Agility is critical when it comes to developing policy, and students at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs made the most of their opportunity to adjust on the fly by producing a guide that will help Indiana communities adapt to changing energy needs without state or federal help.
The Indiana Energy Playbook, produced by students in Paul H. O’Neill Professor Aaron Deslatte’s S515 Sustainable Communities class, has been distributed to all Indiana cities and towns with a population above 1,000. The playbook is designed to help reduce energy costs, improve public facilities, and support residents and businesses facing rising utility expenses across Indiana.
“The class is based on an NSF grant I received to study Indiana local government sustainability,” Deslatte said. “Through this grant, we have conducted two waves of surveys, analyzed hundreds of local planning documents, and conducted roughly 70 interviews with local government practitioners across the state. Based on this effort, the class typically takes on an Indiana service-learning problem and tries to solve it.”
Last fall, Deslatte’s class planned to evaluate the Indiana Solar For All project, a $117 million Environmental Protection Agency grant to advance community solar in several Indiana cities. That project, however, was cancelled a week before classes were set to start.
“We shifted gears into trying to produce a guide or resource that local governments could use to get started without program support,” Deslatte said. “Several of the Indiana organizations that had been involved in the grant were more than happy to meet with us and give us the lowdown on the difficulties in getting these kinds of projects started in Indiana. So, we broke into teams and spent the semester researching all the barriers and what the research says about overcoming them.”
The Indiana Energy Playbook serves as a practical, step-by-step manual that municipalities can follow from start to finish or pick and choose the strategies that best serve their community’s specific energy efficiency needs. Deslatte also has plans to expand the playbook in the future to focus on the county level as well as update the project to address evolving technologies and funding landscapes.
The Indiana Energy Playbook is available as part of the Integrated Local Sustainability Strategies, Capacities, and Performance Management project.