Greensburg, Kansas, and Beyond Webinar (text version)
Below is the text version of the Webinar titled "Greensburg Kansas and Beyond," originally presented on December 15, 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:
Welcome, and thank you for standing by. All participants will be on a listen-only mode for today's presentation. Also, today's call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Mr. Anthoney Perkins. Thank you. You may begin.
Anthoney Perkins:
Thank you, Lisa. My name is Anthoney Perkins and I'd like to welcome you to the Greensburg, Kansas and Beyond webinar presented by the Building Technologies Program and the U.S. Department of Energy. We're excited to have with us today four speakers who have been instrumental in helping Greensburg go green, but before we start I have some housekeeping items that I'd like to cover.
First, I want to mention that everybody today is on listen-only mode as you just heard. We will have Q&A sessions at the end of the presentation. You can participate by submitting your questions electronically through the webinar. To submit a question you click on the Q&A link at the top of the bar on your screen, type the question in the box, and then 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.
During the presentation we will be showing a few videos today that will require audio through your computer, so in order to hear the videos, you will need to turn on or turn up the sound on your computer. As a reminder to the speakers, please either mute your phone or do not turn on the audio during this time. Also, I wanted to point out the URL is on the screen. www.buildings.energy.gov/webinars.html. On that webpage is a link to see today's slides. Also, today's presentation as you've heard is being recorded and a video of the presentation will be posted in the near future.
Finally, we have a few quick questions to ask before we get started to help us learn more about you the audience and target future presentations. We will start with two questions now and then at the end of this presentation, we will have two questions as well before the Q&A session.
[Next Slide]
So please click on your screen to indicate the appropriate response. The first one, at your location, how many people total are participating in today's webinar? Go ahead and review the question and click the answer that's appropriate. I'll give you a few moments to go ahead and click. Okay, we're going to go ahead and go on to the next question, so go ahead and answer now, please.
[Next Slide]
Okay. Next question. What best describes your affiliation or organization? So if you would review the question, and select the answer that best describes your organization. If you haven't voted, please vote now. We're about to close the question.
[Next Slide]
Okay. Thank you. Appreciate your participation in that. And now to introduce our first speaker, Chuck Banks. Chuck is the Principal of Chuck Banks Associates. He was the Kansas Director of the USDA Rural Development from 2001 to early 2009. He has been a champion and advocate of Greensburg Sustainable Projects, including playing a major role in ensuring that the Mennonite Housing project, which erected 23 homes in town, was the greenest blitz build project ever seen in the country.
Okay, so now I'll turn the presentation over to you, Chuck.
Chuck Banks:
Well, thank you very much, Anthoney. And I would also like to thank you, the Department of Energy, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, for hosting this webinar. I would also like to thank all the attendees participating in today's webinar. It was reported this morning that we have over 500 folks registered for today's webinar ranging from building industry, the commercial sector, energy-related interests, homeowners, and also government. So we really appreciate everybody taking time out of their busy schedule.
We're going to be running a video here very shortly, and I would like to ask all of you to please make sure that your computer speakers are turned on, and the volume is also turned up so that you can hear the upcoming videos. So Anthoney, if you will please run the video giving you an overview of what's happened in Greensburg in May 2007.
[Next Slide]
As you can see from the video, the Greensburg tornado was certainly a devastating event. Never before had we seen anything of that nature in Kansas from a single event. Totally destroying the business sector, the public sector, the residential sector, and the public sector. As all the agencies came to assist Greensburg, it became very clear that it was going to take a multiple-sector effort and leveraging resources to help rebuild this community.
One of the groups that we felt very close and felt needed to be involved in this effort because of the interest by the community to rebuild green was the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and as we started working with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Shanti Pless with NREL became very involved then with us, and he's been an outstanding advocate and has provided outstanding assistance for the rebuilding efforts, so I would like to introduce Shanti for his presentation. Shanti.
[Next Slide]
Shanti Pless:
Thanks, Chuck. Welcome all. So as Chuck said, I'm a researcher in the NREL Commercial Buildings Research Group. We focus on energy efficiency and renewable energy in the commercial building sector, and what it's going to take to get net zero energy buildings by 2025 is our program goal. So we were involved in Greensburg looking at, you know, zero energy buildings as well as a zero energy community, and what rebuilding is needed to get to a net zero energy position. So we'll go through some of how Greensburg has gone to restore buildings for a renewable city.
[Next Slide]
As Chuck talked about, the destruction in Greensburg was extensive. Of the 1,700 homes in the area, 961 were completely destroyed and another 100 had major, significant damage. Of all the businesses in town, 110 had major damage and had to be torn down and rebuilt, and there were 11 deaths in Greensburg. All the infrastructure for what allows the town to function — the hospital, the school, all the city buildings, the county buildings, and the downtown retail district were all destroyed. So there's some pretty significant destruction to overcome. And over 90% of the structures were destroyed.
[Next Slide]
And so a lot of folks are involved in the vision of rebuilding for a sustainable renewable power in the city. Part of our involvement at the lab was to look at a few sectors in terms of where the opportunities are for rebuilding as a sustainable city from ethanol availability and alternative fuels to hybrid electric vehicles. Community wind farms were talked about extensively early on as well as what it takes to rebuild, you know, both residential and commercial sectors efficiently. So I'll focus today on the building sector, and their successes.
[Next Slide]
Our goal early on in being involved in the various commercial building projects in town was to support what we call an integrated building design process. To be able to design, construct, and operate low energy buildings, and buildings that fit in a renewable power city. So a lot of this work early on focused on setting energy efficiency goals. Goals that are measurable and that we could, you know, clearly communicate to both the architect, engineers and builders as well as the owners in town. Part of that was to be able to communicate cost pathways to be able to hit those energy goals in a cost effective way. A lot of our work and my work was both to educate local builders and owners and engineers on using energy modeling tools and simulation tools to look at the cost effectiveness of various energy efficiency options. To be able to understand interactions between envelope and mechanical systems and daylighting.
We also provided — NREL did – a lot of objective review and assessments of various energy efficiency opportunities as well as renewable opportunities from biomass assessments and wind assessments, energy efficiency, all sorts of things like that can be done on the energy efficiency side, so being able to provide an objective review of what really works in Greensburg. This also included PV and solar assessments as well as providing on-site residential efficiency experts to support rebuilding homes.
[Next Slide]
This is a slide that I think I showed pretty much to all the building owners in town whenever we'd sit down at early to share and to talk about energy efficiency and how to include energy efficiency into their projects and really focus on what's cost effective and energy efficient. We really focused on the setting those measurable energy goals. This is a key tenant of an integrated design process so that everyone involved in the project can have a goal to reach and understand that goal. Another key strategy is to be able to use your climate, the architecture and the envelope to reduce loads as much as possible. If you're familiar with architecture in an envelope, if you can use that for reducing loads as well. It's an integrated solution and doesn't to cost anymore. Strategies such as good insulation, good thermal envelopes, airtight, daylighting and natural ventilation are common building-integrated, architecture-integrated strategies that really can be part of the purpose of the building and be well integrated into the final solution. Spent some time in the project evaluating design solutions based on a life cycle cost basis rather than a first cost basis to be able to understand decisions related to energy efficiency and their life cycle savings rather than the first cost.
