Ann Arbor Energy Commission Meeting 8/8/23

001fantastic just see everyone okay good evening um 602 p.m my name is Claire McKenna and I'm the chair of the Ann Arbor energy commission as the chair I'm calling this meeting to order and I'm participating from Ann Arbor welcome to the August 8th 2023 electronic meeting of the energy commission we will conduct this meeting like in-person meetings Commissioners during roll call please indicate your current location also during the meeting please remain on camera just as you would be visible during in-person meetings finally please meet your microphone when not speaking public comment will be via telephone only to speak during any of the public comment opportunities please call one of the following two toll-free numbers 877-853-5247 or 888-788-0099 and enter the ID number 956-8718-7876 on your phone this information is also available on the published agenda

002in the Public Notices section of the city website and on the broadcast meeting and on the broadcast of this meeting on CTN Channel 16 ATT channel 99 and online at a2gov.org watch CTN Joe would you please read the land acknowledgment for us yep um excuse me um I acknowledge that the land the city of Ann Arbor occupies is the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the anishinabe including Odawa Ojibwe and bodewadmi and Wyandotte peoples I further acknowledge that our city stands like almost all property in the United States on lands obtained generally in unconscionable ways from indigenous peoples The Taking of this land was formalized by the tree of Detroit in 1807 knowing where we live work study and recreate does not change the past but a thorough understanding of the ongoing consequences of this

003past can Empower us in our work to create a future that supports human flourishing and justice for all individuals great thanks Joe will you take the roll call please yep all right um commissioner and as stated if you can say okay where you're calling in from uh as you're saying your present um commissioner Berkowitz president from my home in Ann Arbor councilmember Briggs notified me they will not be able to make it as did Vice chair Colvin or commissioner Colvin Garcia um Vice chair harp present calling from here in Ann Arbor chair McKenna president calling from Ann Arbor commissioner mursky present calling in from here my home in Ann Arbor commissioner overpick here uh Colleen for my home and over council member radina you're in Ann Arbor commissioner Sandra uh was unable to make it

004as well um commissioner Smith present in Ann Arbor and commissioner zitelman in Ann Arbor and commissioner Levin yes I'm not hearing you but I see they are present okay can you hear me now I can hear you okay gotcha all good care you have a quorum thanks Joe can I have a motion to approve the agenda as posted in a second pusher murski yes I move that the agenda be approved as published thank you and a second thank you all right uh Commissioners please raise your hand if you want to propose changes or discuss an issue the agenda seeing No Hands raise all those in favor of approving the agenda as opposed raise your hand and say aye all those opposed please raise your hand all right okay all those opposed please raise your hand

005and say no okay thank you um we have um everybody in the eye so the agenda is approved is there a motion to approve the minutes as posted so moved second commissioner mursky in a second council member radina thank you can commissioner please raise your hand if you want to propose changes or discuss an issue all right so you know hands raised all those in favor of approving the minutes as posted please raise your hand and say aye okay with the majority vote voting I we have the minutes are approved all right we'll move into public input this is an opportunity for people to speak for up to three minutes if you're watching on CTN please call 888-788-0099-4877 853-5247 and under the meeting ID 956-8718-7876 this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and

006video feed City staff will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone you will hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area mute any television or background sound so that we may hear you clearly please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments um caller ending in one three four uh thank you Mr Lang and chair McKenna I'm Ken Garber I live at 28 Henry Hill Court I'm looking forward to the discussion on grid availability important issue um commissioner Briggs in her newsletter suggested that residents submit questions during public comment time

007so here are mine one I assume that increasing grid availability means adding substation Transformers to step down more power off Regional High Voltage ITC transmission um if new demand is high enough does this mean entirely new substations need to be built two question two to provide capacity to serve large new developments that include rooftop solar and battery storage can you use can DTE use these der capabilities to offset its peak load and thus limit the necessary work to just reconductoring existing circuits instead of doing these substation upgrades to date I haven't seen DTE make any effort to adapt its systems for developers who want to put in distributed generation and thus make it easier to add grid capacity uh question three Ann Arbor has large areas served by outdated 4.8 kilovolt ungrounded transmission lines and

008that's one big reason for our outage problems uh DTE acknowledges these need upgrading to 13.2 kilovolt systems I've heard that uh 13.2 conversion requires a new substation with a new ITC feed at 120 kilovolt transmission which in turn requires miso approval so lead time is a big issue my question is shouldn't DTE be currently replacing its local 4.8 kilowatt local grid with 13.2 kilovolts while building or upgrading the necessary substations to solve our capacity problem this would address reliability and capacity at the same time instead DTE seems to be avoiding 13.2 conversion at least here in Ann Arbor and just hardening the existing 4.8 kilovolt lines I'd be interested to hear from Mr Witkowski what dte's plans are for 4.8 to 13.2 conversion in Ann Arbor question four I've heard that DTE has charged developers

009fees on the order of up to three hundred thousand dollars each to increase capacity to serve new developments is this true and if so how does DTE justify this given that the mpsc guarantees the company at 9.9 return on equity for Capital Improvements uh isn't DTE getting paid twice for the same work 130 seconds and once by rate payers uh question five last one uh it's corollary question shouldn't DTE be paying itself for capacity upgrades like any company making a capital investment in new Revenue generating infrastructure um so uh those are my five questions do we need new substations uh can DTE leverage uh der to reduce the necessary work uh the 4.8 to 13.2 conversion what's DT's plans for Ann Arbor on dte's excessive Feast of developers and double dipping from the public purse

010right and thank you thank you um no further callers great okay so we're going to move into discussion um I'll share a little bit about uh this this component of what we have on the agenda and kind of the thinking behind what we put together here um so the thought was to have a bit of a Roundtable discussion and so we invited two speakers to come today to the meeting um we invited a professor Seth guicama from U of M uh he was unable to join us in live right now because he got a flight delay uh but he provided a recorded statement and we also have my Mike wakowski here on the call um thank you so much Mike for joining us we're excited to speak with you um so we've asked both um

011both of these folks to come and prepare some brief remarks and I'm going to share kind of the prompt um just so you have a sense of of what the um the kind of concept around the sharing will be and uh so then after we hear the two shares and I'd like to kind of open it up and have all the Commissioners have kind of an open discussion and and could you ask questions and um definitely share um if you have any um questions from constituents otherwise um yeah we'll kind of make it a bit of an open discussion so let me just quickly bring up the prompt okay we're looking to have a conversation with all the speakers on the commission about what the reliability of the electric grid might look like in five

012or ten years and what could change over those time frames to reduce outages and improve outage response um with that in mind it might not be as necessary to look at specific dates or areas um but we are concerned about outages that were experienced uh recently in in many parts of Ann Arbor and we feel that it's at the top of mind um especially from from recent uh uh storms so that's what we shared and um why don't we have uh the recorded message first and then Mike will have you so because we have you live we can kind of go right into the discussion from there does that sound okay great okay Joe can you play that for us yep I will share um please let me know I'm clicking share sound but if

013it doesn't share please let me know professor at the University of Michigan and I was asked to speak at tonight's uh council meeting talk a little bit about Power Systems uh storms and reliability I wish I could be there with you in person but due to travel challenges I am stuck in Chicago trying to get home today so like I said I'm Seth Geiger I'm a professor in engineering at the University of Michigan in a lot of my research over the past 15 to 20 years has focused on power outage forecasting and Storm Restoration with utilities we've worked a lot with a lot of the big utilities throughout the US and developed models that they use to help support their storm response planning in particular outage forecasting wanted to talk a little bit about kind

014of the outage process why do utilities have outages what can they do about it what can't they do about it talk a little bit about restoration and then talk about some of the longer term hardening options so in terms of outages for big storms no utility can prevent all the outages there will be outages there's nothing well there's nothing they can do within reasonable costs all the outages so there will be outages what the utility has to do is Strike this cost benefit analysis of how much Harding do we do how do we restore from those outages that we're inevitably going to have that we can get that right balance of cost to customers versus reliability of the system so in the kinds of weather events we get in the southeast Michigan area typically wind

015events uh storm winter events ice storms like we had earlier this year most of the outages are going to be in the distribution so we have the generation transmission and distribution the generation is the production of the power the transmission is the high voltage lines typically very high maintained to a very high standard and then the distribution is what most of us typically see and that's our our lines the cities in the rural areas around Ann Arbor so this is where most of the outages are in Wind events and snow events and Ice events and this is where a company like DTE has to put in a lot of effort to maintain those lines so what causes outages uh often it's things impacting lines so trees falling on lines is a big one could be

016debris in some cases it could be lines themselves failing but typically a big one is trees impacting lights which points to one of the big things that utilities have to do to maintain the system and maintain reliability which is tree trimming featuring's not always popular with homeowners because well they're trimming our trees but this is um research has shown this is arguably the single biggest thing that utilities can do to improve the reliability of the system that is trimmed the trees more frequently in terms of farther back so utilities have to have the leeway to do that tree trimming and DTE has significantly improved their tree trimming over the last few years since a big storm we had a I think it was a March storm a number of years ago so they put a

017lot of effort into that tree trimming process and made some significant improvements that's not always popular with homeowners because they're out there cutting your trees but this is this has a huge impact on power system reliability so this is one of the things they can do in advance of any storm to improve the reliability now let's talk a little bit about a storm that's forecast so kind of the short term what does utility do so they see a weather forecast that says okay we're gonna have 70 mile dust winds and hail and lightning and all this other stuff right what can they do well the decisions they have are how how many crews do they have on hand to respond to that storm and where do they station them and then there's some extent material

018but cruises the big one and this is where a lot of our researchers tried to help utilities of helping them plan those um true needs so what they have to be able to do is estimate roughly how many outages are we going to have because they can get if they can get number of outages they can figure out well how many crews do we need um given how much work a crew can get done in a 16 hour shift how many crews do we need to get power back on at a certain rate so they need some way of estimating how bad it's going to be before the event so they can get those crews in place so they're not waiting 24 48 hours to get those crews in there to restore power so once

