2010-09-10 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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when not needed. Somebody said the highway in Kona was too well lit, cut off every other light. Another one, county vehicle is driven home and one was on a fuel graded county cars. So it looks like the employees, at least some of them are interested in this so if you could get all the employees on conservation it might make a big impact right away. MR. FROST: That’s great to hear, the comments that have come up. MS. O’HARA: I have a couple of questions. The first one is a point just brought up about heaters being used in the offices. What’s the suggestion of the Green Team to mitigate that issue because it is being used intensely. MR. FROST: The heaters are very touchy subject because what we’ve come to understand is that the way the building has been designed, and the way that the air conditioning system has been designed, there is a certain flaw so certain sections of the office is colder and the other section is hotter. But also it’s personal, there’s quite a bit of personal kind of subjective preference on what is comfortable air temperature. Like right now this would be too cold for me, but for a lot of people this is just right. So, we recommended 74 degrees Fahrenheit is the best temperature according the International Energy Association. So, those things have begun in certain offices where the department heads have really taken initiative. So Civil Defense actually has operated and just changed that. Just that alone, two degrees, there is quite a bit of savings in terms of electricity use. We’re still trying to figure out the heater thing. The other piece was refrigerators. We have a lot of old refrigerators that use a lot of energy, but we cannot take away the frig, so the recommendation is, okay how do we upgrade to the energy efficient refrigerator which cuts energy use by 30, 40 percent. MS. O’HARA: There was a good program for that just a few months ago. MR. FROST: Yeah. The rebate? Yeah. MS. O’HARA: The fleet analysis, you said you got, or you are complete on it? MR. FROST: The first level of the fleet analysis which was looking at the fuel use, the annual mileage of all vehicles and separating it into diesel and gasoline. So, we’ve finished with that. We’ve made some preliminary recommendations but for more detailed analysis because we’re looking at okay, what is the feasibility of electrifying our fleet electric vehicle or bio-diesel. So NREL, National Renewal Energy Laboratory, is a federal organization focused on research and deployment of technology is providing us with technical assistance to complete the detail analysis. They were helping us earlier in the year and then the State Department of Business Economical Development and Tourism kind of took our resources away to focus on Oahu projects. But now we’re going to be getting it back in September. MS. O’HARA: I’m just curious because in terms of emissions the vehicles represented 10% and what number of vehicles that we have total diesel and gasoline? MR. FROST: A little over a thousand. I can’t say on the top of my head what the percentage of diesel and gasoline is, but I can find that out. 8