Once Pittsburgh's Green Government Task Force finishes its inventory of the city's energy demands this year, eco-experts ranging from building managers to architects plan to offer ways to cut energy consumption one light bulb at a time.
The group of 25, headed by Councilman Bill Peduto, Sen. Jim Ferlo, D-Highland Park, and Mayor Luke Ravenstahl, announced Thursday their commitment to reducing energy costs and lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
Pittsburgh is a peculiar newcomer to a group of Northeast cities that have signed on with the International Council of Environmental Initiatives and nonprofit Clean Air Cool Planet.
Many towns that have successfully reduced energy costs are much smaller than Pittsburgh. Energy savings from replacing standard traffic lights with energy-conserving LED lights, for example, are measured only in the thousands of dollars.
Pittsburgh's potential savings undoubtedly would exceed that, but Cool Planet Executive Director Adam Markham said the city first must establish where it's wasting power. A group of seven Carnegie Mellon University students are calculating how much gasoline, electricity and other resources the city uses now.
"We hope to reduce Pittsburgh's energy usage, therefore obviously saving taxpayer dollars and reducing our dependency on foreign energy," Ravenstahl said. "We always are referred to as the black-and-gold city ... hopefully we can have a little green in there."
Peduto said the task force would help Pittsburgh shed its image as a smoky steel city.
"It's important that we don't look just at what other cities have done," Peduto said. "This is an opportunity to be an innovator and leader in green technology and in environmental issues."
Already, Peduto said, the city has invested in low-energy florescent lights and automatic light turn-on sensors to conserve power in empty City-County Building offices.
Green Government Task Force member William T. Cagney, business manager of the International Union of Operating Engineers, is training 800 maintenance workers throughout the city to comply with the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Star program, which requires buildings to reduce power consumption by 10 percent to qualify.
"We have a major impact," said Cagney, whose workers run about 30 large buildings Downtown and in Oakland. He's encouraging the group to push companies such as PNC Bank to build environmentally friendly buildings.
"It's going to be a long-range effort," Peduto said. "We can't do this overnight. It's probably going to happen over the course of a decade."
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