When it comes to decarbonization, local governments have a twofold role to play: reducing the impacts of their own operations, which can be broader than one thinks depending on the footprint of county services; then in supporting the ecosystem of public, private and stakeholder groups like NGOs in growing impacts within the region.

In this episode, Lincoln is joined by Lisa Lin, who currently serves as the Director of Sustainability for Harris County, Texas, the third-largest county in the United States and home to Houston. Lisa discusses the role of driving behavior change in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, how the county is pursuing renewable energy and energy storage to create jobs and add resilience as much as curb emissions, how the county is growing its “solar-ready” status through the SolSmart program, and how her team is collaborating with both private companies and other local governments to enhance sustainability efforts.

With a background in architecture and a passion for green building, Lisa has played a crucial role in shaping sustainability initiatives for local governments across central Texas for the last 12 years. Her journey began assisting the city of Houston with its Green Office Challenge, and eventually led her to leading sustainability programs for three local governments (San Antonio, Houston and now Harris County) and Rice University. As Harris County’s first Director of Sustainability for Harris County, Lisa has been instrumental in crafting Harris County’s first Climate Action Plan, which includes energy conservation measures, renewable energy projects, and transportation demand management programs.

Key Takeaways

1. A key goal for Harris County is to reduce reliance on grid power through two targets: securing a 50-100 megawatt power purchase agreement and developing up to 20 megawatts of solar and 10 megawatt-hours of battery storage projects at county facilities. The county plans to site these projects to support community centers or other facilities that can serve as “resilience hubs,” protecting critical services and providing powered shelter in case of extreme weather.
2. The Inflation Reduction Act tax credits have created a range of opportunities for counties and cities to invest more heavily in renewable energy, electric vehicle deployment or clean fuel projects. The county recently conducted a series of community meetings with its precincts to see what critical assets or sites should be prioritized so they can work to leverage the new federal funding and incentives.
3. Harris County recently achieved the Silver designation in the U.S. Department of Energy’s SolSmart program – a free series of trainings and resources available to towns, cities, MPOs, and regional organizations to break down barriers to solar adoption.

Resources

• Harris County’s Climate Action Plan for Internal Operations – aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2030 compared to the base year of 2021
• The Sunnyside Landfill Solar Project mentioned by Lisa – 52 MW of utility-scale solar being built on a local, 240-acre former landfill site that has limited reuse potential; will include 2 MW of community solar, as well as 150 MW of battery storage and an Agricultural Hub and Training Center
• The SolSmart program – provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, to help towns, cities, MPOs and regional organizations get “solar-ready” and support solar deployment in their areas
• The federal Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund – competitive grant program administered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, funds that must be disbursed by 9/30/2024
• The National Community Solar Partnership, run by the U.S. Department of Energy – the program’s goal is to enable community solar systems to power the equivalent of five million households by 2025 and create $1 billion in energy savings for subscribers
• Urban Sustainability Directors Network

Transcript

Dana Dohse: On this episode of the Decarbonization Race…

Lisa Lin: We partnered with our precincts to see what are those critical assets or critical sites that serve our community members in making sure that there’s this clean energy resilience built into those infrastructure sites. We were able to be pretty detailed in that target because we had that clean energy strategy sheet that fed into that.

Dana Dohse: Lisa Lin is the director of sustainability for Harris County, charged with crafting and delivering the county’s climate action plan, only the second county in Texas to create one. With over 12 years of sustainability experience in the public, nonprofit, and higher education sectors, Lisa’s previous roles and responsibilities have included leading the implementation of sustainable transportation initiatives at Rice University, coordinating San Antonio’s first climate action and adoption plan during her time at the city of San Antonio and serving as the sustainability manager for the City of Houston. On this episode, Lisa joins our hosts Clear Trace CEO, Lincoln Peyton, to look at how local government both pursues sustainability in its own operations and encourages the buildout of sustainable resources across the region. They also discuss her role in driving more sustainable behaviors, local adoption of clean energy, and how Harris County has crafted its forward-looking climate action agenda and more ready to lead the sustainability pack. This is the Decarbonization Race.

