April 13, 2009
Energy Committee minutes taken by: Chinloo Lama
Energy Committee Present: Chinloo Lama
Martha Broad
Paula Berg
Laura Kischitz
Beth McGilvray
Non-voting members: John Balco
Leigh Shanny
The Energy Committee met at 7:00 p.m. at the Town Hall.
Minutes of (date): _1/09_ and _3/09_ were approved.
The meeting was adjourned at 9:00 p.m.
Discussion:
Agenda
- Earth Day Fair update: May 2nd, 1-4pm at Winery and co-hosted by Bolton Local
- Recycling on Earth Day April 22
- Energy Weatherization seminar from MMA
- Update on guideline education gatherings
- Cell towers converted to wind mills
- Laura’s end of term decisions
Earth Day Plans
This will be at the Winery. May 2, 2009, 1-4 pm. We need to find more artisans. Paula knows a group that does drum circle. Hopefully, we can invite them to come. We are trying to have people volunteer. They need to bring their own table. We do have to be careful not to invite direct local competitors to the Winery.
Leigh Shanny – Grant Research
Report on her efforts. It is more difficult to find out where to go to apply for the specific grant. She brought her research results. The Grants Database is a collection of non-government funded grant. We can get to this database for free through C-MAR and the Worcester public library. They have a course for grant writing and how to research using that database. There is no charge on the database lesson, but there is a charge for the grant writing.
She recommends going for a federal grant for the solar hot water solution for PS. However, Laura noted that the BOS has decided that this is not going to be in the top three items to address so we will not get our local government support to qualify for the grant.
She would not recommend spending money to access the database until we have properly tested the system out through the library and see that it is beneficial.
There is money out there for solar and renewable technologies and small projects below 10KW. Wind is not too popular in this area. There is no one out there volunteering to do a free assessment for wind power.
Block grant from the economic stimulus plan - Department of Energy Resources (DOER) website has info on how to access this grant money. Unfortunately, we tried out the site and the PDF is not accessible. The Block grants apply to projects that begin construction after 2009 and end 2016. Solar hot water would be considered energy efficiency technology in these grants.
This is an area that is very new to Leigh and she feels like she does not have enough knowledge about this to pursue further. She felt that our committee should consider someone who has a lot more experience and skills in this. However, our group has already sought out volunteers to help and no one stepped up, so we are more than happy with the effort that Leigh has done. We would like her to continue with her efforts on the grant research.
Emerson renovation (School Space Needs Committee) would be more eligible for government grants than State.
Leigh should go to Worcester and continue to look in the Grants Database for grants outside of the stimulus plan.
If once we get more grant info, then we really need to decide what we want it to look like and what info we want to keep in the database. What is the scope?
Leigh has also collected information on grants that are outside the energy scope like in schools and fire safety. We would like her to send along the info to us and we can pass on the info to the other committee.
We as a group need to let Leigh know what kind of information we want to include in our database as well as Tags and Keywords that our departments would. Currently we will rethink our real need for a database when the info expires so regularly. So perhaps we should just stay with the current process the Leigh is doing of dumping the info to the spreadsheets.
PV Update
Martha is not getting info from the PV process. Cannot get all the stakeholders together to speak about this. No one is interested in getting the energy info incorporated into the curriculum. They have to send out an RFP for the PV installation and a data acquisition system.
Propose New Group Practice
By Noon the day of the meeting, people who will not be attending should let everyone know that.
At least one action item from the meeting should be assign to each person.
DPW recycling days on Earth Day
Shelly needs some help coordinate. Energy Committee should support it as much as possible. Wednesday 1-7pm
MMA presentation
Will be set for the September education series. (late September)
Laura will be ending her term in June
Next Month’s Proposed Agenda
- Next meeting is the 18th of May
Action Item
Chinloo:
- Send Linda invitation verbiage for Energy Guideline meetings.
- Find article about local woman who makes plastic reusable bags from plastic bags
- Contact a geothermal vendor to see if they would like to come to the event to showcase
- Check with cub scouts to see if they are interested in helping out with the Earth Day event.
Martha:
- Contact Mr. Isomacky if he is interested in helping to choose and incorporate a data acquisition into the course curriculum.
Paula:
- Send out info to the group about setup days 4/20 or 4/26.
Laura:
- Send a blurb about volunteers needed for the Earth Day Event in the Commons
- Talk to Bill Spratt
Beth:
John:
- Speak to Rona about participating at the fair.
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