that was the new beginning. It was there that it was made very clear that nobody wasn't wanting to build back this community. This was a very rooted community and the fact that all the material of that community was gone was irrelevant. What mattered was the relationships and the history folks had in the community and they were going to build it back. A very emotional meeting and that's when the momentum really started.
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The question is often asked how did the idea of rebuilding Greensburg as a model green community come about? Well, like many great ideas, it came from many different directions. Most importantly, it was the mayor and the city administrator of the city of Greensburg started talking about it just a few days after the storm. The governor's office, the governor was involved in those early days and was also very excited about the prospect of rebuilding as a model green community. Some other individuals in the state and actually outside the state also had the idea and myself, Daniel Wallach, with my wife, Catherine Hart, founded a non-profit organization called Greensburg GreenTown and we came to town and started working with people right away.
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So again, lots of different directions got the initiative, what's called now the Green Initiative, going. The planning process that grew out of that first tent meeting just snowballed and there was just tremendous energy and involvement by literally hundreds of citizens in the community. There were many, many meetings where people came together, discussed where the town was gonna go, how it would come back. Again, there was really no doubt that it was gonna come back. The question was how and embracing the identity of becoming a model green community made a lot of sense and it got a lot of people excited. And the values that you see here on the right, community, family, prosperity, environment, affordability, growth, renewal, water, health, energy, wind in the built environment, those were all values that were identified that would construct a framework in which to move forward for Greensburg.
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What really can't be conveyed in words was how incredible it was, the support that came to the town, the support that came from within the town, the character and strength of the citizens who had to rebuild back every facet of their lives but they also were doing it on a much bigger scale. But it took a lot of different parties providing a lot of different resources, energy, support, and this is just a visual of all those different groups that made this happen. And again, it's just so incredible because even though it's a small community, you had to have the buy in from so many different people and so many different elements. Politically, it could have been impossible but, again, everybody came together to form this collective vision and everybody pitched in to do their part as they continue to do today over two and a half years after the storm.
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The sustainable master plan, just a typical master plan but done, again, with a focus on sustainability and green living, a very unique plan, an award winning plan that has received acknowledgement and awards from all over. It was really a successful piece that was conducted by the contractor, BNIM, working with the city of Greensburg. That can be seen on the city website. You can download that.
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The other thing, before moving forward and talking about the progress and the buildings, it has to be mentioned because it's so important to the story of Greensburg and that's been the media coverage. This is a story that's really struck a chord internationally and there – many different media outlets have come to Greensburg to tell the story, including the Discovery Network, which launched a new network called Planet Green, which one of its original programs was documenting the comeback of Greensburg and in year one had 13 one-hour episodes. Year two, there were 6 one-hour episodes and they're back in town continuing to film the story. And if you're interested, that DVD can be purchased online or you can rent it from Netflix.
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Okay, so again, it's very hard to convey just how much work and how much went into pulling this vision together and doing what was necessary to actually achieve this vision of a model green community. But as I said, it's over two and a half years into it and the vision is being realized.
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This is one of the first city buildings, it's a LEED platinum building. It's a building that houses eight different businesses. One of the problems after the storm was to rebuild buildings. Rent for businesses would be in the neighborhood of $1,000.00 on average and businesses that were there before the storm were paying 3, maybe $400.00 a month. So it was very difficult for businesses to come back and so the city came up with what is called the City of Greensburg Sun Chips, who provided sponsorships, a business incubator, and today that's open. Again, it achieved LEED platinum status and has many different features that make it a state-of-the-art building, including geothermal wells, occupancy sensors in the building for lighting and climate control. It has solar panels on the room and it's really well designed for day lit lighting. It's a really beautiful building to go into it.
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The next is City Hall. City Hall, also another state-of-the-art building just recently opened. It's awaiting LEED platinum status. I'm pretty certain it's gonna be achieved. A beautiful building inside and out, natural daylighting, really a pleasant place to be and a pleasant place to work.
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I actually think I'm gonna move forward and Darin Headrick, who is the superintendent of the schools and Darin, who's been an inspirational leader in Greensburg, and he has to get going to another meeting but we want him to share with you his experience and impressions and what they're doing with the school. Darin.
Darin Headrick:
Thanks, Daniel, and greetings to everybody. What I'd like to do is kind of play off some things Daniel said and that's with regards to the recovery. I've been watching on the postings the various questions that you have with regard to the recovery efforts we have and some different things we did. I'm gonna try to speak to the school just a little bit and kind of give you some background.
Directly after the tornado, the entire community was displaced. You couldn't live here and so basically it was uninhabited for somewhere between two and three months. So if you think of wherever you live and reside and everyone being displaced from your community. Our people were faced with the challenge of trying to find a place to live and that place may have been in a surrounding town or it may have been with family that lived in another community.
But regardless of that, when we started to look at the recovery and what we needed to do and the rebuilding efforts of Greensburg, one thing was really evident and that was when we analyzed what kind of a community we were, we were a typical rural farming community that had a declining population. Our school had a declining enrollment. If you watched what our business sector was doing, we had fewer businesses each and every year. And so like most rural towns in the Midwest and in America, it's kind of a dying breed and we were slowly going through a decline. And when we looked at the rebuilding efforts, one thing we identified was that if we built it back the same way that it was, we were destined for the same success and/or failure we were destined to have prior to the tornado and that didn't look like a real optimistic future for us. And in light of the fact we didn't have anything in our community, when we looked at the rebuilding, we decided rather than build it back just the way it was with the same problems and issues and future that it had, can we do something that gives ourselves a better opportunity to prosper, a better opportunity to grow, and a better opportunity to have a brighter future.
