Chris Castro, Director of Sustainability & Resilience, Co-Chair of Smart Cities Initiative, City of Orlando

Mayor Buddy Dyer launched Green Works Orlando in 2007 to transform Orlando into one of the most environmentally-friendly, socially inclusive and economically vibrant communities in the nation. Green Works Orlando represents Orlando’s commitment to utilize the City’s regional leadership position to build partnerships and share resources that foster positive environmental changes.

The City has won numerous awards for its work in sustainability including recognition from Green Builder Magazine as a 2019 top municipal government sustainability program.  It was named a trailblazer for the state of Florida by USGBC’s Florida chapter, and it was ranked the Greenest City in the South Eastern United States on WalletHub’s America’s Greenest Cities (ACG) Report.  The ACG report also listed Orlando as one of the top 30 greenest cities in the entire US; one of only five cities listed that are not on the West Coast. 

Orlando was also recently awarded $2.5M from Michael Bloomberg as part of the American Cities Climate Challenge to help the city accelerate its climate mitigation and adaptation plans.  Both Orlando and Mayor Bloomberg were also featured in the National Geographic documentary Paris to Pittsburgh which celebrates how Americans are demanding and developing real solutions in the face of climate change.

The success of this program is regularly attributed to the visionary leadership from the mayor, city council, senior officers like Chris, and their partners throughout the city who have worked tirelessly to create a city culture of partnership and collaboration in Orlando. 

What do you actually do all day? 

I’m the Mayor’s senior advisor for all things environment, energy, climate, and smart cities.  I’m also the Director of the Office of Sustainability and Resilience.  My main focus is on assisting Mayor Dyer, City commissioners, and our senior staff with the coordination, development, integration, and administration of the city’s sustainability, energy, and climate policies and programs. 

I spend most of my time interacting on the political side with our city’s C-level executives such as the Mayor, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Accounting Officer, Chief Legal Counsel, and many others.  One of the best parts of my role is that I get to work with almost every department in the city – code enforcement, police, fire, transit, etc.  We did a study and found that our office touches over 90% of the city’s departments and divisions.  We’re very much a cross-sectoral, cross-departmental initiative, and I think that’s the most effective way to do it.  We think of our team as the in-house sustainability consulting firm for the City of Orlando.  We focus a lot on creating a cultural change that is transforming how our city does business.

I view my role as that of an eco-entrepreneur, building business models that make our city more efficient in order to lower our impact, save tax money, and improve community health and quality of life.  This is my dream job, I get to think creatively, work with an incredibly talented team of experts, and help the city both internally and externally.  I’m often partnering with our local utility to pitch and build new programs and ideas. 

Tell us more about Green Works Orlando and the work that your team is doing

Within the context of Green Works Orlando, I oversee seven critical functions of the city – green building development, clean energy development, local food systems, zero waste strategies, livability, clean water, and transportation.  Within those, we have over one hundred different strategies that we are implementing or have implemented since we began working on this ten years ago. 

Clean Energy Development

We’re very committed to moving the city to renewable power; we have a goal of powering 100% of city operations with renewables by 2030, and powering the entire city with renewables by 2050.  That’s in direct alignment with 80×50 and the Paris Agreement for carbon reduction. 

In order to achieve these goals, we’re doing a lot of work to enable businesses and homeowners to invest in solar. 

Community solar:

55% of our population lives in densely concentrated housing complexes.  If we’re going to move to 100% renewable energy citywide, we need ways to get those people access to renewable energy.  To that end, our municipal electric and water utility, Orlando Utilities Commission (OUC), has built two offsite utility scale community solar farms totaling 20MW that individuals and companies can subscribe to in order to offset all or part of their consumption. 

Collective solar:

There are still many homeowners who want solar on their rooftops, but the biggest barrier for them is the upfront cost.  The state of Florida has outlawed third party power purchase agreements (PPAs) which is when the solar company owns the panels on your roof and they essentially become your utility provider that you pay monthly.  The PPA model is how about 70% of solar is installed in this country.  The model makes sense because many people don’t have a spare $20k to put solar on their roof.  We’re taking a different approach through our collective solar program, which is all about bundling demand for solar panels for homeowners to lower their installation costs through economies of scale.  We bundle groups of 100 homes that are interested in opting in to collective solar, which creates a combined purchase total of upwards of a megawatt.  That kind of scale is enough to enable us to negotiate bulk rates with contractors which allows homeowners to install solar at $2.25/W instead of rack rates which are more like $3.25/W.  When you combine those economies of scale with Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing and tax credits, everyone wins.  We have also worked with nonprofits like Florida Solar United Neighbors (FL SUN) to organize “solar coops” that also bundles the homeowner demands to lower the overall price point and make solar more affordable.

