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Community
Cutting edge moves to Charles
Solar project, green plans vault county to fore
Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2009
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by ALAN BRODY
Steve Griessel, CEO of American Community Properties Trust, discusses the "Green City" initiative at a press conference Monday.
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In an effort to build a prototype community of the future that uses clean energy technology and recycled building materials, and promotes sustainable living, American Community Properties Trust announced Monday its "Green City" initiative to give St. Charles a major facelift.
Currently, the 40-year-old master-planned community that houses nearly one of every three Charles County residents, consists of 9,100 acres with nine schools, eight neighborhood centers, miles of interconnected hiker-biker trails and 40,000 residents.
The proposed revamping and expansion of St. Charles emphasizes the latest push to build energy-efficient homes and sustainable communities where residents can live and work.
"Our vision is to make St. Charles the international model for 21st-century smart, green and growing communities," said Steve Griessel, CEO of ACPT, which is the land development and property management company for St. Charles.
In conjunction with ACPT's announcement, Competitive Power Ventures, which is developing a 640-megawatt natural gas generation plant in St. Charles, announced plans for a 75-acre, 10-megawatt solar farm that will reduce the community's carbon footprint and decrease by thousands of pounds the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus that is annually discharged into the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
"It's the largest project of its type ever proposed in Maryland," said Bruce Kelly, vice president of public affairs for CPV, which is based in Silver Spring.
The announcement drew a bevy of elected officials, including Gov. Martin O'Malley (D), who has embraced "green" policies and promoted sustainable development throughout his first term.
"It's about improving the connections between the land, the air, the water and the energy that we as human beings use as we live together in communities," he told reporters after the event. "So it's about strengthening the bonds not only as neighbors in the here and now but also our responsibility to neighbors who will come after us."
Going green will involve the construction of energy-efficient homes that are equipped with Energy Star-rated appliances and other design elements that will mean lower electricity bills for homeowners, while meeting Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards.
For existing residents and businesses, ACPT will undertake an immense retrofitting program to improve energy and water efficiency, Griessel said.
It is estimated that homeowners will save approximately $6,800 per year in energy, water and transportation costs.
ACPT is working with Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative on multiple projects such as smart meters, programmable thermostats and light-emitting diodes.
"Through our plan to reduce energy consumption, water consumption, increase renewable energy, reduce vehicle miles traveled, we've calculated that we will double in size, but use less carbon and less water than we do today," Griessel said. "It's a significant statement to make and we believe we can do that."
As the community grows, "our calculation is that we will end up with 40 percent [of the county's residents] on 2 percent of the land. That truly is an example of smart, green and growing," he said.
The O'Malley administration has set several ambitious goals to make Maryland one of the most energy-conscious and environmentally friendly states in the nation. The St. Charles and CPV initiatives are consistent with the quest to produce 20 percent of the state's electricity through renewable sources by 2022, create 100,000 "green" jobs by 2015 and reduce greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent from 1996 levels by 2020.
"It's one thing to have a motto, a battle cry of ‘Smart, Green and Growing,'" O'Malley said, referring to the package of administration-sponsored bills that focused on sustainability and conservation goals. "It's another to be able to point to concrete examples like this one."
In his remarks, O'Malley played up the environmental benefits — decreasing energy consumption, reducing stormwater runoff and using more recycled materials — and lauded the creation of about 1,600 immediate jobs between the projects that could spawn up to 20,000 jobs.
The solar farm abuts the property where the gas-fired power plant will be developed, once financing is obtained.
"One of the challenges with renewable energy is that it's not always on," said Kelly, the CPV official. "If the sun is out, you can produce electricity, if the sun is not out, then it's not producing. We need to know that electricity is always there. This is a new kind of concept that CPV is pioneering in Southern Maryland."
Together, the projects "will produce more than $97 million for the local taxing districts," he said. "Because of this power source, it would lower the cost of electricity for everybody in the state of Maryland and would save [consumers] $400 million every year."
CPV hopes to be online in 2012.
St. Charles can serve as a blueprint for future smart growth projects, O'Malley said. While Maryland's population has climbed 30 percent in the last three decades, land consumption has risen by 100 percent during the same time.
"There's only so much land," he said. "We cannot continue to grow in the way we have been growing and also have a safe, healthy future for our kids and that's particularly true in our state where our land is so very close to the waters of the Chesapeake Bay and the Mattawoman [Creek] and all of the other tributaries."
But O'Malley noted the project's missing link: the lack of mass transit — either light rail or bus rapid transit — linking St. Charles to the Washington, D.C., Metro system.
"Right now, it almost all rolls along the road," he said, acknowledging that the state currently has insufficient funds to commit to such an undertaking. "I think it's not only plausible, it's necessary and it is going to happen. The question is how quickly we can speed its advent and its arrival."
That pledge won plaudits from Bonnie Bick, a longtime advocate of controlled development who opposes the construction of the cross-county connector that aims to link U.S. 301 in White Plains with Route 210 in Bryans Road.
"We should be prioritizing this kind of project instead of supporting an unwanted, unneeded cross-county connector," she said. "This is Charles County's opportunity to make rail their top priority."