Wherever possible we try to encourage the value added of the marketing and the imaging of rebuilding green and energy efficiency. So that's been a key success I think long term. We'll talk more about how they've been able to keep the national spotlights on Greensburg over, you know, 2 ½ years ago. There's still lots of media attention on Greensburg because they've been able to focus on this concept.
Another key concept we focused on was being able to integrate energy efficiency with disaster resistance. If there's things that can be done on rebuilding to enhance disaster resistance that can also be energy efficient, that's a key integration strategy.
And throughout we've heard from a lot of the local folks about keeping it simple, and rebuilding right. And so doing it right was one of their key strategies to really hone in on rebuilding energy efficiently. Finally, measurement and verification is a key strategy to ensure that their investment in energy efficiency paid off.
[Next Slide]
So, some of the key tools that were available and that definitely were a success in getting Greensburg where they're at now, it started I think where one of the key moves was the LEED Platinum City Ordinance. And so the city committed to LEED Platinum for all their city-owned buildings over 4,000 square feet. And this really was I think a key move that got a lot of the other projects that aren't necessarily city owned to think about this and understand what the city's doing and so they could do it as well. As part of that, as part of their ordinance they also had included an energy savings of 42% for that LEED Platinum just to ensure that energy efficiency was a key consideration in all the city projects.
Another key strategy that really was instrumental in getting Greensburg to where they're at is their comprehensive sustainable master plan put together by a Kansas City based architecture firm, BNIM. And they recommended 30% savings to all projects in town as well as looking at 42% when economically justified. And so it was institutionalized early on in terms of energy efficiency in all rebuilding.
[Next Slide]
A key tool that I viewed as paramount were called Advanced Energy Design Guides. These are a set of prescriptive recommendations for 30% savings over code for various building types. These were put together by the professional societies of ASHRAE, which is the American Society for Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers, the Architect Institute of America, USGBC, the Illumination Society, as well as DOE. And it was a group of industry experts that put together prescriptive recommendations by each of these building types, and it's by climate zone as well. And they're easy to use. Kind of recommendations, kind of a starting point for energy efficiency. They're available for free on ASHRAE's website, and there's currently six of them available and they were all widely used in town.
[Next Slide]
I think mentioning the funding sources and the various organizations that funded a lot of the rebuilding is important here. Chuck will talk more about this at the end, but I just wanted to highlight some of them from the Federal sector to the local and state, providing grants and rebuilding assistance to corporate sponsors, as well as the personal donations and investment in time to rebuild.
[Next Slide]
I want to talk a lot on some of the projects in town. Specifically I'm going to start with the courthouse that was rebuilt. It was one of the commercial projects that did survive the tornado. At least the structure did. I think there was a minivan on the roof after the tornado, so they had to repair that, but it was built about 96 years ago I believe, and so it was built in an age before electricity, so it was designed to be naturally daylight and designed to be naturally ventilated, because there was no lighting or air conditioning — electrical lighting or air conditioning. And so you know, it was designed and built with a lot of energy efficiency strategies already incorporated, and it survived a tornado, so I think it was a good place to start for a lot of the projects that were rebuilding with similar goals. And so they did have to modernize it, adding significant insulation to the 17" concrete walls. There's a lot of interior spray foam that really sealed up the building tight, and they added a state of the art mechanical system, ground source heat pumps, and they're submitting for LEED goal and exceeding 35% energy savings.
So we used this project as an example for all the other projects in town in terms of how they incorporate some of these kind of tried and true energy efficiency strategies.
[Next Slide]
We'll hear more about this as Chuck has some more pictures I believe of this project. It was one of the first ones in the downtown district to rebuild on the Platinum certified seeing 50% savings. You'll see a lot of the projects in town use what are called insulated concrete foam wall systems. These are well insulated structural concrete wall systems that provide both some disaster resistance and a good envelope. Again, ground source heat pump systems and a PV system provided by a corporate donor, about 8% of the total building load.
[Next Slide]
The County Hospital is also being rebuilt, and they'll be submitting for Platinum as well. One of the first critical — or the first critical access hospital to go for LEED Platinum. They've got daylighting in a lot of the interior spaces, which is fairly uncommon in a hospital. Again, a well-insulated envelope of structural concrete, a high efficiency air conditioning system with a VAV which is in commercial buildings is fairly difficult, but in a healthcare hospital setting it's a key move to have to get energy efficiency out of healthcare buildings. And then a 50 kW wind turbine as well.
[Next Slide]
We'll hear a lot more about the John Deere dealership, and so I just want to point out that the small retail Advanced Energy Design Guide was the starting point for this building, and they've exceeded all the recommendations to get to 50% in LEED Platinum.
[Next Slide]
And the school which is also under construction, the largest building in town, will also be submitting for LEED Platinum significant energy savings, energy cost savings, and lots of daylighting and ground source heat pumps as well.
[Next Slide]
So those are some of the big projects, but there's lots of little projects in town that have also adopted a lot of these energy efficiency strategies from the G.M. dealership which is a metal building. There's a lot of metal buildings in this part of the country, and so getting energy efficiency out of a metal building is not always easy so they've gotten around 30% savings. As well as the grocery store and there's three banks in town who have all used the insulated concrete forms for their wall system, and daylighting and heat pumps as well. City Hall, which is a city-owned building. It's now open, submitting for Platinum as well as the Arts Center which is actually the first certified Platinum project in town. Various churches and a hotel that's being rebuilt now are looking at using the Highway Lodging Advance Energy Design Guides.
[Next Slide]
Looking at all the projects in town, there's over 30 commercial and public building projects that have publicly stated they're looking for a LEED certification or a minimum 30% energy savings, and in a town that's about a mile and a half wide by a mile wide, it's the highest density of LEED Platinum projects we think in the U.S. You know, there's seven projects at least getting built now, and another two or three that are in the fundraising, planning stages. So it's definitely pervasive through Greensburg, LEED Platinum, and significant energy savings.
[Next Slide]
All these projects, you can learn more about each one of them in Greensburg Sustainable Building Database, which is available at the link there. All the projects in town, there's a detailed write-up on each of them with updated construction pictures as well as updated content as the projects come out of the ground.
A couple of summary thoughts here in terms of key moves to rebuilding for a renewable energy city. The education of both owners and the design teams on life cycle cost analysis, which focuses on building integrative efficiency first, and then looking at renewables was cheap. Attending to both buy-in to both energy and green goals for each project by the owner down through the builder and the contractor as a key to get 30-50% savings on all the commercial projects in town. Tools such as Advanced Energy Design Guides were used to communicate these strategies. And wherever possible, integrating disaster resistance with the projects, a key strategy which was throughout all projects was the R-22 insulated concrete foam form wall systems. Daylighting was key in all the projects as well. All projects had to have significant daylighting. Fully day lit spaces.