Solar innovations:

In partnership with the City, the OUC has become one of only a few test sites in the nation for floating solar panels.  We have approximately 9,000 man-made stormwater retention ponds in the city.  These are required for new buildings so the new structures don’t cause flooding in neighboring buildings.  It’s frustrating to developers because you lose a half to a quarter acre of land for every project.  If you put floating solar panels on top of those ponds, they suddenly become productive space.  We’re working with OUC on adding this technology to our airport as well as our water treatment plants.  These will serve as test sites for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to test large scale installations of floating solar. 

We’re making big investments in solar and storage as part of city operations in order to support resiliency as well.  We’re using grants from both Bloomberg and NREL to investigate rooftop solar on 14 of the city’s properties which will include energy storage.  These are going onto our critical facilities such as our 911 call center, wastewater treatment center, community centers, and other buildings that are critical to city operations during hurricanes.  We’re also installing them at community centers that are converted to emergency shelters during storms.  Many of those centers have diesel generators, but during Irma some of those didn’t turn on.  We also purchased several mobile solar storage trailers which we’ll have available for plugging in at major intersections and lift stations to help keep traffic moving after major storms. 

Energy Efficiency

We have robust energy efficiency programs both internally and in the private sector.  Internally, we’ve bonded over $20M in funding for energy efficiency since late 2015.  Those retrofits and renovations of city owned properties are now tracking around 19% savings across our entire portfolio since 2011 and have saved us $2.2M per year.  The ROI is incredible, and the US Department of Energy’s Better Buildings Challenge has named us a model city for local governments looking to establish revolving energy funds. 

In the private sector, we’ve enabled private financing for building owners through the PACE program in Orlando.  We have four different PACE providers in the city with $500M in clean energy capital available for financing, so our building owners don’t have to pay up front to invest in energy efficiency.  This has been a huge win for our shopping malls, commercial offices, and even single-family homes. 

Social equity is a big priority for us.  As part of that, we’ve worked with OUC to develop a program called Efficiency Delivered which makes it easier for low- and moderate-income communities to benefit from investments in energy efficiency.  The program offers a free energy audit for renters or homeowners who then use the results to make improvements to their home, usually related to weatherization.  They are then given subsidies or rebates against those improvements based on level of income, and the remaining balance can be paid through their utility bill over two years.  It’s wonderful because now even renters can participate in savings from energy efficiency.   

Zero Waste

We’re also doing some really exciting things around zero waste.  We have an extremely ambitious goal of the entire city becoming zero waste to landfill by 2040.  A large part of how we hope to achieve that is through pulling food waste out of the waste stream since about 30% of our city’s waste by weight is organics. 

To do this, we started a residential backyard composter program which offers residents a free, fully assembled and delivered 80-gallon Earth Machine composter along with instructions.  Each machine can divert about a ton of waste in 3 to 4 years.  Residential waste costs us $40 per ton in tipping fees, and the composters cost us $35 per machine, so it’s a relatively quick payback.  The program has already helped us divert hundreds of thousands of pounds of food waste, which residents are using to fertilize their landscaping (or better yet, to grow their own food at home).  Long-term we hope to move to curbside compost pickup, but in order to get the volume we need for that to be successful, we first have to train our residents to divert organics effectively. 

Orlando is the number one most visited tourism destination in all of North, Central, and South America.  We had over 90 million visitors in 2018, which is 255 tourists for every one resident per year.  That generates a lot of waste at our hotels, conferences, and theme parks.  We set up a commercial waste program that provides our hospitality companies with rolling carts for collecting organics that we then put into an anaerobic digester that creates biogas which in turn produces electricity.  It’s much more cost effective than sending those organics to landfill.  So far, we’ve diverted over 2.5 million pounds of food waste in the last year and a half.  That’s still technically in the pilot phase but we’ll be ramping that up soon. 

We also have a really cool grease collection program that provides homeowners with free containers to collect their cooking grease in.  This keeps it out of our stormwater system and gives us a great raw material which we turn into biodiesel that powers all of the diesel trucks in the city. 

Recycle Across America (RAA) is an important partner of ours for improving our public space recycling.  RAA did a study that showed there were over 7 million different recycling labels across America which has really confused the average consumer.  They created a US standard recycling label which is now used in our national parks, Whole Foods stores, Bank of America locations, and many other places.  We use the standardized label here in our airport, the school system (the 9^th largest in the US), our city parks, and both Disney World and Universal Studios have signed up as well. 

