Providence has set an ambitious goal of being carbon neutral by 2050. That’s why, in 2023, Providence began requiring owners of large buildings – the biggest carbon producers in the city – to track and report their energy usage. After a year of reports from places like schools and the zoo, what do we know?
Morning host Luis Hernandez spoke about the results and the city’s pathway to carbon neutrality with Priscilla de la Cruz, the city’s Director of Sustainability.
Interview highlights
On the biggest energy users: Providence schools
What jumps out at us when looking at our schools is that the majority of them are not efficient, and they account for about over 70% of our energy usage. So for us, when we’re looking at what are the next host of buildings that we’re going to focus on deploying strategies, schools have to be part of that priority. But what it also shows us is that the strengths are that we have already been moving in that direction. Given the standards at which schools are being built, we already have three schools that are all electric.
One of the ones that we’re working on, and where we defaulted to new construction, is looking at Mount Pleasant High School. Like you said, some of our buildings are very old, so the decision has to be made to go with new construction or to do a major retrofit. So that’s a challenge. But we also have newer buildings, like our PCTA building next to Central High School – and that’s that Providence Technical Vocational School – and that’s a challenge looking in there. How can we maximize energy efficiency in that newer-ish building, but also deploy technologies like solar, which also proved to be cost-effective as well?
This interview was conducted by The Public’s Radio. You can read the entire story here.