And so when we started looking at avenues, what we could do that would give us a leg up on other communities, when you drive down the highway and you go through 10 or 20 different small towns, what makes you want to stop in one town more than another? And so we tried to identify and analyze what we could put in our community that gave us an advantage over other towns, other communities, and in light of what's taking place environmentally and in light of what's taking place with the economics and especially energy cost and energy demands, after lots of discussion and lots of different conversations, we kind of targeted to build back green and tried to make sure that as we build back our community, we build back a little bit more responsibly, a little bit more environmentally friendly.
We tried to do all that we could that made our community better suited for the future than the past, and so with that in mind, the city is building back a lot of its structures to LEED platinum levels of sustainability. Our school will be a LEED platinum school. I know the hospital is gonna be a LEED platinum facility. So we have a lot of sustainable and environmentally friendly designs going on within the community as a whole and not only the community as a whole, but also in the private sector. You can't build a residence anymore and not be aware of what's green about it, whether it's insulation, windows, Energy Star appliances, whatever it may be.
And in the school, we tried to identify what we could access that's beneficial for us, and so when we look at the environmentally friendly components of the school, the first thing you'll notice is that we'll have wind generation on the facility that allows us to generate approximately 25 percent of our own power. And the encouraging thing and the reason we didn't make the wind generation a larger part of our construction was the fact that the city is already putting in a wind farm that will produce 100 percent of the energy demands for our community. So whether we're producing it or buying it from the city, it's still gonna be 100 percent green energy that we're using. We also have geothermal wells that will be our heat pump source for heating and cooling of the building, and in our school of about 125,000 square feet, we have 96 geothermal wells that are about 420-foot deep that we're in the process of drilling right now.
The architecture of the school emphasizes a lot of natural daylighting. Most of our classrooms, you won't even have to turn on the light switch even though there'll be lights there and it'll supplement our illumination in lumens a little bit. We're trying to make sure that we have a very natural environment, not only with light quality but also air quality and acoustic values.
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The school itself is really simple, a lot of sustainable surfaces, polished concrete floors, burnished block walls. We're using six panels for exterior construction that has twice the insulated value of normal construction. Obviously technology-wise, we'll have it wired and wireless and all the capabilities that the newer technologies allow for. We have back up generation that is in the form of hydrogen-powered fuel cell. That's kind of a new technology we're excited about.
And all in all, excited about getting back into a permanent building. I know our students and our staff and our community has been in temporary structures for an extended period of time and we're still in modular trailers and we will be for the rest of this school year and hopefully when we open up school next August, we'll be in a new facility.
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But we're really excited about having all the things people take for granted in a school, hallways and lockers and controlled environments and the fact that you can walk in a building, take your coat off, and stay all day. We're pretty excited about that. And then from an activity perspective. Our kids, every time they compete in anything, they have to get on a bus and go out of town. We're excited about being able to stay in town and compete and to show the skills of our kids a little bit.
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But all in all, it's been a great recovery.
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I can't say enough about the resources and people and the skills people brought to town, whether NREL or it's FEMA or it's all the countless organizations, they've been very beneficial to us. One thing I think you publicly hear a little bit that FEMA gets a bad name every now and then. They've been nothing but helpful and beneficial to the school and they're helping our recovery and helping us replace what it is we had before the storm and try to get all those facilities and structures back up and running again with the next, well, hopefully, six to nine months.
But I'm real excited about the process. We're real excited about what the city of Greensburg is doing, what the different businesses are doing. It's truly a unique town and community. I think we've made the right decisions. When people talk about building green or sustainably and financially, how does that impact us? Is it more expensive to build to these standards?
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I do know that we continually analyze all the different things that we do and we try to make sure that there's a payoff in some form or another. And I know with us, our wind generation will have paid off after the first 9 to 11 years and then it's gonna be making us money. I know when we look at reducing utility costs, that allows us to operate on less money and also allows us to use that money for education as opposed to just maintenance. And so there's a lot of good decisions that are going on.
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I know I'm going to Chicago next week and I'm gonna visit with national legislatures with regard to the need to look at changing some legislation so that . . .
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building back green and building back with energy conservation in mind is something that our new legislation needs to allow for. And I think we're learning some valuable lessons here as we look at the rebuild to make sure that the money that we invest today has the best payoff for us down the line, and we'll be kind of a living laboratory . . .
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as Daniel says a lot of times, with regard to this kind of design and as time goes on, we'll have better answers with regard to what was good about what we did and maybe what we may have done a little bit differently. But we're trying to make concerted efforts every day based on the information we have today what's the best direction for us to go and what will give us the most positive results. I do think as you drive down the highway and you go through Greensburg, I think businesses and people and families will notice that we do have something different to offer here than most towns and we're pretty excited about that and we're hopeful that other people will be, too, and that we can continue to grow and continue to recover and continue to put ourselves back, not to the level we were before this disaster but hopefully in a better position than we were before.
Anyway, I've got to take off to a meeting. I appreciate your time. If I can ever do anything to help, any kind of recovery or any school questions, don't hesitate to call or ask, just send me an email. I appreciate your time. Daniel, kick it back to you.