Lincoln Peyton: Hello everybody. This is Lincoln Peyton, the CEO of Cleartrace, and welcome to our installment of the Decarbonization Race. Delighted to have you join us again, and delighted to have a really fantastic person to talk to with a very special angle. I’m delighted to have Lisa Lin, who is the director of sustainability for Harris County, Texas. Not everybody knows exactly what Harris County is, but I can tell you it includes the energy capital of the world, certainly by history and looking to be going forwards Houston, Texas. Really great to have Lisa as a guest, as a person with a very interesting background, but also to be able to touch on local government role, opportunity, exactly the differing components in the local government move in terms of sustainability. Lisa, welcome.

Lisa Lin: Thank you, Lincoln for having me. Really great to be here.

Lincoln Peyton: Let’s talk a little bit about you first. Director of sustainability for, I think, the third largest county in the U.S., but obviously with that very important role because it is such an energy center. Tell me a little bit about how you end up there.

Lisa Lin: I will say I never thought growing up I would’ve ended up in public sector and always wanted to be an architect. But grew up in College Station. My parents came from Taiwan to college consultation in the mid-seventies. My dad was getting his Ph.D. at A&M and we ended up staying there. And so, grew up in that college town, ended up going to A&M, studying architecture and minoring in music. And coming out of that degree, which was actually called a Bachelor’s of Environmental design, it was really much focused on how do you build for natural systems and that sort of thing. And working in commercial architecture, I realized that’s actually not what most of the architecture that you see around actually focuses on.

Was in that field for about five years or so, really trying to actually get into the green building space. And so, got involved with the local US GBC chapter, the US Green Building Council chapter here in Houston. And that’s actually how I started pivoting away from just traditional architecture to more green building sustainability. And that’s when an opportunity opened up with the local office of Iley, local government for sustainability. It’s global NGO that was housed here in Houston, embedded actually with the city of Houston sustainably office under Mayor Parker at the time. I was able to get into that role, start getting my feet wet, understanding what municipal sustainability was all about.

Again, completely different field from architecture. And from there it was actually able to jump into a role that was opening up at the mayor’s office. Became the sustainability manager under Mayor Parker. And from that point on, it was just learning as I go, understanding what cities and sustainability and urbanism all of that entailed in the early days of municipal sustainability. And so, I was there for about five years, then went to Rice University to launch their TDM program, which is transportation demand management, really focusing on sustainable transportation behavior and adoption of different technologies. Then went to the city of San Antonio to launch their SA climate ready plan, which was their climate action adaptation planning effort. Back to Rice. And then actually came here last January to be the first director of sustainability for Harris County.

Lincoln Peyton: Fantastic. Well, first of all, nice for you to be in that role, first director of sustainability. Great that you’ve had some experience, and we’ll talk in a second what the difference between the county and the city and how those areas interact, because you’ve got both sides of that fence. But quickly, I mean, how was Rice because pretty forward-looking, impressive university. What were they looking to achieve and what were you doing there on the transportation side?

Lisa Lin: Oh, sure. I always likened TDM or transportation demand management to the middle ground between you’re not building the infrastructure or the planner, building out the transit lines of the systems you’re actually after to say these are all the different options that you have, what are the barriers from you as an individual, student, faculty, staff from actually adopting that? There’s almost behavior change, behavioral economics, all the different things that also need to be coupled with the horizontal infrastructure design and planning that would really move the needle on more people adopting sustainable transportation. It also involved electrification of vehicles and launching our first solar-powered EV charging station actually in the state. And also just working with the students and understanding why are you driving such a short distance alone in a vehicle when there are all these other options for you to choose?

Lincoln Peyton: Back to your current role now, and we’ll talk about some specifics in a second, but there seem to be very clearly a number of elements to what you do. One of them is that behavioral influence, trying to get people to evolve their behaviors and their approaches. That’s one. Then there’s the actual physical implementation of programs. In today’s world, how do you balance out those things and how much ammunition do you have to really get things done in terms of budgets and decision making? What’s the balance between those two factors, the moral persuasion, persuading, influencing, and actually we are putting in place physical hardware, please use it?