019the outages happen then they have to restore power um prioritization rules vary a little bit utility to utility but generally across the large number of utilities we work with first just go after critical facilities hospitals fire stations police stations water pumping stations things like that some utilities will then prioritize commercial areas particularly commercial areas that have grocery stores and them not all utilities do that and then the general rule is we want to get the most number of people back online as fast as we can so if you're like me and you live in a rural area towards the end of the line we're lower priority which makes sense from the overall societal good so the utilities then go through the process of restoring power and it's a really complicated process it costs them an

020immense amount of money that they then have to expand to get people's power back on okay so that's kind of the short term in the long term utility vegetation management or tree trimming is the big thing they can do they can also think about things to harden the system for example in Hurricane prone areas one thing that some utilities like Florida Power and Light have done is replace wooden poles sub wooden poles with concrete poles very very expensive but very effective at keeping those holes holes from being broken something else that sometimes gets mentioned as undergrounding power lines so this is something after a really big outage that often press and politicians say oh we should bury everything the challenge there is cost the cost of undergrounding line vary tremendously but a million to two

021million a line Mile in relatively simple train is not a bad estimate so if you think about how many how much line there is just in Ann Arbor or just in Washington County this would be an immense cost and if you then divide by the number of customers most of us probably are not going to be willing to pay that so undergrounding Universal undergrounding is generally cost prohibitive now if you're building new construction then the cost difference between undergrading and building overhead isn't as big and you see more new construction that's underground again not always so undergrounding is one of those things people talk about but it's not a universal great solution it only makes sense in very targeted places as the utility goes through this whole process there's also another party involved well at

022least one more and in particular The Regulators are involved so the state Regulators have a say in evaluating the performance of a utility both in the long run and in a specific event but then they also have to say in deciding what costs are allowable what costs can be passed on to customers what costs do utilities have to use and if utility is going to invest a lot of money in hardening a system or doing something like that they have to get regulatory approval to do this for example one utility worked with on the East Coast they were proposing four billion dollars of improvements to try and protect against hurricane storm surge right after Hurricane Sandy they don't generally have problems they were having a hard time making that that argument so this is something

023that kind of overlies all of this which is the role of the state regulators so one other thing that I was asked to talk a little bit about is if you look at DTE versus consumers right two utilities right next to each other same state Regulators uh generally fairly similar weather patterns what's the reliability look like well the utilities are required to report to the state they're what's called Sadie safety and Katie numbers we're going to talk about Stadium safety system average Interruption frequency index and system average Interruption duration index so measures how frequently power goes out and how long it's out when it goes out these are very imperfect measures uh We've published some work on that but that's what gets reported um kind of universally so if you look at consumers versus DTE

024on their latest 80 and safety reportings they're about the same there's really not a distinguishable difference between those two utilities it might seem to those of us like me that are DT customer things have been worse but if you look at that ice storm we had earlier this year it hit the DTE area a lot harder than it did the consumers area so from a data perspective at least what's reported publicly to the state they're very similar one interesting thing is that there is enough word trend in these indices over the past few years that is things are getting slightly worse and it's a discernible Trend it's not a it's not like a rocket climb but it is an upward Trend um what's not clear is why is this is the weather getting um more

025difficult is something else going on it's not clear so overall this hopefully gives you some idea of kind of the picture around power outages again most of them kind of what from the weather events we have are happening in the Distribution Center distribution system that utility vegetation management is the single most important thing that DTE can do to help maintain system reliability even if it's not always popular with cities and customers um and they they do have this interaction with the state that there's in some sense constraining them but it's also a partnership in figuring out how to improve this so I hope this helps um if you have questions you can contact me my um email on sgaikema umich.edu thank you stop sharing and just want to again say thanks if you couldn't tell

026um he was recording from the airport today as his flight was significantly delayed I know some have experienced that recently but appreciate the effort for willing to still record in an airport so commission over back yeah I just want to know if he's delayed by a power outage I'm sorry fantastic a rhetorical question or no okay um thank you thank you so much Joe for sharing that with us um I I let um I let him know uh that I'm gonna follow up with him so um with our minutes here and some notes that I'm taking so um I can pass all this good stuff along okay um Mike wakowski would you like to share with us what you came just came to say yeah so again uh first of all Mike Witkowski one of

027our engineering managers here at DTE uh thank you for uh having us here this evening and um I I guess I'll start with going through a few high level notes and then I'll dive into the questions that were asked those were some very good questions uh by the uh resident earlier and then um I'll be happy to take any any questions at the the council has here so um you know we're we're here to to come and talk about what we've got going on on the system uh what the city of Ann Arbor uh residence businesses have been experiencing uh you know what we're you know trying to do about it so uh yes we know there are uh definitely areas uh that struggle with reliability repeated outages um it sometimes moves around uh year

028over year and that's kind of where you get those pockets of customers who really you know hey I've had two three four outages this year uh and it becomes very repetitive and very disruptive especially a lot of people most of us here you know working taking meetings from home so you're noticing things a lot more than uh you used to where you come home and oh my my clocks are blinking to easy reset you don't it's not the same disruption so um here at DT we've we've really been attacking the reliability it it does uh take a little while to get the results uh we're looking for and you're looking for um but at a high level uh there's four main points that we are really diving into um and the professor kind of kind

029of hit on some of them for us number one really is tree drum uh it is it is a tough thing to do um we all love our trees um I've got some good ones around me here in Livonia and um you know I drive around the neighborhood and they're getting into the power line so I you know we got to go through and and trim those out um we do aim for a five-year cycle on our tree trimming um and Ann Arbor is very close to uh being on that five-year cycle um I think by the end of this year it might be um on that five-year point so um it's actually further ahead than than some other communities in that standpoint um areas where we do uh complete our our tree trimming uh

030do experience a 60 to 70 Improvement in reliability so that's both in terms of your uh number of times you go out and the length of your outage uh just because you've got less less occurrences so it's it's a big uh big impact uh in terms of a quick hit uh instant result the longer term things uh you've got your your maintenance programs where you go through uh replace pole top equipment uh do your maintenance at your substations uh and and keep everything in that working condition so there's a variety of programs we have uh in that space um and honestly for Ann Arbor it does fall into the next category which is more of uh rebuilt and and upgrades um so we've been talking I've talked with planning Commissions in in City councils here

031in Ann Arbor for the better part of a decade on on some of the substation projects uh we've been working on in the city [Music] um uh a couple of the big ones right now we've got uh continuing work at our buckler substation which is there at our Broadway service center site um that is one of those projects that is in that 4.8 to 13.2 uh distribution voltage uh bucket uh that's one of the actually the first one in Ann Arbor uh that we're working on in um I'm glad to say we're finally bringing that home uh here within the next I'll say 9 to 12 months um optimistically by end of year but probably into uh next spring to um work through the final conversions on that project so when we do these projects

032to convert from 4.8 to 13 to um it's it's pretty much a wholesale replacement of the poles and wires um and when we're putting in new poles and wires it's to today's standards so you know a lot of the system in Ann Arbor is from when the community was built um you know 20s 30s 40s 50s um so that equipment has has served its purpose it's time to get the new stuff up there and it's it's the the technology the standards the hardware is so much better than it used to be um you know at a simple stance um Professor mentioned uh transitioning from wood poles to concrete poles and steel poles uh we're working that in so that our most essential service lines are featuring steel poles or concrete poles um we're getting rid

033of wood cross arms uh either going with no cross arm where the connections are directly to the poll or with the fiberglass cross arm and then the the insulators that the wires connect to um used to just kind of be a little piece of porcelain uh with a with the ridge in it the wire sits in there and you kind of strap it on with a with a loop and it just holds in there the new ones are um they have a metal top and it's a clamp top so you fit it in there bolt it in and um it's it's a really strong system so that's what Ann Arbor can expect to be seeing wherever we're doing these projects like I said that that buckler one that we're working to finish up right now

034um we just did uh an area of work in the northern part of downtown and uh the next wave that we're going to be working on here the rest of Summer and into the fall is in the northern residential area um Northwest area like uh towards uh like Sunset and west of Main Street there so that's project number one that is heading towards the Finish Line uh and we're not stopping there um my engineering team has been working on a handful of other projects that we've um moved into design and starting into Construction uh the second one is on the east side of town uh actually just outside of town uh at a substation at Plymouth in Dixboro um and that is going to be uh strengthening up that area which will then Cascade uh

035West over 23 uh kind of along Plymouth Road there so it'll it'll bring uh into that area and allow us to do additional upgrades there so that one just started uh construction this year other parts of the city we just moved out of engineering into design uh similar projects at our uh substitution called Pittsfield which is down on um honestly just off of uh Eisenhower and Burton um down in the Southeast corner so that's going to be the same thing full rebuild of the poles and wires and at that location we're going to be proposing to replace the substation on site so basically take out all the old equipment build a new substation on that site on the west side of town at our Hemlock substation uh at uh kind of roughly Maple and Liberty

036uh same thing uh replacing all the poles and wires in that area um and uh replacing that substation so those two each are like is it just coming out of engineering uh starting into designing we're gonna start to see some Field construction next year on those uh out in the uh the residential areas and uh each of those projects uh will continue for several years as we work through those um and then we've got uh plans that we're starting for the remaining substations in town too so it's kind of a cascading effect as you're converting this 4.8 to 13.2 you need to have 13 2 to 13 2 connections that way you can move the load around you can tie the circuits together um and it it's not just for capacity reasons there but it's

037for reliability um that way if if there is an event uh where a circuit goes down uh you can tie it to an adjacent circuit and that really gets into uh one of the last points of our of our plan is really looking into automation uh getting into a smart grid that um can perform some Restorations without manual intervention so um you know if you think of the circuit breaker that you've got in your basement if you blow a fuse you got to go downstairs flip the switch um and uh you know sometimes there's nothing you need to fix you just kind of switch that uh breaker back in and it holds you can think of the same thing on the electric grid a lot of events honestly um caused by trees are are momentary

038in nature so yes you get you get the ones that bring down wires bring down poles and our stronger system should mitigate um a good portion of those but you do get ones where a tree limb comes down and and causes two wires to contact so that's enough to blow a fuse um but with some of the new equipment we're getting out there it will run through those operations uh automatically so you don't need that manual intervention you don't need to go downstairs flip your breaker I.E you don't need to send a line crew out to go plug with fuse even beyond that the smart grid is really another level more where if uh you know area a is out of power because there is a downline we're able to isolate that from our control