One unique system component that forced a lot of — it didn't force, but a lot of projects considered all-electric heating systems. These are ground source heat pump systems. The idea of the big projects have lots of on-site renewables — electricity from wind systems, as well as the community wind system which we'll hear more about. It has an abundance of wind power for the town, and to make the most use of that, a lot of projects elected to use electric heating systems, which isn't as common in a place without lots of renewable electricity.
[Next Slide]
And for those that are not in Greensburg, there's abundant ways to follow the progress in the local media, and the town has used this extensively to keep the spotlight on their rebuilding progress. From New York Times, CNN, Planet Green. The filming of the rebuilding process has been instrumental in keeping up the public's interest in Greensburg.
[Next Slide]
And a lot of lessons learned have been developed as part of the work in rebuilding green in Greensburg have been put into literature and trying to get the word out in terms of how to rebuild in a disaster recovery and in an energy efficient way, so those are all available on the link here, and it's summarized as an in general disaster recovery opportunity for energy efficiency and green.
[Next Slide]
So thank you, and we'll turn it back to Chuck to introduce our next speaker.
[Next Slide]
I just want to again thank the funders, and Lynn Billman sitting next to me here who is NREL's point of contact on the ground in Greensburg, which was instrumental. So thanks, Lynn.
Chuck Banks:
Well, thank you very much, Shanti. You know, one thing that everybody's going to come away from this presentation today is understanding that technical assistance from the outside has played a huge role, a significant role, in helping the community build the city, the county, the private sector, the individuals, in the recovery process. And especially in the area of rebuilding back green, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Department of Energy has done an outstanding job providing that type of technical assistance. And as Shanti said, Lynn Billman was the key person on the ground, and Lynn and her folks did a great job. Shanti was out there, too. I can't say enough about what a great job they did, so thank you very much to NREL and DOE for all the work you did in that area.
As we moved forward in the recovery process, you have to realize that you have rebuilding going on in all segments to effectively help the community recover. That includes infrastructure. That includes public services. That's working with the individuals for residential housing. But also the private sector. Getting job activity rebuilding, recovering is critically important.
An individual I met very early on in that area was Dave Jeffers, and Dave is the — as you can see from the bio, is with the John Deere Corporation, and Dave and I connected early on, and I found out what John Deere was interested in doing to help recover the community, because the John Deere dealership is one of the major employers — one of the biggest employers in Greensburg, and so they very interested in quickly rebuilding back. They were interested in rebuilding green. And so Dave played a significant role in that process. So Dave, I'll turn it over to you.
[Next Slide]
Dave Jeffers:
My name's Dave Jeffers. I work with John Deere on building dealerships. All of our dealerships are privately owned, however, we provide them with a lot of services to assist them in building their dealerships in a way that represents the brand well, and serves the customer.
About five, six years ago I followed up on a tornado right out of St. Louis _____. And we were able to get that story up and going in about eight months, and took a major effort, but we were all shocked when we heard the story of Greensburg, and of course, for the few months our major effort was doing anything we could to assist the dealers and the community in rebuilding, and supporting the base of farmers that we had in that area.
Then as the Green Initiative became obvious as a real exciting way for us to participate in utilizing this disaster to do something good, we moved our efforts in that direction, and I'd like to show a small film that will introduce our dealer, our independent dealer, Mike Estes, and Ken introduced the entire project. So could you run that video, please?
[Next Slide]
I think that states it pretty well. Two-point margin of error. That's not much. And we were determined to reach that goal, but we realized that we couldn't make a lot of mistakes. So initially the efforts moved in the direction of writing up our construction documents, working with local architects.
[Next Slide]
And achieving whatever funding was possible. I might add that some of that funding was provided through the UDSA, U.S. Department of Agriculture at the time that Chuck Banks was heading it. We got a rural electric loan to help us with the financing.
You can see from this scorecard just how those points played out. And in all the five categories you can see we got practically all the Water Efficiency points, we got a majority of the Energy and Atmosphere points, Indoor Environmental Quality points. We got all the points for innovation and design. And you must remember that when LEED was first begun, there was a tremendous emphasis on urban areas, and office buildings, and universities and such.
[Next Slide]
And to accomplish LEED Platinum in a rural development like Greensburg where you don't have access to a lot of the LEED points, like mass transit and such, it became a very difficult project. So we planned our work carefully. You can see some of the focuses that we had in some of the major areas, and our goal was to go Platinum.
[Next Slide]
Our industrial design still utilized some of our new concepts, we call it John Deere Place. You can see some of the elements on that slide.
[Next Slide]
And so this would be a real live shift store not only for green energy, but also for the different John Deere dealers throughout the country. And then our goal was to provide these plans and all of this information to all those dealers for future projects.
[Next Slide]
But in order to make sure we were on track, we needed to do energy modeling, and this is where NREL and Shanti in particular came in and offered us energy modeling. There are many measures you use to lower your energy costs. You can see those over to the right of the screen under Savings. Anything from water systems to interior equipment.
Our goal was to give our dealer his biggest bang for his buck, because those measures cost money, and some of those measures provide more energy savings per dollar investment than others.
So based on this energy modeling, we selected the measures just left of the 43%. We were initially going in for about 38% of energy savings.
[Next Slide]
And again, it would have been impossible to have done that calculation without the modeling that was provided by NREL. So our goal, 38% energy savings, LEED Platinum. Our strategies of full retail and service daylighting. In fact, over the showroom we utilized over a dozen SolaTube which not only bring in sunlight, but magnifies it so we could provide some of the retail lighting that's needed and still lower our energy cost. Our insulation, we utilized a waste oil burner. That is, we're using all the waste oil from the tractors and equipment that we service. And _____ we're heating water that runs through pipes under the cement of the floor, so we're providing in-floor radiant heat. It's not only a very efficient way to heat the environment, but it's also a very pleasant working atmosphere. What we found were some of the added benefits of this building in the shop area. Obviously that's where our technicians work. Qualified technicians are probably one of the most important elements in any John Deere dealership, and you want to attract and retain the best talent you can. The working environment of that radiant heat and that daylighting just transforms that environment and we have extremely satisfied workers in that area. High efficient VAV and wind turbines. We actually use two different wind turbines. We work with Endurance that provided the 5 kW, and Southwest Wind that provided the 1.8. We wanted to test both of these units, and we got support from those suppliers to do that, to see which would work in various conditions throughout the United States.
[Next Slide]
Part of a LEED certified building, and part of our desire was to share everything that we learned to the community and to the country, and to the nation. There's the site. If you look up in the top hand it's Greensburg.JohnDeere.greentouchscreen.com, and that site contains a lot of the information I'm presenting. It also contains those videos that you've seen.
