Lincoln committee pushing ahead with green goals

Gathering data on Lincoln’s greenhouse gas emissions and encouraging specific ways for residents to use more green energy are among this year’s goals for the Green Energy Committee (GEC).

The GEC serves as the primary resource for the town to identify technologies, initiatives, and means to reduce Lincoln’s CO₂ emissions. One of its long-term goals is for the town’s public buildings to achieve “net zero” status for energy use by 2030 (with production of renewable energy equivalent to fossil fuel consumption) as required by a 2011 Town Meeting vote.

Among the efforts underway: finalizing a proposal for community choice aggregation, which uses the power of group electricity purchasing to offer a greater percentage of electricity from renewable sources than the 15% now required from Eversource. The voluntary Lincoln Green Energy Choice program will also offer a fixed price for electricity supply over a longer period of time. The prices for power will be slightly higher than they would be otherwise, though the figures for different sources of electricity under the program won’t be known until the town signs a contract with an electricity supplier.

The GEC also hopes to gather data and report each year on CO₂e emissions. “CO₂e” means carbon dioxide equivalent, which gauges carbon footprint by expressing the impact of each different greenhouse gas in terms of the amount of CO₂ that would create the same amount of warming.

“Our focus is on tracking CO₂e emissions and reductions data so that we can figure out how to have the biggest impact on reducing them as we develop a plan to become carbon neutral by 2030,” said GEC chair Peter Watkinson. The group is in discussions with a third party to provide this data for the town of Lincoln and “expects progress this quarter,” he added.

Other GEC goals for 2019:

• Work with the School Building Committee on a high-efficiency school building powered completely by onsite solar PV arrays to achieve a net zero campus.
• Encourage residents to buy or lease electric vehicles. Work to make it easier and less expensive to purchase residential charging stations, and investigate locations for public charging stations in town.
• Continue residential efforts including encouraging home energy efficiency measures, energy-efficient heating/cooling systems, and solar installations.
• Encourage/enable the development and implementation of solar PV projects at non-residential locations, including the Lincoln School, Codman Community Farms, the Lincoln Mall parking lot, the First Parish in Lincoln, the Public Safety Building, and the transfer station.

The Codman barn is now having solar panels installed, and the First Parish in Lincoln (FPL) Parish Committee has approved installation of solar panels on the roof of the parish house across from Bemis Hall (they now need approval from the Historic District Commission, according to Larry Buell, chair of the FPL Outreach Committee).

FPL Green was formed in fall 2017 under the leadership of Tom Walker in response to a membership poll that named energy and climate change as the most urgent public priority among a dozen possible. Twenty families are now driving electric vehicles and 35 are using 100% wind-generated electricity, Watkinson said.