Yachats community workshop

Yachats Community Renewable Energy & Resilience Plan Workshop update

Yachats Community Renewable Energy and Resilience Plan Workshop on October 19, over 30 people gathered at the Commons to consider how renewable energy and other power improvements at the Civic Campus can help the City respond to hazard events and enhance day-to-day use. Attendees identified where and how the civic campus connects to places across the City to improve resiliency for the larger community. Kudos to the people who participated in this initial workshop and the great ideas generated to support durable power, communication and access to services. One important conclusion from assessments of essential City facilities in the Civic Campus by the project’s engineers determined that the City has done a great job with investments in the civic campus that can be leveraged with the ODOE renewable energy grant to speed City wide resilience.

Additional key take-aways from the workshop:

1. Thanks to the sustained emergency planning activities in the City, foundational work has already been done, and we have the potential to expand shared power to help more facilities that are needed both on and off campus.

2. The Civic Campus is well located to withstand the most frequent hazard events and serve as an anchor for the emergency actions by public works supporting community and business activities across the City.

3. The Civic Campus has the potential to locate solar canopies and battery storage with emergency generation to significantly reduce its annual operational energy cost while storing power as a critical resource during frequent hazard events and power outages.

4. Civic Campus can support water security, power generation, and power storage as it is a center for mobile generators. This can provide mobile equipment to provide emergency generation or stored battery power to pump stations and lift stations across the water system network.

Mayor Craig Berdie, wisely noted that in addition to water, we should include planning for opportunities to support our local businesses and grocery stores with adequate mobile power for emergency refrigeration of food during power outages. Attendees suggested that the City might address strategies for wind, water capture, and enhanced wayfinding that can help in emergency response as well.

Please plan to join us at an Open House on November 16th from 6:00-8:00 pm at the Commons. At that time detailed thinking will be shared for community input about potential projects for how power generation and storage may be designed to support activities and future use of the Civic Campus.

View the workshop slides and learn more about the project on the City’s website

www.yachatsoregon.org/ODOEenergygrant

Community members can give input on their goals and priorities for the Civic Campus

and RSVP for the upcoming November public meeting here: https://bit.ly/CivicCampusSurvey-RSVP