Through a $245,040 federal grant, Fayetteville is planning to bring together public and private institutions in Cumberland County to develop a comprehensive plan for energy efficiency and conservation.
The city will use the recently awarded grant from the United States Dept. of Energy (DOE) to create a shared “blueprint” between local governments, educational institutions and public utilities to reach renewable energy and energy efficiency goals and to implement sustainability initiatives, Assistant City Manager Jodi Phelps told CityView. The grant is part of the DOE’s Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant Program. Fayetteville is among 151 communities to receive funding from the program since May 29, with those communities being awarded a total of $130 million as part of the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
City staff said Fayetteville will collaborate with a diverse group of stakeholders on the plan, including the Public Works Commission, Cumberland County, Fort Liberty, Cumberland County Schools, Fayetteville State University and the Fayetteville Cumberland Economic Development Corporation.
“The idea is to have a truly regional approach to looking at our energy use, our climate: What is our strategy long term? What are we doing now?” Phelps said. “We’re all individually doing things, but collectively we can have a significant impact. The important part of that, too, is when we come together and develop a real regional energy collaborative and regional energy plan, we can better leverage state and federal resources and maximize their efficiency and their use.”
The grant award coincides with broader attempts in North Carolina, the U.S. and the world to meet renewable goals and reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. These changes are needed to mitigate the impact of climate change, which have already impacted billions of people globally.
According to the federal government’s Fifth National Climate Assessment, communities in the southeastern U.S. are subject to increasing amounts of extreme heat, hurricanes, droughts and sea level rise. A 2022 report from the N.C. Dept. of Public Safety’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency found that Fayetteville is particularly susceptible to extreme heat, drought and precipitation, with flooding presenting a major risk to infrastructure.
As part of the Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant Program, Fayetteville has also been selected to receive a paid energy fellow, who will work as a city employee for 18 months starting in August to develop the regional plan and help the city implement sustainability initiatives, according to city staff. The plan will emphasize infrastructure improvements, such as increasing public green spaces, electric vehicle infrastructure and renewable energy generation. The city hopes to have it completed before the energy fellow’s contract is up.
“We sort of think that having that person for 18 months, at a very minimum, we want to have the plan ready, wrapped up and released well before they go,” Phelps said.
The city will engage technical consultants to implement and develop the plan, which will have measurable objectives for reaching shared energy goals, according to the city’s announcement.
Phelps said city staff and other individuals from the region met last year with Henry McKoy, a senior advisor in the DOE who also grew up in Fayetteville, to discuss the proposal. McKoy told them that the city’s plan for the initiative was essentially unprecedented, Phelps said.
“There is nothing like this that we have seen across the nation, with an entire region of such a broad group of partners coming together — education, government, military, private sector, industry, nonprofit — to really tackle and address this and create a collective plan,” Phelps said.
“ … Reduction of carbon emissions, all those things that we know are really important to a sustainable community, we want to make sure we are doing them together in lockstep.”
Fayetteville was awarded the grant on May 29 and selected among a competitive applicant pool, according to City Management Analyst Chris Williams.
The grant award comes as the city is in the process of developing an updated sustainability plan: a comprehensive strategy to reduce environmental impact and carbon emissions via citywide sustainability initiatives. When the new planning efforts kicked off in March, Fayetteville’s plan had not been updated since its creation in 2009; the new plan will be updated more frequently, the city’s environmental consultants said during the kick-off event.
Phelps said the shared regional energy plan and the city’s sustainability plan will complement each other in meeting the energy demands of the future. While the sustainability plan will focus on the city’s operations and reducing its environmental impact — such as by examining the energy efficiency of buildings, converting the city’s fleet to electric vehicles and increasing the city’s walkability — the grant plan will be more all-encompassing.
“The regional energy collaborative takes that one step further because now we’re broadening out beyond the city to go to everyone and impact our residents, and sort of how we look long term at, where do we want to be as a community 2050, 2060,” Phelps said.
The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), a nonprofit, nonpartisan environmental legal advocacy organization, recently emphasized the importance of local leadership in implementing climate action in accordance with the National Climate Assessment report.
“Climate action that addresses the impacts reviewed in the report must begin at the local level,” Alys Campaigne, leader of SELC’s Climate Initiative, said in a news release. “In the South, we’re seeing climate leadership in cities like Nashville and Charleston, and states like South Carolina, developing climate adaptation plans to prepare communities for climate impacts.”
Phelps said there will be plenty of opportunities for community engagement as the plan is developed. She said she sees the plan as a shared opportunity to build something impactful.
“We are pioneering and being an innovator in this space, and there comes a certain amount of unknown with that,” Phelps said. ”But we’re up for it. We’re ready for it.”
Contact Evey Weisblat at eweisblat@cityviewnc.com or 216-527-3608.
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