Any city is an oil well

“Any city is basically an oil well or a coal mine — it’s sitting on energy,” Douglas Foy, secretary of commonwealth development under former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, told a Lincoln Institute of Land Policy conference in late April. “Any city wastes about 40 percent of the energy it consumes,” said Foy, who, after leaving state government, founded Serrafix, a consulting firm that has helped cities such as New York, Milwaukee, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, implement large-scale energy reduction programs. Foy said $11 billion was spent on energy last year in New York. Some $4 billion of that cost can be eliminated by enforcing building codes, making existing structures more efficient, improving the operations of utility companies, and other techniques, he said. Roughly 800 US cities have adopted climate action plans. Probably the best program, he said, is New York’s, which aims to cut carbon production 30 percent by 2030, partly by fixing “all of the 980,000 buildings” in the city. Foy predicted that Americans will see enormous improvements in the nation’s transit systems in coming years. Today most people have no idea how soon the next bus will arrive at a particular location. In the future, Foy said, “every transit vehicle will be pingable. You can determine its movement on a cellphone.” This should make bus systems easier to use — and increase ridership.