The Seattle City Council has reconfirmed Jorge Carrasco as Superintendent of Seattle City Light. This reconfirmation process is a standard review and confirmation procedure for the continuation of executive leadership of the region’s largest municipal utility. Of particular interest is a set of written responses to Councilmember questions submitted by the Superintendent during the reconfirmation process. On the question of energy efficiency at SCL, the Superintendent’s response is reproduced below;
What do you see as future trends in conservation work?
- Deep retrofitting – to do more in an effort to realize greater energy efficiencies in heating and insulating and committing to a “whole building” approach to energy savings
- Attracting external sources of financing for conservation upgrades in private facilities such as efforts by the Clinton Foundation’s Climate Initiative work
- Exploring innovative program models such as pay for performance incentives
- Incentivize new technologies to create even higher efficiencies than currently exist with Seattle’s energy efficiency codes and demonstrating the viability and cost-effectiveness more stringent building code requirements
- Continuation of City Light’s efforts with LED streetlight conversion. To date, 22,000 of the 41,000 residential streetlights have been converted realizing a cost savings of $1.2 million. Once the program is fully implemented, annual savings will be $2.4 million
- AMI integration should provide opportunities to present consumption information to and engage customers in real time, and it will provide data to increase our understanding of how and when customers are using energy
- Working national through the Alliance to Save Energy’s National Energy Productivity Commission to achieve 50% more energy efficiency by the year 2030.