[Next Slide]
And then you get on the site, you can look at various parts of that building. If you just go to sustainability, the middle button. This brings up a map of the facility, and as you work your way across that map, you can see all the different parts of technology that was used in creating this facility.
[Next Slide]
We're a little slow on the internet, but just a couple of examples, Shanti, if you would. If you click any of those links, you will see web technology was used in that particular aspect of our building both to get our LEED points and to reduce our energy.
So I will tip you off, you'll note there's no www dot. It's just Greensburg.JohnDeere.greentouchscreen.com. We can go back to the presentation now. And if you get on that site, you're going to be able to see some of the features of that building, but you're also going to see some of the videos. You'll also be able to see how the wind turbines work. You'll see what type of energy savings that we're accomplishing in real time on that site.
[Next Slide]
So Greensburg was done and once the building's done, in come the inspectors to see how we did. As it turned out, we actually were trying for more than 52 points. We found ways to get up to 58 points.
[Next Slide]
But we came in right at the amount needed for Platinum, which means we need to be very diligent because a year later they will come back and see how we're doing, and we do not have a point to spare. So I'm sure everybody in there is utilizing the maintenance procedures to keep that rating.
[Next Slide]
You see some of the publicity we've gotten. We've got the Senator of Kansas in the upper left, Brownback. We've got the Governor, the current Governor of Kansas presenting Mike Estes with the Business of the Year award, which is pretty powerful for a small business in the middle of Kansas. And then we've even had Presidential attention. We've had Bush out there twice. The former Governor of Kansas, now cabinet officer was also instrumental. So we had both sides of the aisle supporting this effort.
[Next Slide]
This is John Deere joining the Retailer Energy Alliance, through the Department of Energy. This makes up 150 companies that represent over 60% of all the commercial retail facilities in the United States. Companies like Wal-Mart, Target. John Deere's represented on this, and we're all working together to share best practices, and also to incense the suppliers to buy the materials and the technology needed to build green buildings.
[Next Slide]
Because our goal is to spread this out and our next major project also in conjunction with NREL and the USDA will be completed in 2010, Des Moines, Iowa. We're part of a grant that seeks to build buildings with 50% or more energy reduction from ASHRAE 2004 standards. We believe we can bring this building in at over 60. We're utilizing everything Greensburg plus geothermal. And in fact, in Greensburg, Kansas we're adding another wind turbine, a bigger wind turbine, and we think we'll get up to 90% energy reduction.
All of this information is shared with our dealers throughout the world, and also with some of the partners on the retail energy line so we can utilize this opportunity to affect how commercial buildings are built. Thank you.
[Next Slide]
Chuck Banks:
Thank you very much, Dave. You know, the John Deere dealership in Greensburg was certainly one of the key champions from the private sector in helping the community rebuild. You know, whether it's a disaster or whether it's just economically distressed times — job growth, economic growth — they go hand-in-hand. And the Estes brothers, both Mike and Kelly, approached me in the very first week following the disaster and we sat down and visited, and they asked me, you know, what can the John Deere dealership do to help the community recover. They shared their vision. We talked about some strategies. We talked about some funding opportunities to leverage with them, both in the public sector and the private sector, and they certainly stepped forward and are one of the major champions from the private sector for the community. And obviously, John Deere corporate level. And with Dave being the point person, was a key leader at the upper level of John Deere to be supportive. So Dave, you know, thank you for everything, and everything that John Deere did for that community on the private sector.
Another component of recovery on the public sector was trying to explore ideas of how the community could rebuild back as green as possible, and potentially as Shanti said, you know, zero energy consumption, and maybe even produce their own energy. So one of the discussions early on was well, we've got a lot of wind out here in Kansas. You know, what about exploring the option with wind? And so another individual that I met early on was Tom Wind. And Tom obviously is involved in a lot of wind activity. He sat down and talked with the community, talked with a lot of public sector entities including USDA rural development, to figure out funding opportunities. And Tom played a huge role in working with the community on their wind projects. So Tom, I'll turn it over to you.
[Next Slide]
Tom Wind:
Thank you, Chuck. How can communities incorporate wind power in their electric system? That's what I'm going to talk about today.
[Next Slide]
And generally there are two approaches to this if the community wants to add wind power. The first approach is if the community has ownership in their electric utilities. For example, municipal utilities or rural electric cooperatives, then they take approach one. However, if the community does not have any ownership in the local utility, for example, if they're served by a larger outside utility like an investor-owned utility, then they must take a different approach. We're going to go through those two approaches.
[Next Slide]
The first approach is where there's some sort of local utility ownership. Because the locally owned utility usually has the right to install and own electric generator such as a wind turbine. Sometimes the wholesale power supply that they have may put limits on what they can do.
Typically what I found in the community wind projects that I've been involved with, which have been several, there's some community members that usually start the idea. Have an idea to incorporate wind power in their community. And so they develop an organized effort, and then they work with the local utility. For example, if it's a municipally owned utility, they approach that board and say we have this idea. We think we should install a large wind turbine right outside the city here. Now sometimes that works if there's good wind resources in the area, but if the community is in a valley or in a lower wind resource area where the winds aren't adequate, then the utility has to look at options for putting the wind turbine at a different location. So in any event, when they install the large wind turbines, the power generated by that wind turbine will be blended in with the other wholesale power supplies that they get and the cost will be shared by all the electric customers.
The key issues with local utility ownership is, first of all, wind generation is the most cost effective renewable resource in most areas of the country. Not everywhere, but most areas. And a wind project could very simply be a very large single turbine, or a share of a larger wind farm, or maybe a couple, to two or three turbines, depending on the size of the community. The economics depend on several factors which vary from community to community so you need to do an economic analysis of that specific community.
And what I've found is that any wind generation almost always increases the near-term power supply cost, and the only way you can justify this is by looking at the long term. Therefore, paybacks are typically more than ten years.
[Next Slide]
The overall economics of wind generation is determined by a balance of factors. Kind of like the teeter totter here. On the one side we have factors that discourage the project such as turbines cost more. Of course, that makes it less desirable. The cost to inner connect the turbines to the electric grid is a lot. If cost of money is higher with interest rates, or if it's a cost to do the O&M. All those factors can be discouraging economics.
On the right side are factors that encourage. If the wind speed is a higher wind speed, it's favorable. If cost of electricity in the area is very high, well then that also makes wind generation more favored. If the value of the green tag, renewable energy price is high, mandate to have renewable energy in your state, that helps. Of course, if there's some financial incentive such as USDA grant program, that helps.
[Next Slide]
So I'd like to show some examples of some municipally-owned wind projects. The first one is in Wall Lake, Iowa. It's a small town that was just plain doggedly determined to have a wind turbine. The picture right there shows that 660 kW wind turbine that was installed about six years ago. And finding a suitable site was the initial challenge for this project. And then also connecting it to the grid was a little bit of a problem because they had a very low voltage grid there, 2.4 kV. So those were the initial challenges to get the project done.
