The city of Grand Forks could save $190,000 to $285,000 a year in energy costs if it hired Energy Services Group to improve its energy efficiency, a company representative told a City Council committee Tuesday.
That would be enough for the multimillion dollar improvements to pay for themselves within a few years, said Mark Bucholz, a sales executive with Energy Services Group in West Fargo, N.D.
Better yet, Bucholz said, ESG would guarantee these savings or the company would pay the city.
Some of this stuff makes sense. They’re talking about changing to high efficiency flourescent bulbs better weather stripping and other no brainers. That’s what gets me. We have a city engineers office. If they can’t do some basic no-brainer things like this then what are we paying them for.
Instead this came from a recommendation from the Mayor’s Grand Forks Green Committee. You remember, the self selected committee full of university employees who want to tell us how to live.
So this is their first recommendation, to hire a consultant to go over the energy uses of the system. I guess that’s ok, but wouldn’t it be the job of the MAYOR or the City Administrator to come up with ideas like this? What are we paying them for? I mean updating your lighting system is nothing revolutionary. Some of the most stodgy businesses have done this to save money.
Considering where it’s at I suppose the city ought to go through with this and look at a cost/benefit analysis of making changes. Provided they get good solid numbers AND are willing to share the information fully with the public we probably ought to go through with that. We do need a system for them to report to the public. Too often the city promises to save us money but somehow, someway the savings never seem to materialize. I can’t figure it out.
These are the guys that would spend a million dollars to save a nickel. And according to the Herald’s reporter that wrote the story, the investment could be in the millions.
I almost feel sorry for him though. He seems overly impressed that an out of state consultant actually came up with the idea for the city to save energy using “compact fluorescent lights.” I didn’t think it was that much of a breakthrough technology.
What really got me was this part of his Blog posting:
This news, by the way, is one of the first big things that came out of the mayor’s Green Grand Forks committee (The ESG report came out in July but no one in the news media was paying attention.). It’s a good move for a committee of this nature in a relatively conservative place like Grand Forks. Early on, committee members talked about getting the easy things done first before tackling tougher projects, such as, say, preventing urban sprawl and encouraging carpooling.
To appreciate how stupid that is you have to understand that Grand Forks has one of the shortest commute times of any city in the country. If fact at one time we were #1 in that category according to the Census Bureau. You can get all of the way across town in ten minutes. So these pinheads from the University want to “encourage” carpooling which will probably use MORE gasoline than otherwise.
Imagine, your employer is forced encouraged to have you carpool. So you have to get in your car, drive to a house in another neighborhood. Idle your car for several minutes, drive to another neighborhood and repeat the same process. So they’re going to take your 7 minute commute and make it a 20 minute ordeal. How’s that going to work.
The same thing goes for their worry about “urban sprawl.” What business is it of theirs to tell people where to live and how big their houses can be? But even if you granted that power, is it really worth the effort to keep people from having a 12 minute commute vs a 10 minute one?
What’s scary is that this reporter is so enamored with the idea of having a green committee tell everyone what to do. Now this no-brainer effort to update the lighting system is going to be used for justification to push people around.
Leave me out of it.