The United Illuminating Company, which plans to destroy hundreds of trees throughout New Haven’s neighborhoods, will give the city a $15,000 check to send teens door-to-door to promote energy conservation.
Patrick McDonnell, UI’s director of conservation and load management, said he doesn’t see a connection between those two facts.
He said that at a City Hall press conference Wednesday afternoon, where UI announced its gift to the city to fund a New Haven “Youth Conservation Initiative.” Also at the press conference, Mayor Toni Harp signed an agreement with a clean-energy outfit to have city government purchase 20 percent of its electricity from “clean, renewable energy sources” and slash energy consumption in government buildings by 20 percent by 2018.
UI has earned the rage of New Haven and Hamden environmentalists lately with a plan to remove all trees within eight feet of its power lines — which could end up destroying an estimated half of all trees in the city. (Click here to read the plan.) The utility argues it needs to do that to prevent future outages in major storms. Critics call the plan an environmentally devastating overreaction; some argue it makes more sense to bury power lines, while others argue nature should be left alone to complete a natural pruning process. A public outcry led the utility to put the plan on hold while it negotiates with regulators.
The $15,000 UI grant will enable the Harp administration to hire 10 high-schoolers and two college supervisors to work part-time this summer knocking on doors in low- and moderate-income city neighborhoods. They will promote UI conservation programs like energy audits and weatherization. They’ll earn $8.25 an hour for up to 25 hours a week, and receive free new bikes, to do the work.
Paul Bass Photo
Five of those students spoke at Wednesday’s press conference. Some of them, like Hillhouse students Arif Singh (second from left) and Michael Blake (at center), have through an ecology club organized volunteer recycling efforts at their schools. (Also pictured: Dariel Cardona of Wilbur Cross High School, far left; and Hillhouse’s Colby Jenkins and Cooperative Arts & Humanities School’s Kayla Driffin at right.)
McDonnell was asked if he believes the students’ efforts would outweigh the energy-conservation loss to be caused by all the all the tearing down of trees in city neighborhoods.
“I don’t know that UI is tearing down all the trees in the neighborhoods,” McDonnell responded. “Last I saw that proposal was being modified.” (Click on the video at the top of the story to watch his full answer.)
He called that issue separate from the teen outreach program announced wednesday. “We want to focus on energy conservation in the homes. So much energy leaks out of homes.”
Do trees help that energy stay inside? he was asked.
He conceded that trees “do provide shading” for homes in the summer. “But in the winter they certainly don’t,” he said. He said the utility will discuss the benefits of tree canopies versus the costs of power outages with state legislators and regulators.
“We’ve lived through some serious weather events recently,” he said. “They’ve had a dramatic impact on trees falling down.”
Mayor Harp (pictured), meanwhile, signed an agreement with the Clean Energy Finance and Investment Authority containing the two 20 percent pledges. The pledges build on efforts city government made over the past decade to cut energy usage in municipal buildings and to promote the installation of fuel cells and solar panels both in public and in private facilities.
“Our goal is a bold one,” Harp said.
Robert Wall, outreach point person for the clean energy group, called New Haven a statewide green pioneer in those areas, among the first municipalities to make and keep similar pledges with his agency’s predecessor, the Connecticut Clean Energy Fund. It has already succeeded once in meeting a 20 percent goal for relying on renewable energy sources. (Read about that here.)
Giovanni Zinn, the city engineering department’s green-energy point person on projects from fuel cells to solar-powered library and school buildings to LED streetlights, said the city already purchases about 13 percent of its energy from renewable sources.
Much of the city’s energy-saving progress occurred under the direction of former Chief Administrative Officer Rob Smuts. Click on the video and on this article for details on how he went about it.
City of New Haven
UI should be aware that destroying other peoples property may provoke those people into destroying UIs property.