Daniel Wallach:
Thank you much, Darin, and we'll have Darin's contact information on the screen at the end, as well. It should be noted that in small towns, they live and die with the school and one of the first indicators of a town that often is beyond help is when the schools close. And so it was soon after the storm that Darin came out very strongly saying that the schools would be reopened in August. And again, this was May and the whole town was gone. So that was an incredibly important rallying point for folks and morale booster and Darin and the school board get a lot of credit, a lot of credit for that. The school itself will be a living laboratory so that the kids will be learning there but they'll be immersed in sustainability and environmentally friendly technologies and practices and there's no better education than that and the community's very excited about that and the school.
One other thing I would note, the youth have been an incredibly important segment of the community and the comeback and especially in the Green Initiative. Many kids really saw the wisdom of going this direction. They got very excited about it. They got excited about the prospect of jobs awaiting for them when they came back, which was not common these days in small towns. So there's a lot of enthusiasm and excitement generated from the youth community, and again, Darin gets a lot of credit for facilitating that and make that happen.
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I'll go back up to where I left off, which was at the Kiowa County Courthouse. Again, the county is a separate entity from the city. It is the county seat but different politics, different people, and it took them also coming onboard and they did so in a very enthusiastic way. There were only two historic buildings left standing after the storm and thank goodness the beautiful courthouse was left and they chose to restore it, rebuild it, but keep its historic character but make it a LEED certified building, make it a very energy efficient showcase, make it one of the greenest historic buildings in the country. And today, it's open and operating and it's got 32 geothermal heating/cooling wells, extensive use of reclaimed materials, state-of-the-art windows, native landscaping. It's a wonderful building and a great icon in the community and this building, as others, are available for the public to tour, so we encourage you to come do that and I'll talk about that a little bit more later.
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Now the hospitals. Again, just another amazing project. A separate board, separate staff from all the other entities in town, but they, too, got very much on board and a wonderful architect helped them design and build what is now known as the first – it will be the first LEED platinum critical care facility in the country. The USDA Rural Development has been a major funder of the project and they are very excited about it being a template, being a model in the country. It too will have a wind turbine the same size as the school and the folks from BTI Wind will talk about that, but it's gonna be great to come into town and you'll see the wind turbines at the school and the hospital and off in the distance at the community wind farm, which I'll talk about a little bit in a minute after I finish the hospital. The hospital is just a gorgeous, gorgeous building. It's gonna be a 15-bed facility, and again, encourage folks to come and tour it.
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A beautiful aerial view. It's actually further along now, ahead of schedule, which you don't often see. It's slated for completing in January.
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It's aesthetically a very pleasing building. Again, incorporating native plantings and daylighting. It will have a great educational – what we call education station and like a museum exhibit in the front of the building, so you can learn all about it.
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And then without the buy in and participation of the business community, none of this would have happened. What we've called the Business Redevelopment Committee was one of the first committees after the storm to come together where businesses came and just discussed were they gonna come back, and it, again, was one of the sparks that reignited the new Greensburg. One of the largest private businesses in town is called BTI and they have four dealerships across three counties. They had a big dealership in Greensburg that was absolutely decimated by this storm and several folks saw this and you can actually see it at the BTI website, which we'll list later, but the destruction was heartbreaking. Many of these massive pieces of farm machinery, very expensive farm machinery, were just tossed about like toys.
The building was destroyed and they had a business that really couldn't afford to be interrupted but as part of the community, they chose to take the leadership role and to make a very long story short, they ended up building back their dealership in Greensburg as a LEED platinum certified building, which really took heroic measures to get that built back in that way. Nobody had built a LEED facility like that before and with the help of many, especial NREL, the Department of Energy, providing consulting, they built back this beautiful facility that's open and in business and entertaining lots of tourists that come through. That has been a very important story. John Deere is an icon in rural America and a shot in the arm that the Green Initiative really needed when these folks came to the table and said, "We're gonna be a big part of this."
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Mike and Kelly, of course, will be on in a bit to talk more about that.
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Many folks heard about what's called the 5.4.7 Arts Center. 5/4/07 was the date of the tornado. This is a building that was built by the Kansas University School of Architecture. It was a very progressive, interesting showcase building. It includes lots of different elements of sustainability, wind turbines, solar panels, green roof. It's a beautiful building indoors and one that gets lots of tourists through it. The folks who made that happen worked extraordinarily hard to make it happen, the board and the staff. It's another just amazing success story.
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Kiowa County United is another private initiative, a non-profit, where many leaders in the community came together and said, "We've got to do something to provide spaces for businesses on Main Street. It's not happening quickly enough and it's not happening because it's not affordable." So what happened is community leaders came together. They put in their own funding. Over a million dollars right now has been raised to build this building that will take up almost that whole half of Main Street and provide, again, subsidized space so businesses can afford to come back in and we can revitalize Main Street.
It's being built with what's called affordable green. This is a good model for other small communities who may not want to or can't afford to build LEED but want to build green. This particular building has lots of green elements. It's built out of insulated concrete form, which is polystyrene sandwiched with concrete. It's a very well insulated building, highly durable, and again, just another wonderful story in Greensburg and that's targeted to open in the spring.
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Many different businesses are building back green. Here on this page, you see Dwayne Shank Motors, which is the General Motors dealership, built a very green building back and then three banks. Greensburg State Bank is open for business and another insulated concrete form building, highly energy efficient building, with many other green features incorporated into it and you see the other two banks on the left which are being built. Both are going to be extraordinary and green buildings.
