City of Orlando – Neha Walani – 2019

Goals 

The City of Orlando was seeking support in developing and implementing a variety of clean energy and climate initiatives, including meeting the requirements for the Global Covenant of Mayors and updating the annual GHG inventory collection and analysis. The city also wanted support with data quality review for compliance with building benchmarking and transparency policy – Building Energy Water and Efficiency Strategy (BEWES). EDF Climate Corps fellow Neha Walani was hired to help carry these projects through.

Solutions

After analyzing previous years’ GHG inventory data, Walani enhanced the existing data. She also collected entire GHG inventory for the years 2007 to 2009 for Orlando, and transitioned over ten years’ worth of GHG data and energy use from municipal buildings from a spreadsheet based tool to an online tool – ClearPath. She helped streamlined the entire data collection process for future years by creating data request forms, developed guidelines for entering data into ClearPath, and created Standard Operating Procedures and Gantt chart for the timeline of GHG inventory collection every year. Walani also generated trends and graphs for the city’s public GHG report.

For building the Climate Adaptation plan, Walani created a set of steps and conducted a discussion workshop with the GreenWorks team of the City of Orlando. She then collated materials from other city and regional adaption plans to inform funding, policy and other resources that would be useful in building the Climate Adaptation Plan in future. She also refined data for building an online visualization mapping tool depicting energy efficiency and consumption across buildings of Orlando to further the Building Energy and Water Efficiency Strategy (BEWES) policy.

Potential Impact

Thanks to Walani’s contributions to the GHG inventory, the city was able to identify that total carbon dioxide equivalent emissions were reduced in the city by 18.96% from 2007 to 2018 and total per capita emissions declined by 36.52% in this period. We were also able to uncover the finding that the share of renewable energy in municipal building operations increased from 0.7% in 2007 to 8.82% in 2018.