But they overcame those challenges by actually closing the airport of all things and changing over to a private use, and then also what the group clincher was when the city received the $250,000 in community development block grant program, that what's clinched it and made the city council vote to do the project.
[Next Slide]
Here's another one municipally-owned wind project in the town of Lenox, Iowa. Now Lenox is a small town, maybe about 1,500 people, in southwest Iowa in somewhat a depressed area. The local pharmacist, the Rexall pharmacist there, had a long term interest in renewable energy. He was on the utility board, the board of trustees. And so he doggedly went after the utility management to at least look at a study of wind generation. Now the utility manager did not think that wind generation was a good idea, and so he brought me in just to prove that hey, wind generation does not make sense in southern Iowa.
Anyway, we went through the process and as you can imagine, it turned out that it was a little bit marginal, but we had some issues to get around. In this case we had some restrictions on whether the utility could even own a wind turbine that generated power in terms of wholesale power supply contract. And also like Wall Lake, the grid was a little bit weak and low voltage. But the clincher was the city received a $250,000 community development block grant program. That's what put it over the top. That project right there cost about $800,000 and so that was a significant amount of money to put the project up. After the project came online, the utility manager did a 180° flip and he said hey, this is the best project we ever did. When can we do another one? So it turned out to be a very powerful thing to the community.
[Next Slide]
Here's another example. Seven towns working together collectively and investing in a small wind farm. The reasons a town might not want to invest in a wind farm is that it may not be windy enough right at the location of the town, and that was the case was in a couple of these small towns. And sometimes there's no nearby site for various reasons. An airport. A lot of congestion. Just can't connect to the grid right there. Sometimes the local utility doesn't really want to manage a wind farm, because they've never been involved with one before. It takes new management skills and it's a very complicated endeavor.
And sometimes a large turbine may just be too much for a very small town and what this town said, only about 250 people that invested in this, and it was far too small for any kind of a profitable private wind turbine. So the towns banded together to install wind turbines at the best site, and they installed these three turbines that you see in the picture there in Algona, Iowa. That's been there since 1998.
[Next Slide]
What does it take to get a locally owned utility to install a wind turbine? Well, in the best of circumstances, adding a large wind turbine will usually increase near-term power supply costs for a locally owned utility, therefore, there is little financial incentive to install a wind turbine. Most people think oh, the wind is blowing all the time. It's got to be free power. It's not the case. Capital costs are significant and paying back that capital cost is the primary factor in the cost of wind power.
So usually what I found is that local residents usually have to exert some sort of pressure on the utility to green up their power supply, and this effort usually takes a ring leader or a champion that really pursues the project and convinces people that we really ought to do this. And then like I said before, a long-term perspective is needed and with a belief that there can be some sort of cost penalty for carbon emissions. Everyone that's going to be involved in this have assumed that there's going to be some added cost in the future for electricity with carbon emissions penalties. If you don't make that assumption, in all the studies I've been involved with, the economics just do not look favorable.
And then it often takes some type of incentive — a grant, a donation, a deal, whatever — to clinch the decision. When a grant comes through, that's usually the deciding factor and the council on board will move ahead.
[Next Slide]
All that I've been talking about is approach one. Approach two is where there's no utility involvement. This is a case where the community does not own its own utility. It's served by a larger outside investor-owned utility, and that larger outside utility is the one that makes decisions on power supply resources. The local community really doesn't have any say in it. So if a local community wants to be involved, then it has to find some way that it can use wind turbines. And wind turbines would either have to be used by electric customers in the community, or would have to be used, for example, by the city's water department or the sewage treatment plant. Some big user in the city needs to take initiative. A ____________ perhaps a college. And as a result, sometimes you can have a locally owned wind farm just right outside the edge of the community install wind turbines and then sell the product to the larger utilities, you know, outside of the community. And again, that power that goes into the area will be helpful.
This picture on the left is an interesting story. This was installed in 1994. That wind turbine. That paid back in about seven or eight years. It was installed by a family that owned that manufacturing facility you see in the picture. Look how close that wind turbine is to the actual facility. They went for fourteen years without having any ice fall off of those blades and hurt anybody or hit the building or have any problems — until last year. A piece of ice fell came flying off the blade and hit the parking lot, which is to the right of the picture there, and smashed a windshield out of a car. First time ever they'd had a problem in fourteen years. So they decided it was time to move the wind turbine, so they actually sold that wind turbine. So it was up for fifteen years in service, and it sold and it's going on to a new life in South Dakota. Kind of an interesting story about that.
[Next Slide]
Anyway, key issues with electric customer-owned wind generation projects are the larger wind turbines produce significantly lower cost power, but there aren't that many customers that use a lot of electricity in most communities. Perhaps 2-3% of your largest commercial electric customers can effectively use that much power.
For example, the wind turbine in the picture there was installed by a community college, which was the largest power user in the community. And many times these large customers usually pay the lowest cost for electricity. In Iowa these customers often pay electricity at the rate of 5¢ to 6¢ per kilowatt hour. And a wind turbine oftentimes does not reduce the total electric bill of a customer, because there are some fixed parts in the electric bill. And so therefore, a wind turbine will only reduce energy component of an electric bill which might only be 50-60-70% of the total bill.
I've also found that the utility must offer net metering to really make wind generation cost effective for customers. Net metering is just an option that lets the customer bank extra electricity that the wind turbine generates — for example at night or off peak — with utility and then take that electricity back the next day or sometime later when the wind's not blowing. That ability to bank that excess generation is a key part in the economics and usually is required to make economics feasible.
So an alternative to net metering is that if you have a very high buy-back rate, or mandate a high buy-back rate. For example, you mandate the utility buy excess power back at 5¢ or 6¢ or 7¢ per kilowatt hour, that makes up for not having _____. All those smaller customers pay higher electric rates. Smaller wind turbines usually have higher generating costs, so the bigger the wind turbine the cheaper the electricity costs.
[Next Slide]
What factors make economically viable wind projects for customer-owned utilities? Well, the economics are difficult for customer-owned wind generation projects. They really are. I've done a lot of feasibility studies for large companies and corporations and the payback is usually way beyond the payback that they typically see.
I just got done with one. Looking at some facilities scattered across Iowa and Illinois and the payback screens, the minimum payback was eleven years, and the longest beyond, you know, twenty years. So most corporations just can't justify making investments with those types of paybacks. This motel on the top left installed a wind turbine in 1996, and the school down on the bottom left installed one in 2002, and that one, about another year or two on the bottom picture and they'll have their turbine paid for. So electric customers usually have to place some financial value in green power to justify the long payback. And again, sometimes incentives are needed to get the job done.