039system downtown and then reroute the power through another circuit um re-energizing as many customers uh as possible uh while we wait to make the the repairs of the down wire so um those are our four main points um that we're really uh diving into uh tree trim and maintenance kind of the Cabo one two uh short-term uh short-term work uh for a quick impact and then our longer term plays around rebuilds conversions and uh system Automation and smart grid so that's kind of the prepared notes um would uh would you like me to dive into the four or five questions that were asked by the caller yes okay so those were really good questions um and I think I started to touch on some of those a little bit uh question number one was around

040substation Transformers and uh you know our plans for more substations um yes we did build um our new buckler substation about 10 years ago now like I said at the Ann Arbor service center um and we did build a new station in partnership with the University of Michigan on their campus um but when you look at the rest of Ann Arbor we've we've really looked at what we can do with our existing properties so what we're looking to do is um replace on-site um for the vast majority of them so I'm not going to you know take it off the table that we might need a new substation somewhere that we don't have one today but the plan that we've put out there um does look like we'll be we will be able to efficiently

041convert all of the 4.8 to 13 too create um about a level of 3x capacity as far as what Ann Arbor has now on the distribution system by just replacing the existing substations where they are there's some other um things we have if uh you know you get a large growth area somewhere or you know depending how EVS play out uh what level of charger is needed um throughout commercial or residential areas there's some things we're looking to learn in that space But the plan we've got together like I said about 3x capacity and it does plan for full uh 4.8 to 13 2 conversion throughout the city of Ann Arbor so no I don't think we will need more substations at this time but uh you know what kind of we'll kind of see

042how that goes a little bit the second question was around uh distributed energy uh resources uh ders um that is definitely something that becomes a lot more feasible as you convert to 13 too um because as you've got uh proposed deers whether it's solar storage out there as as those Dr owners whether it's us or um you know independent customers if they want to put power back onto the grid the grid needs to be able to support that two-way power flow and that is a lot more feasible with the 13-2 grid just comes down to voltage support resistance of the wires um and uh you know we're excited to be working with the Viridian development um on their plans um with uh you know solar and storage there that could support the community as well

043as uh possibly come back onto the grid as well so um it's definitely something we are working towards uh we want to learn more about and see where uh where the industry takes us but we're definitely ready to to support uh the interest in that space um I talked quite a bit about 4.8 to 13 um and that that kind of lines up with our big what we call our DGP our distribution grid plan that's something that we're uh working on with the mpsc and that kind of looks at not just our one year or five year view but what our 15 plus year view is for the whole system so um everything I was talking about our our four-point plan um really weaves into that DGP um and uh conversions is a big piece

044of that part of the question that was asked was uh you know how it comes into play with um connections to ITC the transmission company um so in a simple terms the ITC they run the 120 000 volt uh transmission lines that connects some substations to substations DTE also operates as sub transmission line which operates at forty thousand volts um and so we have some stations um actually the newest of which was is either the one that we built in partnership with U of M that's a 120 to 40 KV step down station um where ITC brings in 120. we step it down to 40 and then we provide that 40 to U of M for their distribution system um and they we have a series of of substations that uh are for for U

045of M on the south side of town near Briarwood uh is actually uh one of our probably most state-of-the-art substations we have right now it's a a combined station where again ITC brings in 120 transmission we step it down to 40kv sub transmission that 40 KV sub transmission then goes out and feeds a good majority of the substations in Ann Arbor as well as several other stations around um the city but that substation near Briarwood also has now a 120 to 13 2 connection Point uh where we serve that Briarwood area so yes DTE does work with ITC on uh connections for substations however the substations that we have left in Ann Arbor are served by the 40 KV system and we believe our upgraded uh or replaced substations on those sites will continue to

046be connected to the 40 KV system so at this time we don't see a need to go through the regional approval process with miso with ITC so we don't see that it continued or additional time lag on those projects the projects that we have in our plan are ones that we can move forward with as we get approved through the mphc so we are definitely not avoiding uh conversion to 13.2 if anything uh in Ann Arbor we're looking at how we can expedite that so that's always an area where we look to the community to the leaders here [Music] um you know for those Partnerships um as we're as we're bringing uh projects to the table um so we will be bringing those uh whenever we do substation projects or the large rebuild projects those

047go through the city approval process for permitting and all of that so um you'll be learning a lot more of that as uh as those plans go through design process the last question was a two-parter um and it's it's probably something we could talk for hours on itself is around um what we call contribution and Aid of construction or ciec um and and what that really boils down to is the the question was why we are charging some developers uh for capacity and uh what it comes down to is um you know if customer one um wants to add some load and it creates an overload or projected overload on our system um that customer is responsible to help us mitigate that if they don't uh contribute uh cic uh then that cost is uh

048pretty much goes into the rate base and would be absorbed by all rate payers um so if you look at it at a wider scale um just like we can't charge uh customers in Ann Arbor hire on their bill or customers across the board but customers in Ann Arbor for this purpose higher because we're um you know supporting work for the Gordie Howe Bridge um you know that the large projects have to contribute some ciac into that uh contribution or otherwise it it goes across all the repairs so um we're not double charging or double um making profits on any of that is basically whatever a developer pays into a project is less money that we ask for in our array cases so there's no no additional uh funding there so that's kind of the

049short answers to those I know I kind of talked to for a while but uh definitely open to any questions the council has and uh go from there thank you so much Mike that was a really thorough uh discussion and I'm so happy you shared all that um I wanted to ask you just briefly before we open it up um you know hearing your your kind of four strategies here both long term and and short-term to use some of the reliability issues can you just speak to sort of like 5 10 and 15 years I know that the distribution grid plan is coming out um but you know and also hearing that we're kind of like towards the five-year end of the cycle for tree trimming like within five years what maybe projects do you

050see completed um you know and what kind of results I know you don't have a crystal ball like maybe a short response um because I would like to open it up but but do you see what I mean like just give us a sense for your for um approaches to improve reliability what are the timelines for those yeah so the the tree trim and your your standard maintenance those are going to be ongoing um so customers can expect that every five years we're going through trimming trees and the the biggest change over the last decade has been are changing our tree trim standards um which you know unfortunately in some situations does mean trimming a little bit wider away from the wires um our new equipment like we said when we can go to armless

051we're bringing those wires closer to the pool so we can bring that trim radius along with us um but yeah tree trim and and your standard pull top or equipment maintenance whether it's on poles or at substations um those are going to be ongoing your biggest ones like I said are going to be the the conversions your rebuilds um which feeds into reliability feeds into capacity and then enables the automation so what I would say in in the next five years uh we'll have you know obviously the the buckler substation project uh we'll be wrapping up within the next year or less uh so that's one big piece there for the kind of northern part of the city um and then those other three that I mentioned uh that are out of engineering now on

052the northeast side Southeast side and West Side um those projects when you look at them they're about 40 to 60 million dollars a piece so it does take uh several years to work through those both in terms of the the sheer number of pole and wire Replacements you have to do um we are definitely um pursuing underground opportunities where it makes sense and um you know so that doesn't mean that in all the residential areas we're going to take the stuff that's in in the back areas and and put it underground um we can talk about that uh at another time at length um there's a lot of uh pros and cons to that um but what it does mean is we're we're looking at opportunities where it does make sense to um get some

053of the core infrastructure um the most important piece is get those underground so um you know sometimes where it's along main roads or um you know really bad careers we're looking at those opportunities so it's definitely something that we are very interested all the way at our at our executive level um and then you have the substation parts of those projects so they take a little while um to go through those but I would say in in the five years you should kind of start to see that perimeter of um of the 4.8 to 13 2 conversions start to come into the city um and then in the five to ten year range uh would be the next core of uh substations um working through those so um that's that's kind of where we're at

054I think you know city of Ann Arbor we're probably in the 10 to 15 year range for full conversion and like I said we're we're looking for uh opportunities to to uh to bring that in uh at every uh at every opportunity great thanks for bringing that down for us okay I'd like to open the conversation up for anyone who would like to share and ask questions bless your heart all right thank you thank you so much that was um a great presentation I appreciate the attention the detail on a lot of the issues um from from both speakers um one of the questions I had about with respect to DT is I I know recently that there's there is a sort of longer term plan that's been laid out and you're just we're speaking

055to that I'm sort of wondering what it looks like also beyond the 15 to 20 year time frame in part because you know I think you know as we look back in some of the news reports there's quite a bit of talk about how old a lot of the infrastructure is and and how it's needed updating and sort of I'm wondering if you're able to speak at all to sort of what that looks like now moving forward I'm really appreciative of the sort of 15 to 20-year time frame as the sort of outward look but then what does it look like as we sort of shift our time frame forward are we are we thinking about 15 to 20 year time frames now every year moving forward or are you thinking on a longer term

056scale how does how's DT thinking about that sort of longer term Vision Beyond even just this current sort of planning cycle you know that's that's a good question um it's tough because right now they're you know there's there's so much excitement here on the engineering team about having this opportunity to rebuild the grid and you know at the tail end of this 10 to 15 year window here uh Ann Arbor is probably going to have one of the newest Distribution Systems in the country um you know we're doing it throughout our whole territory um and uh honestly Detroit and Ann Arbor have um been a big Focus of of our conversion efforts so um you know Ann Arbor's uh uh you know quite a bit smaller than Detroit's footprint so uh we're gonna get through

057that um I I think in a decent amount of time here and uh beyond that it's really going to be wherever the wherever the uh the industry goes uh you know back to the question of ders uh solar and storage I think are going to be big components um you know different um opportunities for that smart grid and automation that we're we're really pushing for um that's something we we're looking to get a lot more here in the in the immediate future you know the next five years as well so all of those things combined I think is going to be a very uh dramatically different grid um than you're used to today in terms of uh reliability and uh resiliency and like how the the group can react um to those issues because you

