Four years ago, Ann Arbor Mayor John Hieftje built a fully functioning house entirely off the electric grid. Hieftje designed and built the house, which runs on a solar energy system, on Lake Superior with his father-in-law. It includes all the fundamentals of a normal home — a refrigerator, washer, dryer and dishwasher — and is completely self-contained. And according to Hieftje, he’s never had a single problem with it.

Hieftje’s effort to reduce his carbon footprint is just a small step compared to the enormous strides he has made for the city of Ann Arbor. In 2005, the mayor challenged the city to, by the end of 2010, obtain 30 percent of its energy from renewable sources and to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent.

His plan was inspired by the windmill farms in Sault Saint Marie, Ontario, just north of the Upper Peninsula. Unfortunately, Hieftje said, Michigan doesn’t have strong enough winds to power farms of its own, but it does have two hydro-dams and a landfill gas energy system, both of which have enabled cities across the state to increase alternative energy usage.

By the end of 2009, 16 percent of the total energy used by the city of Ann Arbor — including fuel, heating, lighting and electricity — was generated from renewable sources — the equivalent of taking 400 cars off the road last year.

The number is still far from the mayor’s goal of 30 percent, though he maintains the city will still make up the 14 percent by the end of this year. “We’re going to do it,” he says when asked about making the target.

Though almost doubling the city’s use of renewable energy in just one year seems unlikely, if anyone is going to get Ann Arbor to that goal it’s Hieftje, who has made green energy a focus of his administration from the start. And even if the city doesn’t make it to 30 percent by 2010, the progress the mayor has made has helped mold Ann Arbor into a national leader in environmental practices.

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Hieftje’s plan stems from his personal life. Before setting the challenge in 2005, the mayor and his team made small changes, any little thing they could to make Ann Arbor a greener place. This proactive work has helped accelerate Hieftje’s goal.

“Because we’d been doing this for so long,” Hieftje said, “by the time I made the challenge in 2005 we’d already done all the easy energy savings.”

The mayor has been cognizant of changing all the buses in the city to hydro-buses. And while he won’t decommission a perfectly good bus, he does ensure that when a bus’s life is over, it’s replaced with a hydro-bus. The city has even begun to obtain hydro-bucket trucks to fix streetlights, which require substantially less energy when operating.

“I want Ann Arbor to be an environmentally focused, technologically focused, innovative kind of city that is a place with a high quality of life where people want to live,” Hieftje said.

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Last year, Ann Arbor ranked sixteenth in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s list of on-site green power producers in the agency’s Green Gower Partnership list. The program acknowledges organizations that have made the most resourceful green power purchases. Ann Arbor was recognized for its use of biogas, small-hydro power and solar power. During the summer months, city biofuel vehicles obtain 50 percent of their energy from bio diesel. Additionally, the EPA recognized the mayor’s efforts to replace city street lighting with LED lights.

Ann Arbor is the leading city in the United States in terms of using LED streetlights. The downtown area is almost completely converted at this point and changes have begun in neighboring districts. However, the mayor and his team have faced an imposing obstacle — 5,000 of the 7,000 lights in Ann Arbor are owned by DTE energy. This means that the city cannot change the lights to LED without the company’s consent. And while the city has successfully changed the other 2,000, the push has been met with resistance from DTE.

“We’re going to do everything we can,” Hieftje said. “We’re going to be at 100 percent but we can’t affect the other 5,000 unless we can get them to agree to be partners with us.”

The LED lights the city has installed, however, have been remarkably effective — both environmentally and economically. The installations have cost the city $630,000. Predictions initially projected the investment would be paid off in approximately five years. However, researchers from the Ross School of Business studied the proposal and determined that the city would be paid back in about 3.8 years.

“They came back and told us how productive it is going to be and, from our point of view, if we can make an investment that pays itself back in four years and then forever with energy savings, we’re going to go for it,” Hieftje said. The mayor is so enthusiastic about LED lights that there is even an LED lit conference room in city hall.