[Next Slide]
One last slide here and that is what's the path that Greensburg took? Well, Greensburg owned its own electric utility, and so it initially considered installing a large wind turbine to supplement its wholesale power purchase. I worked on that part for about a year or so, and we finally figured out how to get it. However, John Deere Wind which is a subsidiary of John Deere offered to install a larger wind farm near Greensburg and provide green credits for all the power that Greensburg needed at no cost to Greensburg. Well, here Greensburg sat with this option which required no investment upon its part, little effort or management of the project, and I suggested to the city, hey, this sounds like a good deal to me. Take them up on the offer. So they took the green credits off of the wind farm for all of the electricity that the city of Greensburg uses. So that's a very generous offer that John Deere made, and they took them up on that offer.
Furthermore, the city went another mile and has encouraged its customers to install wind turbines or solar PV panels by offering them net metering which is not very common in Kansas. So they really have embraced all of this. And so the hospital and school have also decided to install wind turbines, and there'll be a few more residential wind turbines in the town.
I'd like to close with saying that Greensburg has definitely set very high what I call green power supply standards for other communities. Not only does it essentially have renewable energy credits for all of its customers, but it also encourages its own customers — like BTI and the hospital and school — to go an extra mile and install wind turbines and PV panels. Thank you very much.
[Next Slide]
[Next Slide]
Chuck Banks:
Well, thank you very much, Tom. I think Tom's presentation is a great example of again how you know, the technical assistance portion of everything that happened in Greensburg was so critically important. No doubt if it hadn't been for all this work that had gone in exploring options, you know, for so long. As Tom said, over a year of research and checking into angles. You know, the ultimate goal of getting John Deere Wind and the community connected with all the other resources, who knows how it would have all turned out? So you know, Tom, I really appreciate all your hard work. I know the community appreciates all your hard work, and all the pieces came together very well.
And it just shows how sometimes when you start in on a project, you might think it's going to go one direction, and then as you do research and check different financing angles, you may ultimately find out that there's another course of action you're going to take.
[Next Slide]
Well, it's my job here now to bring all the pieces together to help everybody understand you know, how this all came together for Greensburg, and how we might be able to you know, replicate this example, this model we'll say, for future situations.
[Next Slide]
The slide we have here obviously, you know, is for Greensburg. It shows what Greensburg looked like prior to the disaster.
[Next Slide]
Obviously, following the disaster, following Greensburg it was totally destroyed from what we had before.
[Next Slide]
[Next Slide]
What we found out in this situation was to have a comprehensive sustainable model for recovery of the community we really needed to have all components in the community. We had to have that local commitment, and in the case of Greensburg it was the regional commitment. We were bringing in you know, technical expertise for the design of the project. Also to help secure financing from a broad variety of sources. And by bringing those pieces together, you know, then we could have comprehensive sustainable long term recovery. That was going to be a huge challenge in the event of Greensburg.
[Next Slide]
[Next Slide]
[Next Slide]
We got technical assistance in early on, but as you can see, this is a slide of the first all-community meeting following the disaster. This is one week following the Greensburg tornado. Over 800 people came to the city park under a large tent to hear what might be possible to help rebuild their community. Just outstanding community support.
[Next Slide]
And what I really want to underscore is you know, when a disaster happens, or whether it's an economically distressed situation, you know, that technical assistance has to begin right from the very beginning. It's got to happen from almost I'll say day two.
[Next Slide]
There was a tremendous outpouring of assistance. This actually was a meeting of a lot of the public officials and government officials within just four or five days following the disaster to start identifying what the needs were, and to start exploring what might be able to be done to recover the community.
[Next Slide]
Because one aspect from a financing standpoint is there's a huge financing gap when it comes to disaster recovery. Typically assets from a private insurance standpoint are grossly underinsured. In the case of a disaster, the public sector funding both from FEMA and the state is inadequate. So what's going to happen is a huge funding gap is going to occur, both to recover preexisting assets, but also to rebuild new assets. That's going to take financing from external sources. It's also going to take technical assistance from outside sources to help both in the design and also some a financing standpoint.
[Next Slide]
In the case of Greensburg, from the public sector financing formula. Certainly we had to look at private insurance, we had to look at public sector financing, but realize those two components are only going to fund what existed prior to the disaster. And so as you recover the community, you're going to have to look at external resources to fill in the gaps for the preexisting assets, but then also to help design and finance new projects, because many times a community isn't going to build back exactly the same way that they were prior to the disaster.
Same scenario with the private sector and businesses. You're going access both your preexisting insurance if you had policies on those assets. SBA does provide some assistance, but again, you're going to have to access and utilize external resources for both preexisting and new assets for the recovery process. And certainly from a homeowner's standpoint, too. You're going to have to access both the private sector insurance, public sector funding, but again, external resources for both preexisting and new assets.
[Next Slide]
Now Shanti referred to the comprehensive master planning process, and that was something that the community realized that if they were going to build back, you know, more resilient, more sustainable for the future, they needed to rebuild back probably differently.
[Next Slide]
And so the community went through a comprehensive master planning process, and as they did that, they identified twelve goals to support the community's long term recovery vision.
[Next Slide]
Of course, in this process of working closely with external resources, a number of public and nonprofit financing partnerships were established.
[Next Slide]
The public sector also worked with community partnerships to identify needs and resources.
[Next Slide]
And of course, as we mentioned, one of those significant partners was NREL working with the community in all aspects of the rebuilding process.
[Next Slide]
[Next Slide]
Greensburg Green Town, a local nonprofit group, was also instrumental in this effort.
[Next Slide]
And through all this integrated assistance, the Business Incubator project came forward. That was one component to help the community and the private sector recover economically.
[Next Slide]
[Next Slide]
And taking basically a downtown district of totally destroyed and rebuilding a Business Incubator to allow twelve businesses to recover in really record time.
[Next Slide]
[Next Slide]
That kind of leadership, you know, supported other private sector development. There's a new business development multi-sector investment project going on, being constructed immediately across from the incubator.
[Next Slide]
And that leadership certainly supported other businesses to move forward. As Shanti had mentioned, the John Deere dealership.
[Next Slide]
And Dave and Shanti talked about, you know, it's just been an outstanding recovery project.
[Next Slide]
[Next Slide]
Of course, the private sector housing was totally destroyed. Once the debris was removed, that's what the community looked like. Just totally devastated.
[Next Slide]
Of course, FEMA came in. Quickly rebuilt, you know, some temporary trailers to house residents but, you know, the community wanted to rebuild back private sector housing as quickly as possible.
[Next Slide]
Using again this same concept that the private sector used, the public sector used, of trying to look at multi-sector partnerships to rebuild back housing, the Greensburg Self-Help Housing came together.
[Next Slide]
Over 25 public, private faith-based partners came together to rebuild back really the greenest, most affordable housing in rural America.
[Next Slide]
[Next Slide]
And that type of modeling also supported additional housing to rebuild back, you know, both energy efficiently and affordably in the community.
