Denver Mayor Outlines Ambitious Green Plan for City

Rocky Mountain News
July 15, 2006

Mayor John Hickenlooper's plan to green up Denver starts with a private company building three solar power plants and continues with school kids taking a tree home to plant.

Bottom line: The cost of the ambitious Greenprint Denver plan announced Wednesday will be covered by investor-partners, the city's own budget for routine replacement of equipment, and volunteer labor.

"There are really no significant costs," the mayor said in an interview Thursday.

The most intriguing components of his plan are four small, new power plants - three solar and one powered by the methane gas that oozes from a city-owned landfill in Arapahoe County.

An unnamed private company wants to build two or three solar power plants, at Denver International Airport, the convention center and perhaps the current jail off Smith Road, Hickenlooper said.

Because Amendment 37, passed last year, requires Xcel Energy to use more solar power, the company is offering to buy up to 9 megawatts of solar power from private companies. The city's partner plans to compete for such a contract, and the accompanying Xcel subsidy.

The plan calls for a four-megawatt plant at DIA and much smaller ones at the other two sites, Hickenlooper said. A four-megawatt plant would power about 4,000 houses.

The city doesn't have a contract with the company yet, but it has checked on its ability to deliver what it has promised, Hickenlooper said.

"On the solar plant, there is no downside for the city, and we get some revenue," he said.

The city has a similar arrangement with Waste Management Inc., which will build a small 2.4- to 3.2-megawatt power plant at the Denver-Arapahoe landfill at its expense, according to company project manager Allen Hunt.

Denver will sell the methane gas to Waste Management, and the company will sell the electricity to Xcel. The company has already done this at 29 other landfills around the country, Hunt said.

The mayor's ambitious proposal to plant 1 million trees over 20 years is meant to reduce air conditioning costs citywide, by shading the south side of homes and streets where cars are parked in the scorching summer sun.

He expects to find private donors to cover the $6 to $8 cost of four-foot trees.

Then "by far the greatest expense is planting them," Hickenlooper said. So he's got Denver school principals interested in a program that will teach school kids from third to seventh grade about trees and "give them a tree to plant in spring and take care of."

He'll send youths the city hires in the summer out to help.

The city's fleet of street sweepers is scheduled for replacement in the next 10 years anyway, so Hickenlooper plans to buy new ones that each cost $8,000 to $10,000 more but use 90 percent less water. That will save more than 1 million gallons a year and cut the city's water bill, the mayor calculates.

However, Denver pays a discounted price of only $1,300 for that 1 million gallons of water, to its own Denver Water Board.

But Hickenlooper is hoping to cut water use citywide enough to avoid the enormous multibillion-dollar cost of building a new dam and reservoir.

He called in his State of the City speech for a 22 percent cut in water use from pre-drought levels, by 2016 instead of 2050 as originally planned. Denver Water said it has already nearly reached that goal, on a per-person basis, but the trick will be holding the line.

Hickenlooper also is leaning on Denver Water for the estimated $50 million cost of replacing inefficient park irrigation systems, in part "so sprinklers don't turn on in the middle of a storm. That drives me crazy."

Denver Water manager Chips Barry said Hickenlooper had not yet sought money for that project. But he added, "I'm sure they're going to ask Denver Water to pay something. We're not unwilling to have the discussion."

New city buildings will use energy- efficient equipment and designs, which will pay for themselves in seven years, the mayor said.

Hickenlooper also expects the city to save on the purchase of efficient hybrid cars, even though consumers have found some don't save enough on gas to offset their higher price tags.

But the city can cut the initial cost because it buys in bulk, said Robert Castaneda, director of fleet management for the city.

The city purchased its first 53 Toyota Priuses for less than $15,000 each, by using federal incentives encouraging fleet owners to buy fuel- saving cars, Castaneda said. That was far below retail prices of about $21,000, Castaneda said.

In 2007, the city plans to purchase another seven or eight Priuses. It will likely get some kind of bulk-purchase discount from Toyota, but even at $21,000, they would not be significantly more expensive than a mid-sized sedan, Castaneda said.

With the price of oil rising - it hit $76 a barrel Thursday as violence escalated between Israel and its opponents in Gaza and Lebanon - Castaneda said the city expects the investment in hybrid vehicles will reap benefits. The hybrids are getting 35 to 40 miles a gallon.

"Here's the real challenge, not only for us, but the whole country: We know that petroleum fuel products are becoming (more expensive)," Castaneda said during an interview he conducted while driving a city-owned Prius. "We have to be looking at alternatives."

The city has already met another of the mayor's goals - switching to biodiesel in the city's more than 800 diesel vehicles.

The alternative fuel, which is 80 percent petroleum-based diesel and 20 percent derived from plants, is running only about 2 cents a gallon higher than conventional diesel, Castaneda said.

And assuming petroleum rises in cost, biodiesel could become less expensive, he said.

Greening Denver

Some key points of Mayor John Hickenlooper's lengthy but still not fully worked-out plan for the efficient use of water and energy in the city are:

• Construction of solar and landfill-methane power plants by private investors on city sites.

• Switching the city's more than 800 diesel vehicles to biodiesel.

• Using energy-efficient construction for new city buildings and renovations.

• Buying hybrids as city vehicles are replaced.

• Reduce city government's energy use 1 percent per year.

• Reduce Denver's per-capita greenhouse emissions by 10 percent from 1990 levels by 2012.

• Plant a million trees over 20 years to reduce use of air conditioning.

• Direct new construction around transit stops.Sources: Mayor John Hickenlooper And Www.Greenprintdenver.Org

20 years is the time frame set by Mayor John Hickenlooper to triple Denver's tree canopy from 6 percent to 18 percent tree cover by planting a million new trees.