Maryland Newsline

University Park Improves its Energy Efficiency with Government Grant

By Karen Carmichael
Maryland Newsline
Friday, Oct. 1, 2010

UNIVERSITY PARK, Md. - University Park resident Chuck Wilson felt a "combination of shock, elation and some disbelief" when he learned his small town had been awarded well over a million dollars this summer from the U.S. Department of Energy to help transform its energy usage.

 

Now Wilson, as chairman of a newly formed advisory committee overseeing the grant, is working with the town to help its households conserve energy and gain solar power for its elementary school.

 

"The objective is to have a community-wide program in which everyone feels invested," said Wilson, one of the grant's lead writers and director of development at the Alliance to Save Energy.

 

The committee estimates at least $250 in savings each year for residents who participate in the program, said town Council member Len Carey, another advisory committee member.

 

The $1.425 million grant came from the Better Buildings Program, a subsidiary of the Department of Energy's Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant program. With an additional $1.2 million from in-kind pledges and contributions from companies such as Pepco and SunTrust, the town has about $2.6 million to $2.8 million to use over a three-year period, said Mayor John Tabori.

 

University Park is one of only 20 small communities in the U.S. to receive a grant under the program, and the only small community in the state to get one, Carey said.

 

With about 2,300 residents, it was the smallest town in the U.S. to receive an award.

 

Once the project, dubbed STEP-UP for Sequential Transformative Energy Program, is fully underway, an energy audit will be available to anyone interested, Tabori said, so homeowners can identify ways to improve their efficiency. The audit will list the costs of recommended upgrades as well as the savings they should provide.

 

Committee members are expecting about 30 percent of residents to undertake improvements.

 

"Each homeowner is going to have individual attention paid to their home," Wilson said.

 

The plan will allow the town to buy in bulk on behalf of residents to install such items as new energy-efficient kitchen appliances and windows. A partnership with SunTrust bank will provide subsidized loans to homeowners to improve efficiency. The bank should be able to lend out close to a million dollars to residents to make renovations to their homes, Tabori said.

 

Each participating household should save 20 percent on its energy bill through such improvements as better insulation and energy-efficient appliances, Carey said.

 

Homeowners could receive assistance from an energy coach, who will become the only paid employee funded by the grant.

 

The grant's special category for small towns made University Park "uniquely qualified" to apply last year, Wilson said, as well as the community's older homes that would greatly benefit from an efficiency program. The town was founded in 1936, and many of the homes date from the 1930s and '40s.

 

"We finally decided we had nothing to lose," Tabori said. Months later, the town got the announcement: "Not only had we won, we got everything we asked for – and we almost fell off our chairs," he said.

 

In awarding the grant this summer, the DOE especially praised the plan's "impressive table of participants and leveraged services" from local banks and utilities, including the town's solar organization, Community Solar LLC.

 

Formed in 2008, Community Solar has installed 99 solar panels on the roof of the Church of the Brethren in University Park and began generating electricity from them in July. The panels can produce 22 kilowatts of electricity, comparable to the usage of six to eight entire houses, said President David Brosch.

 

STEP-UP and Community Solar next hope to install between 400 to 500 panels on the roof of University Park Elementary School, which could generate six to seven times the electricity produced by the church panels. The project is still under discussion with the school board, but it could reduce the school's draw from the electrical grid by as much as 50 percent, Tabori and Brosch said.

 

Excitement is high in the community over the possibilities raised by the grant, Tabori said.

 

"This grant is almost as much about community as it is about saving energy," Carey said. "It's wonderful to see this much energy going into energy conservation."

 

Find out more about the program on a temporary page of the town website. A new, more interactive site is under construction.