Evanston on track to meet greenhouse gas reduction goals
The CARP Implementation Task Force, a subcommittee of the Evanston Environment Board, officially started working with city staff to refine a report on progress the city has made on the Climate Action and Resilience Plan,
During the task force’s Wednesday meeting at the library room of the Morton Civic Center, 909 Davis St., Cara Pratt, the city’s sustainability and resilience manager, gave what she described as a “very rough draft” of what she plans to present to the City Council sometime in May 2026.
The discussion touched on several points — most notably, whether the city should count households enrolled in ComEd Community Solar program toward the CARP goal of increasing renewable energy use.
Pratt also reported that Evanston seems to be doing better on reducing emissions than previously thought. While some task force members wondered how much of it was due to external factors, they ultimately decided to take it as a win.
Reducing gas emissions
The task force and city staff members agreed in July to put together a presentation that would focus on goals Evanston was supposed to meet in 2025 and earlier, as well as some goals that don’t have a firm timeline.
As the RoundTable previously reported, the city has a mixed record of meeting CARP goals. It did not fully meet most of them for 2025, though it saw more progress on some than others, according to a presentation at the June 12 Environmental Board meeting.
City staff also struggled to track progress toward some goals. For example, for the goal of having “buses and fleets based and operating in Evanston [be] 50% electric” by 2025, Evanston could track its own fleet of vehicles and CTA and Pace bus fleet data is publicly available. Getting data from the U.S. Postal Service and private entities such as Amazon is trickier.
One thing that changed since the June presentation was the status of the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions citywide by 50% in 2025. As of 2022, the most recent year the city had data on at the time, Evanston reduced emissions by 36% — 48% if one counts energy saved through EPA Renewable Energy Certificates. Pratt told the Task Force on Wednesday that 2023 data indicates that, at the time, the city reduced emissions by 44%, 50.1% if one counts the renewable energy certificates.
She said that this was the year ComEd changed account numbers, and the city would need to see if the pattern holds for 2024.
Natural gas use ‘flat’
Task force member Jerri Garl wondered what role natural gas usage played in that data. Pratt said that use of natural gas was “flat” over the past couple of years. As she noted, the Healthy Buildings Ordinance was passed only this spring, and the city expects that line to trend downward in the future.
“By the time we present this in 2026, we’ll have two more years of data,” Pratt added.
Task force member Hal Sprague asked what factors drove the decrease. Pratt said it was largely electricity usage and and vehicle emissions.
Task force chair Katarina Topalov wondered how much of this could be attributed to factors outside Evanstonians’ control, such as ComEd using more renewable energy sources, and how much came down to their actions.
“I guess my question is — can we as a community be proud of it, or is it outside our community?” she asked.
Pratt responded that “the community members, not the city government” can take some credit for the shift, saying that the only thing the city did was buy renewable energy certificates.
What measure is renewable
Another time-sensitive CARP goal is to have “75% renewable electricity supply
for all Evanston accounts” by 2025. Pratt said Wednesday that the measure doesn’t capture 704 Evanston households that take part in the Community Solar program.
As task force members noted, the program works similar to renewable energy certificates in the sense that participants don’t get solar power directly. Rather, they pay a monthly subscription fee to a solar panel farm, and get credits on the bill. The key difference from certificates, Sprague noted, is that subscribers don’t get certificates to show they contributed to solar power, so they don’t automatically count toward sustainability goals.
Pratt asked the task force to weigh in on whether participating in the program, along with installing home solar panels, should count toward fulfilling the goal. Topalov argued that participating in Community Solar should count, since, even if it doesn’t impact Evanston directly, “it alleviates pressure on the grid.”
Both Garl and Sprague said they take part in the program. Sprague said he would support counting it, but argued that it would require the city to change the policy.
Task force member Wendy Pollock, who serves as the RoundTable’s environmental editor, wondered if the city should do more to encourage solar power in Evanston proper. Sprague responded that, in the past, Community Solar subscribers like him hoped to see solar power adopted locally.
“If there’s, like, a warehouse near our neighborhood, we’d try to work with them, [so they] put solar on their building. That hasn’t happened,” he said. For example, “It would be nice if we could talk to Bluestone about putting solar on their roof.”