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As part of the city’s effort to address the power crisis, Mayor Shirley Dean will bring a recommendation to the City Council Tuesday that could lead to a citywide community-based energy conservation plan. 

Dean’s program would rely on neighborhood groups to distribute energy-efficient fluorescent light bulbs and information on energy conservation. The city would provide incentives to the associations involved if they manage to get a specific number of households to change their lighting. 

“(We have adopted) a number of energy-saving measures, but this is the first one in terms of getting a lot of people to convert,” said Dean during a phone interview Friday. “This is a distribution plan.” 

The proposed program offers a number of advantages. It would allow the city to reach out quickly to many people; it would help the city meet its goal of reducing energy use by 20 percent. It would also help residents achieve the 20 percent credit that PG&E offers those who save energy. 

A compact fluorescent bulb, the mayor says in her recommendation, uses 75 percent less energy than incandescent bulbs and saves at least $26 in energy costs over the bulb’s lifetime. If the City Council adopts the recommendation and provides incentives, the mayor predicts that 90 percent of the households would participate in the conversion to energy-efficient lighting. 

The recommendation asks the city manager and the Energy Commission to determine incentives the city would provide to attract the neighborhood associations’ and watch groups’ participation, and it gives some suggestions as well:  

“Incentives might be another dumpster, a cash voucher to assist with costs associated with a block party; flower seeds, street trees or the like,” according to the document. 

The neighborhood groups will not be contacted until the council approves the recommendation and the incentives have been defined. Some organizations, however, already reacted to the proposal.  

While the mayor said she would fund the program from the utility user tax windfall, Ted Edlin, president of the Council of Neighborhood Associations, argues that the mayor does not say exactly how the program would be financed or its cost. 

“The problem with the item is there is no money attached to it,” he said. “It says the city will buy the bulbs at the discretion of the city manager, but it doesn’t provide any money.” 

Edlin also said there ought to be more specific provisions to help low income people save energy. 

This recommendation is not the city’s first effort to get Berkeley residents and businesses to switch to energy-efficient lighting. A partnership between the city and Philips Lighting Company led to the replacement of all the bulbs on a whole block of Telegraph Avenue last week. And at the end of June, the city announced it was working with a group of experts from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley to find local solutions to the energy crisis.  

For additional information on energy-saving programs visit: 

http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/energy/incentives.html