East Hampton Moves Toward Renewable Energy Roadmap Adoption

The East Hampton Town Board held the first of two public hearings on a draft renewable energy roadmap plan, which was crafted by consultants with input from the town’s Energy and Sustainability Advisory Committee, the Natural Resources and Planning departments, and the previous town board, on July 18.

The hearing drew comment from two residents, both of whom serve on the Energy and Sustainability Committee.

The plan is intended to reduce or eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, adapt to a changing climate and recover from the conditions and events that climate scientists agree will increasingly alter the environment. Following a second public hearing, which has yet to be scheduled, it is expected to be adopted into the town’s comprehensive plan.

Core concepts include the electrification of buildings and vehicles and the pairing of renewable energy generation with electrification; energy efficiency and reduction strategies, and community engagement in the clean energy transition and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Implementation of community choice aggregation, or CCA, in coordination with Southampton Town; community distributed generation of solar-derived electricity, and long-duration energy storage are among the intended programs. Municipal buildings and properties are to undergo energy audits, be upgraded to electrify space and water heating equipment, and add solar on rooftops and parking canopies and pair it with battery storage and electric vehicle charging.

The roadmap would also include support for adoption of onsite renewable energy, electrification, efficiency and vehicle charging for nonmunicipal buildings. The town’s building codes would be updated to move to electrification and net-zero energy consumption.

The town’s Climate Action Roadmap, adopted into the comprehensive plan in 2014, enumerated initial steps for addressing climate change, but was “more aspirational than concrete recommendations,” Councilwoman Cate Rogers said at the hearing. But “many of the town’s programs and changes to renewable energy in many of our systems and buildings came from those aspirations.”

In 2021, the Energy and Sustainability Committee recommended an additional roadmap to achieving 100 percent of the town’s energy consumption with renewable sources by 2030, and the town hired the consultants GDS Associates and Optony USA to prepare it in coordination with the committee and aforementioned departments.

“Goal-setting is easier than implementation,” said Lena Tabori of the committee. “I think that was really what drove us to realize that we needed a roadmap from outside the community that took a look at what the needs of the community were from a much more professional place,” the committee comprising volunteers who lack the consultants’ expertise. “The purpose was to try to make the 2030 goals that we’d established in 2014 more realistic and more possible.”

Climate change mitigation is not everyone’s priority, nor will it be easy to achieve, she said. “I have a terrible fear that with the growing consequences of climate change, we’re going to spend more of our available capital adapting to the problems, overcoming the consequences rather than mitigating to prevent future consequences.” The roadmap, she said, “addresses that very specifically. Although you will find that change is not convenient, we are a coastal community and we’re extremely susceptible to the problems that climate change is going to bring us.”

Krae Van Sickle, also of the committee, told the board that “a wise and informed energy policy can greatly help our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” to help the town become more resilient in responding to the impacts of climate change. The single most impactful move the town could make, he said, is CCA, whereby a municipality enters into contracts with energy service companies for power supply purchase options within its jurisdiction.

Options include power produced through 100 percent-renewable sources, through nonrenewable sources, or a blend. The town has created CCA enabling legislation, but owing to tangled negotiations involving potential suppliers and the Public Service Commission, which regulates the state’s electric utilities, implementation is stalled.

Solar energy coupled with battery storage “holds so much promise for this community,” Van Sickle said, “both to manage the causes of climate change and to manage the impacts.” Incentivizing a transition to electric vehicles and heat pumps, along with all-electric building codes, “have multiple co-benefits to not just reducing emissions but to building local resilience,” he said. “So I hope this gets adopted into the Comprehensive Plan.”