Putting our roofs to work for the Bay
The Coalition currently generates 21 percent of its own electricity from solar and its committed to further reducing reliance on fossil fuel by applying the lessons its learned from installing its current solar systems to new projects.
President Biden recently pledged that the United States will aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. At an Earth Day celebration for the new solar power installation at the Fiber Optic Center in New Bedford, Coalition President Mark Rasmussen discussed how the organization today generates 21 percent of its own electricity from solar and its commitment to further reducing reliance on fossil fuel.
When we began to think about siting and renovating the Coalition’s headquarters in 2010, we knew we had to do whatever we could to reduce our use of fossil fuels, and maybe inspire others to take their own small steps.
We all know that climate change is happening because of our collective burning of fossil fuels to create the energy that we use each day. And in the United States, buildings account for 40 percent of all energy use. So we simply can’t transition away from fossil fuels without a huge focus on the buildings where we live and work.
Three things we did that make a positive difference in our headquarters:
1. We reused an existing building in the city core, right here in one of New Bedford’s oldest neighborhoods. Not only did that prevent the clearing of carbon-storing forest out in the suburbs, but it takes advantage of the large amounts of “Embodied Energy” present in our nearly 200 year old walls. How’s that? No one had to fire new bricks, they were already there.
2. We made it super efficient. That, of course, means highly energy efficient mechanical systems, but mostly it means SUPER, SUPER insulated. Not only are there eight-inch thick walls built inside of our brick and granite shell, we also installed a vegetated roof that no one can even see up there--nine more inches of soil, roots and plants that cool in the summer and retain heat in winter.
3. Lastly, we designed everything to operate on electricity--there are no fossil fuels burned in our building. That gives us the chance to create our own energy through solar but also to purchase renewable energy from the grid as those opportunities continue to expand. Simply put, we did everything we could with the space we had to generate as much of our own electricity as possible..
Here are some fun statistics on our solar panels:
We installed our first 3.5 kilowatt system in 2010 and then expanded it to 8.26 kilowatts in 2015. So today, our system—on top of an 1832 building in a National Historical Park—provides 13 percent of all electricity needed in our building—and that’s for everything: heating, cooling, elevator, etc.
And we took this experience and expanded on it when we built our new Science and Field Operations facility on Route 6 in Marion in 2018. That building—with the opportunity to position its large roof squarely facing the sun—generates 165 percent of the energy needed for that site with its 24.5 kilowatt solar panel system.
We sell that extra 65 percent of excess energy back to the grid and it helps ‘offset’ our electricity use at all of our facilities—in New Bedford, Marion, Wareham and Woods Hole.
Today, organization-wide, the Buzzards Bay Coalition generates 21 percent of its own electricity and we’re not done as we explore new opportunities to expand our solar use on new projects.
We all need to do what we can with the spaces that we have. I look out each day from my office in downtown New Bedford across a sea of huge, empty rooftops and parking lots up and down the harbor and think about how great the potential is still for expansion of local solar energy production.
