Ann Arbor Energy Commission Meeting 4-12-22

001maladies good evening it is 601 pm my name is john mursky chair of the ann arbor energy commission as chair i'm calling this meeting to order i'm participating from my home here in ann arbor welcome to the april 12 2022 electronic meeting of the ann arbor energy commission this virtual meeting is to affect special district or social distancing and mitigate the spread of the covid 19 virus we will conduct this meeting similar to in-person meetings commissioners during the call a roll call please indicate your current location during the meeting please remain on camera just as you would be visible during in-person meetings also mute your microphone when not speeding speaking public comment will be via telephone only to speak during any of the public comment opportunities that's at the beginning and end of the meeting

002please call one of the following toll-free numbers eight seven seven 853-5247-488-788-0099 and enter meeting id number nine three seven six seven five one six eight one nine on your phone this number or this information is also available on the published agenda in the public notices section of the city website and on the broadcast of this meeting on ctn channel 16 and a t channel 99 as well as online at www dot backslash watch ctn missy would you please read the land acknowledgement absolutely chairman i acknowledge that the land the city of ann arbor occupies is the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the anishinabe and wind up 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

003of this land was formalized by the treaty 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 past can empower us in our work to create a future that supports supports human flourishing and justice for all individuals thank you so now we will take a roll call before we start that two points of note first of all i received a notice from cole stevens that he's going to be late for the meeting he'll be joining us about halfway through and i also wanted to announce that we will have a new energy commissioner um she's officially appointed already but she's out of town and presenting at a conference and so she was not able to attend um tonight's meeting

004her name is sheree smith and she will attend the uh may meeting at which time she will introduce herself give a little give you a little bit about her background um she works um as a consultant in the energy space and missy and carlene and i have all met her and reviewed her resume and everything and she's really in us outstanding addition to the commission so we're really looking forward to welcoming welcoming her next month you see if you could conduct the roll call then that would be great who will be chair mursky you're from ann arbor thank you vice chair colvin garcia here from ann arbor also thank you thank you forgive me i'm trying to capture this end notes uh commissioner hook um okay commissioner mccomber you're from ann arbor thank you councilmember

005briggs all right here from ann arbor great thanks levin here in ann arbor thank you uh councilmember radina here in ann arbor commissioner mccoy and did you see ann arbor okay great thanks um commissioner george i hear from ann arbor thank you commissioner kerber you're from anatomy commissioner peck you're from sunny ann arbor sure commissioner juno let me just see if nicole is here okay so cool's not here right now and sharish is not that chair you have a corn you're on youtube thank you very much um so we um have an agenda and hopefully people if they can look at that can i get a motion to approve the agenda and then a second and we'll take a vote so a motion from uh council member rodina and a second i think was from

006council member briggs all those in favor say aye or raise your hand i any opposed any abstentions i guess i should have asked any any changes um uh i let me do that retroactively or or after the fact is are there any uh necessary changes okay so we will stick with the agenda as as approved then we also have minutes they're posted on legistar um i've reviewed them hopefully others have as well can i get a motion to approve those minutes so moved by commissioner mccoy and seconded by commissioner mccumber um all those in favor say aye all those proposed ones opposed they passed unanimously so now we're at public input um i just wanted to mention before we got into public input that we received uh and the commissioners all know this but we

007received two letters commenting on one of the presentations scheduled for tonight that's on this the landfill project one was from a representative of ann arbor for public power and the other was authored by three commissioners one of whom um was myself and um we will do our best to address the questions posed in those i just wanted to mention that um so when people are thinking calling in they know that in advance so we still encourage people to call in and to provide comments on anything relevant to tonight's agenda as well as any other topics that are important to you related to energy this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes if you're watching on ctn please call again the numbers 888 eight zero zero nine nine or eight seven

008seven eight five three five two four seven and enter meeting id nine three seven six seven five one this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and in the video feed city staff will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone you will hear an automated message that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area and mute any television or background sound so that we may hear you clearly and finally please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments [Music] hello can you hear me we do thank you uh my name is greg

009woodring i'm the president of ann arbor for public power and i wanted to call in about the solar landfill presentation i appreciate uh chair mursky mentioning the email that ann arbor public power submitted asking a few various questions i just wanted to call in to reiterate that uh you know we're really curious to learn more about this project um there's certainly some very attractive something very attractive about building up some solar power in the city especially with the speed that it could be built at but there are a few concerning aspects that i'm hoping will be cleared up throughout the presentation one thing that i'm wondering about is is the solar that we are building up going to count against ete's requirement to build up renewable energy generation it seems that if that is the