058know a lot of things we're seeing ice or um trees and a lot of the trees that are coming down you know gotta say it's a lot of them are despite what we trim it's it's a large tree from outside of our uh easement and those are um you know always tough um but uh you know if something goes wrong at a substation or something like that we're building a grid that can absorb um those contingencies uh without overbuilding as well thank you Richard mursky good evening thank you for your presentation and also thank you to Professor um glickema uh I hate I'm hoping that um Mr witowski you're able to answer something that the professor addressed um he indicated that utilities evaluate costs and benefits when deciding um how to upgrade um for reliability

059purposes um I'm wondering if there is um a clear understanding and definition for example imposed by the mpsc or um maybe some type of Association on how that is evaluated and what are the costs and what are the benefits that are included um I've been impacted several times in the last year by outages um and the last time I just recently three weeks or so ago I lost power for two days um in spite of buying ice we lost a lot of things in our freezer some of which we were able to consume some of which we couldn't um so I'm I'm really wondering when he says utilities evaluate costs and benefits how was that done and is DTE do it the same way that consumers does or that Duke power does or um PG

060e how how is this evaluation done yeah that's a really good question and we do work with the mpsc very closely on that um we have what we call a a GPM or a global priority model um where all of the projects um that our Engineers are proposing um are put into the model and um scored based on a variety of categories benefits could include safety impact um uh outage impact frequency duration um risk of a risk of what the event could be uh you know like uh kind of like the professor mentioned in terms of like storm outages or restoration strategy um you know is it is he is an event at a site gonna affect a thousand customers or 100 customers is it going to affect a hospital or a public service like

061a water station something like that so um it is a an endless amount of variables that that weigh into that benefit side of the equation um but we've done a lot of uh work a lot of discussions with uh the mpsc and we do have um pretty good support um for our our push to convert the 4.8 system um and that's where a lot of our dollars are going um long term um and that's that's what's that's what's now driving um a lot of that uh investment into the city of Ann Arbor uh between that and uh like I said some of the newer Technologies around automation [Music] um we're doing Pilots with micro grids um really really doing a lot of uh a lot of things in Ann Arbor now that uh you know

062we we weren't uh approved for in the past I have a couple of other questions if I may uh the professor also mentioned two standard metrics um that are used um I didn't get those exactly but um I have a more general question and that is DTE has a service Monopoly that's granted um to service customers in a region um including residents industry Etc um I'm wondering what level of performance transparency there is that DT has for example on these two metrics um overall for its uh entire service area as well as by jurisdiction um that anyone like myself or a customer that you know pays a billion dollars a year for for power to DTE where can they access information on DTE performance and similarly you gave a lot of anecdotal information um well

063first let me finish the first thought so what I would love to see I don't know if this possible but this is something that you know we're talking about also for the city is um performance means what are the trends um over time um how do those Trends compared to goals that have been set in the past um how what are the goals for the future and how does your performance compare to benchmarks um CMS was mentioned as one Benchmark but there's clearly probably other benchmarks and without that you can talk a lot about we're looking for opportunities and you can list 15 different projects and things like that but without really seeing what the outcomes are it's difficult for us to understand what those are so I'm wondering what is being done in that

064regard yeah I'm just I'm getting some uh some additional support here from one of my VPS so um yes um so the two metrics that you mentioned are uh Safi and Sadie um real simple way to look at those safety is frequency Sadie is duration so if I mean neither one of those um as I understand it and the way he is described as well includes a factor or a multiplier indicating the number of residents impacted or the number of businesses or anything like that right neither one of those really includes an impact yeah those those actually would include the whole system or or an aggregate um so when you look at the duration piece um Katie with a c would be an individual customer so you would have a Katie okay actually everybody on

065this call would have a Katie that's how long you were out um for a for a year or whatever the period of time is if you wanted to aggregate why um when you put those all together that becomes the Sadie the system average so um but again at their course safety frequency Sadie duration right uh when you look at the DT system as a whole I don't have the numbers up here but um and I'm not going to pretend to make them up um but our our safety on average um is usually fairly good um there are definitely Pockets um where customers experience a high frequency of events in a year um I'm with you right now I've had three including the two during the ice storm and one two weeks ago so um you

066know right now nobody's nobody's immune to it um even though we're focusing on it duration um that is an area where where we're um under performing some of the other uh peer utilities um and that's that really goes to our Focus around the automation space and that smart grid space where can the General Public access that information is is it on a GTE web page is it through the mpsc how is that reported yeah so we do report it to the mpsc um I don't know if it is um published on our uh website it looks like it is um starting the first quarter of this year um it's reported on the npsc website um and it was initially reported as an aggregate aggregate system total now it is published by ZIP code and it

067is uh now reported quarterly so [Music] um you know like you said the data we got to get that visible um and that's uh something that the npsc has uh has requested so um it's it's out there um and we're definitely you know willing to to come meet and talk again more about any you know specific Ann Arbor issues for sure the other thing that you did is you ticked off a number of different projects I'm wondering if there is a again a web page public pacing web page where that kind of information is available I'll give you a an example of what the city of Ann Arbor does it has a web page you could take a look at it the city of Ann Arbor pavement condition page and you can go and you

068can see what the average pay payment condition is in Ann Arbor you can look at the pavement condition um for Indian individual streets you can click on those streets and you can get information that indicates when those are on the schedule to be paid resurfaced whatever the case may be it would be wonderful if that kind of information was out there again for us so that we could understand um what is DTE doing other than just sort of anecdotal and a list of projects information from you um and so that we we would be able to plan accordingly um with you know any projects that might be impacted by that here is anything like that available yeah so you actually also brought up something that I'll touch on too um yes there is a map

069that is available um it's pretty high level uh but it is available to the public so we can share that link with you um the DGP the distribution grid plan is also posted on the mpsc website um it's I think the prior version might be over 100 Pages um and the the new one we're trying to slow down a little bit but it is a good read um one thing you mentioned um is you know really looking for I think Partnerships with communities where you're doing projects uh where you might be doing a road project how [Music] you know that may overlay with the work we need to do um so that's that's something that uh we're definitely interested in having those discussions um and seeing where where those overlay and um you know it

070could be you know significant cost savings um for all parties so I don't know if you intended to to spark that thought but but you brought that up good I I have several other questions but I'll yield the floor because I don't know how much more time we want to devote to this I'll just let you know that there's a lot of interest from the general public I had two people text me with questions um and I really didn't get to either one of them I mean one of them was simply um we pay high rates higher than the average in the Midwest and why doesn't DTE simply hire more people and accelerate the conversion from 4 between 4.8 to 13.2 not only here but also in in underserved areas in Detroit um as you're

071probably aware um there's been analyzes done on that um but you don't have to answer that question I mean there's a lot of other questions that the community has on this this topic as you might imagine yeah thanks commission moroski yeah I'd like to um gather those actually commissionersky if you could share them maybe with Joe and we can get them on um on the meeting minutes because I'd like to start compiling a list and I think that tracking this um along with the documents and the kind of public resources that were shared around reliability are super important um you know I I have a similar um experience of just having friends you know contact me and ask specific questions and that's some where some of the motivation came from my questions so um yeah

072I think as a community we all are checking this individually and it makes a lot of sense to kind of get together and make sure that um our voices are heard so thanks commissioner mursky council member Regina are you ready to share thanks um I also have a number of questions um and so I'm gonna I'm gonna try to keep them um relatively focused to kind of your area um Mr rotowski because I I know that um not everything that I I have would necessarily probably be best directed to you um but specifically on some of the grid capacity um you've touched you touched on this briefly and and I guess I wanted to dig in a little bit more um around exactly where I I've uh where where the the challenge is um particularly

073when we have new um new builds in the area that are are going to create a capacity issue um and one of the frustrations that I think continues to be a bubbling up seemingly more and more and particularly as Ann Arbor is working quickly to address our housing crisis and our affordability crisis is that we will have a new proposal for for um uh an apartment complex a multiple unit housing complex that's willing to come in and I'm hearing consistently from the developer on that project that hundreds of thousands if not a million plus dollars of grid improvements are are being requested from DTE in order to in their view uh have the benefit of then paying you for the power that they're going to use as well and so I know it you mentioned

074it doesn't it's not really double dipping but they are I mean they're essentially paying you to put in the infrastructure to pay you for the product and I guess I'm wondering I I heard your explanation around spreading that across rate rate payers would be the alternative um I've heard mixed things about where the hold up on that that is you know I I would actually challenge a little bit I mean when we're hearing that this is adding hundreds of thousands if not a million plus dollars to every new Housing Development that's coming in um that makes every one of those units even less affordable for our community and so that challenge is also exacerbating our our affordability crisis here and so I guess I'm trying to understand a little bit more about what goes into

075that decision what goes into that cost and why there is such a heavy burden for kind of the last in to make up for really the the um the additional grid capacity that's needed yeah so um yeah like I said earlier we could we could talk on this for hours um I actually kind of do lead our our ciac uh policy around this and we're we're always anything that we charge a customer uh to contribute towards your towards a project is always the um minimum standard so we're not going to charge them to rebuild Miles and Miles um because it's something we want to do we're going to charge the the minimum of what it takes to serve their development um oftentimes we do opt uh to invest beyond that to continue those upgrades to

076set up for um some additional projects so we are looking for those opportunities um you know I would definitely be interested in in talking with you further on this I I haven't seen one lately that has been in the million dollar range but there very well may have been um some of the most challenging projects actually are downtown Ann Arbor um some of the ones I'm thinking of right now are actually more relocation based versus capacity based um so if we have to move lines put them underground those downtown underground builds are especially expensive um putting in the conduit and the cable and replicating an overhead system with switching opportunities um it can be quite expensive so that might be some of those most expensive ones um and uh yeah as we continue these conversion

077projects um a lot of the capacity will be there um so you know I guess I'm not giving you a uh you know a brief and Brilliant answer to that um because there's many layers to it but um cic is a policy um at the mpsc level um so let's you know we're working through that requirement and looking to be as efficient uh with those costs to the developers as as absolutely possible and the biggest thing we really do encourage developers to do is as soon as they're thinking about a project start talking to us um because sometimes it means we can um you know look at what we've got in our plans sometimes that means um putting their electrical room on the west side of the building versus the east side of the building

