Alison Higgins, Key West Resiliency Manager, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about energy.
October is Energy Month and the Energy Technology Innovation Partnership Project is underway.
Higgins said, “The city got, it wasn’t a grant, per se that involved money, but it was a technical assistance grant, which meant we got the best and brightest from the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab and Berkeley Lab to come and look at our situation. The program is only for kind of places that are far flung and hard to manage. It actually was something that our energy and adaptation person found. She wrote her very first grant application, and we got picked. So they came down and did a bunch of stakeholder meetings with Keys Energy and our EMT and Monroe County weatherization and social services and then with the community. And they said, hey, here’s some really important things you guys should be looking at, which was great, because we were in the process of making a 10 year energy plan that was basically staff led. It was what we could Google and learn from other people and cobble together. So they came in with their expertise and crunched numbers, and they actually analyzed the entire islands building stock, and they found that that even though our homes are smaller on average than the rest of Florida, our energy consumption was higher than the average by 57%.”
Maybe it was the air conditioning.
Higgins said, “So they gave us a bunch of things to work on. And what’s kind of even more exciting than that, because of that relationship we built, we have this chance to go on to step two, which is an even deeper dive into things that we can do to help everybody. So I will give a more thorough explanation of what we found at our next call, but thanks for giving me the chance to share.”