On November 15, 2021, President Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act into law. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is commonly referred to as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides billions of dollars in funding for projects relating to energy efficiency, roads and bridges, highway and pedestrian safety, public transit, clean school buses, electric vehicle charging, water infrastructure, etc.
On February 5, 2024, Montgomery County applied for Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding through the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant (EECBG) Program. The EECBG Program ($550M) provides competitive and formulaic grants to States, local governments, and tribes to implement strategies to reduce energy use, to reduce fossil fuel emissions, and to improve energy efficiency.
On June 1, 2024, Montgomery County was awarded $594,260 as a formulaic EECBG Program grant for the following two projects:
Montgomery County owns one hundred and sixty acres in Eagleville, Pennsylvania, housing multiple County operational buildings, including the County Correctional Facility, the County Emergency Operations Center Facility, the County Archives Facility, and the County Coroner Facility. All facilities on the Eagleville Campus, with the exception of the Archives Facility, operate on a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week schedule. With a residential prison, a 9-1-1 emergency communications center, and an on-call office presence in the coroner building, energy consumption at these facilities is the highest of all County-owned buildings. Combined with an abundance of available land, the Eagleville Campus is a prime site for the installation of sustainable energy infrastructure such as cogeneration, solar, and/or geothermal, or a combination of all three.
Montgomery County directly manages over one million square feet of office space, six thousand acres of parkland, sixty miles of trails, seventy-five miles of roads, one hundred and thirty bridge structures, and five historic sites. These assets require electrical power generally provided by grid energy, either directly to numerous built structures in the County or indirectly to support facilities, such as road and bridge equipment yards. Currently, the County does not have any independent systems to analyze, audit, or influence energy consumption rates across any of its inventory. Montgomery County endeavors to better understand its overall energy usage, address the aforementioned deficiency, and improve overall energy performance.
The U.S. Department of Energy will provide oversight of the projects, which will be completed by 2026. The projects will benefit Montgomery County residents and will yield sustained long-term impacts in terms of energy, emission reductions, and community investment.
This [information] is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of State and Community Energy Programs (SCEP) under the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant Program (EECBG) Award Number DE-SE0000200.
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