On Kansas High Plains, There’s No Place Like A Clean Energy Home

GREENSBURG, Kansas - The worst thing that ever happened to the more than 1,400 residents of this southwest Kansas farm town was the tornado that 26 months ago turned nearly every house and commercial building into scattered piles of splintered wood and broken bricks.

The best thing that ever happened to the 900 residents who remained has been a reconstruction effort based on a $100-million clean energy economic development strategy. Greensburg’s clean energy development plan has attracted the attention of two presidents, generated some of the most energy efficient homes and public buildings in the United States, and turned Greensburg into, arguably, the greenest small town in America.

On this July 4, Greensburg, like a growing number of communities across the country, is celebrating its steadily evolving program to deploy the latest in energy efficient design and clean energy technology to lower energy costs, improve economic opportunity, achieve energy independence, and build a safer and cleaner American way of life.

“In Greensburg, people saw that a terrible tragedy could be made into something valuable and durable and better,” said Daniel Wallach, founder and executive director of Greensburg Green Town, a non-profit organization that has provided technical assistance and organizational support for the reconstruction. “They focused on remaking themselves cleaner and greener and more energy efficient. They said look what we can do when we think about this in a new way.”

Coast to Coast Traction
The same ideas and values also are celebrated today by the Apollo Alliance and its partner organizations in the labor, environmental, social justice, and business communities. The clean energy economic and environmental vision first introduced by the Apollo Alliance in 2003 - to invest $300 billion in clean energy development in order to create jobs and rebuild the middle class, achieve energy independence, and solve climate change - is becoming a reality.

On June 26, the House of Representatives approved legislation that sets a limit on greenhouse gas emissions and invests billions to retool American manufacturers to build the components and systems to meet the new standard. The House vote is just the latest momentous step in Washington on clean energy development. Since February, the White House and Congress have committed more than $300 billion to clean energy investment and generating millions of green-collar jobs. Not since the 1956 Highway Act and the Apollo Space Program of the 1960s has the nation made such a sweeping commitment to establishing a new economic path. The goals of the federal clean energy program - much of it developed and advocated by the Apollo Alliance - are to generate broadly shared prosperity, enhance national security, and provide immense new job opportunity.

“The American Clean Energy And Security Act is a giant leap forward to establish energy security, reduce harmful carbon emissions, and create millions of green jobs that will put our citizens back to work and get our economy back on track,” said Phil Angelides, chairman of the Apollo Alliance. “Its investments to help U.S. manufacturers retool plants and retrain workers to meet the demands of the clean energy economy will keep new green jobs here at home and help revive America’s long suffering manufacturing sector.”

Greensburg is on that very same path. “Just a few days after the tornado, a bunch of us were talking and the idea of green just came up,” said Mike Estes, manager of BTI Greensburg, which owns a John Deere dealership in Greensburg built to LEED platinum standards, the highest energy efficiency and environmental sensitivity designation of the U.S. Green Building Council. “It came up because of the name, Greensburg. There’s something providential about that. We knew that we had to do something unique. Building green industries is unique. We had the chance to start over. What do you do when you start with a clean slate? You want to build it better. Right?”

Green Town
Greensburg’s redevelopment as a center of innovation for energy efficiency, clean energy construction, and new clean energy businesses - including a new wind turbine sales and service business - is a microcosm of both the quickening pace as well as the stubborn cultural and economic impediments to clean energy development throughout the nation.

The town’s new City Hall, school, hospital and business incubation center, financed in large part with low interest federal loans and other public monies, are all LEED platinum certified. Greensburg built a 32-unit LEED platinum certified public housing development. Many of the more than 200 homes that have replaced those that were destroyed were constructed with design techniques and advanced energy efficient equipment - such as geothermal heating and cooling units - that have lowered energy costs and water use while increasing property value. Passive solar design, R values, the heat island effect, and other clean energy terms rarely heard here before the 2007 tornado are now part of every day conversation.

But even as Greensburg makes headway in its focus on clean energy and new green-collar jobs, obstacles similar to those that have hampered national progress to scale up the clean energy sector are interfering with Greensburg’s efforts as well.

The town’s 19-month-old land use and development plan, which detailed Greensburg’s strategy of building energy efficient homes and businesses in order to attract new employers and reverse decades of population losses, has come under attack as inflexible, unworkable, too slow, and too expensive. Steve Hewitt, the Greensburg city administrator, said the criticism does not represent the majority view, and much of it is either wrong or misplaced.

And though Mike Estes has opened Greensburg’s first post-tornado clean energy business - a sales, distribution and service dealer for small wind turbines capable of powering homes and businesses - the Endurance Wind Power Incorporated machines are made in Canada. Roughly 70 percent of all the components and equipment of America’s clean energy sector are manufactured outside the United States, according to the Apollo Alliance.