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The Dillons. Again, grocery stores are the lifeblood of communities and it was real good news when Dillons announced that they would rebuild in town and they in fact came forward very supportive of the Green Initiative and built a prototype for the whole Kroger chain, a very energy efficient building, working with NREL to provide LED lighting for display cases. It's also an ITF construction building. It uses daylighting. And again, one of the things we're happiest about in Greensburg is when something that's happening in Greensburg ripples out and benefits other companies or communities, and that has been the case with Kroger, which is one of the largest grocery chains in the world.
Other buildings that are in process, there's a teen center, a funeral home, motel, and the Big Well Museum, and all of those are going to have state-of-the art elements if not outrightly platinum, which the Big Well Museum is likely to be.
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And then the churches, which are very important entity in towns, also built back green, each in their own way. Some are just really state-of-the-art buildings and they're very happy to be built back that way because they have much smaller utility bills, which generally in congregations, large congregations, are very big bills. So it's really paid off for them but they also see it as being good stewards of the land.
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And then finally on the building side, we go to residential. This has been an area where there's been no mandates at all in town. The idea and hope was that people would be inspired to build back green. It certainly makes sense financially to build back green and many folks have done that. Again, with the help of the technical support of the National Renewal Energy Laboratory, a lot of homes are much greener than the ones they replaced. In fact, over 100 of the homes have energy ratings of average 58 percent, which basically means they are 42 percent more energy efficient than code required, which is a really significant achievement. And some people have gone above and beyond that and you'll see that this home here on the left that's kind of a partial geodesic dome is a wonderful home made out of SIPS panel construction. Now this one here is made out of ITF construction.
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And the Self-Help Housing Program was a collective effort spearheaded by the USDA Rural Development but NREL was part of the design of those homes and several different non-profit agencies came together and built 23 homes which were subsidized and provided to residents who had lost their homes before the storm. And as you can see, they look like everyday "normal" homes, but they are more than 40 percent more energy efficient than a typical home. Again, the first of its kind with a let's build housing to be so energy efficient.
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Another LEED platinum facility. These are town homes that look just, again, very conventional but eight of the homes and actually all of the homes were patterned after those eight that received LEED platinum status.
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The Robinett Building. This is the other historic building that stood, a really beautiful building, and the first floor it is an antique store and on the upper floor, it is a residence. And this is just a tremendous example of what you can do when you salvage a building. It's a highly energy efficient building that just, again, retains some of the character that was in the town before the storm on the first block of Main Street.
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As I mentioned before, all these buildings in the town were kind of set up like a living laboratory or a living science museum where people can come tour the buildings and learn all about sustainability and green living. Because we couldn't really ask people to open their homes, we came up with this idea called the Chain of Eco, and this is a project where we're looking at building up to a dozen homes, each of which will be open to the public and in fact will be used as bed and breakfasts. So if you want to come experience what green housing is like, you can actually stay in them and each one will be different from the next but all modeling sustainable residential design.
The first home which is very close to opening is a concrete home and that's just right across from the Big Well. You come into town, you can come visit us there.
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Another planned eco home called the Homestead eco home designed by a gentleman who grew up in Greensburg.
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Then we held the eco home design competition, last month announced the winners. We had 150 home designs submitted from 13 different countries and 38 states, some really wonderful designs and here you can see the first place, second place, and third place winners. Now all of this is gonna be accessible on the GreenTown website and/or the city website when we're done. So if you don't get a chance to take all this in, you can go back and study at your own pace. But this first home, the Meadowlark home, is the home we're working on building in Greensburg next.
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Other projects that make Greensburg truly a model sustainable community and one already identified as most cutting edge small community in the country and one of the most in the world, includes this streetscape project which is designed for the area. It will have native plantings. It will reclaim storm water. It's built to a very comfortable human walking scale. It's turning out really beautifully. It's well on its way near completion. In fact, Main Street is open as they continue to finish it up.
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LED street lights. We lost so many lights, the community decided, the city decided as a model community, why not replace them with state-of-the-art LED street lights. And so you come into town and you see these beautiful streetlights, which a lot of people didn't know LED technology was that advanced but it provides a very nice light with tremendous energy savings and in some way more important labor savings, so it's a very cost effective move for the city of Greensburg.
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And the community wind farm. A model green community without renewable power would be a hard sell, so we were very grateful as many different parties worked together to create, you can see, these are recent pictures of the turbines going up on the community wind farm. It would be 12 1/2 megawatts of power that will be provided to the grid but offsetting all the power needs for the city of Greensburg for now and into the foreseeable future.
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And just briefly touch on economic development, which will be a very important part of the future of Greensburg and folks, again, from BTI Wind Energy are with us today but I'll just mention that it's exactly what we were hoping for with the new identity for Greensburg is that businesses like this would sprout up. And this one has taken off beyond anybody's wildest imagination and they have taken their John Deere dealership network and come up with a way to distribute wind turbine throughout the country. And more important than distributing them is servicing them and that's been the missing link in small-scale or medium-scale wind energy and they're filling that niche and at the same time, providing a wonderful employer for Greensburg. And again, Mike and Kelly will talk about that more in a bit.
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Eco tourism has been identified as a key economic engine for the future of the town and we already started with the Greensburg green tour program and you can go to the website, GreenTown website, and download that and get all the details of the sites of significance in town. But we want you to come to Greensburg and experience it because it really is something that is hard to describe. When folks come to town, they have a great time and they leave really inspired. The other thing I just want to reiterate that I mentioned before but we kind of conceptualize the whole town as a museum and all these different sites, all these different buildings will be set up like exhibits in a museum that allow you to come and get the submersive education experience that's also very entertaining.
