UA gets portion of energy funding

It’s 1 of 8 parties sharing $2 million

The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville is among eight groups in four states sharing in a $2 million green-energy grant awarded Oct. 30 as the result of a legal settlement between a major utility and environmentalists.

Earlier this month, the Arkansas Community Foundation of Little Rock announced it had recently awarded $2 million in sustainable-energy grants to the eight groups in Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana.

The Fayetteville campus will use its grant proceeds for a pilot program in which it will help cities deploy energy-efficiency policies, it announced Tuesday.

UA is among six of the grant recipients to receive $250,000 awards, said Jessica Szenher, a communications consultant for the foundation.

“Each recipient was fully funded at the requested amount,” said the foundation’s president and chief executive officer, Heather Larkin, as part of the foun-dation’s Sustainable Energy Initiative.

For example, the Arkansas Community Action Agencies Association in Little Rock asked for and received a $190,000 grant.

Rose Adams, the nonprofit association’s executive director, said the money is welcomed by a group that spends much effort lobbying the Arkansas Public Service Commission on behalf of low- and moderate-income ratepayers.

“This grant will ensure that we can continue to have a presence there,” Adams said Tuesday. “Because it does take a lot of time.”

One of the agency’s goals is to help low- and moderate-income Arkansans, who aren’t always able to afford the capital investment to install an energy-efficient heating or cooling system that would save them money each month, even thoughthe utilities often charge customers for “green” initiatives.

The cost is starting to come down for the compact fluorescent light bulbs, “But back when they were about $12 a bulb, there weren’t many low-income people who could make that capital investment,” Adams said.

The association also looks out for ratepayers as a whole, she added, “Because we’re all in this together.”

UA-Fayetteville plans to use its grant to recruit four to five cities around Arkansas in 2013 for pilot programs to help the cities embrace energy-efficient policies and expand to eight to 10 cities by 2014, it said in a news release Tuesday.

Once selected, the cities could participate for free, said UA’s Michele Halsell, managing director of the Walton College of Business’ Applied Sustainability Center, in the release.

The Little Rock-based foundation’s Larkin added that most grantees have between two and three years to implement the grant.

About a year ago, the foundation got the $2 millionfrom Southwestern Electric Power Co. as part of the legal settlement of a dispute over the $2.1 billion John W. Turk coal-fired power plant in Texarkana, according to newspaper archives.

A consent decree from the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas ordered SWEPCO, the plant’s majority owner, to pay $2 million to be spent funding grants supporting policy initiatives for clean and efficient energy.

The utility also was ordered to reimburse environmental groups $2 million for legal costs and to contribute $8 million to The Nature Conservancy for land conservation.

Other Arkansas recipients sharing in the $2 million grant are: the Arkansas Advanced Energy Foundation and the Arkansas Public Policy Panel in Little Rock.

One out-of-state grantee, the Wind Coalition of Texas, will use its grant to help increase “transmission sources” for renewable wind and solar power in Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, according to the foundation’s Nov. 1 news release announcing the grant awards.

The remaining recipients are the Alliance for Affordable Energy of Louisiana, the Oklahoma Sustainability Network and the Sustainable Energy and Economic Development Coalition of Texas.

The foundation used a board composed of its board of directors and private citizens to select the eight based on these criteria: their potential to benefit “green” energy policy; their capacity to achieve results, evidence of a plan for evaluating the project, potential for “sustainability beyond the grant period,” their collaboration with others in the same field, evidence of current and future financial support and their approach’s innovation and creativity.

The university, in choosing its cities, will want to select those that can help them fulfill the grant, but ideally, they would be geographically dispersed across the state, Halsell said in the UA release.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 11/28/2012

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