Jobs
Still, the new dealership is bringing six to eight new technical level jobs to Greensburg that will pay $50,000 to $60,000 a year, a handsome wage on the high plains of southwest Kansas. Moreover, Estes is at the center of a $20 million wind development project - financed by John Deere Renewables, the company’s wind energy finance arm - to install 10 utility scale 1.25 megawatt windmills three miles from Greensburg. The wind farm will generate 100 percent of the town’s power, with any surplus going into the Kansas Power Pool.

“Our goal was to be 100 percent renewable in our power needs, and we achieved that with this project,” said Steve Hewitt, the city administrator. Hewitt added that Kansas ranks third among states in the potential to generate electricity from the wind, a fact confirmed by the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Construction on Greensburg’s wind farm is scheduled to begin this summer.

Across the country, similar evidence of success in America’s unfolding clean energy economy is appearing daily. Toledo, Ohio, is replacing jobs lost in the sagging auto parts manufacturing sector with jobs in the photovoltaic manufacturing sector. The city and surrounding region have developed 6,000 new jobs, which pay union-quality wages, in the high-tech thin film photovoltaic manufacturing sector. Texas is the largest buyer of wind turbines and developer of wind farms in the world. The Port of Duluth, Minn., at the far western coast of Lake Superior, is experiencing a boom as shipments of wind turbine components to and from the West increase. On Earth Day, President Obama visited Newton, Iowa, where state and local development officials have successfully recruited American manufacturers of wind towers, blades, and other clean energy components to build new plants that employ nearly 2,000 people. New energy efficient light rail and bus rapid transit systems have been built in more than 30 American cities since 1990, strengthening metropolitan economies.

These and thousands of other stories of investment, job growth, and research breakthroughs have yielded lower energy costs in cities and private homes, restored dwindling hope in hard-hit manufacturing communities across America, and stirred promising new scientific activities in the nation’s universities.

Economic Benefits
A report by the Pew Charitable Trusts in June found that jobs in the clean energy economy grew at a national rate of 9.1 percent, while traditional jobs grew by only 3.7 percent between 1998 and 2007. In 2007, more than 68,200 clean energy sector businesses operated across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, accounting for approximately 770,000 jobs.

The Apollo Alliance, from its start in 2003, anticipated the economic and environmental benefits of investing in clean energy enterprises. Last year, one of the three primary messages that helped to elect President Barack Obama was his call for investing $150 billion in clean energy to generate 5 million new jobs. With the help of the Apollo Alliance and a number of our allies, the president has already committed to spend twice that amount over the next two years. The president and democratic congressional leaders also vow to enact a climate and energy bill this year that accelerates the nation’s transition to a clean energy economy.

“As we transition into this clean energy economy we are going to see, I think, an enormous amount of economic activity and job production emerging,” said President Obama after the House energy bill vote. “I know that opponents of this bill kept on suggesting this was a jobs-killer, but everybody I talk to, when we think about how are we going to drive this economy forward post-bubble, keep on pointing to the opportunities for us to transition to a clean energy economy as a driver of economic growth.

“We know that our buildings are hugely inefficient. Every time we provide incentives for making our buildings more energy efficient, those are jobs for welders, jobs for engineers, jobs for a construction industry that obviously is going to be in a tough way for some time to come. High-skill and relatively low-skill jobs are going to be generated in this process. When you look at our renewable energy standard — wind, solar — as a consequence of our Recovery Act you’re already seeing thousands of jobs being produced. This bill will build on that. Every time we make a wind turbine, you’re looking at 400 tons of steel, you have the potential for jobs not only in design but also in manufacturing of wind turbines.”

Another result is the economic optimism that has settled over places like Greensburg. Deae Corns, a Greensburg realtor and banker whose home was ruined by the tornado, said families with young children are starting to buy homes in town with the intent of sending their children to the greenest school in America, which is under construction. Home values have risen for the first time in generations. And Greensburg residents, she said, like the attention that comes with being a pioneer and an innovator: “You know, a lot of the things we’ve done here weren’t that weird to us. Our grandparents used the wind to get water. They were thrifty and efficient because they had to be. To a lot of us, using the wind and the sun, being more energy efficient, putting the “green” in Greensburg - it was an easy sell.”

Keith Schneider, who writes for the New York Times, Yale Environment 360, Circle of Blue, and is the former communications director at the Apollo Alliance, is director of media and communications at the U.S. Climate Action Network in Washington, D.C. Reach him at kschneider@climatenetwork.org.