RACER Update
Since our update last December (https://duluthmn.gov/sustain/news-updates/community-energy-resiliency/), Renewables Advancing Community Energy Resilience (RACER) has made significant progress in identifying Duluth’s resilience needs. We are well on our way to defining the basic resilience standards for our community, resulting in actionable steps we can begin to take in 2025. These actionable steps will not only help us become more resilient as a community by deploying solar and storage but have helped us identify how to build resilience at the individual household level.
Site identification
In order to compare potential solar sites, we created a site scoring rubric. The developed rubric considers not only the characteristics of each site, but the possible savings and electrical load coverage for each site. The rubric that has been finalized has been able to assist not only Duluth but other organizations in identifying the most viable sites for solar. Developing the rubric helped us narrow down 34 potential sites for solar and storage in our community to a viable 10. Once we had it narrowed down, we were able to cost effectively do feasibility studies to create a portfolio of the five perfect sites to deploy solar and storage in Duluth.
The five sites include two community centers, one fire hall, one water reservoir and pumping station, and the natural gas utility building. Between these five sites, the city is looking to deploy over 750 kilowatts of solar and close to 500 kilowatt hours of storage. This solar deployment will save the city and taxpayers over $1.8 million in energy costs during the lifetime and will develop two resource hubs that our community can turn to in times of power loss or extreme weather events.
Understanding community resilience
Along with our rubric for asset assessment, we are in the process of completing our comprehensive community research to understand what Duluth’s minimum resilience standards are. After completing the emergency response exercise, we took the same scenario to our community organizations. Often, after emergency response leaves, community organizations are left to focus on long-term recovery. Because of this, we felt our community organizations could provide important feedback that would help bridge gaps in our resilience understanding. This tabletop was able to provide critical information into communication gaps and service during and after an extreme weather event.
After gathering information from both tabletops, we proceeded to ask the residents of our community to define what resilience means in every household. We did this through surveys, interviews, and by holding focus groups in different neighborhoods. When matched with our results from the tabletops, this gave us data across all three aspects of an extreme weather event: response, recovery, and mitigation. Currently, our partner Ecolibrium3 is completing community canvassing to expand on our found results and confirm the needs of resilience in our community.
Toolkit implementation
After developing the toolkit and testing it in our community, we are now seeking to implement the toolkit in three different communities in our region. Maplewood, MN, Moorhead, MN and Rapid City, SD have all agreed to participate in implementing the toolkit in their own communities and provide feedback on how the toolkit works. This will help us to refine the toolkit for dissemination in mid-to-late 2025. We are excited to work with these communities in the coming months and see how we can help them identify their own pathway to solar and storage deployment and increased community resilience.
Actionable steps
Solar deployment is only one area of resilience that we will be able to take actionable items on to build resilience. We are also taking steps to increase communication, service access, in home emergency preparedness and knowledge, and resources available before, during, and after an extreme weather event. As we wrap up our community research and look to deploy solar, we will be writing and bringing forward our identified actionable steps in 2025 to create our own resiliency plan that will help us meet more identified goals in our Climate Action Work Plan.
