Northampton and Westhampton are two of the communities included in the latest round of awarded Green Communities competitive grants from the state and will use their funding toward the enhancing energy efficiency in select town buildings.
The grant funding is in part of a recent announcement from Gov. Maura Healey that more than $7.2 million will go to cities and towns across the state to fund clean energy projects.
Northampton was awarded $494,613 to fund energy recovery ventilators, or ERVs, ERV controls and a heat pump system at Leeds Elementary School. Westhampton was awarded $90,326 for weatherization and insulation improvements at Westhampton Elementary School.
The Department of Energy Resources selected 42 municipalities in total to receive the Green Communities competitive grants. With the announcement, DOER has now awarded more than $191 million to Green Communities in Designation Grants and Competitive Grants since 2010.
“We are happy to help our cities and towns move forward with initiatives that create healthier communities and boost local economies,” said Healey in the announcement. “These projects will ultimately save people, businesses and municipalities’ money and will help Massachusetts achieve energy independence.”
Cities and towns will use the funding for a variety of projects aimed at reducing energy in their municipal operations. These projects include installing high-efficiency lighting, building weatherization, upgrading energy management systems, facility retro-commissioning and transitioning HVAC systems away from fossil fuels by installing air-or ground-source heat pumps.
“These projects reflect the hard work and dedication of our local officials to make Massachusetts a healthier, more affordable place for families and businesses,” said Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll. “We are committed to partnering with our local leaders to support efforts that save cities and towns money and strengthen communities.”
Additionally, 17 of the communities’ awards are for fuel-switching projects — replacing fossil fuel-fired HVAC or water hearing systems with heat pumps. Once installed, those projects will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 283 tons annually.
“Cities and towns are slashing their energy bills and leading the fight against climate change. We’re proud to invest in their leadership,” said Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Rebecca Tepper. “Local clean energy projects will make us less reliant on expensive fossil fuels and help lower our overall energy demand, cutting costs for all ratepayers.”
With the $494,613 in funding awarded to Northampton, Climate Action and Project Administration, or CAPA, Director Ben Weil told Reminder Publishing the plan is to fund energy recovery ventilators, or ERVs, ERV controls and a heat pump system at Leeds Elementary School.
The goal for the Leeds building, as well as other aged buildings in Northampton, is to aid in a larger effort to decarbonize the school’s energy usage, while also updating dated infrastructure in the school’s two wings, according to Weil.
This summer, ERV’s will replace dated unit ventilators throughout the school with an ERV and a heat pump going into each classroom and four heat pumps and a large ERV being installed in the school’s larger “cafetorium” space. Weil explained that currently, Leeds has a steam boiler and that the wing of the building built in the 1950s is heated by the steam and fresh air is tempered with steam.
The school’s old boilers will also be disassembled this summer and replaced with a new, high efficiency boiler system that the city was able to pull from a mothballed building. Weil added that the replacement of the boiler was something the city will be covering.
“We’ve invested already a lot in insulation and air sealing and really good new windows in this 1950s wing that included the cafetorium,” Weil explained. “Then there’s the 1990s wing. That one is heated, still not cooled, with circulating hot water. The circulating hot water comes off the steam boiler, so it’s really, really inefficient. This project takes away the steam boiler entirely, replaces the portion that used to be [the] heat exchanger from steam is now going to be two new boilers. They’re actually existing, so we basically pulled them out of a mothballed building, so free to us.”
Weil said the project will keep the 1990s wing heated as steam boilers are taken out and eventually replaced with air source heat pumps to every classroom and ERVs. In the summer, the same heat pumps will provide cooling.
By project’s end, Weil said the city will save approximately $23,000 a year and will also be cutting gas use in half and reducing carbon emissions by over 70%.
“That’s the whole project, basically heat pumps, ERVs and a new boiler,” Weil said. “We have to get it done this summer. As soon as we knew the money was going to come, we knew we can do it. We can’t do any of it, we can’t do all of it, and we have to do all of it before school opens [in the fall].”
Weil noted that this type of project will be needed on essentially every single aged building in the city at some point in the future, in fully committing to enhancing energy efficiency. Not including the future 1990s wing work, the project is expected to cost just under $1 million, but thanks to this grant and its size, the city is expected to foot just over a third of the bill.
“We’re going to pull things together,” Weil said about tackling projects when they can as a city, as much of this work will become costly in the aggregate. “Just talking schools, there are other schools that are just going to be a big, very expensive project, and then you have to ask are we going to invest in the schools in a big way, and that’s a big community wide decision.”
Weil said, in the meantime, he and the team at CAPA will continue to identify buildings that can be proven proof of concept for these projects and then look for proper grant funding to send projects in motion, all in the name of a greener Northampton.
“Everyone in this office, our job is at least, ‘hey, we want to reduce carbon emissions.’ But we also need to make these buildings resilient so if you have a heat wave in May, are the kids gonna be able to be in school and learning or are they just going to be sweating,” Weil said. “Are we able to take all of these schools, most of them with the same basic ventilation technology — kids need fresh air to learn. Theres a lot of evidence that sufficient ventilation and cooling are critical to actual learning.”
Reminder Publishing was unable to connect with the town of Westhampton on their plans for this funding by press time.
