Greensburg, Kansas
A High-Renewables Tomorrow,Today: Greensburg, Kansas
A small town in Kansas has taken a disaster and used the opportunity to emerge stronger and greener. While RMI’s Reinventing Fire campaign lays out a blueprint for ending our addiction to fossil fuels, Greensburg, Kansas is an on-the-ground example of how renewables can not only power our communities, but also help them thrive economically at the same time.
A RED TOWN TURNED GREEN
In 2007, Greensburg, Kansas was a 1,400-resident rural farming town with declining population. The economy was struggling and its biggest claim to fame was that it was home to the world's largest hand dug water well. In May of that year, tragedy struck when a class EF5 tornado—the strongest category in the tornado rating system—demolished the town. Over 95 percent of the buildings were flattened, along with the entire city’s electric distribution system. Instead of taking the insurance and FEMA money and moving away, the mostly religious mostly republican residents decided they not only wanted to rebuild, but wanted to rebuild in a way that made them stronger.
In the months following the tornado, with the help of Greensburg GreenTown, a community-based organization formed to help the town rebuild, the community held a 12-week process involving meetings and discussion with citizens, civic groups, business owners, and government officials. These meetings produced a Long-Term Recovery Plan and a Sustainable Comprehensive Plan for the next 20 years. One of the goals in these plans was to look towards renewable energy resources.
GREEN BUILDING FOR GREENSBURG
To power Greensburg with as much renewables as possible, they realized that efficiency had to come first. So in December of 2007, only seven months after the tornado, the City Council adopted a resolution that all municipally owned buildings greater than 4,000 square feet be certified LEED Platinum and be designed to achieve all ten points possible under LEED EA Credit 1, the single most important credit in LEED. To earn those points, a project has to show a 42 percent reduction in predicted energy use compared with a base-case building. Currently, Greensburg has the highest concentration of LEED Gold and Platinum buildings in the U.S., which include the City Hall built using reclaimed brick from the town itself, the 48,000 square foot hospital which uses rainwater catchment and greywater, the passive solar arts center which sports a green roof, the K-12 school with its own wind turbine, the daylit and PV powered business incubator, and the renovated Kiowa County Courthouse, one of the few historic buildings in Greensburg to survive. These efforts to rebuild green are paying off, as thirteen buildings analyzed (eight of which are LEED certified) are saving a combined total of over $200,000 in energy costs per year.
GREEN POWER
In 2009, through a 20-year power purchase agreement with Exelon Corporation, Greensburg installed a 12.5 megawatt wind farm that supplies enough electricity to power every house, business, and municipal building in the town, and then some....
http://blog.rmi.org/blog_2013_09_10_high_renewables_tomorrow_today_greensburg_kansas
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I fucking love my job that sent me out there.
Magnificent people, I met many of them including some kids who drove me around town pointing at holes where their house used to be.
One lost a grandparent. 
The LEED platinum gallery had just opened, the Big Well was it's old self, there's a new museum there now.
Not much more had been built except for the new big gymnasium, along the south side of which are several tornado shelters.
These are them:
hand dug well? Now that trip back up was a goodie!
I was driving to a meeting from Topeka to Meade and stopped there with some friends and did the well. Saw the meteorite etc. Great little place. It was gone shortly after that trip. Hope you had fun. Kansas is strange, ever stranger now, but it can be a pretty awesome place too. 
It was still the old visitor's center, very 50's and modest.
Nice people, I bought a bunch of stuff, my favorite is a little shot glass.
The new place looks incredible, slick and swanky! I'd forgotten about the meteorite!
That is what it looks like now? Somewhere I think I have pictures of the old one. It looked like a largish silo with the Bill Well painted on it or something. That is awesome.
It just goes to show you that even the people you least expect an embracing of change to come from can surprise you. If you drove around there you likely saw all the huge signs in yards and along the sides of farms about killing babies and sinning etc. Amazing stuff to see this. It is about a 6 hour drive from where I live. I think I may have to make a long day trip just to go see what it is like in person.
I think the shed over the well had blown away or may have had a temporary thing over it.
I was allowed only to look down into it, but as I said the store seemed intact and it was open for business.
You might be thinking of the big water tower, which did not survive.
Thanks. It was long enough ago I just did not remember it well enough.
I am so happy reading how they have pulled through this and what they have done. We have moved since I was there and I don't know where all my old stuff is, I hope to find it one of these days when I have time to finish clearing out my boxes.
I will never forget that day. It was horrid all over. There was a horse show in Medicine Lodge and they spent half the time hiding from the weather. It was iffy all day. Was so sad about what happened in Greensburg. I hoped that the sweet lady that we spoke to before we went down the well was OK.
that they are fully committed to this endeavor.
I was a relief worker after the tornado, what a horrible scene... I have seen the aftermath of tornadoes before but none of those compared to what Greensburg looked like, that was more like a bombing site, seen those too.
Good on them, would be nice if all those other towns that have been ravaged in recent years would take on such projects as well.
