An idea to fast-track alternative power

By David Beard, Globe Staff

How can the Bay State jump-start alternative power generation?

One idea: give the state the power to approve small-scale power generating plants.

Massachusetts would like that authority, a decision already granted to state officials for the Bay State’s neighbors, Ian Bowles, the state’s secretary for energy and environment, said on Sunday.

The move could accelerate the ability to get beyond fossil fuels.

Now the state can approve only sites that would provide 100 megawatts of energy or more, although authorities in other New England states can approve sites with 10 or 20 megawatts, Bowles told a conference today at MIT’s Stata Center sponsored by Mass Climate Action Network. State officials in Vermont, Bowles said, have 100 percent jurisdiction.

Bowles also urged the hundreds of students and grass-roots environmental activists in attendance to keep challenging local efforts to maintain high energy conservation standards. For example, if a big-box store seeks to open in a community, Bowles said, make sure to press the company and local officials to include solar energy in it.

The state is committed by 2020 to get emissions at least 10 percent below 1990 levels. A theme of the conference looked at ways residents could bypass state solutions in cutting back home power, discretionary driving, etc.

One energy conservation leader noted that in 2006, NASA scientist and global warming expert James Hansen said we had 10 years to make serious inroads in cutting carbon emissions – or climate change would be irreversible. The conservation leader, David Gershon, told the crowd at MIT that Nobel Peace Prize winner Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the UN Intergovernmental Agency on Climate Change, said we must take drastic action before 2012.

That’s not enough time, Gershon told the conference Sunday, to rely on legislation, taxation and protest to push for rapid transformation.

Instead, neighbors must collaborate now to reduce the nearly half of energy usage that is residential based.

‘’The old thought was there’s an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’ The new thinking says there’s only a ‘us,’ ‘’ said Gershon, CEO of the Empowerment Institute and the author of “The Low Carbon Diet: A 30-Day Program To Lose 5,000 Pounds.’’ ‘’We seem to be thinking like we have a lot of time to solve these problems, and we don’t.’’

Gershon, in conjunction with the Mass Climate Action Network, hopes to organize 10 communities in the state to commit by spring to reduce energy use drastically. He says that the communities, to be formed by spring, will try to get 25 percent of their households to cut 25 percent of their carbon emissions within three years.

Another wave of communities could be organized to begin by fall 2009, Gershon said.