With the help of North Carolina software developer, the city of Roanoke, Virginia is finding it a lot easier, faster and less expensive to improve the energy efficiency of its municipal buildings, most of which were built more than half a century ago.

Roanoke’s efficiency push is part of its first-ever Climate Action Plan, aimed at lowering its carbon footprint on multiple fronts. But the city is finding there’s a strong economic case for the projects as well.

In 2014, Roanoke saved more than $500,000 in avoided energy costs compared to 2005, according to Nell Boyle, the city’s sustainability and outreach coordinator.

In a draft of the city’s initial Climate Action Plan report due out this fall and shared with Southeast Energy News, the city acknowledges how its “building stock was aging, maintenance on the buildings was well behind schedule and equipment was in imminent need of repair.” The upshot: Roanoke, like many municipalities, had its work cut out for itself, and every day it delayed was costing it more money.

Read the full story. (Southeast Energy News)

It’s an understatement to say that the Obama administration has been dedicated to fighting climate change — with its biggest achievements including introducing the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan and negotiating the Paris climate agreement. This is surely the most that any U.S. president has done to try to change the course of energy heating the planet.

But it’s much less widely known that at the same time, Obama could also be dubbed the “energy efficiency president”– the U.S. leader who has done more than any other to help us use less energy, and pay less for it, as we go about our daily lives. Which, of course, also helps fight climate change.

The story does not command nearly as much attention as the Paris talks or the Clean Power Plan, but the facts are tough to dispute: Obama’s Energy Department has finalized more new standards for energy efficient appliances and products than any past administration, a new report finds.

Read the full story. (Washington Post)

U.S. federal agencies should disclose whether their actions and decisions will have an impact on climate change, the White House announced on Tuesday.

The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) finalized an update after nearly six years of consultations of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a Nixon-era statute that called on officials to weigh the environmental effects of projects such as highways, dams or oil drilling.

The update takes NEPA a step further by requiring agencies such as the Interior Department to the Army Corps of Engineers to quantify greenhouse gas emissions in NEPA project reviews and to describe the potential climate change impacts.

“This increased predictability and certainty will allow decision makers and the public to more fully understand the potential climate impacts of all proposed federal actions,” the CEQ said in a statement.

This would prompt agencies to consider alternatives or propose measures to mitigate the climate impacts of a project, it said.

Read the full story. (Reuters)

When Hurricane Isabel pummeled Hampton Roads with 5- to 8-foot waves in 2003, low-lying Langley Air Force Base in Hampton was largely underwater, sustaining more than $160 million in damage.

Now, a new Union of Concerned Scientists report warns that Isabel was just a grim taste of things to come. That flooding and storm surge at Langley and other coastal military installations will only get worse — maybe a lot worse.

In fact, under the worst-case scenario of 6.9 feet of sea level rise for this region by the end of this century, the base stands to lose nearly 90 percent of its land to daily flooding as it essentially becomes part of the tidal zone.
Meanwhile, some 20 miles away along the James River, roughly 60 percent of Joint Base Langley-Eustis could be lost to high tides — with even more lost to the extreme spring and king tides.

Read the full story. (Daily Press)

Donald Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, questions climate change just like Trump himself does.

By contrast, a peek into the recent past of Hillary Clinton’s running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, suggests he takes the issue seriously and has paid particular attention to how it is affecting his constituents in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, which faces some of the largest rates of sea level rise in the country. The link also underscores the strong connection between climate change and national security, because one of the key players that must grapple with sea level rise in the area is Naval Station Norfolk, “the largest naval complex in the world.”

And it suggests that by approaching the issue in this way — focusing on regional vulnerability and on national security — Kaine has actually been able to make some significant bipartisan progress.

Read the full story. (Washington Post)

Inside a plain brick building in Burlington lies the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies, a buzzing hipster incubator that looks as if it could be in Silicon Valley. It is powered invisibly by forces that any city would envy: a green grid that is highly energy-efficient and a superfast one-gigabit internet connection.

“People would kill for this internet connection,” said Tom Torti, president of the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce. “For us to grow our tech network, we needed to double down on fiber network.” The new Burlington economy is going to be knowledge- and skills-based, he added.

This digital superhighway runs through beautiful Burlington, a small city sandwiched between the distant Green Mountains and the 125-mile-long Lake Champlain. It is an outlier as far as emerging technology hubs and so-called smart cities go. But Burlington, which has a lower unemployment rate than Silicon Valley, is now spawning a wave of technology pioneers.

The technology center, called VCET, provides free advice, mentoring, seed money and gorgeous co-working spaces that are available to entrepreneurs for a low fee. Students can use these spaces free, so Max Robbins and Peter Silverman, 20-year-old college students, are starting their business, Beacon VT, there. It is similar to the dating site OkCupid, but for employment, matching students with employers.

“We’re trying to give people an unfair advantage,” said David Bradbury, president and fund manager at VCET. “There’s nothing too big that you can’t dream here. And the snowball is moving faster.”

Read the full story. (New York Times)

California’s film industry may have taught the Golden State something that folks in other parts of the nation are just beginning to understand.

Around 1920, movies were silent, black and white, and largely quite crude, though there were occasional masterpieces. It was a lot like renewable energy around 2010.

As technology breakthroughs and economies of scale grew movie industry returns, the industry lured Wall Street capital that financed bigger, better, more profitable projects. That’s a lot like the history of renewables this decade.

Big studios, challenged by independent producers and stronger regulation, either adapted to disruption or went broke. California utilities, perhaps inspired by the trials of the old film houses, are leading the response to demands from their “audience” for more renewable energy.

The state’s three dominant investor-owned utilities (IOUs) topped the just-released Ceres/CleanEdge clean energy deployment rankings. Though the U.S. Department of Energy forecasts solar and wind generation will grow from 2015’s 227 billion kWh to almost 1 trillion kWh in 2040, utilities in many other states have yet to jump on the bandwagon.

Even so, the report numbers show overall growth in utility renewables, and executives at both leader and laggard companies told Utility Dive that a paradigm shift toward cleaner energy solutions has influenced how they think about the grid.

Read the full story. (Utility Dive)