Local Food Systems

We’ve been focusing a lot on growing food locally in our city as part of our overall resiliency plan.  We updated our landscape codes so that a homeowner can plant edible landscaping on up to 60% of their front yard and 100% of the rest of their property.  We also have ordinances that allow backyard chickens, hens, apiaries, and beehives.  It’s really helped enable us to create a culture of farming in the city, and many have been selling any excess food grown at SNAP approved farmers markets and restaurants. One of the unique nonprofits that has started from this is Fleet Farming, a bike-powered urban farming program that is converting homeowner lawns and our vacant public land into an edible oasis of organic food. This program has been recognized by NBC Nightly News, NPR All Things Considered, and has garnered the attention of more than 1,000 communities looking to replicate this model.

We have a strong food policy council with representatives from the Department of Health, our universities, and government officials from both the city and state who talk about different policies we can move forward to build food production in the city.  For example, we worked with our real estate department to obtain conditional use permits for two pieces of public, city-owned vacant land and developed them into urban farms.  We then partnered with local nonprofits like Fleet Farming to run the farms and they use the food that is grown to address food security and access issues.  We’re also trying to help expand the twenty community gardens we have throughout the city that are in targeted food deserts.  We help them raise funds and volunteers to operate the gardens which supply some of the farmers markets we have daily throughout the city. 

What are some of the key skills for success in this role? 

You need a very solid understanding of and foundation in sustainability in general.  That’s really important because this role takes a unique, interdisciplinary knowledge set to tackle these immense challenges.  You don’t need to know every area of sustainability intimately, but you need to have an interdisciplinary background and approach to problem solving. 

Everyone on our team is a great communicator, storytelling and communications are half the battle for us when working with commissioners, neighborhood associations, and other members of our community.  You need to be able to stand up in a room and really command the attention of everyone in the room so that you can effectively communicate what we’re doing.  Active listening is also very important, we’re essentially consultants doing consultative sales of a concept or idea, and you can’t do that if you aren’t able to actively listen to uncover people’s needs and barriers so that you can get creative about solving them. 

Passion is also really important.  This job takes more than 40 hours a week, and you need to be able to work those hours and feel good about what you’ve accomplished at the end of the day.  This is a big part of who I am, and I’m very fortunate that my skillset aligns so well with my passion. 

What is your proudest professional achievement?

This past December I was recognized as one of the top ten public officials of the year by Governing Magazine.  It’s considered a pinnacle achievement for people in state and local government, everyone from the governor level and below is eligible.  There were over 4,500 applications this year and I’m incredibly honored to have received this award alongside so many people whom I admire such as Mayor Garcetti in Los Angeles, Governor Haslam from Tennessee, and New York City Commissioner of Transportation Polly Trottenburg. 

I was the first sustainability director to have been recognized with this award, and I’m also the youngest official to have received it.  It’s such a reinforcement for what I’m doing and the important role that sustainability and resilience plays, it was really heartening. 

What are your favorite resources? 

I’m a member of the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN), which is a network of city and county sustainability directors from around the US.  We’ve got an incredible intranet and dashboard which is really inspiring and a great way to share ideas.   

The Institute for Market Transformation is a critical resource supporting cities in this area. 

I listen to both the Energy Gang and Intersection podcasts, which are tremendously helpful weekly podcasts. 

Some of the organizations I keep an eye on are the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE), Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL).  The Brookings Institute is also great if you’re interested in the UN SDGs. 

I loved the book Reinventing Fire by Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute, in fact I love almost anything they put out.  NREL is also a great source of reading material.  Paul Hawkens’ Project Drawdown is an amazing blueprint for what we should be doing. 

The Willing World is a more academically oriented but wonderful resource by former congressman Jim Bacchus covering sustainable development. 

Who (or what) is your sustainability hero?  

Many of my peers are incredibly inspiring.  John R. Seydel, the Director of Sustainability in Atlanta certainly stands out.  He beat me as the youngest urban Directory of Sustainability after I’d held that title for two years.  He’s an amazing guy.  Mark Chambers in New York City, Lauren Faber in Los Angeles, Grant Ervin in Pittsburgh, the talent in this field is just unreal. 

At a global level, I admire game changers like Elon Musk.  I don’t know of any other person in the last 100 years who has created such a paradigm shift and influenced market changes so significantly.  He’s singlehandedly changed how we use currency for transactions, how we’re moving, how we’re powering our lives, and enabled us to travel to space.  He’s impacting all of the critical points of sustainability for our future, and that’s his objective.  I heard him speak and I love that he’s using his massive wealth to make planet earth a more sustainable place.  He’s risking a lot to make that happen.  

I also greatly admire Michael Bloomberg.  He’s leveraging his wealth to tackle the most critical humanitarian and environmental problems we have.  If Jeff Bezos and his peers did that as well, we’d have these issues solved in less than a decade.