Music City Solar Park in Madison
Two years ago, then-Mayor Megan Barry’s Livable Nashville Committee released a report with 25 recommendations aimed at “making Nashville the greenest city in the Southeast.”
In the time since, assessments of the effects of global climate change — and how much worse the problem is going to get without major action — have become only more dire. But there has been little action on the local front, even in a city that likes to see itself as a progressive hub of the Southeast.
Metro Councilmember Freddie O’Connell, who represents North Nashville and downtown, says he wants to change that. An avid cyclist who’s been driving an electric car for seven years and advocating for climate-friendly policies even longer, O’Connell is planning to make a suite of energy-and-climate-focused policies a significant part of his re-election campaign this year.
“The funniest thing about where we are in Nashville right now is we have a series of amazing plans that are ready to just be implemented,” he tells the Scene.
O’Connell describes what would “effectively be a ‘green New Deal’ for Nashville.”
“This isn’t just like a great transformative shower one morning led me to these brilliant ideas,” he says. “These are fairly simple concepts that we just have to create the collective will around.”
The elevator pitch includes plans to: transition Metro government to using 100 percent renewable energy; start building and encouraging the construction of net-zero-energy buildings; and replace most of the Metro fleet with electric vehicles, with charging stations at all Metro buildings.
O’Connell has been talking publicly about that first goal for almost two years now. After President Trump announced that he was pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement in June 2017, O’Connell began inquiring with Metro’s Department of Finance about how much it would cost for Metro to offset its energy use through the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Green Power Switch. The program allows customers of utilities in the TVA region to purchase blocks of renewable energy for as little as $4 per month, which is added onto their power bill. For each $4 block, TVA adds 150-kilowatt hours of renewable energy to its energy mix. If one can afford it, the program makes it possible to offset the entire household’s energy use with investment in renewable energy.
If using both the Green Power Switch and Nashville Electric Service’s Music City Solar program — a two-megawatt community solar site in the Madison area that went online last year — O’Connell says he’d be surprised if it cost more than $7 million to get Metro to 100 percent renewable energy. A closer analysis is still needed to figure out the exact cost, he says, but he plans to propose a bill in the Metro Council this year that would put Metro on a schedule to get there. Acknowledging that the city has other pressing needs that have to be addressed through the upcoming budget — delayed cost-of-living raises for Metro workers, for instance — he says an ambitious timeline would have the city on 100 percent renewable energy by 2025.
When it comes to net-zero-energy buildings, O’Connell looks west. Salt Lake City has been a leader in constructing public buildings that leave no energy footprint. One school built there in 2014, for instance, has solar panels on its window awnings. As of October 2018, Salt Lake City was the only city in the country with zero-energy fire stations — and it has two.
More than a decade ago, O’Connell notes, the Metro Council passed a green-building standard. Now, he says, it’s time to revisit that with an eye toward the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED Zero program. A number of strategies are used to get buildings to net-zero energy use, from green roofs and efficient windows to offsets like planting trees.
Large buildings — look around, Nashville has a few — are among the biggest drivers of energy use. The other? Automobiles.
That’s why O’Connell says he wants to make more progress toward getting Metro’s fleet completely off fossil fuels. He says he sees little reason why just about all Metro vehicles couldn’t be replaced with electric ones over time. (Initially, he says, first-responder vehicles could be excluded to avoid any doubts regarding their range.) He’d couple that with the installation of charging stations at all Metro buildings.
Overall, O’Connell says initiatives like the ones he proposes would likely encourage the private sector, and private citizens, to move in the same direction. He adds that energy independence is also a security step in an age when threats to the energy grid seem increasingly likely.
“We’re seeing an enormous abdication of leadership for one of the most pressing issues, I think, of our generation at the federal level,” says O’Connell. “Cities have enormous capacity to transform that.”