Lisa Lin: That’s a great question. It’s a little bit of all of that. It’s one of those things where I think what we’re trying to do is obviously the low cost new cost measures first. And so, maybe that’s more of your traditional energy conservation mindset. How can we all be better stewards and actually back to basics, turn off lights when we’re not using it, that sort of thing. Scheduling our buildings and not having them run 24/7, things like that. And I think that takes some level of influence and education and awareness. That’s probably more on the behavior side. And then in terms of actual physical development or infrastructure development or technology implementation, we definitely want to move in that space. We’re wanting to make sure we’re going through this in a very balanced, pragmatic approach in implementing sustainable initiatives here.

Lincoln Peyton: Okay, cool. And then again, the role of the local government, and we’ve talked you and I separately, that there’s two elements to that. One is very directly reducing the footprint of the actual machinery of local government. And then second is that perhaps the bigger one, which is overall county ecosystem. How do we change that?

Lisa Lin: Yeah. The first question was down how are we reducing our own internal operations emissions? What we did, again, the first operational year of this office, that’s really what our number one driver of, “What are we going to do? What’s the strategy?” And so, we actually set forth this planning initiative that was very quick, probably within three or four months, we were able to develop an internal operations climate action plan for Harris County. And that really ties into one of our priority outcomes for the county, which is reducing direct chs, greenhouse gas emissions. And that target was the 40% reduction to 2030. This is a pretty short-ish term plan, and we’re really just wanting to see how much we can get done the next seven years or so and try to reach that. I think we were also looking at some of the best practices out there, but there was a range. Some were saying 40% reduction by 2030, some are saying 50 plus, 60%, and we understood this being our first year, let’s maybe under promise and over-deliver.

Lincoln Peyton: Let me ask you, so there was the debate that you just laid out. You could go 60%, 40%, 20%, nothing. What’s the decision making process for you and how did you get in the local government for that?

Lisa Lin: Yeah. I mean, we worked pretty closely with our local consultant, HARC, which is the Houston Advanced Research Center, and they helped us do some of the modeling. We actually looked at different scenarios if we went 100 percent green power, PPA, whatever, and did 50% of our fleet that was electrified. We looked at all the different models and 40% was definitely reachable. We were starting to push some of the actions a little bit more aggressively to get even beyond that. And I think we’re also cognizant that we don’t know how technology will change or evolve in the next even five years. And so, I think we just wanted to be a little bit more conservative to say, we really see a pathway forward to 40%, but there might be technologies or other funding streams or other public private partnerships that will actually help us achieve an even higher emissions reduction goals. I think that’s how we were pitching that and how we brought that to different commissioner core offices to this

Lincoln Peyton: And congratulations because it’s a very real goal. As you say, lovely to set a target and try and beat it, but it’s a pretty good target in and of itself, so well done.

Lisa Lin: Yeah. And I’ll say again, we did our first emissions inventory last summer with the team of interns. No one had ever measured that before. And so, we’re just saying, “Let’s see where we can start and where we can leapfrog, learn from others, see what works and adopt that for what makes sense here locally at Harris County.”

Lincoln Peyton: Excellent. Now let’s drill into that a little bit because you’ve got an impressive climate action plan. And what I find very interesting is you’ve really set targets, which yes, there’s that big number, and there’s some interesting things like 50% reduction from county buildings and facilities without the use of offset. This is the coming phase of environmental and sustainability management. How did you come up with that target?

Lisa Lin: This goes back to what I said earlier about borrowing ideas and see how they fit here. For the two targets around energy consumption, those actually lean on existing initiatives and things that we should be doing already. The first one, to your point about the 50% reduction without using the offsets actually comes from the DOE’s better climate challenge. And so, that was something when I was with the city of Houston, we are actually DOE Better Buildings Challenge Partners. And reflecting on that experience felt like that was really rich experience to compare with other cities, other private partners and learn from them. And this goal is actually one of the stretch goals from the Better Climate Challenge of Initiative.

Now we’re not an official partner, but on DOE’s website, there is a whole list of folks, cities, again, private sector partners who have signed onto that challenge. And so, I think we knew that there was a wealth of resources out there to lean on. And so, again, it’s nothing that we couldn’t tie ourselves to defined resources for. I think that’s something that we were really cognizant of. The second one is reducing electricity usage by 5% per year. That’s actually something that the State Energy Conservation Office requires of us, being in a non-attainment region in Texas. And so, if there’s ever questioning of why that, it’s because we shouldn’t already be doing this and reporting to SICO about that. We were, again, trying to give ourselves cushion for these targets that some are aggressive, some are just basic good energy management 101 that we should have been doing. That’s how we came up with those specific targets.