010case then we're not really increasing the amount of solar that is going to be uh available in michigan in total we're simply allowing dte an easier avenue to build up that solar generation that they're already required to create additionally uh i've heard in the past that there that we may be selling wrecks based off of this energy renewable energy credits i'm curious if that's the case um because those two things put together seems to indicate that we would really be potentially creating less renewable energy total by doing this project rather than not doing it at all we would both be reducing dte's requirement to generate a renewable electricity as well as selling off selling credits that would alleviate someone else of their obligation to build up renewable energy so i'm hopeful that we'll get cleared

011up and finally i'd just like to say that i really hope we can think of a way that this could be rolled into the seu project or the traditional muni project uh it seems like it would be a much better value to ann arbor residents if we owned it directly i'm curious to hear what the reasoning for having dd own this uh solar project is but from an outsider point of view it certainly seems like it would be a much better deal if ann arbor was the primary owner of this uh landfill project so thank you for your time i look forward to a very elucidating presentation thank you for your comments caller ending in 661. hello hello can you hear me we do all right thank you hello my name is gus teschke i

012live at 313 montgomery i'm a supporter of ann arbor for public power thank you for the opportunity to speak i'm calling in support of the landfill solar array project it's a great idea it makes total sense if you want to cut carbon emissions for electricity i believe that the landfill is the only major public open area in ann arbor well we could put an array so it's worth a thorough discussion um and thanks to the energy commission for giving the public a chance to comment on it um you know i've learned a few things about the project that concerned me so i have a couple of questions uh the first is how will the construction of the landfill solar array be financed i understand the subscribers will collectively pay the entire cost of the project

013through excuse me individual utility bills but the dte will own the physical asset so you know and then question number two will dte assume any unreimbursed costs for this project and if so what are they the city council was told in 2020 that dpe will not have any financial responsibility for the project although they will own it the city has already paid dte's pr preliminary engineering review and distribution study and for the environmental assessment so will dte pay anything for this solar array that ann arbor is going to get to it those are my two questions thank you thank you all are ending in one three four thank you dr stalton chair mursky and garber 28 haverhill court um yeah i'm going to speak on landfill solar too i think we can agree on three

014things first staff has put a huge amount of diligent and creative work into this project and deserves a recognition for that um second we still need more information i've seen the list of questions from a2p2 and they overlap with a lot of my own i expect that we'll get answers from tonight's staff presentation the third thing we can agree on is that the current plan is not ideal there are a lot of trade-offs yes we want to get this solar energy on the grid as soon as possible that's extremely important but giving this valuable asset to dte is painful especially since we're already talking about buying it back once we can directly use the power buying back the landfill solar project is even in the new muni rfp of course as a business deal this

015is absurd but we're not a business not to be too grandiose but we're here to stave off global catastrophe but there may be ways the city could keep ownership and use the power directly with only a small delay maybe a few years run transmission lines to the water and sewage plants as a2p2 suggests get in the queue for a miso connection work to legalize true community solar at the state level then implement it here get the seo or a parallel utility up and running and start selling power to local commercial users these options are not mutually exclusive but they do require owning the asset yes we could buy it back from dte in five years seven years but the price will be very high selling would take renewable power capacity off their books so it's

016worth a lot more to dte than mere market value and we would pay a big premium i share the first caller greg woodring's concern about additionality of this project i think it's a valid question i don't know the answer um if it is if it isn't uh additional then we're better off on our own doing an additional solar farm and even if it is additional i think we still need to um have a conversation around ownership thanks thank you that's all risky very good okay so let me pull out the agenda here just a second so um the first presentation or point on the agenda i should say is the capital investment process and this how that overlaps with our sustainability agenda and um deb i think um you're joining us this evening to present

017thank you very much appreciate you um spending your time your evening with us and um missy i don't know if you want to introduce the topic briefly first or um if you want to just hand things over to dip i want to thank deb for coming you may not know but deb is retiring in just a few weeks so i think you might be one of her last public meetings and we grabbed her so we could get all that institutional knowledge before she transitions and she's doing a beautiful job passing it on to kayla coleman but i just want to acknowledge that the work that you've done for the city for a blink of an eye but a longer time than that and uh you will be sorely missed but thank you for spending one

018of your last public meetings with us uh so without further ado deb do you want to share your slides or do you want me to run them i can just go ahead and do a show screen all right so i'm going to click it here in just a minute so my presentation is not terribly long tonight but what i would like to do is kind of quickly cover where we have been in the capital improvement plan and how we started out integrating sustainability where we are today and where we hope to go next so that's sort of my goal and with that i will give you just a second and share screen okay i assume we're all set at this point yes we see it yeah it's always weird how we zoom unlike when we

