City Releases Clean Energy Vision Action Plan

To continue its commitment to green the city, the Office of Sustainability released more plans last week.

The Clean Energy Vision Action Plan drills further into the Powering Our Future Plan to identify actions the city can push by 2020 (that’s T-1.5 years from now) to move quickly to cut our carbon footprint.

The Clean Energy Vision Action Plan is broken down into 6 key areas, which are:

1. Implementing the Municipal Energy Master Plan – this is the city-plan to reduce emissions in city-owned buildings like City Hall, Art Museum, streetlights, and more.
2. Growing existing Clean Energy Programs – Think building codes, solar energy, energy benchmarking, Phila 2030 and more.
3. New local programs & policy to advance clean energy – Many of these may need city council approval, but opportunities include a commercial PACE (property assessments), building tune-up to implement energy-saving, and home energy use requirements when buying or selling a single-family residence.
4. New state legislation to advance clean energy – Once again, this requires legislation but on a state level. Opportunities include existing nuclear power plants, expansion of the Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard (currently it requires 18% of electricity in PA to come from renewables, but will expire in 2021.)
5. Go beyond the built environment – We gotta think beyond buildings, eh? This includes how Zero Waste and Litter Plan to reduce landfill use, Transportation efficiency and Clean Fleet to encourage electric vehicles and solar charging stations.
6. Planning, education and advocacy – OOS wants to educate other levels of governments like updating about climate science, PGW, large institutions and state/federal advocacy.

Read the full plan on the website.

Christine Knapp of OOS attended the Global Climate Action Summit in San Fran last week to celebrate climate actions and ways the city is signing onto climate commitments.

PSSST. Want to learn more about buildings and 2030 districts? We’re launching a podcast soon, and a few of the episodes will do a deep dive into green buildings, both in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Subscribe now on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.