Panelists: Communities go green

Government representatives from communities in Athens, North Carolina and Alabama participated Tuesday in a panel discussion about community-based renewable-energy initiatives as a part of the Appalachian Regional Conference at Ohio University.

Steve Garrison, county manager in Madison County, N.C., was the first speaker, and he showed a short video about issues the area has dealt with over the last several decades. As the video explained, Madison County was a haven for vacation housing until the housing bubble burst and the unemployment level soared to 9.5 percent.

The county, with a population of about 22,000, adopted several renewable-energy practices to reduce the financial impact of the recession, Garrison said. They added wind turbines and solar panels to the school buildings, integrated a geothermal system into the local college, and gave local farmers grants for using alternative energy sources, he added.

"We are all sort of moving toward the same direction at the same time," Garrison said.

After the video, Athens City Council Member Elahu Gosney gave a short presentation introducing possible renewable-energy initiatives in Athens. Following a model of success based on recent legislation in California, council is seeking funding from the state of Ohio and federal stimulus grants to begin work on several renewable energy goals, Gosney said.

These goals include reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, as well as increasing the use of renewable energies, and creating green jobs, he said.

The Athens Solar Initiative would create low-interest government loans to assist homeowners with the high upfront costs of installing solar panels. So far, an obstacle to going solar, Gosney explained, has been that installing solar panels is often prohibitively expensive, and the majority of people don't plan to live in their houses long enough to make up the cost in energy savings.

While Athens is still in the process of making changes, the community has been moving in the right direction, Gosney said.

Last to speak was the mayor of Hoover, Ala., Tony Petelos. The city made national headlines when President George W. Bush visited to praise its renewable-energy initiatives, and the city even won an award in England for its outstanding environmentally sensitive practices.

When he was elected to office five years ago, Petelos said he began a residential recycling program that converted donated used cooking oil into ethanol. While members of the community were skeptical, he recalled, when the city collected 500 gallons of oil instead of the projected 25 gallons, the critics were silenced.

In only five years, 88 percent of city-owned vehicles are now run on some type of alternative fuel, according to Petelos. In March, General Motors even sent the city a letter saying its fuel is certified to not void warranties on vehicles. And when the federal Environmental Protection Agency came to Hoover to evaluate its process, they were surprised with the effectiveness and quality of their relatively simple conversion process, he said.

The only byproduct from the oil was glycerin, so they sold it to a local car wash, which used it to make soap, Petelos said. It takes less that a dollar to process the fuel, he added, and the only drawback as an alternative to gasoline is that filters need to be replaced more often.

"Every gallon of ethanol we burn is a gallon we aren't importing," he said. "You have to start on a local level."

A similar conversion program would be simple to integrate into Ohio University, he suggested, because of the prevalence of dining halls, which could contribute a great amount of cooking oil.

He said that every time a crisis arises in the energy industry, people start searching for alternatives. However, when gas prices go down, people "go back to sleep."

"If we had started on hydrogen back in the '70s, we would have had it figured by now," he said. "Last winter ethanol businesses failed because gas prices went down."

The next step in Hoover's renewable fuel process is converting wood waste to ethanol, and then the city plans on using garbage when the technology becomes available.

"We are doing something on a local level that communities can do around the country," he said.