Matt McRae
Climate Policy Strategist
Oregonians young and old are sounding the alarm in communities across the state.
They are attending town hall meetings, protesting pipelines, setting up tree sits, and taking other forms of direct action to address climate change. If you looked to the top of the Ya-Po-Ah Terrace apartment tower in downtown Eugene last spring, dangling 200 feet above the ground you would have seen a prime example of local climate action. Clad in bright colored helmets and full body harnesses the team had planned this direct action for well over a year.
These were not climate protesters, however. They were employees of more than a dozen Eugene-based businesses like BrandSafway Services, LLC., FM Sheet Metal, Ferguson, Twin Rivers Plumbing, Inc., and Integrated Electronic Systems, among others. They were taking on the quiet, smart, energy-saving, easily overlooked, and thankless task of transitioning the building off of fossil fuels. It doesn’t make headlines, but it does create living wage jobs, it saves money, and this is precisely the kind of work we must scale up quickly and apply to buildings all across the entire country if we are going to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels within just a few short decades.
Making energy upgrades to the building is a prime example of smart climate action because it begins with equity.
Ya-Po-Ah Terrace houses hundreds of low-income seniors who pay a modest rent proportional to their income. If we are to make a serious effort to transition our energy system off of fossil fuels, affordable housing projects like this one, as well as homes and apartments rented by families on limited incomes, must be the first place we focus our energy efficiency efforts. This will help ensure that those who are most at risk and those with the fewest resources will be the first to benefit, rather than the first to be left behind. With equity at its core, the process of swiftly transitioning off of fossil based energy sources rests on three pillars:
The first pillar is radical energy efficiency and it will be delivered to Ya-Po-Ah Terrace when workers install new insulation that will nearly triple the insulation values in the exterior walls and floors. Skilled hands will replace eighteen floors of glass with new energy efficient triple pane windows. Specialists will install an energy recovery ventilation (ERV) system that borders on magic. The ERV reuses the heat from the outgoing stale air to warm up the incoming cold fresh air, saving a ton of energy in the process. With these and other efficiency upgrades, the energy bills for the Ya-Po-Ah terrace will fall by 45 percent and the total energy use will fall by a jaw-dropping 63 percent!
For pillar two we electrify everything, a step that enables us to run more of our economy (and this building in particular) on any variety of renewable energy sources including wind, solar, geothermal, and hydropower. Electricians and heating equipment technicians were employed at Ya-Po-Ah to replace the gas-fired furnace with an energy efficient, electric-powered heating and cooling system. Switching over from gas heat to electric heat will cause the gas use in the building to plummet by 90 percent.
The last pillar is moving to 100 percent renewable electricity and it has less to do with the actions at Ya-Po-Ah Terrace and more to do with our local utility and state and federal policies and investments. Even though this part of Oregon is blessed with low-carbon hydroelectricity, we will need to install more renewable electricity generation in our region if we are going to run most of our economy on renewable energy.
That’s how it gets done. One building at a time. Three pillars.
Nobody has to live in caves. Nobody is deprived of basic comforts. Yes, it requires effort and capital and change and leadership, but the task in front of us is no mystery. It’s just smart, money-saving, job-creating investment.
This project is seeing investment from multiple sources including the State of Oregon Housing and Community Services, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the City of Eugene, and the Eugene Water & Electric Board (our local electric utility), among others. Smaller scale projects like home energy retrofits won’t need this scale of funds, but they will require public policies that support renewable energy, energy conservation, and convenient access to financing.
Whether blocking the path of a pipeline or balancing on scaffolding eighteen stories above the ground to transform this building, each requires skill, focus, and fair dose of courage. These are the same qualities we need from our government leaders right now as we call upon them to expedite the transformation of our entire energy system.
Matt McRae is the Climate Policy Strategist for Our Children’s Trust and served as the Climate and Energy Analyst for the City of Eugene for eight years.
Photo credit: Meadowhawk Imagery, LLC.