LITTLE ROCK — The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville is among eight groups in four states sharing in a $2 million energy grant awarded Oct. 30 as the result of a legal settlement between a major utility and environmentalists.
Earlier this month, the Arkansas Community Foundation of Little Rock announced it had recently awarded $2 million in sustainable-energy grants to eight groups in Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana.
The Fayetteville campus will use its grant proceeds for a pilot program in which it will help cities deploy energy-efficiency policies, it announced Tuesday.
The university is among six of the grant recipients to receive $250,000 awards, said Jessica Szenher, a communications consultant for the foundation.
“Each recipient was fully funded at the requested amount” as part of the foundation’s Sustainable Energy Initiative, said Heather Larkin, the foundation’s president and chief executive officer.
The university plans to use its grant to recruit four or five cities around Arkansas in 2013 for pilot programs to help the cities embrace energy-efficient policies and expand to eight to 10 cities by 2014, it said in a news release Tuesday.
Once selected, the cities can participate for free, said Michele Halsell, managing director of the Walton College of Business’ Applied Sustainability Center, in the release.
The university, in choosing the cities, will want to select those that can help them fulfill the grant, but ideally they would be geographically dispersed across the state, Halsell said in the news release.
Larkin said most grantees have between two and three years to implement their grants.
The foundation received the $2 million about a year ago from Southwestern Electric Power Co. as part of the legal settlement of a dispute over the $2.1 billion John W. Turk coal-fired power plant in Texarkana, according to newspaper archives.
A consent decree from the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas ordered SWEPCO, the plant’s majority owner, to pay $2 million to be spent funding grants supporting policy initiatives for clean and efficient energy.
The utility also was ordered to reimburse environmental groups $2 million for legal costs and to contribute $8 million to The Nature Conservancy for land conservation.
Other Arkansas recipients sharing in the $2 million grant are the Arkansas Community Action Agencies Association, the Arkansas Advanced Energy Foundation and the Arkansas Public Policy Panel.
The Arkansas Community Action Agencies Association asked for and received a $190,000 grant. Rose Adams, the nonprofit’s executive director, said the money is welcomed by a group that spends a lot of time and effort lobbying the Arkansas Public Service Commission on behalf of low- and moderate-income utility ratepayers.
“This grant will ensure that we can continue to have a presence there,” Adams said Tuesday. “Because it does take a lot of time.”
One out-of-state grantee, the Wind Coalition of Texas, will use its grant to help increase “transmission sources” for renewable wind and solar power in Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, according to the foundation’s Nov. 1 news release announcing the grant awards.
The remaining recipients are the Alliance for Affordable Energy of Louisiana, the Oklahoma Sustainability Network and the Sustainable Energy and Economic Development Coalition of Texas.
The foundation used a board that comprises its board of directors and private citizens to select the eight grantees based on the following criteria: their potential to create energy-efficient policy and achieve results, evidenced by a plan to evaluate the project; the potential for “sustainability beyond the grant period”; their collaboration with others in the same field; current and future financial support; and their innovation and creativity.
Arkansas, Pages 13 on 11/30/2012