Lincoln Peyton: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you have green energy PPA procurement in there as well, which for many entities, even corporations that would consider themselves agile and flexible and quick, what progress have you made on that?

Lisa Lin: Goal two is around the renewable energy piece. And those two targets, the 50 to 100 megawatt PPA and the solar and battery storage pilot projects that actually comes from the clean energy strategy that we released last February. And so, we’ve been working with two consultants, Energy Edge and Tradition Energy, and they both have been helping with different pieces of that. We plan on issuing an RF RFP about the PPA shortly. And so, I think we just want to understand what’s out in the market, how can we poise ourself when our current electricity contract is over for structuring that PPA. We’re just in that phase right now of understanding what’s in the pipeline, that thing, and also looking at are there opportunities. Some of our commissioners are very keen on having something more locally developed too.

And so, I think a great project that the city of Houston has been working on is the Sunnyside Landfill project, and we want to see those types of opportunities popping up so we can look at ways to leverage the inflation reduction at tax credits that are available for counties and cities and ways to incorporate clean energy apprenticeships and workforce development. And on the distributed energy resource side of things with the solar battery storage, we partnered with our precincts to see what are those critical assets in their precincts. Community centers often used as sites for heating cooling shelters, during extreme weather events, during Winter Storm [inaudible 00:14:10], some of our libraries were used as overnight shelters. Identifying those key critical county sites that serve our community members and making sure that there’s this clean energy resilience built into those infrastructure sites. I think that’s one of the things that we are able to be pretty detailed in that target because we had that clean energy strategy that fed into that.

Lincoln Peyton: It’s a lot. It’s almost more than I think one would expect. And if I’m correct, you’re only the second county in Texas that has adopted a formal climate action plan, is that right?

Lisa Lin: Correct. Yeah. For internal operations, I believe Travis County released theirs a couple of years before us, but we are actually moving into phase two, this external facing climate planning effort. And so, potentially that could be the first, but I could be wrong.

Lincoln Peyton: No. Look, again, overall congratulations. It’s very forward-looking. I know also this is a very timely conversation because I think in the last few hours you’ve announced that you are advancing on a particular program. SolSmart, I believe it is. I’m sure most people don’t know what it is and it’s very new. What is SolSmart?

Lisa Lin: SolSmart is a free program that the U.S. Department of Energy provides to towns, cities, MPOs, regional organizations to really break down the barriers to solar adoption. It’s basically saying, we as a community, we’re open for solar business and it looks at different areas of action. It could be market and finance, it could be utility engagement, community engagement, that thing. And you basically look at the different activities and submit the documentation to say, “We’ve done this and we actually received silver designation,” and this was the first time that we actually applied for it. We went beyond bronze and got silver because of all the things that we were just talking about, right? All our solar initiatives, we actually have solar installations on three of our county buildings. One is actually designed to be net zero administration building at in Tomball. And so, the county has been doing some interesting things, sometimes quietly. And so, how are we able to be the convener and share those best practices across the region? A lot that it was just all those things that how can we learn together, how can we help create demand, that thing.

Dana Dohse: Like Lisa mentioned, SolSmart is a no-cost technical assistance program led by the Interstate Renewable Energy Council, or IREC, and the International City Council Management Association, or ICMA, and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. The goal of SolSmart is to help local governments and regional organizations accelerate the growth of clean, affordable solar energy in their jurisdictions. The program helps local governments and their residents save time and money by reducing the soft cost of going solar in five key areas, including permitting, inspection, planning and zoning, government operations, community engagement and market development. To date more than 488 local governments in 43 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico have achieved SolSmart designations, representing over 134 million people.

A study published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences evaluated the impact of the SolSmart program. The authors found that adding more technical expertise at the local government level through SolSmart was associated with an increase in the installed solar capacity of 18 to 19% per month in that jurisdiction. By advancing this program, Lisa and Harris County are taking steps towards making solar adoption easier in the region while also working to reduce climate impacts for the county’s operations. This breakout is brought to you by Cleartrace. For more information on how our platform can help you at your stage of the decarbonization journey, visit cleartrace.io.

