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Ithaca’s building plan is designed to roll out in two phases. The first phase will change over 1,600 buildings and help the city and partners determine best practices, while the second phase will use those learnings to convert the remaining 4,400.
Freeman said Alturus’s goal is to retrofit at least 50 buildings by the end of 2022, as its first inroad into Ithaca’s electrification. BlocPower hopes to complete its contract within four years, Baird said.
In all, the building decarbonization project could cost upward of $500 million over the next eight years, Aguirre-Torres told us. The city has already secured over $100 million in funding from private investors like Goldman Sachs. That sum includes $50 million from Alturus, which Aguirre-Torres said could provide an additional $550 million if initial efforts suggest the plans can scale on a community-wide basis.
Ithaca is generally a progressive college town, with students from both Ithaca College and Cornell University being very active in the town’s politics. It was the Ithaca branch of the Sunrise Movement, comprised mostly of students from those universities, that helped spur the city government to adopt a Green New Deal for the city in the first place.
But not every resident will fall into this early-adopter category.
“It’s natural gas—for cooktops, ranges—that is going to be a huge challenge. People love cooking with natural gas, and we have been told by several people [that they] are just not interested: ‘You're not taking my natural gas stove from me,’” Rebecca Evans, Ithaca’s sustainability planner. “There’s also kind of an education curve. One of the comments that we get a lot is, ‘What happens when the power goes out? I still have heat when the power goes out,’ which is just not true. Your natural gas furnace still relies on electricity to move that warm air around.”
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Evans also told us that low-income individuals will have lower electric bill payments to convert to electricity within their means, and that some of the city’s first electrification efforts will be directed toward two historically Black community centers in low-income neighborhoods.
Aguirre-Torres said the city is looking at regulatory instruments and legislation to prod homeowners and businesses to convert to electricity. By 2026, new buildings and major renovations in Ithaca will be banned from using natural gas, and proposals have been submitted to Ithaca’s Common Council to mandate a phased reduction of emissions in existing residential and commercial buildings by 2030.
Residents won’t have to pay up-front for changes, but the structure of repayment means they won’t immediately see their bills lowered either. In most cases, their current energy bill will remain the same, with any savings they would have received from electrification being applied to pay back Alturus and BlocPower.
Many of the companies and organizations involved in the process—from Alturus to BlocPower, Ithaca College to Cornell—have also challenged places like Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Palo Alto, California, to embrace similarly ambitious goals. Cambridge, for its part, adopted a 2050 timeline for decarbonization, while Palo Alto committed to reducing emissions by 80% by 2030.
Ultimately, those involved in Ithaca’s decarbonization movement hope it can help act as a proof-of-concept for other cities to embrace more concrete decarbonization plans.
“Given the scale of crisis that our world is currently undergoing, it’s really important that we approach these benchmarks and we approach these goals of carbon neutrality as though we can achieve them,” Siobhan Hull, Ithaca hub coordinator of the Sunrise Movement, told Emerging Tech Brew. “Because while they have a lot of obstacles in their way, and it's going to require a tremendous amount of effort, it’s really more dependent on willpower to do it rather than feasibility.”
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