078um because sometimes the difference of a block uh can be in capacity is there or it isn't um and uh so getting those early discussions um you know we can really be a partner in this and um you know make sure capacity is there when customers need it yeah I appreciate the offer to continue that conversation as well because this is something that's coming up more and more frequently um and particularly as we're trying to expedite the increase of housing stock in the community um I've also heard kind of a much smaller level um luckily impact on kind of a Housing Commission project that we have there it's even you know more impactful when we're trying to build specifically affordable units um and so uh I would very much appreciate a continued conversation on that

079and if it's something that needs to be addressed at the mp uh SC level I think that's a conversation worth having um uh also a bit on infrastructure and I I don't know if this is outside of your scope is on the actual technology that DTE is using itself um the outage map in particular um I've consistently heard from folks about kind of the inaccuracy around the outage map um sometimes the outage map itself is out um and then also I think what I've been hearing a bit more frequently from constituents is reports on the outage map that they're back on uh that their power is back on when they are not back on they have to resubmit a report and then feel like they're starting all over again in the process and so that

080comes down to a bit of the public trust issue but also around the reliability concerns is that I get the question does DT even know which power is on and which power is off during these major outages um so I don't know if you can address kind of some of the reliability of the outage map itself I can't really speak to the outage map itself um I I will say we we hear those concerns and um the team is definitely looking into um modifications to make those improvements um the second piece that you touched on um is a very um frequent thing that we hear from customers um and you know as I'm downtown working on the Storm teams um that's a big challenge that we look at um so that's it's this whole concept

081of Trouble behind trouble um and you take the simple form of it let's say a whole circuit is a thousand customers um and that's on day one we roll out there because that's the biggest job we've got out on the system we're gonna send a crew out there get that wire back up on the poles and think that we restored that thousand customers um what happens uh a lot of times is um there may be a few section a smaller section 50 customers 100 customers towards the end of the circuit well there's a wire down and a blown fuse there too so what what has to kind of happened is that first event gets fixed and then another event gets created for that smaller event and when you look at the the whole restoration strategy

082that you employ during a storm uh just like the professor mentioned you know you're trying to hit your critical services but you're also trying to get as many customers back as soon as possible um you know the unfortunate the way that plays out is sometimes those customers get a response that says hey congratulations your power's been restored no it hasn't you're still out it's very frustrating um so that is something we have a lot of attention on trying to figure out how to um manage that um and um both in in terms of the operational side but as well um in terms of the messaging side so um we definitely hear that and um we're we're trying to get an answer on how to uh fix that situation um I also heard you mention that

083kind of over the next 10 to 15 year period that with the plans Ann Arbor or will have one of the kind of most upgraded parts of the grid um I I hear that as kind of an elected official with you know 10 to 15 years particularly the type of year we had this year it it's not super encouraging to me um and I I actually want to challenge something a little bit that um that you didn't say actually the professor professor said but I think is worth discussing here and and I'd like to hear a little bit more about dte's plans I'm I'm grateful to hear that you're now open to the possibility of working with the city and potentially burying lines when we're doing existing road work that's something that council member Briggs

084and I actually brought up in a conversation with DTE in our first term or the first half of our term uh two years ago um and at the time it was not an interest area um so I'm glad to hear that that's shifting um but I I do want to challenge a little bit on the notion that undergrounding lines isn't is cost prohibitive um and and I wanna preface that with I know that the data is the the study could be updated um to use current data but there's a FEMA study out there that that was looking at um the fact that two significant storm events uh two major storm events essentially pays for undergrounding a line the costs that go into that I'm sure that it's potentially three or four Now by today's costs

085um but I look at you know last year the last several years DTE averaged almost a billion dollars in profits if we accept that it costs a million dollars uh a mile to Barry lines every year for the next 10 years you know we could be burying a thousand miles of line every year so and and not only I mean does that seem to make good business sense in the long run for me but for my constituents the people in Ann Arbor the people in Ypsilanti the people throughout Southeast Michigan why is that not the best investment that DTE could be making in terms of the astronomical costs if you every household that has to throw away an entire refrigerator of food every household that has to get into a hotel room because it's freezing

086um those costs are being borne by the community already and so I guess why shouldn't we expect that DTE should be looking at making the most reliable grid possible when they are reporting a billion dollar in profit every year yeah so on the on the Underground piece um like I said we're definitely open to it um we have a variety of um pilot projects that we're looking to see where we can make cost improvements on that and if we are successful in those Pilots um you know it is something we hope we can bring uh to scale in a lot wider areas so um all the projects I mentioned for Ann Arbor like I said we are looking at underground um at the simple level um it's taking more underground from the substations um like

087I said for those for those core parts of the circuit what we would call like a backbone that impacts the largest number of customers we're looking to to extend that Underground um you know how we bring that into the residential areas uh there are challenges there in terms of um easements where to put Transformers um you know putting underground uh lines in a residential area could have almost a you know more detrimental impact to trees depending on where the roots are um but that's not everywhere so um we are going to look for those opportunities um and I think definitely looking where there are our road projects are some of those Maybe you know more optimistic opportunities where um there's there's some cost benefits so um yes it's something where all right like you know

088I was in a meeting uh proposing a project just a couple of weeks ago with our president and we said oh you know we want to put overhead here and he's he's ticking off on the side you know here's two miles of missed underground opportunities so it's it is high focus um all the way to the top so um it's it's something we're uh we're looking to do and um you know you know looking to to improve our cost on that sorry um I think I think the last question I have that I'll ask right now before I seed the floor for a minute for for others um because I know that I have opportunities to talk to um to other folks at DT more regularly um I guess this maybe goes a little bit

089towards the question that John was asking about benchmarking and and some of the DT has relatively reliably at least in recent times been one of the worst in the country in terms of the the frequency with which there are outages or shutoffs um I don't believe that we have kind of the worst situation in terms of trees or storms and so I guess I'm wondering if DT has been analyzing like how did we get here how how I mean I think I'm I maybe know that I I personally feel maybe we have not invested enough in the infrastructure improvements that have been needed over the years but is is DTE acknowledging how we got here to make sure that you know I I hear 10 to 15 years Ann Arbor's going to have the best

090grid but then 10 to 15 years after that will we will we be back in the same place again um and and I guess I just would like to be able to understand how we can trust that DTE is not only going to upgrade the grid now because there's a bit of pressure on them from Ann Arbor as we explore our opportunities and our Alternatives but that this is something that we can count on into the future and and I I just don't know that I I have that confidence and so I'd I'd like to hear a little bit about what DTE um is doing in terms of benchmarking and making sure that where we are right now is not the future yeah um you know the the short answer to that is yes we

091do a lot of uh benchmarking both with uh Midwest utilities uh you know look in the utilities in the South that face hurricanes um you know we don't get hurricanes but you know we've had some some pretty strong winds um more frequently than we would have expected recently so um you know looking to see what is successful well in those areas uh we're also part of a variety of uh industry um groups um one of them being epri who does a lot of studies um and uh different benchmarking type efforts across uh the whole country and even outside of the country so um we're looking to uh those that's where we're getting uh some of the new uh equipment uh that we're bringing in [Music] um so how we can employ those um the distributed

092resources uh like I said solar storage um wind um and using those um into that micro grid space uh that's something really exciting that we're just starting to get into um so those are the things we look at and yeah I mean it's a valid question you know what what happens at the end once once Ann Arbor's got one of the newest in in the country um you know it like I said it's going to depend where really the industry goes what the usage goes um you know how we got here is is a long story we can um definitely come back and and talk with that another time there's a lot of variables into that um you know when you look at uh population shifts um over the in in Michigan over the years

093and um how that factors into uh um you know the the rate plans and everything so a lot of things that we can definitely come back and talk more on because it's it's a good question chair McKenna if I could I actually looked down and I do have one more question I focused all of mine on uh so far largely I'm I'm grid reliability and improvements um one of the other pieces is around as you're making these upgrades um I I don't believe I heard in the four bullet point points um any conversation around uh transition to Renewables and um and I guess I would like to hear if you can answer a little bit more about the plan you know I dte's transition to carbon neutrality uh is lags behind even consumers here in

094the state um as we're looking to to our own 2030 climate goals here in the city um what are the plans as these upgrades are going in not to just put you know concrete posts but to actually make sure that the power that's flowing through them is with cleaner and renewable clean renewable energy because I think it's worth acknowledging that as we see increasing storm um severity that our power companies own some of the responsibility for that because they continue to rely mostly on fossil fuels you so um great question that is not my specialty but I did I did get some notes so um yes we've spent this whole time talking about the distribution system within Ann Arbor um we did just uh have a uh a great outcome with our uh what we

095call the IRP to integrated resource plan um where uh we actually brought down uh or actually uh sped up the uh transition away from coal and I believe it's uh uh now projecting to be uh off of call by 2032 so the prior was in the in the later 2030s and we put together a plan to bring that in a large piece of that uh does come from the renewable space um solar and really important is going to be storage um such that you can manage those uh those Peak periods and and uh you know the overnight time so um there's a lot in that IRP um if you haven't seen it we can get you a copy of uh of what we shared with the npsc and like I said that uh just got

096approved by the mpsc a couple of weeks ago and it's something that a lot of people are really excited about great um sirkowski just a couple of closing comments here um I'd like you to come back and share your analysis of essentially how we got here I think councilmember Medina had a really important point there um in terms of trust and um just the the kind of in our words experience um not only with our own power reliability and the repercussions that we bear the cost of um yeah of course including food hotel stays appliances and such um that have been ruined but also when we think about development and housing I mean um the cost borne by developers are not just you know maybe the idea of double dipping but also the fact that

097you know how can we trust that that in fact the system hasn't been underinvested in over the course of the last century and and kind of is getting us where we are today um and so you know it's uh yeah just seeing how the housing crisis kind of um overlaps a bit of a Venn diagram look what's happening with the distribution system I think it's pretty tragic anyway I'd like to definitely take you up on the offer to talk further about the your analysis of of that history and if that's you or somebody else we'd love to um invite that person as well so um I'll follow up with you on that we can have you come a little bit later in the year um okay any other final comments before we move on to