Lincoln Peyton: Very cool indeed. That brings us to that question that we touched on before. The interaction between the different areas of local government, how does that work?

Lisa Lin: I think it’s mostly good. I would say it’s just the coordination piece, because everyone is so busy and we just all have an understanding that we have to do so much more faster and coordinated. It does add that level of complexity. And so, we do have a good relationship with the city of Houston and they obviously have their climate action plan. And so, as we go through our external facing planning effort, we’re trying to figure out how we compliment that, how do we not be duplicative, but be complimentary and maybe focus on areas that don’t have a climate action plan that’s in place with their locality, basically?

Lincoln Peyton: You opened a parenthesis there that I’m going to dive through. Here are you moving things in a green direction, which the world generally is doing. But how is that relationship? How do you manage that, the historical oil and gas history of the town? What are the challenges there? And maybe more importantly, how do you address them?

Lisa Lin: This actually ties into your question earlier about the difference between cities and counties, and we actually are pretty limited in that. Where we do have sway is maybe, again, leading these initiatives that we’re adopting are buying power, what type of infrastructure that we’re building and that sort thing. Where we can’t say or mandate certain things, we can certainly work with interesting and say, “This is what we are wanting to do now. This is the type of project that has carbon intensity in mind or low carbon emitting materials,” or things like that. And so, how can we work with industry to say, “Are there technologies that you’re working on that feed into the direction that we’re wanting to go?” And I think the other thing is there are a lot of industry that have put a lot of resources into this shift, and I think that’s one effort that we definitely applaud. We’re wanting to go down to the grassroots level and make sure that those folks on the ground also aren’t left behind in this shift. Be it revamped social programs or jobs training so that everyone moves together in tandem.

Lincoln Peyton: Very well answered. And I know that Houston is quite forward-looking in terms of encouraging the growth of the green energy incubators for some of the technologies that will evolve some of the legacy energy industries and grow some of the new age ones. What can you say a little bit about that? Is that the thing you mean when you say encouraging the infrastructure overall?

Lisa Lin: Definitely. I think those institutions for sure. But also looking at the ecosystem of community colleges and making sure that alignment is there for the job training for our clean tech ecosystem. And so, I think that’s one thing that we’re more involved with. There’s actually been this JPMorgan Chase-funded opportunity called the Resiliency Workforce Collaborative, and that’s in partnership with the Houston Community College, and all the different training partners to help build that pipeline with major employers like the City of Houston and Harris County to be at the table to say, “We’ll have these job openings available once we have the training designed,” and that sort of thing. But for me personally, I’ve been more involved on that jobs pipeline and making sure that we have folks who can tune up an electric bus or electric vehicle or help us understand how to do vehicle to building or vehicle to grid technologies on all these different energy assets that we have.

Lincoln Peyton: No. Look, it’s a very real application of a shift to the new economy, which is jobs and opportunities and people training and retraining in that respect. The companies or businesses or people that are looking to relocate and Texas growing population. How are you thinking about very specifically encouraging investment?

Lisa Lin: Yeah. And actually it didn’t go to court this week, but there has been a revamp of our tax abatement policy. And so, we are trying to figure out how to sprinkle in some more of that type of thinking so that there might be opportunities there for tax abatement opportunities at Harris County. Hopefully they’ll be passed at court in a bit. But again, I think it’s us driving that demand. I’ve been more cognizant when we are writing RFPs for different projects of asking for those types of questions. What are you doing internally as a business to be in line with what you’re trying to sell us, these services that are sustainably related? Really being more comprehensive and holistic in walking the walk and talking the talk.

Lincoln Peyton: Ah, very cool. Look, it’s refreshing to see. So, extrapolating that you’ve got the specific targets. But maybe let’s not go out to 2030. Let’s go out to 20 26, 27, what does good progress look like for Harris County?

