Just last month, on May 20, the Town Board of East Hampton
voted unanimously to accomplish an extremely ambitious goal—to meet 100
percent of the town’s community-wide power needs with renewable energy.
The board plans to realize this by 2020, which would make East Hampton
the first municipality in New York State to do so.
“It’s an aggressive goal, but it makes a statement of where East
Hampton wants to be in the future,” said Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell. Town Councilwoman Sylvia Overby, liaison on the Energy Sustainability
Committee, remarked, “Our everyday lives are impacted by the effects of
global warming. We owe it to the children of East Hampton to do
something about climate change and air pollution caused by fossil
fuels.” East Hampton may be leading the way in New York State, but other
communities in both the U.S. and abroad have already switched to
renewable energy, both solar and wind. In both Germany and Italy,
communities have made the leap to renewable energy with success.
Closer to home, Austin, Texas has been powering all of its public
buildings with renewable energy from wind farms in West Texas, and is
hoping to achieve their goal of deriving 35% of all their energy needs
from renewable sources by 2030. Ninety-one communities in Illinois are
operating on 100% renewable energy. The East Hampton community is unique in many respects, with a
population that swells dramatically during the summer, and an economy
dependent on both tourism and real estate. Other communities
contemplating renewable energy options have investigated whether
implementing those systems would create issues with noise pollution,
impact on property values, or harm to local wildlife. Wind turbines are
relatively quiet, there has been no appreciable effect on property
values, and the effects of climate change pose a far greater threat to
birds, bats and other wildlife than any danger from wind turbines.
There are other economic benefits to renewable energy besides the
obvious. In a press release, Cantwell stated, “Energy efficiency
improvements, and solar rooftop systems can save homeowner’s several
thousand dollars a year while building local solar farms can generate
hundreds of thousands of dollars in lease revenue for the town. Making
the switch to clean energy is just the right thing to do, both for the
environment and for keeping more money in the local economy and creating
jobs here.”
The first steps have already been taken. The town has already
received proposals from a number of solar developers for large solar
farms to be built on land that is already owned by the town. The Town
Board is also looking at offshore wind farms—Deepwater Wind, a Rhode
Island company, has submitted plans for a 35-turbine wind farm off of
Montauk Point. Those 35 turbines could create enough energy to serve the
entire East End.
Gordon Raacke, executive director of Renewable Energy Long Island, felt confident that the ambitious goal could be met. “The East Hampton community consumed 310,000 megawatt hours of
electricity in 2010. The reason it is achievable in six years is because
we already have proposals on the table. If we build those, it would
create more than 310,000 megawatt hours,” Raacke said. Any surplus
energy could be stored in energy storage systems such as lithium-ion
batteries and liquid flow batteries. Educating the public is another facet of the plan. Homeowners are
urged to get a free energy audit from the New York State Energy Research
and Development Authority. “This is putting East Hampton on the map,” Raacke commented. “We hope
to be an inspiration for the rest of Long Island, for the state and the
country.”
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