098the next agenda item okay all right Ms Rakowski thank you so so much for joining us um and we really enjoyed your time with us yep thanks again uh for all the time and uh really good really good questions um we're excited to uh bring these improvements to Ann Arbor I know I've been I've been working on them uh my whole time here so uh excited to get them going and uh hopefully get them sped up and uh look forward to uh seeing this group uh again sometime soon thanks take care fantastic okay we're gonna move on to our next agenda item um that is our presentation and our representation of the 2022 greenhouse gas inventory so if we have Thea on the line hi Thea thanks for joining us hi good evening good evening

099I'll let you take it away okay um I'll make sure my screen okay can you all see those slides all right so we saw a hands up um well okay I'll get started then uh thank you so much for having me here this evening uh for those of you who don't know my name is Thea jagerlener I'm a senior energy analyst with the city of universe office of sustainability and Innovation uh every year I complete a community-wide greenhouse gas inventory for the city of Ann Arbor um and I'm excited to be here today to present an update on the 2022 calendar year greenhouse gas inventory um so to get started uh just some brief uh background notes on this as I mentioned I estimate the greenhouse gas inventory on an annual basis um very rarely

100is there uh data available specifically for the city of Ann Arbor for exactly what we're looking for um so a lot of this data is aggregated scaled or modeled uh just as a caveat as we look at it uh I follow the ickley U.S Community protocol when I put together the greenhouse gas inventory uh I am sharing it today with you all but I also report it on an annual basis to the CDP choose to stand for the carbon disclosure project uh which helps fulfill uh some commitments the city van ever has made in terms of uh climate action um and so by following a standard protocol it means our inventory can be relatively easily compared to those of other cities um this inventory currently includes three greenhouse gases uh CO2 n2o and CH4 which

101is methane and it factors in the global warming potentials of of each um one last comment on the scope of this so this really looks at the missions of the community as a whole if anyone on here or listening to this presentation really wants to know what your household emissions inventory looks like I just want to direct uh you all to a good resource which is a cool climate calculator offered by Berkeley which is great for estimating individual uh carbon preference so with that I'll get into [Music] um some data so I do two not two different inventories but two um scales of inventory so the first I'll call this simple inventory um this allows comparison to the inventory Baseline of the year 2000 uh we now have more data than when it's available in

1022000 so about half of this presentation I'll switch over to talking about more Mission sources that we can report on but this lets us look at our um uh changes over the last 23 years um so since the year 2000 by 2019 we had a 25 reduction uh in emission levels I'm stopping at 2019 here for this graph because um once we hit 2020 and impacts from the covid-19 pandemic uh emissions year to year start looking a little bit different um and I like to talk through those individually uh and so where do we see those changes happening from from 2000 to 2019 uh those are permanently in our buildings and in transportation and honestly primarily in the carbon the carbon intensity per unit of um being a little bit better so I think from

1032000 to 2019 we actually used more energy in Ann Arbor but the carbon intensity of that electricity uh decreased um here I have commercial and institutional buildings lumped together uh since spring 2019 um acquired a lot of buildings uh it's kind of tricky to try and keep them separate um so they're combined here uh and then some uh efficiency improvements in vehicles as well um so 25 increase decreased sorry from 2000 to 2019. um so as I mentioned uh that was the simple inventory which looks at um comparing data sources that we also have comparable data for for the year 2000 but there are also important emission sources I think that are important to include um as we as I kind of dig more into more details um so this table kind of summarizes it

104a lot of these are fairly small in scale the largest impact is those of uh commuting of passenger vehicles and kind of out of boundary uh Transportation trips um so the numbers from the previous slides will be smaller than what I talk about going forward um but I again cannot compare to 2000. um so this is our expanded inventory since 2015 as I said I do it I complete the inventory every year um and I want to talk through a few General Trends here before I dig into why things are happening and where we're saying things so the simple inventory I stopped at 2019 um and that was because 2020 was a pretty anomalous year with the kova 19 pandemic um with folks both staying from home and we having less uh Transportation trips as

105well as um buildings being unoccupied uh occupancy patterns for buildings looking incredibly different um we saw a significant dip in emissions in 2020 uh by 2021 we started to see vmts sorry vehicle miles traveled uh come back up again um and by last year 2022 we're only about um a fraction lower or a really small uh percentage lower than where we were in 2019 pre-pandemic um and so I want to dig into kind of like where are we seeing the changes um some of them are expected I think from recovering from the pandemic and some of them I think are a little bit less uh expected um so just to quickly illustrate um the darker blue line here is the simple inventory that I was talking about the lighter blue line is the expanded inventory

106with additional emission sources that increase those numbers up uh and then this dashed line here is showing a really simple trajectory to carbon neutrality by 2030 um which we can now see is quite a dramatic line and we certainly have a lot of work to do uh okay so in 2022 where did emissions come from uh 21 from residential buildings 15 from commercial buildings and then 29 from institutional buildings this is by institutional I mean the University of Michigan um three percent Upstream 17 from Local transportation so that's Transportation occurring within the boundaries of Ann Arbor uh 12 from commuting uh and then three percent from solid waste and Wastewater um so we still see buildings being the primary Mission source with Transportation falling the secondary um and how has that looked year over year

107uh again um so there's I have another chart kind of breaking this out a little bit more um but the the two sources that we've kind of seen big changes in year over year has been electricity and and vehicle fuel um electricity uh one we saw occupancy patterns change a little bit I'll also dig into some changes in the DT's fuel mix and carbon intensity which has had an impact on emissions as well and then the vehicle fuel emissions has largely been driven by Vehicles miles traveled which we saw a huge decrease and try 22 2020 um an increase in 2021 and pretty close to pre-pandemic Levels by last year um so I broke out before kind of like the sectors where emissions came from this is a chart showing where this uh sources of

108emissions come from so 39 from electricity uh 28 from natural gas and 28 from vehicle fuel I also include some Upstream emissions here as well I wanted to make a brief note here that the Upstream emissions for natural gas include those that um DTE sites for their estimated methane fugitive emissions in their system uh I would recommend um and it's something that we consider when we look at specific calculations not necessarily for the inventory but maybe comparing um a type of appliance that uses natural gas versus electricity um so natural gas can have a a lot of fugitive methane emissions uh associated with it um the estimates for that are have a wide range of values um the inventory is hard to present a range of those uh constantly so I would for specific uh

109calculations that can be useful to pull out um and look at that range of values for comparing lifetime emissions for for a certain um fuels so I hope that makes sense oops so um from 2020 to 2022 again admissions have increased year over year um where have we seen those emissions increases um primarily in electricity and in transportation um and um electricity has been both in an increase in consumption as well as an increase in carbon intensity and then Transportation largely an increase in consumption or Vehicles miles traveled cool so I'm going to run through a few sectors and talk about some changes that have happened um recently in the last few years uh so our missions from our residential buildings um so this is uh our homes it's a multi-family um these come from

110like like electricity natural gas and a little bit of Propane fuel that we estimate uh people consume uh in 2022 uh since the last year um electricity consumption was actually down about three percent with um natural gas consumption up about seven percent uh the reason why we see this is because residential energy consumption is actually pretty closely tied to weather and temperature um so this is the heating Degree Days uh compared to um how much uh natural gas uh residential buildings have consumed over the last few years um the scales on the side are a little bit focused but I just kind of wanted to show overall Trends how closely correlated these are so a heating degree day represents how cold it is the more heat and degree days in a year the more uh

111heat people are using or the more you have to heat to be comfortable um so we see again from 2021 to 2022 that increase into degree days that correlates to an increase in natural gas consumption uh following for the inverse so cool in Degree Days the number of um an estimate for like how much we have to cool our buildings to stay comfortable compared to how much electricity consumed are also fairly correlated so we see a decrease um 2021 to 2022 which we also saw reflected in consumption foreign I have included this here I will caveat this by saying that DT has not provided uh data for a commercial building for the last few years so commercial building uh energy consumption is currently a really rough estimate based off of what previous years have looked

112like uh we are currently waiting on um some mpsc rulings on data access to uh local governments to academic institutions to just the general public and hoping that we can get aggregated commercial data again in the near future but again that is contingent on an mpsc ruling that's still ongoing um we do have uh really accurate data from University of Michigan um so the University of Michigan completes also an annual greenhouse gas inventory it will caveat they do there's on a fiscal year so it can kind of lag in a weird way but in general is useful to include um the University of Michigan uh used both uh three percent increase in electricity and a two percent increase in TCF um which of national gas which combined with uh kind of a higher intensity um

113grid resulted in increased emissions of 21 2021 to 2022 um and so I'd like to dig into what I've been talking about a little bit with increased emissions um so this is DT's fuel mix since uh um the way DT prevent presents their fuel mix is one the percentage of uh sources of um electricity that they produce but they also they also share uh the carbon intensity of fossil fuel produce electricity as well um so the two factors that are important here are one the percentage of electricity that comes from fossil fuels and this chart that's represented by oil coal and natural gas and then combined with that is the carbon intensity of that production um so from year over from year to year sometimes the carbon intensity of just general electricity is better or

114worse than previous years in the case of 2022 we see one um so this top or this middle Blue Line represented by natural gas we can see from 2021 to 2022 an increase and the total fuel mix represented by fossil fuel in addition the carbon intensity also increased um the results of this is an 11 increase in the overall carbon intensity of electricity from 2021 to 2022 which is one of the primary drivers for emissions increases that we're seeing um overall we've seen a seven percent decrease since 2015 um but I just want to kind of explain why we've seen an increase in emissions the last couple years okay so I am going to do my best to finish as well as I can but I understand that it's a little bit confusing um I

115shared earlier that I can complete the greenhouse gas inventory following the specific protocol um which the protocol doesn't let you account for things like uh voluntary green power purchases things like wrecks things like offsets the intention of the inventory is that we could using a regional example for Washington County we could add up Ann arborers and Ypsilanti and the townships and we could get a complete inventory for Washington County um so what that means is um and the scope of inventories it ends up being double counting if Ann Arbor accounts for renewable energy that's being produced somewhere else but that's being reported on their um that Region's e-grid numbers um however uh annivers also has a 100 renewable energy goal and I think it's still important to look at what percent is coming from renewable

