Reno residents can track the city’s progress in reducing carbon emissions

RENO, Nev. (KOLO) - The community can now follow along as the City of Reno works towards its sustainability goals.

“If it’s available to the public and they can see how we’re doing, it can help us do better,” said Suzanne Groneman, sustainability program manager at the city of Reno.

The city has launched a public portal, which monitors carbon emissions from city buildings, like fire stations, public utilities, meters, vehicle fleets, and more.

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure so being able to see where the cost reduction and emissions reduction come in through this platform, we can make better decisions on how we use electricity, our fleet vehicle choices, whether or not we deploy additional solar, those types of things,” said Groneman.

The tracking dashboard was created in partnership with local startup Ledger8760. Their technology is not only able to identify the source of the emission, but also the cost.

“Whether it’s something like using natural gas to heat the fire station rather than an electric heat pump or putting more rooftop solar on a site versus working on a different solution is understanding where your emissions are coming from and what the cost of them are,” said Adam Kramer, CEO of Ledger8760. “Helping people see something they haven’t seen before, that’s the real blind spot Ledger is focused on helping organizations understand.”

The data available for residents and policy decision-makers is a simplified version of what the city has access to in real time, 24/7.

Reno has been using the portal for about five months, and according to city leaders, it has already identified usage patterns not helping reduce carbon emissions.

“In two sites we actually changed our rate structure and we’re changing how we’re charging vehicles at those sites,” said Groneman. “For example, one site where we have solar we are charging the vehicles during the day ‘cause that’s when the solar is producing so that makes the most sense for reducing your emissions profile, but because we have solar there we can also change the rate structure there to what we pay to the utility, to NV Energy and reduce the cost and reduce our carbon footprint at the same time.

The public dashboard will update every month.

To access it, go to: https://public.ledger8760.com/reno/

The city’s goal is to reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by 28% by 2025.

According to Groneman, one of the city’s additional proposed projects includes, adding solar to the public safety center.

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