The City of Grand Marais will be promoting its Conservation Improvement Program once again this year in accordance with a Minnesota Statute that requires power suppliers to spend money on incentives to reduce electrical consumption.
The city will spend 1.5 percent of its gross operating electrical revenue on incentives this year, including rebates and CFL bulb giveaways. According to Utility Administrative Specialist Jan Smith, “All utilities, privately owned such as Minnesota Power, cooperatives, and municipals, have requirements they must meet. We not only need to spend 1.5% of our operating revenue ($34,580) on different parts of the program, we need to try to show a saving of 1.5% of our retail sales (319,693 kWh).”
In addition, about $1,800 is available to provide new energy-efficient appliances for qualifying low-income homeowners. This is paid for by the city’s electrical cooperative, Southern Minnesota Municipal Power Agency (SMMPA) and carried out through a contract with the Arrowhead Economic Opportunity Agency (AEOA).
PUC commissioner Tim Kennedy said he would like to see renters be able to qualify for the appliances as well, because some of them could benefit from lower utility bills that come with more energyefficient appliances. City Administrator Mike Roth said providing appliances to homeowners rather than renters probably increases the likelihood that the people benefitting from the program will be the ones using it over the course of time since homeowner turnover is lower than renter turnover.
Smith presented Kennedy’s concern to SMMPA and received an answer back from John O’Neil: “Designing programs for low-income renters has always been a struggle for us,” he wrote. “We specifically exclude them from our lowincome program with the CAP [community action program] agencies [such as AEOA] because we didn’t think it made sense for members to provide the building owner with free energy-efficient appliances even though it would reduce the electric bills for the renter. We were also worried that the new appliances may cause the building owner to raise the rent.
“Another issue is that while some apartment units are targeted for low-income renters now, those requirements could change at any time [leaving the apartments available for people with higher incomes]. So the expenditure that was made to try and help low-income customers might not actually benefit low-income customers in the long run.”
Roth said that while Grand Marais’ electrical consumption continues to increase as the number of users grows, that increase is becoming flatter and flatter over the course of time.
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