116energy even if it can't be directly attributed to um the uh specific generation that Ann Arbor pulls from uh so this chart here represents the chart on the left represents uh the total electricity consumption in Ann Arbor from last year and the sources of um green power purchases that it's attributed to so the dark blue section shows just total non-renewable energy um this is an order of scale um U of M now makes so GP in these charts stands for green power purchases uh U of M now makes significant green power purchases uh it's actually larger almost larger in scale than DT's Renewables percentage in total uh DT has about 13 Renewables in their fuel mix uh DT um has an initial two percent to reach their 15 State uh renewable portfolio standard mandate um

117and then there is also residential and Commercial participation in green power purchases as well that we know of um so in total that's about 29 of um the total electricity consumption that can be attributed to renewable energy again this is not reflected in the inventory numbers that I report on but this chart on the right does um which drops the total emissions down to about 1.92 um so I just wanted to do my best to explain um renewable green power purchases that are happening as well okay uh the last section I wanted to talk about was Transportation so again uh we have seen this big dip in 2020 again I think everyone can remember standing out and saying empty roads um which increased in 2021 and we are almost back up to 20 to 2019

118levels last year um so again this is uh vehicle miles traveled specifically these are kilometers um which you can kind of see is the pretty much direct uh Trend that we see in VMT um or in emissions so the primary driver for that emissions trans is the amount of Miles traveled um I will continue to say that one of the um easiest ways to reduce emissions is by simply not driving um we have a lot of commuting at Ann Arbor uh the 2020 uh just having less commuting in general was incredibly impactful um and continuing to support working from home policies or enabling uh less committing in general can be really really impactful um so this data is actually from a uh recently available uh data source called the Google environmental insights Explorer so they

119use uh everyone's phone data anonymized and aggregated um based on where you're going and how fast you're traveling um and they're able to estimate and Aggregate and scale to incredibly high accuracy compared to other data sources um here to your vehicle miles traveled they're also able to estimate uh trips and Miles traveled on foot on bus and on bike based on those patterns as well so I just wanted to share um kind of this interesting tidbit uh this is for in boundary trips so this is not representing miles traveled but the number of trips taken and this is only showing in boundary trips so trips that are within the boundary of Ann Arbor so this doesn't include any trips coming into Ann Arbor or any trips going outside of Ann Arbor so I want to

120make that scale really really clear um and so you can kind of see that light green bar of bussing essentially disappearing in 2020 and coming back again over the last couple years uh but I just wanted to point this out h0 has a goal of 50 of trips within the study of an ever being done uh by non-motorized and public transit um and we're about eight percent shy of that that goal based on this data um it's hard data to track and find a good data source for it but this is one of them and hopefully provides some interesting context great um so that was the inventory um I'll pause for seconds in a second or pause for questions in a second but I wanted to share some um interesting or some new tools available

121out there uh one we now have a um OSI performance metrics dashboard out this is on the study administrator's page um I would say the easiest way to find this right now is to Google OSI metrics dashboard and you should get there um but one thing I wanted to share this is just a screenshot I took a a while ago um 2022 data is now available on there as well but these are interactive charts uh so you can hover over and see the specific numbers of sectors you can select and deselect sectors so if you want to see the greenhouse gas inventory let's say without U of M in it or you only want to see what natural gas looks like and vehicle fuel this allows for anyone to kind of customize how they want

122to look and evaluate the greenhouse gas inventory another resource I wanted to share um is the osi's community greenhouse gas inventory page on there I post um similar recordings year to year of this presentation um I also have on their um annual reports and a guide to methodologies used so if anyone's interested in methodologies use assumptions made data sources what a mission Factor was used and where it came from that is all publicly available as well um so I think that's it with that um I'll pause I know that there were a few questions shared beforehand that I think I did my best to respond to all of them but um if not feel free to ask them again now for clarifying or follow up on email um via email but with that open up

123person sessions yeah I mean thank you uh see just a question about missing data um my understanding was that you said that we still don't have data from DTE on I think we grouped as commercial and industrial buildings is that correct for three years now uh for I think it's two years now um go ahead oh no I'll just go ahead and see what your question is I I would make an appeal to uh council member Adina and to Council in general um to um intercede where possible um potentially through the Michigan Municipal league and through other entities um because this kind this is just really unacceptable I hope the VP that was listening in earlier from DTE is still listening in and and he recognizes that it's really unacceptable that we don't get this

124um just more generally I'm also concerned that we had this report in August of last year where we had the inventory presented um and uh we agreed at that time that we would like to see this earlier in the year and I know that we had problems with getting data again this year more generally I can only say that um any business would would never be driving by looking in the rearview mirror eight months arrears and really this is something that we really need to improve on and I think we need people in high places um talking to other people in high places whether it's at the mpsc or whatever to to address that situation um just if if I may um just two comments that I have for now um you don't have to

125go to the slide but or you can if you want to slide seven I think if uh we're all to do a mental best fit slope on slide seven there we are of what our emissions reductions have been 2015 to the present and you look at that slope and then you look at the slope that's necessary uh we we really need to Double Down um and I'm really concerned um obviously there's some big big drops foreseen in the A200 plan where we go to 100 clean renewable power through CCA or through some other means but nevertheless this is really a daunting task um the other thing that I want to point out is on slide 12 if you can go to that this is residential emissions you can see basically in 2022 were exactly where

126we were um in 2015 through 2017 2018 basically on average we really haven't haven't changed much and what I think we all have to recognize is that um as far as I know uh since 2020 roughly since June of 2020 when a20 was approved uh roughly 2600 new housing units um have been approved by the Planning Commission and city council um probably very few of those um are reflected in any of these figures yet in the vast majority of those are all natural gas connected so um that's um I think there's roughly 50 000 residential units in the city right now and that means we're adding another five percent and most of those are natural gas connected and those are not going to be converted to 100 Electric in the next 15 years probably because

127these are all new units so what we're not seeing here is this trend that was coming out of the pandemic from 2020 to 2022 is most likely going to continue to be on this curve at least for emissions from residential buildings those those are my only two comments and the I as you know I posted a lot of provided a lot of comments before the meeting you addressed many of them I'll go over and look at those again and I'll um ask you if you would wouldn't mind to respond to any that I think um at least I still have a question in my mind thank you all right hey Thea would you mind not uh unsharing so I could see the good people thank you so much anybody else yes commissioner mursky you're a

128mute I do have one other question since there was a at least a few second present second applause there and that is um the University of Michigan um has decreased let me see where's my little sleep paper that I enjoyed this down um it reported in fiscal year 21 um net emissions equal to gross emissions of 523 000 metric tons of co2e in fiscal year 2022 it's indicated through its tracking that gross emissions Rose to 576 000 uh metric tons of CO2 that's an increase of 10 but their net emissions dropped to 486 um thousand or a drop of 10 versus the prior year so that's a Delta of 20 and this difference between net and gross um is in a an Excel file um that is accessible through the office of sustainabilities metrics and

129if I'm not mistaken in my recollection the first year there was a difference between net and gross was this year and I'm one I'm not aware that the university is buying any offsets and I'm wondering if this is some kind of new accounting for green power purchases um and I guess lastly if if this these numbers from the University are correct then that would mean that the reduction that we've seen in emissions from 2019 to 2012 22 all of those reductions have come through actions from the University and none have come from the city so if you go back and look at emissions in 2019 granted U of M is reporting on a fiscal year but if you look at the Delta between emissions in 2019 versus what they are currently at U of M

130it's a something like a drop from 640 000. metric tons of CO2 down to this new net figure of 487 000 if you take that Delta that Delta is the entire emissions reduction for the community um I I put some of that in my email to you not this net gross difference I'm hoping that CAU or Tech can speak to um some of these figures or at least the conceptually um um I will do my best and I'm going to clarify I'm not going to make I'm not going to attempt at Mental Math since it is nearing my bedtime so I hope everyone uh apologizes for that if you want uh specific numbers feel free to follow follow up in an email and I'll be happy to look into things um some things I will

131share so if you're saying that the missions decreases are only coming from U of M um you we can see looking at the inventory Broken Out by different sectors that decreases have come from certain sectors specifically for example Transportation VMT is lower than 2019 you can see for your transportation um just the total emissions amounts are lower for that specific sector um if you were saying that the the U of M's total decrease is equivalent to the city's totally decrease because we've also had some sectors increase as well I think that's what you're saying um I will say if you go through U of M's shared spreadsheet on their um uh inventory um there are I don't look at it and take out an aggregate number I pull out specific uh data points that they

132share on specifically how much fossil fuels they're consuming um things like how much they're using on their buses things like how much natural gas using both in their buildings and in their power plant um sometimes they use some fuel oil and then how much electricity they're purchasing they also report on how much renewable energy uh purchases they're making as well um and so um has shared uh that they are starting to um they account for that in their inventory um because they're not following they don't have to follow the same protocol that I follow um and so they are able to uh kind of like claim that and share that as an official inventory um it may be a question going forward on how we share uh information on renewable energy purchases kind of for

133informational purposes not necessarily for this is Ann Arbor's official inventory um as I think that difference will continue to become more significant in upcoming years good thank you yes Commission yeah I'm not I'm I can't answer the question either um but I suggest we get uh Shauna Weber our new associate VP for sustainability uh to come and join us and maybe bring uh a staff member who know really knows this stuff um and we should you know because it might be we don't want to put her on the spot that'd be a horrible way to start a good relationship um and certainly the new president is very committed to um reducing our emissions and exceeding that up as is the CFO who has shot as boss she reports to both of them um and she

134comes from Princeton so she has experience with University and all that uh so we'll get we'll get the answers we're after uh the one thing I can offer is what we're doing now uh trying to do is uh zero out our scope 2 emissions um and I think we're really close in other words we said we do by 2025 and the office sustainability keeps saying we're going to do it we're going to actually reach the Finish Line before then um at the same time were so there and we've got big rfps out on that big RFP out of that front but we also have uh you know for renewable energy we also have a fairly sizable one and I remember I can't remember the numbers um but pretty big and surprisingly big uh for on-campus

135generation um so it'll count against scope one um what is it I think so I know the city is piggybacking their RFP yeah with with the universities um at least in terms of the structure and things like that Joe do you know if that if the 25 megawatt makes is is correct sounds right yeah but you know that's like given that the president's Commission on carbon neutrality did not suggest doing that because it is more expensive um I personally like the idea because you know we want to show what we're doing not just do it um but in any case that's good news um and then of course we're we've started our first geothermal field um for one of our new buildings so that whole Enterprise is often uh to a slow but nonetheless I