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And with that, I will introduce Bob Dixson, who is the mayor. Bob has been a wonderful ambassador for Greensburg, going around the world talking about what we're doing here and building good buzz. And he's a very eloquent speaker and representing the community well and I'm happy to introduce Bob Dixson.
Bob Dixson:
Well, thank you, Daniel, and participants, it's a real honor and pleasure to have you with us today. We here in Greensburg have been blessed with a tremendous opportunity. Even though we lost 11 of our community members and sorely miss them and memorialize them daily, but we've been blessed with a tremendous opportunity here to utilize the concepts that our ancestors that pioneered central and western Kansas that if you take care of the land, it takes care of you. And when we talk about green sustainable, we need to focus on environmental stewardship. We need to be good stewards of the resources that the Lord's blessed us with and as you see on the screen, the new City Hall, as Daniel alluded to, all the active systems that we have all over town, all the brick on the City Hall is reclaimed from the rubble of our old power plant. We see a new water tower that we needed for not only water for life sustaining health and fire protection, but it was one of the first buildings up or facilities up that showed rising above the rubble. It was a beacon of hope for our community and a beacon of hope for travelers going up and down Highway 54 that, yes, Greensburg is building back.
We're very blessed, again, with this opportunity and it shows the citizens of Greensburg have been truly resilient. They've been adaptive and innovative in their approach. Have we done everything right? No, we haven't. Are we learning on the fly? Yes, we are. But you have to do something and we feel here in Greensburg that we're making a tremendous effort to learn as much as we can and implement as many ideas and technologies that we can to take advantage of those concepts our ancestors taught us. We have the opportunity to be the new pioneers of the 21st century and in the midst of being a pioneer, you're going to have situations that come up that cause you to possibly rethink or questions from the outside that rethink things. We regret nothing here in Greensburg. We're here to make a difference, to show the world, to offer hope, to offer good news that we each can have an impact of being environmental stewards.
I've been viewing the questions on the screen. There is some great questions there and I do not want to take too much away from – time away from addressing those questions because we have two excellent, very knowledgeable, very committed citizens of the community and business owners, Mike and Kelly Estes, to speak later. But we live in one of the most exciting times in history in the United States. We have the chance to truly step out and be bold right now. We have a chance to be those good stewards of the resources that the Lord's blessed us with and what we're trying to accomplish here in Greensburg is simply we would like to build a town back both economically and residentially and commercially that you all can be proud of and that you can come and see what we've done, like community wind farm, like geothermal wells, the highest concentration per capita in the world of geothermal wells, those closed and open loop systems here in our community.
Our next step is we want to continue to encourage economic development of those companies that want to come and share our vision and come and grow with us, come and be sustainable in this community. We feel we have a tremendous list of opportunities that will allow that to happen, quality of life issues, but more than anything, we offer a sense of community here, a sense of hope, a sense of part of being something exciting of taking care of our environment.
And Daniel, I'm just gonna kind of leave it at that with you because, like I say, there's some tremendous questions here. I think we really need to get to address the attendees concerns. I thank you all for being with us today.
Daniel Wallach:
Thank you very much, Bob. Well said and I would just echo on the economic development side that given all of the elements make Greensburg this showcase of sustainability and the community's commitment to keep it that way for the long term. We think that businesses are going to be happy to be associated with Greensburg and settle in Greensburg and have a Greensburg mailing address. We think that's gonna do a lot for businesses who are putting themselves out there as being leaders in sustainability and green product design.
All right, well, Mike and Kelly Estes, I alluded to them earlier. They run BTI, which is the John Deere dealership, and they have been incredibly important players and they kind of typify, in my experience, what I really see as the heroism in town because they had to rebuild their lives while simultaneously going out and developing these new ideas and to providing the kind of support that the community really desperately needed at the time.
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So with that, I will pull up the slides and Mike, would you please take it away?
Mike Estes:
Can you hear me, Daniel?
Daniel Wallach:
Yes.
Mike Estes:
All right. Well, thank you for everybody that's on this call. We really appreciate as a community everybody that has shown an interest in Greensburg and as has been alluded to by all the previous speakers here, we wouldn't be where we are without the help of the world, as it were. There's so many people to thank that we just can't thank them enough but we do enjoy sharing the Greensburg story and hope that it will help somebody out there as they move into the future. But as we indicated, we're – Kelly and I – I'm co-owner, Kelly's the president. We're a fourth generation family-owned John Deere dealership with four locations. We're in Bucklin, which is 20 miles to the west; we're in Greensburg; Ness City, about 60 miles north; and Pratt, about 30 miles to the east. So we're down in Southwest Kansas here and have been here for 55 years. Our grandfather started the business in ‘44. We've been in Greensburg since 1996 as an entity.
We had a 42,000 square-foot facility on the west edge of Greensburg, a very, very nice facility, recently upgraded and modernized. It was a nice place but the tornado that hit that evening totally destroyed our dealership and the equipment. It was a $23 million insurance claim, the single largest claim in the history of 102-year-old insurance company, Federated. We lost about 55 combines, 45 tractors, 20 sprayers, probably 100 or more headers, which are the platforms that go on the front of a combine to cut the grain. It was devastating. You can get on the Internet and I'm sure a lot of you have seen pictures of the loss.