019do teams meetings i don't actually see what you see once i go to this mode so we're good so um is there a chance you could go to um like slideshow mode it's still showing some um borders and things like that i don't know if you can do that uh yeah hold on just go view daddy right but i think that i grabbed just the pdf because sometimes that's easier so full screen mode i think it should work view and then full screen mode a little bit farther down near the bottom there we go yes that better that's a little bigger yeah thanks okay great because again weird looks exactly the same on mine so all right so with that um i wanted to start very briefly just explaining how the capital improvement plan is

020put together so you can see where the ability to integrate sustainability as the plan is put together and then of course once we implement plans is the second and probably more major opportunity so one thing that's important to understand because not all cities organized i'm going to call it cip out of brevity at this point but we organize our cip by asset groups and we set it up that way because generally speaking these groups are not competing with each other for money so when we go to doing the prioritization like we'll talk about later and where we can integrate sustainability criteria um each group has then more flexibility in setting up those criteria and again like water funds don't compete with sewer funds or street village funds so it works well to parse out uh

021the groups like that so we have three overarching groups that's municipal facilities transportation and utilities and then we break each one down further so municipal facilities include city-owned buildings parks and recreation and solid waste transportation is the biggest group because we have our municipal airport active transportation is the area where things you do that don't involve a motor so bicycling pedestrian activities anything that gets people out of their cars basically we do maintain i believe it's 16 bridges in the city new streets is a very minimal category because generally ann arbor is quite build out we're not really much in the business of new streets mostly what ends up in that category is requests to pave gravel streets um other transportation is other things that happen inside the limits of the right-of-way but that are

022not about getting around like on your feet or on a bike so that's like signs and signals would fall in there um if the downtown development authority does streetscape projects to beautify them so that's where other transportation is really other right-of-way projects parking facilities the city owns a number of parking structures and some surface lots they are actually operated for us through the dda but they're still city assets so improvements to those still fall in our capital improvement plan street construction speaks for itself and transit is basically the future train station and an idea about um cube jump lanes for uh buses are in there so it's quite a tiny category but we distinguished it out because it has unique properties and then the final asset teams are utilities sort of self-explanatory we have sanitary

023sewers storm water and water and in the sanitary and water that includes the plants themselves that are operating the system as well as all the pipes that are part of the system so groups of staff are organized by these asset groups and to create the plan i always refer to it as the three p's so the first thing we do is identify new projects and where those ideas come from um is pretty broad sometimes they come directly from citizen requests or maybe it's a group more than an individual citizen but um you know throughout the year i may receive emails saying anything from can you pave my street to i think we need a crosswalk here so we do get requests that come in that way um master plans so many asset groups have long

024term capital plans and they say when you get to this point you should do x so we get ideas for master plans and then probably the biggest single source is staff knowledge nobody knows better where the water mains are breaking or where the heating and cooling isn't working very well or whatever to suggest projects so we actually have a meeting in which people present projects if we're in the year like this is an even numbered year so we tackle a full six years in the even-numbered years we only look at the front two years and the odd that keeps us in cycle with the capital budget so people can suggest other things that aren't already in the cip and they can also suggest changes to the scope of the project so that's always meeting one

025of the first of the three p's and just a quick notion of what makes something eligible to go in the plan we're looking for capital improvements that cost more than a hundred thousand dollars and it could also be a suite of projects that cumulatively go over that limit so let's say um missy suggested um you know a series of ev charging stations and it was 25 25 25 25 4 years in a row as long as the project itself reaches um that hundred thousand below that things tend to get funded through operation and maintenance um and then also we will fund studies in the capital improvement plan if they're going to lead to a capital improvement so let's say we do uh you know a study of all our buildings uh an energy assessment then

026we know that that's gonna lead to some energy related changes or we study you know flooding areas and we know that will lead to some storm water projects so studies that are more than 50 000 that will lead to capital improvements also make it into the plan then the next thing that we do is actually prioritize the project and this is where we're going to spend a little time and i'm going to finish going through the process itself first but if we have this whole body of projects we have to have a way to decide what to do first what's more important to the city you know what contributes more to our goals so any new project that is added is prioritized and if someone suggested a scope change to a project that's already in

027the plan we re-score it uh to prioritize it and i'll mention in a minute we're using a software called alavance that we tend to refer to it more as strategic value scoring but everybody still calls it prioritization but we think of it as what strategic values can this project exam and while we're working on that finance is off to the side setting the parameters for us because in order to get to the next step of program we have to know how much money do i have to spend in the water group in 2024 so i have to have a financial target for the teams to be keeping their ideas within and then the final step is actually programming and by that i mean what year is this project going to fit in the plan and

