The Green Worcester Plan has the goal of achieving 30 percent renewable energy for heating and transportation citywide by 2030 and 100 percent by 2045. The committee called for more resources to meet the goals set out by the plan
WORCESTER—Four to five percent of the city’s building stock needs to be converted to renewable energy annually to meet the goals set out in the Green Worcester Plan, according to a statement from the Green Worcester Advisory Committee.
During the committee meeting on Monday, the group voted to accept a progress report on the Green Worcester Plan but added a statement calling for the necessary resources to meet the goals set out in the plan.
The plan has the goal of achieving 30 percent renewable energy for heating and transportation citywide by 2030 and 100 percent by 2045.
“The city’s efforts toward achieving this goal are just beginning and tracking early progress doesn’t predict the pace of later progress, however, annually converting four to five percent of the city’s building stock to renewable energy over the next six or seven years – what’s needed to meet the 2030 goal of 30 percent – will require significant resources,” GWAC’s statement reads.
If the city puts the effort into meeting the related goal of converting municipal buildings to 100 percent net zero energy by 2030, GWAC’s statement said it will provide proof of concept and a model for best practices.
The statement called on the city to allocate more resources to the Department of Sustainability and Resilience for additional needed staffing and to support its ability to leverage additional funding and partnership opportunities within and beyond city government.
The progress report made “the magnitude of the task before us and the need for much more significant investment in municipal resources” clear, according to the statement.
In addition, the committee’s statement called for sustainability to become a bedrock principle in all of the city’s plans, including the Worcester Now|Next Plan.
Multiple committee members raised concerns that the Green Worcester Plan was not being fully incorporated into the Now|Next Plan at GWAC’s meeting Monday.
John Odell, the city’s chief sustainability officer, explained that Now|Next is an overarching plan above everything else, so “by definition it is short on details and broad in terms of overall outlook.”
“It covers literally, the goal is, all things Worcester, in terms of the future growth of Worcester and how we’re going to look at both our economic development, but also with an equity and health lens as we have here in our own Green Worcester Plan so we can help sort of start righting the wrongs of not having a plan that was actionable over the last many decades,” Odell said.
The Green Worcester Plan will act as a sub-plan to the Now|Next plan, according to Odell.
Odell said he was confident that at the end of the day the Now|Next Plan will include enough of the Green Worcester Plan in specifics and in values, that “we will be very comfortable with then having the Green Worcester Plan itself stand alone as the tool that we will need to make sure it gets implemented, that it will be the connecting point.”
The city released the Worcester Green Plan in 2021, describing it as a roadmap to bring sustainability values to all aspects of city life. One of the plan’s goals was to establish the Department of Sustainability and Resilience (DSR) itself, which was established in July 2021 and now has 12 full and part-time staff members, according to the draft progress report.
Another goal was establishing the Green Worcester Advisory Committee, which includes members who do not work for the city to advise its sustainability and resilience activities, according to the city’s website. The committee began meeting in 2022.
Kiernan Dunlop is an award-winning journalist who has spent the past five years reporting in Worcester, New Bedford and Antigua and Barbuda. She’s been published in Bloomberg, USA Today, Canary Media, MassLive, and the New Bedford Standard Times, among other outlets. She can be contacted at kdunlop@theworcesterguardian.org
