Earlier this year, Fort Collins, Colorado announced it would aggressively step up its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and intended to become carbon neutral by 2050. The goal is one of the most aggressive in the nation—and meeting it could require big changes to how the city's economy functions and stakeholders find common ground.
The Fort Collins City Council unanimously adopted goals in March to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% below 2005 levels by 2020. The goal skyrockets to an 80% emissions reduction by 2030. Those hugely ambitious plans put the city on a path to carbon neutrality by the middle of this century, but they also represent a very long road ahead: The city has only reduced its emissions about 5% since 2005.
While the plan establishes Fort Collins as a “national leader in striving to mitigate local greenhouse gas emissions,” the city's Environmental Services Director Lucinda Smith acknowledged that now “the hard work begins to develop a more detailed plan to implement these strategies.”
The city council adopted the goals and a basic framework after working for several years with the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), the sustainability consulting and research firm that helped the city consider the economic feasibility of a carbon-neutral future. Now, the city will need to begin the tough work of creating a detailed implementation plan—one that will ensure long-term economic benefit from carbon reductions, while accepting that the near-term costs could be significant.
RMI developed a range of strategies the city could use, including a re-imagining of how utilities function and provide services. But “a lot of work remains to be done,” said Coreina Chan, a senior consultant who managed the project for RMI.
“So far what the city has is a list of promising tactics,” Chan said. “They are now on the hook to provide implementation by 2020, where they will be needing to choose between tactics.”
A detailed plan is in the works, according to Lucinda Smith, and city officials will likely engage with the public this fall on how to move forward. “This is where the concept of the goals would be evaluated in more detail. That will be our next focus,” she said.
Facilitating change
Understanding the background of Fort Collins' aggressive goal may be key to the city's ability to not only succeed, but to serve as a model for other municipalities seeking to take on similar goals. The city's target is one of the most aggressive in the country and will require buy-in from committed, diverse stakeholders who feel ownership over the target and have trust in the process.
The city originally put greenhouse gas emissions targets in place that targeted reductions by 2010, but some in the community were concerned the city was not likely to meet the goals. These concerns led the city to form a climate task force in 2007—the same year the city began its FortZED project, which looked to create a zero-emissions district in Fort Collins.
Five years later, the Rocky Mountain Institute's e-Lab, which the city is a founding member of, facilitated a charrette to explore how the FortZED concept could evolve. From those discussions, the city began to wonder if the district's zero-emissions goal could be expanded to the entire city.
“We created a safe space – literally a meeting space ,” said Chan.
The charrette pulled in community stakeholders, including representatives from the City of Fort Collins, the Colorado Clean Energy Cluster, the Fort Collins Energy Board, and the FortZED Steering Committee. RMI worked to create a report with Fort Collins Utilities, titled "Stepping Up,” which examined the feasibility of accelerating the city's carbon goals.
The Fort Collins goals are so far-reaching that Chan said the process can be daunting—and even potentially threatening to incumbent stakeholders.
“There is a lot of sensitivity, a lot of political issues, and a lot of real risks at stake to try something new,” Chan explained. “And so a safe space is needed.”
RMI's work involved reaching out to more than 40 experts across the country, requesting input on how the city could move forward. That led to the development of a suite of strategies Fort Collins could use, which the city has turned into a climate action framework. City officials are now in the process of developing a more structured and detailed plan on how to reach its goals.
The long path ahead
Fort Collins has been working since 1999 to reduce emissions, but so far has only cut them 5% below the 2005 baseline. The bulk of that comes from reductions in community-generated solid waste, but it also comes at a time of growth for the city.
Population in Fort Collins is up more than 15% since it started to reduce carbon emissions. The city has also seen a 22% rise in sales and use tax collections—important because, while the Fort Collins plan envisions its carbon-neutral future as a long-term boon to residents, there will be an immediate short-term cost.
“We were looking at ways the community participates — and benefits from their participation — as opposed to exporting all of the work to the utility or all the work to a third party,” Chan said. “We're talking about a big change in how services and money flows in the community."
The city's plan calls for boosting building efficiency; making transportation more convenient, cleaner and faster; shifting to renewable energy sources through increased solar; and reducing peak energy demand through load shifting and storage.
A focus on homes and commercial buildings will drive significant carbon savings, with an anticipated 21% of emissions reductions coming from making existing homes more efficient, and another 21% by boosting commercial and industrial efficiencies.
Utility-scale renewables are expected to help reduce emissions by 11% out to 2050, while residential and commercial solar will cut emissions another 10%. The city expects to see a 6% reduction from a shift towards more efficient vehicles and electric cars, and a 12% reduction from shifting heating loads.
RMI's “Stepping Up” report actually concluded that, given abundant clean energy resources in Colorado, the transition to carbon neutrality could be done even faster, but it would require more focus on system diversity, including demand response, storage and flexible gas generation.
Demand response "has the potential to provide a significant source of flexibility to Fort Collins," RMI concluded. The city has a renewable and distributed systems integration project, which recently demonstrated the "capability of a portfolio of demand- and supply-resources, including demand response, to reduce peak demands on a distribution circuit by 20%," RMI said in its report.
'An energy service SWAT team'
Martha Campbell, a senior associate at RMI, worked with the city to consider what costs would be associated with the carbon targets, and how to get customers on board quickly and efficiently.
"We did a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how bundling energy conservation measures, coupled with a transferable on-bill tariff, allowed a customer to go deeper when retrofitting their home, all while remaining bill neutral,” Campbell said. “Given current electricity rates in Fort Collins, a bill neutral package could consist of an audit, a smart thermostat, a new furnace, hot water heater, air sealing and roof insulation.”
Campbell said RMI considered what the savings would be given current electricity rates in Fort Collins and what the cost of capital would need to be from a consumer's perspective. They also considered considered the revenue potential from the Fort Collins utility's perspective.
In order to make the changes quickly, audits and installations would be done simultaneously. "Like an energy service SWAT team,” Campbell said.
How much will carbon neutrality cost?
Reducing carbon emissions will likely cost hundreds of millions in the short-term, though Fort Collins officials believe the long-term view could yield billions in savings. But reaching that point will require dedicated buy-in from stakeholders, which is one reason the economics and changes to the city's services must be managed so closely.
The city's framework suggests net cumulative implementation costs of about $300 million by 2020, ultimately leading to $2-6 billion in savings in 2050. But those costs will likely rise, as they do not include infrastructure enhancement costs or energy storage options.
“There is almost a certainty that the economics will change,” Smith conceded. “To achieve rapid carbon reductions will require some up-front costs that will eventually play out in savings.”
“Of course, elected officials want to know how much this is going to cost,” she said, explaining the initial estimates and the difficulty in judging how much would be spent on storage and infrastructure. “It wasn't an effort to obscure. We were trying to be transparent that we did not estimate some costs. Clearly, this is not a complete cost picture.”
While the city still has much work to do to develop a specific implementation plan, RMI's Chan points out that the strategy being developed – the concept that aggressive carbon reductions can boost the economy – will be key to advancing and executing the goals.
"There are all these different players in the incumbent system,” Chan said. “In today's world—whether they are aware of it or not, whether it is explicit or not—they pay for or provide services that contribute to today's emissions profile. Moving to a new future, the flows of services and money can be very different than they are today.”
“This can be a large money-making opportunity for a lot of different players,” Chan stressed. “It can make money for the utility. It can generate revenue for the city. It can be a big source of savings for customers. It can be a big source of savings and branding for businesses.”