M Focus on: Water & Energy
Wisconsin city and county partner to realize energy savings
By LAUREN CAGGIANO | The Municipal
As cities and towns across the nation look to hit next-level climate change-related goals, a city and county in Wisconsin are setting out on their own energy-saving initiative together. Earlier this year, the city of Madison announced the U.S. Department of Energy would be giving Dane County, the city of Madison and local nonprofit, Slipstream, nearly $1 million to retrofit the 500,000-square-foot City-County Building with high performance, triple-paned windows and cost-effective LED lighting systems. The funding is being made available through the department’s Building Technologies Proving Ground — Public Sector Field Validation Funding Opportunity. This project is expected to produce whole-building energy savings, resulting from integrated HVAC and lighting systems that save 10% and 60%, respectively, while providing key grid services simultaneously. According to Kathy Kuntz, director of the Office of Energy and Climate Change at Dane County, Wis., the project is significant in part because of the joint nature of the effort. She said the two government entities became
As director of the Office of Energy and Climate Change for Dane County, Wis., Kathy Kuntz is charged with coordinating the energy-saving project’s implementation. (Photo provided) 34 THE MUNICIPAL | JUNE 2021
aware of the grant last year and determined it was best to streamline efforts. “The City-County Building is kind of typical of older government buildings,” she said. “It’s had various retrofits and additions at various points in time. And it’s a big project to tackle the windows in a holistic way because they’re really expensive. And so, figuring out a way to do that, that would be cost effective was sort of challenging. And because the city and county share the building and are responsible for their own spaces, it was complicated for either of us to sort of do it on our own. So, coming together seemed like a really good idea.” This isn’t unusual in the sense that, according to Kurtz, they have what she refers to as “an active collaboration” among the cities, towns and villages in the county on clean energy and sustainability issues. The project is expected to total about $1.5 million, with Dane County and the city of Madison allocating approximately $500,000 in matching funds. Since receipt of the grant in February, Kuntz said officials have been busy refining the scope of the work and agreeing on the specifics. At the time of press, she said involved parties were expecting to finalize the contract with the vendor in the next few weeks. Then officials plan to spend the next six to eight months studying window technologies and how they can be coupled in tandem with innovations in interior lighting. Then implementation will follow, likely next year.
