Green Building Tour highlights Need for New Utility Business Model

The Citizen's League, which co-hosted today's Best Practices Green Building Tour, echoes the same vision for a new Utility Business model which has inspired Minneapolis Energy Options. See their webpage Here.

What I saw on the Green Building Tour illustrates the imperative transitioning to a performance based utility business model as opposed to a clinging to model where the goal is to merely sell more Kilowatt Hours.

There were four different sites on the Green Building Tour all with very different stories and backgrounds: 

1: The Hawthorne Ecovillage revitalizing 4 blocks with Habitat for Humanity built single-family LEED certified homes.

2: The mixed-use urban development of Hope Community with intelligent architecture based on Living Building Challenge (tm) standards. 

3: A passionate homeowner near Lake Nokomis who invested his own money into remodeling his existing house to EnerPHit Passivhaus standards. 

4: Inspiring visions for the transit oriented redevelopment of the Midtown Farmers Market site to be truly green.  

Innovative smart design like we saw on the Green Building Tour will be incentivized for a far greater number if we collectively apply the new utility business model for system - wide efficiency that Citizen's League is promoting, and that Minneapolis Energy Options is mobilizing for.  Otherwise, developers coming into sites like the Midtown Farmers Market will be inclined to do only what is cheapest in the short-term.

Arranging a city-utility partnership with a Community Input advisory committee, will amplify the public voices and be a vehicle fro driving the positive change Citizen's League would like to see.