But five days later, we talked with President Bush, Governor Sebelius, and the whole government entourage in our destroyed foyer of our old store and we talked about rebuilding our store but we also talked about rebuilding the town. We committed to build back quite quickly. Our family decided we were coming back regardless but we needed to kind of convey some messages that we were going to be here to stay and we even made up t-shirts that said, "Still here, still John Deere" that we have here and it was a pretty popular item.
But that's where we first heard in that foyer the ideas about the greening of Greensburg. Governor Sebelius talked about that, even how it would be neat to have Greensburg build back green and here we are in Midwest bible belt areas and President Bush agreed with Governor Sebelius and all the entourage, Pat Roberts and Ti Hart, Moran, and all of them, and basically kind of talked about wind farms and bio fuels and things that we could do. It was a good conversation. It was interesting that that took place so quickly after the tornado, but that's kind of where we first heard it.
As Daniel said, it wasn't any one place. It came out of multiple places and from multiple fronts and Daniel Wallach and GreenTown was certainly a very big impetus to the Green Initiative taking off the way it did. The city council and Steve Hewitt, the administrator, too off with that quickly and the mayor. It was a group effort, but I think that it was the right thing to do. I still believe in it. I still believe that it's going to propel Greensburg forward in some really exciting, new ways.
But really right after the disaster, Kelly, my brother; myself; and a man named Scott Brown, who is a local businessman, in fact he's very responsible in the Main Street project, worked with the business community to try to make sure commerce was gonna return to the area because we had over 100 businesses before the tornado and we weren't sure, we started hearing people were not coming back. So we started a business redevelopment group and met every week for about 18 months to try to bring people together, get everybody on the same page. I mean we have had so much help from the federal, the state, non-profit, and businesses that came. It was a pretty amazing meeting and some of the things that came out of it.
And then there was another process that went on in town that we don't have time to get into but if you have questions, we can later, called the Public Square Process, which was about the town right after the tornado by Governor Sebelius, actually, kind of instituted this and it was very, very good in rebuilding the relational aspects. Rebuilding buildings is one thing but rebuilding the relationships is another, and I think this community has really seen that faith and family and friends is what it's all about to get the community back on track. The town has taken, as Bob said and Daniel said, their steps to build green and as a large family business in the area, we just elected to support their efforts and felt like we have to build back, as well. Why don't we do this and build it better than what we had? What we had was nice but it certainly wasn't green and it certainly wasn't a sustainable energy efficient building.
So that's what we set about doing and we set the goal as a LEED platinum facility, which was pretty far reaching, but that's what we did. And due to the highway redesign through Greensburg, you saw the hospital there and Daniel told you about the hospital. We sold our ground to the county so they could build the hospital on a new site and that was on the west side of town and we purchased 77 acres on the east edge of town and that's where we laid plans for building this LEED designed building. The first thing we put up on the site was an Endurance five-kilowatt wind turbine which powered the job site, and as far as we know, this was a first. Another first in this endeavor was this was a prefabricated metal building that I'm sitting in here talking to you now. It's just a standard steel building but then it was overlayed with the sustainable elements that kind of allowed us to get this platinum status.
We're also the first John Deere dealership or building, for that matter, to obtain a LEED rating of any kind. John Deere was so encouraged about that that they have since made us a model dealership for their new Dealers of Tomorrow network, which are the dealerships that they're kind of sinking their teeth in for the future, and we're a green model. I mean John Deere's green anyway. We're taking green John Deere up a notch.
We targeted 58 LEED points out of the 69 possible that we thought we could get. We achieved the platinum by getting 52 points, which is really the minimum, as you probably know, on that scale accepted by the U.S. Green Building Council. But NREL, they're on here obviously with us, they modeled this building for us and without their help, we couldn't have achieved this. We got a 42 percent reduction in energy usage and a 50 percent reduction in water usage for a comparable non-sustainable building site such as this.
I'll just mention a few highlights before I end here. We have a lot of daylighting through windows, solatubes in the showroom and skylights in the shop, and then we have daylight sensing that reduces electrical usage. We have motion sensors in all areas. We have a very large VAV air-handling unit. That gives us a lot of things. It gives us excellent air quality, measurement capabilities, and we can manage the zones very well for the occupants. We have in-floor heating and we're deriving our heat source from the used oil that we – when we change the oil out of our combines, tractors, sprayers, our large units, we save that oil and capture it and then we burn it as a heat source in the winter. We have a water capture pond and we have, as I mentioned, a wind turbine that gives us about seven to ten percent of the power requirements of this building. A lot of recycling content.
Believe it or not, I even have a bike rack and a shower. Most of my farmers don't use bikes when they come to my store, but I'll tell you what. It's kind of starting to come in handy because we're starting to become, as Daniel said, kind of a tourist destination and I think it will see some usage sooner or later. But we have FFC lumber throughout the building, low water usage fixtures and plant life, pervious pavers. Our insulation values in here, we're using metal insulated panels is what we actually use. They're sandwiched panels which gives us double the value of the insulation that we would need in a comparable building like this. And our roof's like an R38 and we have heavy-duty insulated panels in the large doors in our shop.
There's a lot of things neat. We do have something you can get online with. It's called a green touch screen. It's an educational credit but it's very interesting. It's a software Internet based program that has been custom designed for us to display anything we want, diagrams of our building, videos, measurement charts ‘cause we're tracking all of our systems, donor lists. I mean it goes on. You can do anything with this. It's a very, very excellent tool and we have a large kiosk in the display room that lets people give themselves a self-guided tour.