[Next Slide]
And that housing rebuilding continues even today. And of course, public sector financing for income-eligible housing also came into play. In fact, this is a LEED Platinum multi-family housing project in the community.
[Next Slide]
[Next Slide]
[Next Slide]
[Next Slide]
[Next Slide]
I think this concept we're talking about of you know, community support, technical assistance, leverage resourcing, is a key reason why we are seeing Greensburg rebuild back, you know, so quickly, so effectively. I mean, it is just remarkable. And in fact, you know, this is why I think — one reason why FEMA long term recovery has publicly stated that this Greensburg model is the model they would like to see scaled and replicated, you know, for future disaster long term recovery. It is just, you know, a remarkable story.
[Next Slide]
[Next Slide]
[Next Slide]
[Next Slide]
[Next Slide]
And of course, this community support continues as we see from the second anniversary Greensburg Green Awards banquet held last May.
[Next Slide]
[Next Slide]
[Next Slide]
Certainly the determination of the community and support of the community is a key reason, you know, why we see this kind of vision for recovery. And all the partners coming together you know, to help the community.
[Next Slide]
What I think I want to underscore though, is this economic recovery model that we use for Greensburg really was used on a number of other projects. First with a BRAC expansion of Fort Riley, Kansas two years prior to Greensburg. And we've used it on a number of examples including the Chapman tornado relief efforts a year following Greensburg.
[Next Slide]
And you know, utilizing community, taking advantage of community supports.
[Next Slide]
Technical assistance to focus in on these projects.
[Next Slide]
Finding the financing and coordinating that financing can —
[Next Slide]
Certainly economic opportunity. I'm firmly convinced that this is a model that can be you know, utilized in other situations. Whether we're talking about you know —
[Next Slide]
Future disasters as FEMA has identified.
[Next Slide]
You know, future economic opportunities like BRAC expansions —
[Next Slide]
Or whether we're talking about economic recovery in just normally distressed situations.
[Next Slide]
Or hopefully in the future with business redevelopment as our economy recovers.
[Next Slide]
So we're just very proud of what we've been able to accomplish utilizing all the resources and leveraging the opportunity in Greensburg. And I think we also as a group want to have one major takeaway for everybody, that this is a model I think we can utilize in other situations in the future. So with that Anthoney, I'll turn it back over to you.
Anthoney Perkins:
Thank you very much, and thank you to all of the presenters today. As I mentioned, we have two additional polling questions before we start the Q&A session.
[Next Slide]
The first question should be up now, and it's asking you what you're hoping to learn today. We'll leave this up for few seconds, and give you an opportunity to vote. So please do so now.
I'll give you another moment or so, so please review and vote if you haven't had the opportunity to.
[Next Slide]
Okay, we're going to go on to the next question. Based on your expectations, how satisfied were you? I'll give you a few moments to go ahead and vote with this. I'll give you just another moment or so to vote, so please do so.
Okay, now we'll go ahead and get on with the questions and answers.
[Next Slide]
As we mentioned, we 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 that they have received.
Shanti Pless:
This is Shanti. I'll start with some of the questions I got since I'm the first here. So the first question I got was, has there been any automation deployed within the buildings of Greensburg? Things like HVAC automation, automated window treatments, automated lighting controls.
So the answer to this question is yes and no. So in general, whether it's daylighting spaces, automated lighting control, daylighting, dimming in particular, was used from continuous dimming lighting controls to step-dimming were strategies supported in all the day lit spaces of all the buildings.
In general, the idea of trying to keep it simple and trying to educate the occupants on how these energy efficiency strategies should be used. You know, in natural ventilation cases, it's not a fully automatic natural ventilation system. The windows don't open automatically for you. You rely on the occupants to control the windows, and the feedback from the building to say when that's okay is there, but you're relying somewhat on the occupants to be good occupants of the building. And HVAC automation with command control. The outgoing air CO2 control was a common strategy. But in general, we really tried to keep it as simple as possible to really ensure the longevity of the energy efficiency strategies in the buildings.
The second question I got was about, has there been any building criteria put in place to minimize damage from another tornado? And so in general I don't believe codes were necessarily adjusted to address this, but I think looking at examples of the project looking at insulated concrete forms or concrete structures, there's a couple of residential examples of high concrete and high structural integrity buildings really that have been rebuilt to have enhanced disaster resistance for sure. And so there's no building criteria or codes necessarily put in place to require that, but it was definitely encouraged and lots of examples of that in town.
Next question I got was about the LEED Platinum city ordinance. Did it apply to new, remodeled or existing buildings? And I don't believe there were any existing city buildings left after the tornado, so it was only for new buildings. The one building that was existing was the County building, and that was rebuilt to the LEED goal as to what they're submitting for.
The fourth question I got was, why limit the use of skylights for daylighting? The idea being that if you can integrate daylighting strategies into the current windows, the windows you are planning on having, and orient them either south or north, you can control the solar gain through those windows, and that in a climate with significant heating, but also significant cooling, you want the daylight to be a cool daylight in the summer and provide direct heating in the winter. To do that, south-facing clear stories are kind of the best strategy to do so.
And satellites were used throughout many projects, but really the idea there being that we wanted to minimize the solar gain that you get in the summer with your daylighting, and that the air conditioning load from your daylighting, we wanted to minimize that, but still provide the daylighting so the lights can be turned off. And that was the key strategy for a lot of the early daylighting discussions with various projects.
Let's see. Another question that I got was about organizations developing high structural concrete building technologies and they were looking for what programs were available for grants through DOE and other Federal organizations. So I've got a lot of places to go to. Grants.gov provides a lot of real time email alerts for what's available for Federal grants related to energy. Greensburggreentown.org has a lot of discussions on projects in town, and residential. Especially on what's being rebuilt and opportunities to rebuild in Greensburg. The U.S. Department of Energy has a research program related to residential primarily. It's called the Building America Program and its got lots of research there related to energy efficiency in residential sector. The Small Business Innovation Research, sbir.gov, is another great place to identify for grants.
So with that, I'll turn it over to Dave Jeffers and seeing there's some questions that he received on his talk.
Dave Jeffers:
I received three questions, Shanti. How do water systems save energy? We have a lot of technology and a lot of occupants' education on how to reduce the use of water. For instance, we have waterless urinals and other types of technology. Any time we save hot water, we obviously save the energy that goes into heating. Any time we save any water — treated water — we save energy required to treat that water. And then of course, another water system is our in-floor radiant heating system where we're actually using water to heat the building.
The second question was what are the plans for John Deere to use this building as a model in other locations? We have a website up, and on that website we provide dealers — and even more important, their contractors — with everything that we've learned from this project. We also have a list of 20 different suppliers who have provided everything from insulation to natural light windows, to radiant heat, all sorts of wind generators, all sorts of things. All those suppliers and their names are all available on our website. And we've worked with those suppliers to be extra generous when it comes to working with our dealers.
