The Park City Council approved a $25,000 grant to the SCPW during their budget discussions for the 2019 fiscal year. Part of that money has gone toward creating the SCPW Challenge Website to help residents lower their energy consumption. Melissa Allison has more:
The Park City Council has been leading the net-zero movement in Utah since they set the goal to be net-zero carbon and to use 100 percent renewable electricity by 2022 for the city and 2032 communitywide.
While the city operations and buildings are well on their way to meeting their goal, the community has further to go. To help jumpstart the initiative, the council has partnered with Summit County and the SCPW to launch their SCPW Challenge Website.
The city has referred to the website as a one-stop-shop for residents to log onto and start saving and conserving their own energy.
Assistant Manager Matt Dias said it’s a free service.
“Households and individuals can go in, signup and tell the website a little bit about their households in terms of square footage and the year it was built and other things," Dias said. "And then it will offer you some strategies and reminders about irrigations and turning your lights off and what to do with incandescent bulbs versus fluorescent bulbs. And this is one component of achieving our energy goals. The other side is the city is working to reduce its carbon footprint where it sources electricity from, so are the bigt employers in town. But the other part is this communitywide sort of campaign where every household has to do their part.”
Dias said the website has many tools which will hopefully motivate the community.
“The neat part of the website is it comes with a full slate of incentive programs and so, we will be over the course of the next 12 and 24 months, running a variety of challenges that have rewards at the end of it," Dias said. "So, incentive based, trying to incentivize people trying to change their behavior when it comes to how they’re using energy. So, through the website we’re able to do that in a really fair and transparent way where we can present a challenge, what the reward would be for, let’s say who reduces their water consumption the most, or who reduces their power bill the most and then reward that individual for it, or that household for it.”
The website will be managed by the SCPW and is on the agenda for Thursday’s City Council meeting at 5:15 p.m. during the work session.
I’m Melissa Allison, KPCW News.