Q & A with K.C. Poulos

We caught up with Oak Park's sustainability manager K.C. Poulos for a quick chat. Here are the contents of that interview.

Sustainability is a word that's tossed around often. What exactly does it mean to you?

For me, it's a big picture concept in an urban setting. We want to create and maintain a village that is valuable on a number of levels: economic, education and our built environment.

On the environmental side, it means becoming more efficient in how we use our resources. We're not sustainably ideal by any stretch of the imagination, but we are making strides.

Who else in town is doing good things?

Sally Stoval at the Interfaith Green Network. [Churches] are starting car-free Sunday, where they're encouraging the congregations to walk to church. They're starting community gardens on their church grounds. And they are reinvesting in their buildings to make them more energy efficient.

We have professors and energy experts who all live here. We have home energy auditors that have been in the business forever that live and work here. We have all this great brain resource that we're tapping into.

And our sister agencies like the Park District of Oak Park and their green advisory committee. They're doing wonderful things with sustainability landscaping and hardscaping, and our public works department is really quite amazing in what they're able to accomplish.

Municipalities eat up a lot of power. . . keeping the lights on at parking garages, fueling a fleet of cars, maintaining water pumping stations, etc. So where do you even start?

Oak Park did some baseline measuring last year. One of the things we learned was that the majority of older building stock is older than 1940. Most buildings here were built before modern-day energy efficient stuff. So you're looking at single pane windows, no insulation in the walls or attic, storm doors that are old. All kinds of things.

When you look at that village-wide, on a systemic level, you see that is our No. 1 contribution to carbon emissions.

It's not our cars; it's not our gas grills and lawnmowers; it's our houses and buildings. So as a village, we ask the question, "How do we reduce that?"

How about an update on smart meters?

The meters have been deployed in all the ComEd customer communities. And some people have been given the opportunity to install an in-home E-reader and have real-time energy use information right at their kitchen counter.

They consider [the results] an on-ramp to future technologies.

ComEd also got a grant from [U.S.] Department of Energy for solar panel at homes within their nine-community area. They're also looking to put a solar power charging station in Oak Park. We're only one of two locations being chosen, which is kind of exciting.

The station is powered by solar panels on a roof. Just park your electric car underneath, plug it in and the solar panels are providing the energy.

That's kind of amazing.

I know! It's amazing! This is actually happening.

Remember what a cell phone used to look like? The big phone and all the dropped calls?  This is where we are with electricity. We've got that big fat cell phone in our hands, and we're learning how to use it.