Surrounded by small business owners and energy entrepreneurs at the Gereau Center on Friday, Congressman Tom Perriello unveiled “New Energy for the Fifth District: A Blueprint for Putting Southside and Central Virginia at the Forefront of the Clean Energy Economy.” The strategy document outlines why the 5th District of Virginia is positioned to become a leading region in the nation for the clean energy economy.
Rep. Perriello will distribute the document to elected officials, administration officials, investors, entrepreneurs, and others to make the case for energy investments in the 5th District. The blueprint is the product of the “New Energy Summit” held on April 10, 2009 in Rustburg, VA at which Perriello convened more than 50 leaders in new energy from around the 5th District, as well as six months of listening and visiting energy projects around the district as congressman.
“Southern and Central Virginia stand poised to lead the nation towards energy independence, and this new commitment is the kind of game-changer our area has needed to regain our competitive edge. Our local entrepreneurs are already the best in the nation at energy efficiency modular homes, bio-fuels, bio-refineries, and nuclear energy. If we have the courage to move from merely surviving to thriving as a region, this can be a homerun for our farmers, advanced manufacturers, and construction industries,” said Perriello.
Points noted on the blueprint document include:
Building Efficiency: Throughout the region, architects are designing and contractors are building energy efficient structures. Companies are manufacturing energy efficient buildings and energy efficient building supplies, like structural insulated panels and insulated windows. To encourage landlords to increase the efficiency of their units, localities are considering an energy rating system or requiring utility costs to be disclosed, allowing tenants to make housing choices based on energy use. Communities are converting to energy efficient street lights and traffic lights.
Home Efficiency: A program in development with the City of Charlottesville and County of Albemarle and supported by state law allows those localities to lend funds from federal and other grant sources to area residents to make their homes more energy efficient. The loans would be paid back from the energy savings that are generated by the efficiency upgrades, and the federal funds would also be used to train area workers in retrofitting and energy efficiency upgrading. This program can be replicated in localities across the district and create a national model for a region committing itself to energy efficiency and workforce training for this new job market.
Locally Grown Food: Locally grown food not only provides increased nutritional benefits to consumers and an improved market for the region’s farmers, but reduces the energy required to move farm goods vast miles from far-away farms to local consumers. Access to locally grown food needs to be made more convenient, and efforts can be made to match institutional consumers of food (like hospitals, schools and restaurants) with local producers.
Smart Grid Technology: Multiple electric utilities serve the region. These include investor-owned utilities, municipally-owned utilities and electric cooperatives. Each would be encouraged to upgrade to a smart electricity grid. The smart grid can allow consumers to monitor and reduce energy use, and can promote the proliferation of small-scale energy production at the home or business scale, where energy can flow back to the utility.
To advance the installation of the smart grid, broadband access needs to be available to all homes and businesses in the region. To work, the smart grid requires two-way communication between building and utility. As smart grid applications expand and become more information-intensive, larger bandwidth will likely be required over time. With funding from the Virginia Tobacco Commission, the Mid-Atlantic Broadband Cooperative has already built a broadband spine throughout most of the region. Congressman Perriello will aggressively pursue funding to build the “last mile” that will connect the spine with homes and businesses in the district.
Advanced Battery Technology: Electric vehicles are 80% efficient, while internal combustion engines are less than 20% efficient. The region can become a leader in developing and using electric vehicles. The key to extending the range of electric vehicles is developing an advanced battery and reducing the weight of vehicles. The Advanced Vehicle Research Center is opening in the City of Danville, which has attracted a new company to produce advanced battery technology for hybrid buses.
There is a pending contract for more than 750 buses nationwide to be equipped with these batteries, which are currently not being manufactured in the U.S. In Charlottesville, a company is designing fast-charging technologies that will effectively extend the range of plug-in electric vehicles.
Energy Sources
Efficiency gains alone are not sufficient to meet the need for energy independence. Tapping energy sources in the region involves moving from the current paradigm of large, centrally-located production facilities to a more dispersed, community-focused approach that takes advantage of local energy sources.
Bio-refineries/Bio-power plants: Bio-refineries and bio-power plants can be strategically located throughout the region using feedstocks grown by local farmers, many of whom are looking for a crop to replace tobacco as a sustainable source of income. Ideally, the production facilities would be located within 30 miles of the farms that provide the feedstocks to them. Feedstock producers could have an ownership interest in these production facilities, allowing the profits from the venture to circulate more widely in the local community. Federal legislation could look at shifting farm subsidies to support more crops to be used for bio-fuel production. Entrepreneurs in Henry and Pittsylvania Counties have already built small-scale bio-refineries.
Bio-refineries could produce the same range of valuable co-products currently produced by petroleum refineries. These co-products include not just liquid transportation fuels (ethanol or diesel), but also heating fuels, precursors to plastic and carbon fibers.
Landfill Gas-To-Energy projects and Solar power: Closed landfills in the region can be harvested for methane, either to produce fuel or electricity. There are projects like this pending in Martinsville, Halifax and Cumberland Counties. Where feasible, these landfills could also be the site for large-scale solar production. Solar energy can play an important role in reducing peak demand, especially during the summer months where the heat of the sun provides the need for the air conditioning that can be powered by the light of the sun. Large roofs, such as those on school buildings and shopping malls, could provide locations for cost-effective solar installations.
Wind and Hydro Power: Similarly, small-scale wind turbines can help reduce consumption from the grid when properly located and could be encouraged throughout the region. Numerous wind energy companies operate in the region, ready to provide power in a new energy economy. Several localities, such as the City of Bedford, own dated hydroelectric facilities located in existing dams. Those turbines could be replaced with more efficient devices that can at once produce more electricity while releasing more water downstream to maintain habitat.
Waste-to-Energy Projects: Wastewater treatment plants and farms with concentrated amounts of manure – notably poultry and dairy farms – can harvest the methane produced by the waste and convert it into energy. The by-product of this conversion is fertilizer, and a benefit of this conversion is that it turns a liability into an asset, producing energy while protecting our region’s rivers, streams, lakes and ponds. Plans for such facilities are underway in Albemarle, Cumberland and Pittsylvania Counties.
Nuclear energy: Communities around Lynchburg have become a magnet for nuclear power entrepreneurs, who are ready to deploy their expertise to develop a safe and rejuvenated nuclear power industry.
The new, “all-of-the-above” approach focuses on a distributed energy system, with a portfolio of regionally appropriate technologies, manufactured locally, operating as distributed generation sources close to the point of use, wired together into a smart grid network. It’s a different mindset, analogous to distributed (or cloud) computing versus centralized mainframes. This is about energy independence, economic development and greenhouse gas reduction. It’s about community-based energy.
The blueprint document can be accessed here: http://perriello.house.gov/uploads/Perriello%20Energy%20Blueprint.pdf. The blueprint will be supplemented by an interactive map on Rep. Perriello’s website identifying clean energy projects throughout the 5th District.