And like you mentioned, Daniel, we are giving tours. It's very interesting. We even contracted, more or less, with GreenTown to help us with that. But once again, I want to thank NREL for all they've done for us. They helped us put together a brochure and we have that available to the public. It's called "Rebuilding it Better: BTI Greensburg."
So with that, Daniel, I'm gonna turn it back over to you.
Daniel Wallach:
Thank you, Mike, and at the end, we will have contact information, the different websites that have been mentioned where you can go check things out. And we know there's gonna be more questions than we can answer today. I would encourage everybody to send any questions they have to info@GreensburgGreenTown.org, and again, we'll give you that address at the end. But any questions that we don't get to today, we'll get to afterwards.
With that, I'll bring up Mike's brother, Kelly, who is also co-owner and president of BTI. Kelly and Mike are a phenomenal team. Kelly has moved lots of mountains in the last couple of years and the community is really indebted to both these guys. Kelly, I'm gonna have you come and talk about your experience and specifically the new business that you both started. Kelly.
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Kelly J. Estes:
Daniel, thank you. I'd like to thank all the participants for being here today and as you can tell, there's a lot of people that have moved mountains, not just Kelly. So I want to thank everybody for participating, the DOE and NREL and then for letting us be on here today, and then Daniel Wallach has been a pioneer for green and the Green Initiative in our community and he's really led a lot of these projects, so thank you for being there.
With that, I'd like to head into a story that initiative that happened. The very winds and the tornado that destroyed us has given us an opportunity to come back in a very unique way and energy is a great deal of topic of discussion, as you well know, across the entire country right now. And with the first energy bill that's passed in 42 years, I think the tornado has blessed us with the timing to be in the right area at the right time. By doing this, what happened was a company came to town and donated a unique product. At the time, we were just trying to survive, as Mike told you, to bring our business back and our building back and help everybody else build back, but by getting this product, it was an innovation point to building our site. It was one of our green building points.
And this particular turbine is an Endurance wind turbine and it was built and designed by two engineers that have been in the business for two decades. And like I say, at the time we did not realize it. They'd been known in the business for quite some time. Dean Davis is an electrical engineer. David Laino is a Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering. They started their own business in consulting for Big Wind around the world for two decades, then went into their own business and got a DOE grant to develop – about five years ago, a DOE grant to develop and build a unique turbine.
They saw what was happening with net metering standards across the 44 states and that had passed net metering at this point of some form. They saw what was coming down the pipe and built the only small wind turbine, as we know it, that has enough energy to be sustainable and do something for a project, was the Endurance turbine. These two guys basically developed and built this turbine on a – it's a small scale. The 5KW turbine was the first initiative and the one that we had out here and since have developed three more, going up to as large as 50KW.
But anyway, these two gentlemen saw the future and donated a turbine to our cause and that uniqueness is that it has no inverter. There's no wild energy coming out of the head. So therefore, for our innovation point, we could plug into the head of this turbine and power up our site. You want to remember, Darin, I think commented, that we didn't have power for three months. Think about being without power in your house or your community for three months and without running this, we would not have known. And guess what? We got to test this product still not knowing how unique it was at that point in building our building back. After finding out that this was, indeed, a unique machine, it's kind of like from the old bag phones of yesterday to the new cell phones or iPod phones that you carry today. It's that unique and that far advanced and we are very blessed and fortunate to find it.
And so what we decided to do, a man came to town by the name of Bill Hanlon and Bill Hanlon is a professor at Emporia State University and he basically went broke in small wind in the ‘70's and ‘80's. We started to put solar into our building only and then we started – because of the history of small wind – and then we found the uniqueness of this product. And then we cornered Bill Hanlon, who went broke in that business in the ‘70's and ‘80's, and we quizzed him for everything we could find out about what did it. No. 1 was product. No. 2 was sales, services, and support and how to implement a business plan that would be sustainable for not just five years or ten years that these places might be in business but for many years. And so therefore, that's what we did.
We developed a written business plan through BTI Wind and organized and structured our company. Then we developed a Harvest the Wind Network and what we did is we targeted our peers across North America. We figured if it worked for us so well and integrated into our business and cut costs and energy costs for our consumers, not just ag, but all kinds of consumers. The other thing is, in the ag business, we are pretty reliant on weather and crop for our survival. If we lose a crop or freeze or drought, then it's real hard for our type of business to survive, so we were looking for something sustainable. Guess what, you can harvest the wind pretty well year round, especially with what these two engineers saw in that metering in the 44 states that we've already set up across the entire country.
So by doing that, we were able to target our peers and set up a complete network across North America. We've hit several markets so far. We have found, and with the addition of the three machines that these same two engineers built a lot of their patented items in the larger machines that they have now currently, we can handle small commercial businesses. We can handle farmers, shops, irrigations, grain dryers. You heard the school is putting a turbine up. You heard Darin talk about that. We've had many colleges and schools and universities come at us across the entire country. The hospital is putting one in Greensburg, a 50KW, that Daniel talked about. We've seen municipalities, city municipalities, come at us, dairies, water, waste management systems, over the road dispatchers offices, casinos.
The vertical markets just keep coming at us, which is phenomenal, and the reason it is is because in short order, with us targeting the entire – we did get the exclusive rights to Endurance across North America and currently we have traveled – and we started BTI Wind in July of 2008. We've set up approximately 44 states and 6 provinces of Canada so far with our network, and under that network, there's over 300 locations within the amount of stores they might own, like BTI owns 4 locations. We own Pratt, Ness City, Greensburg, and Bucklin is what we own. Some of these networks own up to 15 to 20-some dealerships and what do we require?
