CIERP Internships: Environmental Defense Fund Climate Corps Fellowship

By Nakul Prabhakar Sangolli

Through my journey at Fletcher, I have sought to understand my role in combating climate change, and the summer of 2022 provided me with an opportunity to find out. Leveraging my experience working with local government in India, I was tasked to assist three municipalities in New Jersey to become more sustainable as part of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) Climate Corps Fellowship. It was an opportunity to understand how local governments can help achieve federal targets in reducing GHGs and how bipartisan support can be catalyzed for this mission.

Nakul Prabhakar Sangolli MALD ‘22

Sustainable Jersey, a New Jersey based non-profit, provides certification through a points system to local governments and public schools throughout New Jersey. These entities can strive for Bronze, Silver, or Gold certification based on the points they achieve for sustainability actions under various categories such as Community Health, Transportation, Energy, Climate Resiliency, etc.

Six EDF Climate Corps Fellows spent ten weeks across 18+ local governments and public school districts focusing on achieving milestones in energy efficiency/conservation and transportation actions as part of their respective Sustainable Jersey certification.

After intensive training from both EDF and Sustainable Jersey on Energy Efficiency Measures, Vehicle Electrification, New Jersey Clean Energy Program, Utility (Electric and Gas) Incentive Programs for Energy Efficiency upgrades, and related topics, we all dispersed to be close to our respective towns and schools – our consulting clients for the summer.

Considering the time constraint I was working under, I realized that trust and relationship building with the township and utility staff was crucial to success. Thus, the townships and I arrived at a clear plan where we both worked towards achieving each other's goals. This joint plan required prioritizing quick wins for the towns to feel validated and laying the foundation for sustained improvement in energy consumption and fleet management.

I began by identifying and ranking the facilities and buildings of the townships which consumed the most energy and where there was an easy path toward achieving substantial cost savings. This process entailed visiting building facilities, identifying energy meters, mapping energy meters to buildings to relevant energy bills, documenting historical usage patterns, and uploading the same to Energy Star Portfolio Manager (an energy tracking platform). Through this effort, I identified the appropriate Utility incentive program for the township to take advantage of.    

I trained the township staff to take over the reins of maintaining and updating the Energy Star Portfolio Manager so that they could identify trends in energy consumption and measure savings after implementing energy conservation measures.

Once the utilities reviewed the incentive program application, they scheduled engineering audits as a pre-requisite to developing a project plan for equipment replacement and upgradation along with projected energy and savings over a period.

Figure 1: Facility Walktrough by an Energy Contractor at Little Silver Boro

I took a similar approach to Fleet Management and Electrification. The townships, keen for their fleets to be analyzed, provided me with information on the make and model of their vehicles, age, fuel consumed, and costs in the past year, among other details. Using this, I analyzed the like-for-like replacements with Electric Vehicles that were feasible with a 33% reduction in the Average Total Cost of Ownership over the vehicle's lifetime. A key takeaway was that, under current market conditions, light/medium duty vehicles such as Sedans and SUVs, which constituted more than half the fleet inventory for these townships, were the most suitable for replacement.

Site Identification for installation of Public EV Chargers at Manchester Township

The analysis presupposed the existence of a well-developed public and private charging infrastructure. Thus I supplemented my analysis by suggesting the federal, state, and utility-led programs in purchasing and setting public EV chargers that these townships could benefit from. 

Final presentation of findings at Howell Township

Thanks to the support of my clients Howell, Little Silver and Manchester Townships, Sustainable Jersey, and EDF Climate Corps Fellowship, I was able to work on a grassroots-level initiative of realizing a townships carbon footprint as part of the long journey for the United States to achieve its GHG Reduction by 2035. I was thoroughly impressed by the foresight of the New Jersey State's Clean Energy Program, the collective participation of the ratepayers through the Societal Benefits Charge (levy), Sustainable Jersey for leveraging gamification to achieve bi-partisan support for sustainability, and the local governments for their efforts with the resources available at hand. ∎

Nakul Prabhakar Sangolli is a MALD candidate at The Fletcher School, Tufts University.