The high cost of energy is an issue weighing heavily on many communities’ bottom lines these days. At town meeting this year, those concerns will be reflected on warrant articles in at least two New Hampshire towns. The school board in Bow and the town of Newmarket are asking their voters to approve bonds that would allow their communities to invest in local energy projects. The two ideas represent the alpha and omega of power generation…one would cost 1 point 3 million dollars, the other 45 and a half million. But both proposals are driven by the same ideals: the cost of energy and cleaner energy. New Hampshire Public Radio’s Rebecca Kaufman has more.
If Dr. Stephen Elgert has his way, the Bow Memorial School will be-as far as he knows- the first school in New Hampshire to get its heat from a geothermal system.
Elgert, co-chair of the Bow School Board, says there’s growing concern in town over the rising cost of heating and cooling public buildings.
With the tax-payers pocketbook in mind, Elgert says the school board started to explore alternative energy sources.
"Geothermal is becoming increasingly more popular in the northeast, hundreds, there are hundreds of installations mostly in residential places, it’s being recognized as a commercial alternative."
But being first is never easy.
And Dr. Elgert admits that convincing voters a geothermal heating system could lower their taxes in the long run is an uphill battle.
"Because they’re new people are hesitant about it, they don’t want to go for a pig in a poke, they also do require a larger upfront cost that is sometimes hard to swallow and without realizing a benefit and we're estimating the benefit won’t come for a minimum of 8 years."
Residents of Bow will get the final say on whether they find that argument persuasive.
But the town budget committee has already come out against the project saying the upfront costs are too high.
Further east, in the town of Newmarket, the push is on for a much larger, very ambitious, 45.5 million dollar proposal.
Town planner Clay Mitchell says the idea came from a brainstorming session on new ways municipalities can serve their citizens.
"We have all been reading about municipalities getting into the game of clean energy and alternative fuel vehicles, so a group of us got together and said what role can Newmarket play?"
What they came up with was a proposal to create a municipal power utility.
The idea is to take several public buildings in town off the electricity grid and power them instead with microturbines fueled by natural gas….a cheaper and cleaner source of power, Clay Mitchell says.
But that part of the plan isn’t novel.
What is novel, says Mitchell, is the idea to sell the power to private customers inside—or outside---of Newmarket and back to the power grid.
"A lot of towns have solar voltaics or microturbines, clean burning gas fired turbines, and do co-generation what we don’t have is a model where an entire municipality has said this is it we’re going to do, form a utility and we’re forming the utility on the backbone that we are going to do clean and green power, that’s fiscally stable and an economic benefit to the community, that’s the difference between what we’re doing and what everyone else is doing."
Mitchell is thinking big. He would like to see the utility include renewable power sources like solar and wind.
Keith Freischlag would like to see more municipalities thinking along these lines.
Freischlag is the energy efficiency coordinator at Unitil—a power company that serves both New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
He also has assisted the town of Bow with their geothermal project.
Freischlag says in New Hampshire, it’s really up to local citizens to do the leg work to get these projects off the ground…it’s also up to them to foot the bill.
In Massachusetts, Freischlag says, towns have benefited from a special tax that goes towards funding renewable energy projects.
"Groups like in Massachusetts, Mass Tech Collaborative, do a good job at educating folks on renewable energy and they assist them in getting projects done, that kind of group is absent from new Hampshire and I think as a result municipalities have suffered, they don’t have the guidance or funding to get these projects done."
Freischlag says that lack of technical and financial support could hurt New Hampshire in the future.
Despite tough opposition, supporters of the Newmarket and Bow plans remain optimistic.
They say they have current events on their side.
President Bush has recently admitted that the U.S. is addicted to oil.
And he said Americans should invest in renewable energy.
Dr. Stephen Elgert of the Bow School Board says he hopes his town will get the ball rolling.
"There’s a lot of information coming out about global warming, fossil energy use, about our dependency on oil, it really is in my mind a national security concern, you know little old bow memorial school is probably not going to make a drop in the bucket difference in terms of total u.s. energy or oil use, but if everyone did something like this we’d all be better off."
For NHPR news, I’m RK.