We're also working with Blue Quest buildings. They own Butler steel buildings, Varco Pruden steel buildings and some others. They represent probably over 3,000 independent builders throughout the United States. Through our involvement, they have a new Green Build Initiative, and we've offered to provide them all of our information so they can get it down to their local builders throughout the United States on any building project.
Specifically we have another project in Kansas, Project Kansas, that will probably be going for Platinum certification, and we've got about five other projects also in the works.
Greensburg benefited from a lot of contribution. Our main project in Des Moines that's going to be completed in September of 2010 won't have that benefit, and that's on purpose. To see if we can bring this project out without some of the extraordinary contributions, let's go utilizing all the government programs that are available.
Another question was, do you have an extensive commissioning process? We at Deere don't. We continue to rely mostly on the individual builders and general contractors to do the commissioning. We did not see any extraordinary work needed for this project.
And those are my questions.
Tom Wind:
This is Tom Wind. I'd like to answer four questions. I got six of them. I'll take two of them offline though they're not quite exactly related to Greensburg. You can email me those. One was dealing with Lenox, the requirements, and the other one was dealing with siding concerns, icing. Just give me an email and I'll answer those.
Number one, did you have any grid issues to address from integrating wind at Greensburg? Yes, a little bit. The regular is 12.47 kV there and we can integrate up to two large wind turbines there. Anything other than that, right at the community would be a problem. John Deere Wind, however, developed their wind farm which had like 15 megawatts transmission line, so that was connected to a different electric system.
The second question I had was were there any NIMBY issues with people of Greensburg? Were any reluctant to have a wind farm installed nearby? And when I was there, I didn't hear any NIMBY issues at all, and I'll let Chuck address that later, if he heard of any issues from the project.
The third question was where does Greensburg buy their power when it's not windy? Well, they're just like everybody else. When the wind's not blowing, you get power that's put on the grid from other generators. And same way with Greensburg. It's typically a lot of coal-fired generation in that area. Sometimes there's some nuclear power near that area, too. So when the wind's not blowing, it's primarily coal-fired power. However, Greensburg has renewable energy credits which gives them the bragging rights that their power is from the wind.
The fourth question and last I'll answer here is can you please explain the offer that John Deere Wind made to Greensburg? _____ _____. Well, John Deere Wind sold the wind farm. They sold the wind farm. They sold the power to municipal power agency or _____ most the power supplier _____ in Greensburg, but they also went the extra step in supplying saying, Greensburg for all the electricity that you restore to the town we'll give you renewable energy credits. Award them to you. The renewable energy credits might be worth 3/10th or 4/10th of a cent today. We expect that they'll go up in value perhaps depending maybe the next five or ten years. So I'll turn it over to Chuck, because he has some questions, too.
Chuck Banks:
Okay. Thank you, Tom. Yeah, I have four questions and I'll go through them quickly here. Did Greensburg have to go through a grant request process to secure their funding? Yes, there was a process. Generally most Federal agencies are not going to have excess funds in their normal appropriations allocation process to deal with a disaster. Most of their funds are already tied up with normal programming. So when you see disasters occur around the country, that's when you'll hear these supplemental funding processes that happen.
Greensburg did go through a supplemental funding process, and USDA was the recipient of that funding from Congress, but it was a very modest amount of funding, and honestly, it was pretty — we were somewhat lucky that we were even able to get that because at that point you've got to probably attach that supplemental funding to some other type of piece of legislation that's already moving through Congress. And at that time back in the summer, early summer of 2007, there wasn't much legislation moving in. We were able to get it on one piece of legislation going through, but it was a very modest amount of money, and the fact that we were able to get it attached to that legislation was remarkable because we had to have all the information on our proposal to Congress within about a week's period of time. So when a disaster happens in the future, folks really need to get that information together as quickly as possible to their elected officials. And basically we worked through the weekend following the Friday night tornado to have that information basically sent to Congress by Tuesday of the following — you know, four days later. So it's very timing is extremely critical.
But what I'll also mention and to tie it back to another question is public sector funding and government funding, Federal funding, is not going to fulfill all the financing gaps because, you know, by law, Federal government entities can only provide a certain level of grant funding for projects. So it's going to have to be leveraged with other monies.
The second question I had was, you know, that they saw the single-family housing — habitats, garages — was there a negative impact on air quality because of that? I have not heard of any negative air quality issues because of the attached garages. What I'll also add is you have to realize that most of the housing that was lost in Greensburg was fairly old housing. So it was very energy inefficient, and so rebuilding back this housing, the new housing was built back, as Shanti has talked about, much, much more energy efficient housing being built. The big challenge was on the financing side because the average value of homes were about $65,000 on average out in Greensburg. To build back that same quality of home per square footage amenities, it would run about $145,000 or $150,000. So that's why the leveraged resource partnership of the community self-house housing program that we talked about was so critically important. Because that brought the cost of that housing down to about in that $65,000 to $70,000 range. So it really made that housing very affordable, but also very energy efficient.
Number three was did DOE or NREL provide any financial support for this recovery or was it just technical assistance? Shanti, as far as I know, you were primarily technical assistance, is that correct?
Shanti Pless:
That's right. And we still a lot of times, you know, directing people to what financial resources are available, but DOE didn't provide — or doesn't really provide any capital.
Chuck Banks:
But again, remember that technical assistance is so valuable. So we really appreciated DOE's participation, along with a lot of other Federal agencies and private sector associations.
The fourth question I have is, what was the most important lesson you learned working Greensburg as far as being able to secure financing? Again, as I mentioned, getting a real handle on all the sectors of losses quickly, and doing some very aggressive projecting of what it was going to cost to rebuild is critically important whether you're dealing with you know, a supplemental funding request, whether you're dealing with you know, other funding avenues.
And you've got to look at each sector individually. You know, private sector, public sector. You know, individual housing. Infrastructure. And you have to look at each project to see what the expenditures are going to be. Recognize that again, the government will only fund a certain percent of that recovery cost. I think there's an attitude that FEMA is going to come in and rebuild, or refinance all the rebuilding, and that simply just does not happen.
They'll take insurance into play first. Then FEMA does their calculation. And then there's going to be a gap in the rebuilding process. Again, if you're going to rebuild back for the future, you're going to have to add additional costs. You're not going to build back a 1950 courthouse to 1950 standards. You're going to build it back to 2010 standards. So you know, have that gap financing, and you have to find those resources. And that's the end of my questions for now.
Chuck Banks:
Thank you to all of our speakers, and thank you to all of our participants. Please visit www.buildings.energy.gov/webinars.html to get a copy of today's slides. Today was the second in a series of three presentations on Greensburg. You can view the presentation slides and listen to the recording of the first webinar which took place in November by visiting that same webpage. The final Greensburg webinar will take place in January, so please check back to our webpage for further details as they become available, as well as for information on future building technology program webinars.
This concludes our presentation. We thank you and goodbye.
[End of Audio]