Green guru offers energy-saving ideas for Charleston

Urges panel to look at what New York, other cities have done to deal with climate change

Cities should be seen as untapped energy resources, where the savings from making homes and buildings more efficient could rival the energy produced by expensive new power plants, members of the Charleston Green Committee were told on Tuesday.

"The largest source of domestic U.S. energy is what we waste," said environmental guru Doug Foy, whose company, Serrafix, helped New York City design a plan to reduce climate-damaging emissions by 30 percent.

Foy, a former member of Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's Cabinet, said governments need to coordinate energy, transportation, housing and environmental policies in order to tackle climate change issues.

The location of a public building can have a great impact on traffic and pollution from vehicles, he said, such as schools that fill roads with traffic because they are hard to reach by foot or bicycle.

The Charleston Green Committee, launched by Mayor Joe Riley last year, is looking for ways to make Charleston a greener city and reduce the carbon dioxide emissions that most scientists believe are warming the planet.

"Coastal cities are really facing the worst of this (climate change), from storms and sea-level rise," Foy said.

Foy was preaching to the choir on Tuesday, addressing about 70 committee members and guests representing environmental groups, college students, government staffers, and builders and architects active in green design.

He urged the committee to look at what other cities have done. "Steal their stuff," Foy said. "Seattle has a wonderful plan, steal their stuff."

One challenge for a smaller city such as Charleston, where most of the population lives in single-family homes, lies in figuring out how to improve the energy efficiency of buildings on a wide scale. Some cities, such as Cambridge, Mass., have taken on that challenge by creating large pools of funding to make loans to property owners for energy-saving improvements.

The concept, which Charleston has used for its own government buildings, is to finance improvements that initially pay for themselves with energy savings, and then generate long-term savings for the property owner.

Meanwhile, Foy said there are small and easy steps that average people can take to reduce their energy use, such as unplugging devices when they aren't in use. "The clock in your microwave oven uses more energy, over one year, than your microwave oven," he said.

Reach David Slade at 937-5552 or dslade@postandcourier.com.

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