Well, we require trained specialists at each network. They must have a trained specialist who knows and understands energy, small wind turbines, and the product. Then he sets up the dealership sales people under him or her and then they have over – basically each network has to have two trained skilled service technicians that are required to keep up with annual certification. And we have built a BTI Wind Energy facility – I think Daniel might have a slide on that – in Greensburg right next to our LEED platinum facility that Mike talked about and it's BTI Wind, and we also have a training center that we have built inside that building that we train. It's called the Endurance room, because Endurance, our manufacturer, helps sponsor that with us.
Garden City Community College has got a grant set up to train and as a community college has established a curriculum for training our service training through Endurance and the Endurance room, so we know we are gonna have sustainability and service that is gonna be around for many years. We're putting packages, these machines together, that we can turnkey, come in with bonded installers and electricians that must be trained by Endurance and Harvest the Wind Network. That way it's from start to finish that we get this precise. Precision is what is lacking or has been lacking in small wind and then sustainability, of course.
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The other thing that's pretty exciting is John Deere credit will finance and lease only certified Endurance machines through the entire network. That has been a really big benefit because we can cover the entire nation for funding and financing. I might add that through the initiative with what President Obama passed that every machine is 30 percent investment tax credit automatically goes with it. The USDA has a 25 percent grant that they can, if funded, will go with that in conjunction with it.
But anyway, I could go on for hours. I know that we need to go to the question and answering as quick as we can. The one thing I will say is that BTI, we feel real fortunate we found a way to give back. Whether it be through the sustainability in our building or the BTI Wind Harvest the Wind Network that we put across the entire country, we've created over 100 new jobs across the country at a time when jobs aren't easy to come by. We put five new jobs in Greensburg that we're excited about.
So I just want to let people know that bad happens but good can come from that if we're looking for it and with the times that we're going through now, I would like everybody to keep that in mind. There are opportunities but we just kind of get beat down and we don't look for them at the time. But with that, I guess I'd like to turn it back to Daniel and head into the question and answer part of the session.
Daniel Wallach:
Thanks so much, Kelly. I appreciate it and I'm sorry to folks that we don't have more time for questions. Like I said, though, you can see the websites on your screen now. If you write to us at GreensburgGreenTown.org, we'll answer all questions. I'm just gonna run through some that we've got here in front of us.
In terms of a geothermal that provides both heating and cooling, there's a question about has Greensburg mandated residential units be to a certain code or requirements? No, not other than the basic code. We are working right now with the National Association of Homebuilders to come up with a voluntary code that is rewarded when built to those standards, but that has not yet been implemented.
Somebody asked about the durability of the structures in town. It varies. Affordability is an issue and but when you've been through a tornado like that, you're usually very mindful of building more smart in that way.
A question about the role that the state agencies played. The governor's office and state agencies played a huge role, different agencies in different ways, but again, as Kelly mentioned earlier and Mike, there's so many people to thank we can't adequately do it.
The electric utility provider, it's a group. Actually, John Deere Renewables, John Deere owns the wind farm but has contracted with the city to provide the amount of power that the city needs from it. There's a group called the Kansas Power Pool that's also part of that group.
In terms of how LEED buildings are performing, time will tell. Fortunately, we have NREL is in town doing testing and Kelly and Mike's facility has their green screening and monitoring equipment and we're looking to get more and more of that done so we can quantify exactly what's happening.
In terms of FEMA allowing for the use of public assistance funds to cover the cost of LEED, FEMA has a pretty strict formula of 75 percent of what was there before the storm, so we've had to come up with donations or creative ways to come up with additional monies to build more energy efficiently and greener. But that is something, as Darin mentioned earlier, something that is being reexamined thanks to Greensburg.
Okay, I know it's exactly 1:30. I encourage folks, again, to check out the different sites. GreensburgGreenTown.org, you can write us there and we'll do our best to respond to you in a timely manner. I guess I would just ask if, Bob, do you have anything else you want to add?
Bob Dixson:
Well, No. 1, Daniel, I would just like to thank all the participants being with us today and to reiterate everything, we are so blessed here to have volunteers from all over the world that came and helped us.
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I would also like to make sure we recognize NREL again that has helped us with all kinds of codes, all kinds of information. And Daniel, you and Greensburg GreenTown have been a tremendous asset to the community in informational and encouragement and we really appreciate that. And I would encourage all the participants to understand that sustainability is about us. It's not a political issue. It transcends politics and we can be green and we can be sustainable and we can make a difference.
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Daniel Wallach:
Thank you very much, Bob, and encourage people to go to the buildings.energy.gov if they want to get a copy of the slides from today and the video will be available soon. Thanks to everybody for your patience and for participating and we hope you'll connect to Greensburg and stay tuned and come visit. Anthoney?
Anthoney Perkins:
Thank you, Daniel, and thank you to all of our speakers today. We'd also like to thank all of the participating today, as well, and sharing in the amazing story of Greensburg. As it says on your screen, please visit www.buildings.energy.gov/webinars to get a copy of the slides, as Daniel's already told you. Today was the first in a series of three webinars on Greensburg. The next one will take place in December, so please check to the same web page for details about the dates, times, and topics, as well as any future webinars that Buildings puts on for you.
Thank you and this concludes our presentation.
Operator:
That concludes today's conference. Everyone may disconnect at this time.
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