Park City in energy prize semi-finals
PARK CITY, Utah – The clock is now ticking in Park City. The town and Summit County were recently named among the 50 semi-finalists for the $5 million Georgetown University Energy Prize.
The mountain communities of Aspen and Jackson, Wyo., along with Bend, Ore., are also among the finalists. In Colorado, the Front Range communities of Brighton and Fort Collins also made the cut.
“This is a marathon, and we have a long road ahead of us, but we are excited to see what works and how we can tap into our community’s competitive spirit,” said Matt Abbott, environmental project manager for Park City. The program there is called Summit Community Power Works.
“I’m excited and feel like we are off to a great start, especially with our three school districts,” added Abbott. “We are starting simple, with LEDs, and working our way up to smart controls, infrastructure, and eventually, renewables.”
The contest was created by Dr. Francis Slakey, a physicist at Georgetown University and co-director of the university’s Program on Science in the Public Interest. He saw the prize money as a way to stir competitive juices that will stimulate innovation but also spark community-wide cooperation among schools, governments, utilities, and other groups.
In Wyoming, Jackson Hole Energy Conservation Works has teamed up with the local electrical cooperative to start distributing 1,000 LED light bulbs to schools and homes in Jackson and Teton County.
But whether Jackson Hole wins is not entirely the point, says Phil Cameron, the director of the group. He says the connections that the program provides in sharing best practices and other resources are also of great value.
In Fort Collins, John Phelan placed the competition in two time frames, with two distinct layers to the aspiration. During 2015 and 2016, he said in a webcast press conference, Fort Collins and other semi-finalists will roll out their efforts to improve energy efficiency.
Fort Collins had been thinking about this intently for much of the last decade, most notably through its FortZED program, which seeks to boost renewable energy while decreasing energy demand in a district that aspires to have net-zero carbon use.
But that’s only half the issue, added Phelan, the energy service manager for the city’s electrical utility.
“Performing really well gets us into the finals. But once we’re in the finals, the energy savings are a much smaller value, because at that point everybody will have done well,” he explained.
“Then the focus becomes how did we innovate? What are the things we did and how replicable are they? How scalable is that to other communities? What kind of persistence did we see? How did we educate our communities? Those become the primary criteria for the $5 million prize.
“We need to get the energy savings and show the measured results. That is critical. And then we have to show the ways we accomplished that and why this will matter across the country and into the future.”
Telluride recognized for innovation
TELLURIDE – Telluride is getting new attention for its role in the electrical transformation that profoundly altered the 20th century, making way for computers and most everything else in modern life.
The innovation had to do with the transmission of electricity devised by Nicholas Tesla and George Westinghouse. Power from the Ames Hydroelectric Generating Plant was transmitted 2.6 miles to the Gold King Mine, in what is today Mountain Village. It was the first industrial application of alternating current.
Telluride, in turn, became the first place in the world to have streetlights powered by AC electricity.
The Telluride Daily Planet explains that Telluride is part of the Smithsonian Institute’s Places of Invention program. Also featured is Hartford, Conn., for its precision manufacturing in the late 1800s; Hollywood, Calif., for its Technicolor innovation in the 1930s; and hip-hop in the Bronx of New York in the 1970s.
California’s Silicon Valley gets a nod for the rise of the personal computer in the 1970s and 1980s, while Fort Collins is getting recognized for clean-energy innovations now under way.
Rain replaces snow in the Sierra Nevada
LAKE TAHOE, Calif. – Those big dumps of snow that the Sierra Nevada is famous for? In the future, many of them will be replaced by big drenchings, as the air warms.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that 2014 was the 38th straight year with global annual temperatures above the long-term average. Climate scientists say that it’s only going to get warmer.
Mike Dettinger, with the U.S. Geological Society, was in Lake Tahoe recently, and he echoed what he and other climate scientists have been saying for some time. By 2050, the average snowpack for the Sierra Nevada is expected to be half of what it is now.
“With more rain, less snow, and larger storms, it all comes together that the flood risk goes up in the Sierra,” Dettinger said, according to a story in the Lake Tahoe News.
While peak runoff today is in May, rising temperatures will cause peak runoff to eventually be in April, said Arlan Nickel, with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
A virtual raft trip down the Yampa
CRAIG – You can do it with streets, so why not rivers? The Steamboat Pilot & Today reports that American Rivers, a conservation advocacy group, has sponsored a river-type viewing of the Yampa River as it descends through Dinosaur National Park.
The river originates about 100 miles northwest of Denver, flows through Steamboat Springs and is a rarity in the American West because it has no dams on its main stem.
In the 1950s, though, an effort was made to dam the river in Dinosaur, not far from its confluence with the Green River. Instead of a dam in Dinosaur, conservation leader David Brower and others conceded a dam at Flaming Gorge Canyon, creating Lake Powell. Brower later experienced serious heartburn about the concession.
Today, the Yampa is still wilderness. The Google Street View Trekker cameras were floated down the Yampa for 72 miles with its magnificent desert-varnished sandstone cliffs. It is, notes the Steamboat Pilot, a place seen by far fewer than the Grand Canyon.
But will the Yampa continue to flow as easily as it has? That’s the nervous question on the minds of many residents of Steamboat Springs, Craig and other towns along the river. The river is separated from Colorado’s fast-growing Front Range by two mountain ranges. But is that enough?
“It’s almost inevitable that the Eastern Slope will come after the Western Slope’s water one more time, but if it happens on the Yampa, there’s going to be a lot of outcry,” says Kent Vertrees, of Steamboat Springs.
The background issue is whether Colorado can meet its obligations to allow water to flow downstream to California, Nevada and Arizona, as specified by the Colorado River compact of 1922.
The Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River Water Conservation District has advocated that any further Western Slope diversions, be they from the Yampa or other rivers, be subject to a series of no-harm provisions.
Lone wolverine in Sierra Nevada?
TRUCKEE, Calif. – A lone wolverine showed up in the Sierra Nevada of California in 2008, and a flurry of recent sightings document a wolverine in the general vicinity of Truckee.
But are they the same wolverine? That remains unclear, although DNA testing at a Colorado laboratory is expected to provide the answer, reports the Associated Press.
“Based on our history, it’s most likely going to be the same individual, but our hope is it’s not,” said Chris Stermer, a biologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Nonetheless, he added, biologists think that over time more wolverines will migrate from the Cascades and from Idaho into California, where the last wolverine seen prior to the 2008 sighting had been documented in 1922.
It’s not clear whether the wolverine near Truckee migrated from Idaho or was released by somebody.
Wolverines were also once tolerably common in Colorado and other parts of the Rocky Mountains, but had generally disappeared by the 1930s because of unregulated trapping and poisoning efforts.
– Allen Best
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