Green Cities $ave Greenbacks
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal detailed plans from cities around the globe to cut costs while becoming energy efficient at the same time. The small city of Ann Arbor, Michigan projects its savings at almost $700,000 a year from the installation of LEDs in public street lamps and parking lot lights. Chicago experimented with planting rooftop gardens capable of withstanding harsh winters to cut electricity costs. As many may well know, New York City is attempting to harness the power of tidal currents in the East River to power roughly 640,000 homes.
Though the article detailed six other cities experimenting with alternative energy in an effort to save money and increase efficiency, these three examples are particularly instructive. Each innovative technique is something that the City of Buffalo is capable of doing. Replacing city lamps with LEDs is a cheap and easy fix for the city. Likewise, planting rooftop gardens serves a dual purpose. Not only does it save money, but it creates more usable space for employees. Even the example of New York City’s tidal turbine project is feasible in the Niagara River.
While there certainly is a cost efficiency aspect to going green, there is also the added bonus of creating jobs to service and maintain the infrastructure. Though replacing LEDs and creating roof top gardens may just provide more busy work for city employees or landscapers, there is no doubt that it takes a highly educated and skilled workforce to operate tidal turbines. Monitoring stations and service engineers would be needed year round to ensure their viability.
Though solutions like this may take years to implement, they are certainly not out of the reach for the City of Buffalo. With the great abundance of natural resources available to the area, the city and region can take advantage of its skilled labor force to reinvent itself as a hub for alternative energy. It is also a reminder that the eight windmills in Lackawanna should serve as a starting point and not the culmination of Buffalo’s alternative energy experiments. Not only would the city serve as a national example for green energy, it would save enormous sums of money each year to help solve more pressing needs.
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sbrof
installation sonly a small part of the prize here. what we should really be trying to promote here is the development of new ideas and technologies, so they can be manufactured here and then exported to the many cities within easy reach of our hub like location. Especially if CSX improves connections to the east coast, our proximity to Toronto, Chicago, cheaper and more on time air transportation than most places we could really capitalize on turning our region into a sustainable technology hub. UB is starting this movement, the wind turbines have been fantastic in improving peoples perceptions of our natural resources and potential in new tech.
This has to be promoted soon, there are many many places competing to attract the researchers, grants and companies to build a new green economy around.
Think of this as a couterweight project like the Medical Campus. We need more than one egg to grow our future.
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terrapintim
Also, with 'green' energy beginning to be a part of the political agenda for both sides of the aisle now, there will soon be a lot of federal funds available for research and installation. If Buffalo can market itself in this manner there is a good possibility that our senators and representatives could secure a chunk of these funds for WNY. The US is starting to embrace this as our future - Buffalo should put itself in a position to be the future.
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Downtownjunkie
This is an awesome article. I wish our elected officials could rally around a truly regional united front in ushering this new green age in for Buffalo bringing us to the forefront of renewable energy technology. I dont see why a Binational niagara peninsula region could lead the world in windmill and water turbine production. Cheap clean electricity and water were what built this region and will help us hopefully if our region wakes up in reinventing ourselves once again.
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apocalypsekirk
A wholesale switch to a 'green' economy is the only way Buffalo can remain relevant in today's world. Maybe instead of worrying about keeping a football team that hasn't done anything in 15 years, if everyone would put their hearts and minds behind making Buffalo a 'green' city with a sustainable technology industry, we might just actually achieve the renaissance everyone so dearly wishes were here.
We need our elected officials to think outside the box on this one. The three things recommended in this article would only be the tip of the iceberg on what we could accomplish if there was a groundswell of support.
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sbrof
The only problem with getting behind the green movement, here like anywhere in the US, is as soon as you do that you can't support the scale of green field development that much of the region uses to "increase tax base."
100 home subdivisions are about as unsustainable as you can get. Not just in their waste or biologically productive lands but in the isolated, lifestyle, and waste culture they reinforce. sustainability is inherently linked to social justice because you no longer make decisions based on what is best for me.. but what is best for us. That concept will truly never fly in the US without a major pollution linked ecological / economic catastrophe.
We are not the kind of society that puts thought and science first. If so Lead and DDT would have been non-issues but instead we saw the opportunity to make a dollar and ran with it for as long as we could without worrying about the consequences.
This isn't to say it is impossible or that things are not changing, because I feel that finally are, but just one hurdle that you need to think about and be prepared to argue against to bring these kinds of eco-technologies and lifestyles to bear.
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RisingDamp666
Buffalo doesn't have to be the green workshop to the world, it just needs to quit wasting its money on everyone else's crappy coal and oil. Think Buffalo can't go solar? Consider this: the nation with the highest use and commitment to solar is Germany. And no other city in America, or really, on the planet is better suited to mass transit than Buffalo. What a layout! Buffalo can be a leader just by doing simple sensible things to wean itself off carbon. Make it all tax deductible, the whole country needs to dump fossil fuels.
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