The city of St. Petersburg is no stranger to eco-friendly policies. It was the first city in the state to receive a Green Cities certification and was among the first to develop a reclaimed water plan (which in part, due to a troubled aquifer, was done out of necessity).
Now, in concert with the Sierra Club, city officials are taking on a seemingly daunting challenge: remaking the way the city consumes energy as one of the 100 cities across the U.S. to embark on the Sierra Club's "Ready for 100" campaign. That effort entails opting for 100 percent renewable energy for all of the city's municipal power needs (zero-emissions public buses and electric cars for city workers, for example).
Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune was in town Tuesday morning to herald the move as a symbol of a society-wide shift away from fossil fuels and nuclear energy.
“The solutions are cheaper than the problems,” he said. “What that means is, for the first time in history, we can build our civilization with power that is 100 percent safe, 100 percent secure, 100 percent sustainable. Think about that.”
While it won't be cheap or incredibly easy, said Sharon Wright, the city's sustainability director (who heads a department Mayor Rick Kriseman created by executive order), it would ultimately be a major step toward negating and mitigating climate change.
“As a coastal city we must have a healthy environment in order to have a healthy economy and community,” she said. “The city is a willing and able leader. But moving towards 100 percent clean energy will also require significant community-wide effort. A path to 100 percent clean energy requires buy-in from decision makers, business leaders and residents. This effort requires changes in behavior and thinking and will require that we accept these challenges in places where they are not always so comfortable. And it will require that we try new things and take the risks.”
Kriseman himself had been invited to the event, and probably would have been there had it not been for the fact that he was in Cuba attending a Tampa Bay Rays game with President Obama and other key officials.
Elected officials who were there included St. Pete City Council members Darden Rice and Karl Nurse as well as Pinellas County Commissioner John Morroni.
Rice said there are at least 50 policy changes that need to be put in place in order for the plan to be a success, and called the goal of 100 percent clean energy "audacious."
“The choices that we make now are very important, and some of the work is hard and it takes a while," she said. “Our goals are to drive sustainability into the DNA of the city so that years down the line we have it engrained as a regular way of doing business.”
In addition to the expense of such a sweeping policy change, a key obstacle for cities attempting to adopt 100 percent sustainability could be local utility companies, which in places like Florida essentially have monopolies over their customers. In St. Petersburg, officials have long complained that Duke Energy has made it difficult to adopt more sustainable features like LED street lighting.
Brune acknowledged this could be a stumbling block.
“That's the exact challenge that we face, that most of the country recognizes that we have to fight climate change," he said. "Most of the country recognizes that clean energy offers an enormous amount of benefits to the, what I would say, to the industry. The industry is largely trapped in that it is very difficult for them, in most places across the country, the utility industry finds it very difficult to profit from their business model, the way in which they're regulated makes it very difficult for them to profit from energy efficiency investments, or to profit from larger investments in decentralized power or even decentralized wind.”
This article appears in Mar 17-23, 2016.