136think meaningful start um and the big thing that it hasn't been finished yet is uh an assessment well two things one is an assessment of what we could if anything use offsets for um uh and even though I was kind of supportive of that and I'd say a minority of our president's commission and permanent neutrality were um eager to do it uh it would cost more money and but it would get us to zero faster um and then we could backfill with real uh local Michigan Action and on campus but the point is is that that's that still has to be done and then Greg keolian and sees is doing the uh scope three you know he's leading a team to do the scope 3 assessment which as far as I can tell you know

137isn't going to be done at home for a little while 2025 too um so but that doesn't mean we will make progress in scope two so I think that's you know I'm not an expert I could if I wasn't lazy uh just go on the website there's a all this is reported um so people can see it but a lot of work remains to be done hope that helps a little bust your heart yeah thanks for the presentation I I just wanted to ask a question about the resolution of of some of the data and the inventory particularly and I guess the question is is about how um how resolved can it get beyond beyond the year um and is are some of these data either in terms of fuel mix or otherwise um for

138the different sectors something that can be looked at either seasonally or monthly and if if so in your opinion does that sort of have any benefit in terms of the potential for how we look at or potentially Target some of some of the opportunities to to make reductions and I'm thinking primarily of sort of what we saw with the pandemic in that you know there are changes of behavior and if we look a little bit more closely at them we can see that and and we know I would imagine that we're using more natural gas for example during the winter than the summer and vice versa so I guess it's just a question of sort of how we how we look at how highly resolved um or if there's any benefit to looking at it

139more granularly beyond the year yeah so currently nearly every data source I use is provided on an annual basis uh especially the ones for the largest submission sources and buildings so the and the consumption is provided as an annual aggregate total the fuel mix is provided annually at YouTube provided every other year so that feels like an improvement um but um and then transportation is also uh provided on an annual total uh commissioner Mercier mentioned on the timeline of these um that data source comes out uh later this year than they expected it came out late May or early June this year um so it it kind of hinders when you really want to be looking at the data I acknowledge that's a pain Point um uh the one data source that we do currently

140have more uh frequent reporting on is our waste data which is a relatively small in terms of emission impact uh it of course has larger impact in terms of sustainability in general and we do have more time granular data available there um I do think there could be relevance especially for electricity at looking at more granular data if it were ever to be available um there are specific situations like especially as we look at increasing how much increasing the renewable percentage of our energy and electrifying or even before electrifying buildings in general I think it'll be important to see the emissions intensity and the winter when Renewables might be offline versus in the summer and things like that um other cities have actually looked at adopting um uh 24 7 renewable energy standards so pairing

141uh hourly total energy consumption with Renewables since you can look at this uh aggregate annual total but the hourly data might actually tell a really different story um and so some other cities have started to tackle uh looking at that level of detail thank you fantastic okay thank you see ya again for um joining us we're going to move along in the interest of time um all right going to the next agenda item can we have news from the energy office and any Commissioners who have news to share yeah I can go ahead um don't have a couple notes um as I'm sure some of you are aware um heard the home energy rating disclosure ordinance had its first hearing um at Council last night um again remember I know it's been a couple months

142but you know the energy commission did uh have that initial hearing of it um and did provide feedback which was incorporated into that um into that into that version um there'll be I believe a second reading will be coming soon um so feel free to uh uh check in on the council meetings for that um but again thanks for the feedback that went into that um also want to note in terms of um I have too many things open um I did want to note that uh coming up this Friday um from five to nine the Ann Arbor's Farmers Market uh we're having our second annual home electrification Expo this is an event uh it has a bunch of contractors that are doing work in the electric electrifications uh and decarbonization space give people an

143opportunity to interact with contractors learn more about it and just kind of you know see see what makes uh what could potentially make sense um so if you're available or know of others who might be interested uh encourage you to check that out um I think those are the uh those are the main updates I have uh right now thank you Joe for sharing that news okay and commissioner ski would you like to report on the environmental Commission sorry uh uh it's it's ironic that I have nothing to report because the environmental Commission meeting was canceled because it was during the power outage that we hit so just one more impact oh yes well that speaks for itself okay we'll move to our final uh public comment section this is an opportunity for people to

144speak for up to three minutes sorry uh yes could I also just oh yes I wanted to add on to uh Joe's comment so in addition to herd passing first reading last night one second reading comes uh it will have a public hearing attached to it and so I just also wanted to emphasize that if folks wanted to call in um while it did um pass first reading unanimously last night there is still some considerable opposition to it um I think there are still probably a few questions that will get asked between now and second reading um and so for those folks who I know who have been working on this for a long time if you wanted to call in um or to come to the meeting and participate make sure you pay attention

145for the public hearing um and then we also had a um the nomination of a new energy commissioner and so hopefully that will be approved at our next meeting as well amazing thank you for sharing that okay all right so we'll move into our last opportunity for public input this is an opportunity for people to speak for up to three minutes if you're watching on CTN please call 888-788-0099 or 877-853-5247 and enter the meeting ID 956-8718-7876 this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and video feed City staff will select callers and have raised their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone you'll hear an automated announcement that the host

146is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area and mute television or background sounds so that we may hear you clearly and please set your name and address at the beginning of your comments Joe do we have anybody on the line uh yes caller ending in one three four thank you Mr Lang this is Ken Garber again um thank you for the really great discussion on both the grid and the inventory um yeah a few words about the inventory um you know whether or not the the weather in 2022 and higher DTE carbon intensity we're responsible for the 2022 admissions increase overall we're not reducing emissions by the 15 to 20 percent annually that we need to um I'm not talking about the 820 goal I'm talking about the entire developed

147world needs to do this um because we put off um any kind of meaningful action for the last 30 years we're faced with this cliff um and uh it to me it looks impossible it looks like we're doomed to fail um emissions are actually going up probably will continue to do so on the local level with all the new gas-fired construction projects um approved and in the reviewer planning process um yeah buildings and transportation are the big sectors and we continue to build with gas do very few Electric retrofits people are driving more and more bigger and bigger vehicles and inventory doesn't even try to estimate scope 3 emissions which are supply chain and personal consumption um I think Cornell recently published a study showing that scope 3 represented 60 of their emissions we have

148no idea what's going on with these in Ann Arbor our emissions may be much higher than what the inventory shows and maybe going up even faster as people travel more order more stuff for delivery and otherwise my point is we are failing here in Ann Arbor as well as nationally yet the messaging from the city is unrelentingly positive I realize that the city's philosophy is that you cannot motivate people with fear and negativity maybe not but we're certainly not changing Behavior now except for the worse um I think somehow we've got to change both the tone and substance of the way we communicate the dire situation that we're in um we need to tell people that what we're doing is not working the implication that we can somehow make this huge change without altering fundamentally

149the very destructive way all of us live including making the necessary personal sacrifices um I I guess I'm I look at this inventory and I am incredibly demoralized and depressed and I don't really see a path forward um and I wish I had something more constructive to communicate except that we all have to just keep trying but I think we have to acknowledge above all that what we've done so far is not working thank you um no further callers okay and that's sobering note um I have a couple of comments on items for next agenda and I'd also like to hear if anything comes to mind you know quickly quickly-ish um so let's see I wrote down hmm some thoughts kind of going from the back to the front um having uh Shauna Weber from

150uh University of Michigan come on and maybe share um more recent plans for decarbonization at U of M um I'd like to you know incorporate a little bit more of a conversation and maybe have some other folks pack if you'd like to speak we could have um others from Seas or others at the University I think that'd be really nice um I also noted that you know I invited uh Mike butkowski back potentially to speak later in the year or maybe next year um depending on the urgency um around just thrust in the company and talking about uh an analysis of of the history of how we got here from a reliability sense and I have some notes on what specifically I would ask um does anybody else have anything else that came up for

151them that they'd like to get on that list your heart yeah we you know we with the the discussion today um we heard a lot about the sort of systems level resilience um facing Ann Arbor particularly with this Vector grid and one of the things I think that potentially would be helpful is how we might also take up sort of individual household neighborhood resilience as well um particularly with respect to sort of things that um you know whether individual uh renters or homeowners might be able to do to help um in terms of their own setups and systems and and the ways that they're sort of experiencing this and yeah I don't I don't have a particular suggestion I think for how to accomplish that but um there may be some options in terms of

152who we're able to get to speak to that pretty they also heard a mention in the um greenhouse gas inventory about sort of marginal emissions or hourly emissions I know that that's of interest um or has been stated in the past so maybe we can incorporate that as well into future discussions um you know now that we've had the um now that we've had the discussion about the inventory we can we can kind of broaden that and talk a lot more about the implications commissioner marski I'd be very interested in a report from the city about how the city plans to take the the really great effort in the Bryant neighborhood um my understanding it's roughly 260 households um and how that effort um is planned to be rolled out city-wide and replicated and accelerated

153um particularly in in light of Mr garber's comments um we're now three years into the plan um we've got a great Grant to look at a networked uh geothermal uh heating system for that neighborhood that's probably a year out until that's done that doesn't that means it's still not implemented so the question is how do you take that model and accelerate that and roll it out to all these different subdivisions to apartment complexes um and so on and so forth I mean I could I grew up in Ann Arbor so I could you know tick off 10 different subdivisions in neighborhoods across the city where we need to have a similar effort and we only have um seven years to do that so we've got one one neighborhood that's going well and we probably have

15450 neighborhoods that need to be this where we need to be doing the same thing so if we could I mean that that may be something that is not realistic in the next couple of months but it should be something that we look to hear about certainly um at the end of the year early next year thanks and would you look to the OSI or there maybe other City departments that would be helpful just trying to get some more perspectives and like think about the reality of what that rollout looks like it could be a team effort it could be you know yeah and and yeah but I think it probably has to be led by OSI sure hey anything else right seeing none I'm gonna move on okay great so we're ready to adjourn

155um it is now 8 24 and I declare this meeting adjourned thank you so much for your participation good night everybody see you next month I think so