Lisa Lin: That’s a great question too. We’ve actually thought about that in terms of this plan being flexible, do we need to revisit this at a midpoint to recalibrate, adjust targets? Maybe we were too conservative in some of the targets and need to push it a little bit further. And so, let me go to this electric vehicle pilot that we’re doing right now. And I think there’s been a lot of challenges, obviously, outside of our control, and we’re now just about to figure out who will be helping us install EV charging stations. And so, all of this is just building up for us to go faster later. I’m hoping by 2026, 27, we would have much more EVs in the fleet than we have on order now. Again, some of those things are out of control. What we also want to try to do is track the savings too and show our commissioner’s court elected officials that there is true savings and operational efficiencies by doing this shift. It’s not just about reaching GHG reduction goals, there’s also all these other co-benefits.

Lincoln Peyton: Very cool. And again, congratulations on having that review type process. Cooperation with other local government. You talked about maybe within Texas first, but outside of Texas, as I say, you seem pretty advanced and pretty forward-thinking. Does it happen or do local governments across the US do their own thing in isolation? What do you think?

Lisa Lin: There’s definitely a lot of cooperation and idea sharing. I think through channels like NACO, the National Association of Counties, and then there’s also USDN, the Urban Stanley Directors Network. Those are great avenues for us to understand what are the other leading counties or cities doing with their climate planning at this day and age? I just actually spoke on a webinar last week for USDN and it was called Practical Climate Action Planning and talked about this and through that was able to reconnect with folks in Alameda County. That sort of thing is very much needed in this space because we don’t want to recreate the wheel and we definitely don’t want to do something that actually doesn’t work very well. And so, we want to use those best practices and implement where we can.

There’s definitely open dialogue, and I think that happens at our office, that happens at our commissioner’s court offices. They all have policy staff. They’re always asking about what other counties have done this, so we definitely need to have a sense of how other counties are doing it. And that’s how we were able to accelerate so quickly in the planning process. We didn’t develop anything from scratch. These are all borrowed ideas that have been fit into a context that makes sense for us.

Lincoln Peyton: That’s great though. It’s the industrial revolution in the second phase. What could other areas of government do to help you?

Lisa Lin: I would say there’s already a lot of help from the federal government because of the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law. And so, we are actively looking at all those funding opportunities and see where it aligns with our climate action plan, and which funding sources actually will help us implement some of these actions too. I would say this is probably the best time to be in local government sustainability or even non-profit sustainably because you actually have funding opportunities that directly go to community-based organizations now, like to CBOs. It’s just that level of coordination. How do we partner more quickly together? How do we come up with these ideas that are a little bit more bleeding edge so that we get these funding opportunities and learn from each other?

Lincoln Peyton: Excellent. Let’s talk about Lisa for a second. We talked about the county and what does success look like? You’ve done some really interesting things. What does sound interesting to you, Lisa, five years from now? What would be fun and interesting for you to be doing?

Lisa Lin: I’m honestly in my dream job. I hope to still be here in five years. There’s a lot to do and there’s a lot of resources that we need to build up. I’m actually hoping our office gets more resources, more people to work on different initiatives, and I just hope that there’s more opportunities that we also afford. Folks changing jobs,, or wanting to come into the sustainability industry or students who are coming out of community colleges or universities and give them the opportunity to be in my role in the future.

Lincoln Peyton: Okay. In your office, and I can’t actually see it now on the screen, but I know you have a bicycle behind your desk there. What’s the story of the bicycle?

Lisa Lin: When I do come into the office, I do bike. I live about a mile and a half north of-

Lincoln Peyton: That’s a light workout. I think you might have to go round the block four times in the morning to justify your breakfast.

Lisa Lin: Yeah, it’s about an eight to 10 minute bike ride depending on traffic signals.

Lincoln Peyton: It’s interesting because in the people we talk to on the Decarbonization Race, it’s a very prevalent practice, bike riding. It seems to be both the health and the embodiment of greenhouse gas reduction is people use their bicycles, so good for you. I’ll be in Houston soon, so maybe we’ll go for a bike ride. That’s something I’ve threatened other guests on the show. I’m not sure I’ll keep up with you, but I’ll do my best. But definitely look forward to following the very well laid out plan. Congratulations, and really lovely to spend the time talking with you.

Lisa Lin: Likewise. Thank you, Lincoln.

Dana Dohse: Thank you for joining us on the Decarbonization Race. For more resources to help you lead the pack in the most important race of our lifetime, visit cleartrace.io/podcast.