Garrett Neese/Daily Mining Gazette Melissa Davis of the Houghton Energy Efficiency Team gives a presentation to the Houghton City Council Wednesday.

HOUGHTON — The $5 million prize in the Georgetown University Energy Prize isn’t as much of a prize now, Melissa Davis of the Houghton Energy Efficiency Team told the Houghton City Council Wednesday.

Georgetown has revamped the award, previously described as a $5 million prize, to consist of enabling the winning community to secure $5 million in financing for energy conservation measures. 

“We’d rather get the financing locally if we’re ever going to have a great big project, so we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen,” Davis said. “But the county is the legal entity for that, so we’re working with them to figure out what our next move is. Some of us are a little bit up in arms about that.”

Houghton County is a semifinalist in the competition, which challenges communities to work with local governments and utilities to find ways to reduce natural gas and electric consumption.

Davis also spoke to the council to promote HEET’s energy literacy campaign, which includes interviews available online at newpowertour.com/energy. The interviews are with Sam Lockwood, treasurer of the Keweenaw Renewable Energy Coalition; Glen Tolksdorf, owner of Tolksdorf Forestry; Asko Ojaniemi, managing director of Benet Oy; State Rep. Scott Dianda, D-Calumet; and Gary Melow, director of Michigan Biomass. 

“The energy situation in the U.P. is kind of hard to fathom, given the information that we get, so we decided to go ahead and supplement that with an energy literacy campaign,” she said. 

HEET is also hosting an informal renewable energy discussion group at 7:30 p.m. the last Wednesday of the month at the Jutila Center in Hancock. 

Davis also described several steps communities could take to lower energy costs, such as integrating wind and solar energy and backing it up with woody biomass to drive the cost of energy below that of conventional sources. 

“The virtues that are being extolled for natural gas is that it’s rampable, cullable, baseload available, and what’s not being looked at is that woody biomass has all the same properties, except it keeps the money in the local economy,” she said. 

Among the ideas Davis suggested were municipal greenhouses, municipal day care and a municipal water park. The heat produced as a byproduct of woody biomass could be used to heat the water for the park, she said. 

“The idea is you keep the business solvent, keep it in what it needs but take that profit and apply it to driving down the cost of electricity production,” she said. 

Davis, who is speaking to a number of local municipalities, also asked Houghton to form a dedicated energy subcommittee.