028how much is it going to cost so to create that plan obviously we have a prioritization score and that's very important however it can't be the only thing we might say oh gosh we'd like to do you know a train station tomorrow but it's 80 million dollars i don't have 80 million dollars so it doesn't matter if it's number one it's still not going to happen until we have the funding available um and the other thing is the city works very hard to coordinate projects across asset groups with each other so for example if we are going to be paving a street we always have asked the question is the water main okay under there does the sewer need any attention are we having flooding do we need to do storm water work and each

029of those might be projects in their own bucket but we have to coordinate them together and then the last little box i have here says staff and contractor capacity and that i'm sure will not come as a surprise to any of you but that's become quite the challenge contractors are busy and we're competing against other cities counties the state for those same contractors we can't predict exactly but we do tend to know which areas were more short than others in contractor capacity so we at least consider that a bit so we put all those projects that we prioritize we try to do the highest scoring ones first depending on the funding availability and coordinating with other projects and out of that we create the six-year capital improvements program and this is basically just reiterating we

030look if it's coordinated with something we slot at the first available time and we keep adding projects in a given year until our bucket is full and then we move to the next fiscal year and then we go back and keep iterating if another group comes along and says oh i really can't wait another year on my water project but all of that leads to a plan and then the last thing i like to talk about before i turn to sustainability specifically is whose responsibility is it in the city to approve the cip um and so planning commission itself under state law is the body that approves the capital improvement plan it is technically a planning document it has dollars assigned to projects at the planning level but the planning commission actually holds a public

031hearing and eventually votes and adopts the plan and then at that point the cip is the building block for the city's capital budget so generally in the administrator's budget the cip projects have been moved in you know almost completely intact one place where there tends to be little adjustment is if general funds are used because those are not a revenue source in the same sense of you know we all pay a water bill if we live in city there's the water revenue we you know have a street millage and so on so general funds come from property taxes but they're used both for capital and non-capital so there can be some tweaks but generally speaking what's approved in the cip leads to what is approved in the capital budget so let's turn now to how

032do we roll sustainability ideas in well back in fall of 2020 is when we switched to the alavance software and up until that point we had the same prioritization criteria across all groups um and there were like eight of them and then there are a couple of special ones that groups came up with but basically every group had the same um scoring and that seemed good on the surface however what we found in years of practice is people would say well that doesn't really apply to our group and i feel like i'm scoring this for nothing or whatever so we began the process of refining and we did our sixth largest of those asset groups in fall of 2020 and scored projects for the first time and one of the things we wanted to do

033in those change was to start to find an increased emphasis on energy and greenhouse gas emissions climate preparedness equity and so on so as you're all aware the city has had a sustainability framework for a number of years with 16 goals baked into it and what we had been doing was that in all of those groups with the universal criteria sustainability as an element of deciding what projects to advance was the same thing it was basically of those 16 possible goals how many can the project help advance so it was better than nothing um however uh there are things like you know local food source that'll be pretty darn hard for you know say a water project to do anything to assist so again people would say it doesn't feel quite right so once we

034had this opportunity to define things related to sustainability we began to do that so i'm going to show you a couple of examples of what groups came up with and again this is just reiterating where we were you could score 0 3 7 or 10 points depending on how many of those bulls that you ticked but once we got through these groups so active transportation parks and rec street sanitary storm and water were the groups we've done this tweaking on in some ways for the things like you folks care about the most energy there wasn't a tremendous opportunity to incorporate that component of sustainability but i'll show you where we did it and then you know we'll talk about the next steps so um one of the components of sustainability was equity and one of

035the things we found is we tried to develop criteria is there's not a lot out there to guide you and so we started with some of the things where we it has to be a scorable metric so for equity we realize that this neighborhood's at risk which is sort of a national level uh data set had set some metrics related to households in poverty so census tracts for the city of ann arbor allowed us to see within each census tract how many households were living in poverty and i have to say it was kind of an eye-opener for me i think we all think living in ann arbor that we don't have households in poverty or a lot of people i think believe that but we do have them and there's definitely differences in different

036census tracts so one example of an equity scoring now instead of numbers we use low medium and high desirability and behind them there's still a graph so it's not straight line but for example this was used in a couple of groups if the project occurred in a neighborhood with a low percentage of households in poverty meaning less than five percent it got the lower score if there were five to ten percent of the households in poverty in that census track it got medium and if they're greater than 10 and there are such tracks in the city uh then they scored the higher things so this started to bring in um one aspect of equity it being economic equity it's certainly not the only one but it was one that everybody said yes and it helps

037then keep you from accidentally spending more money in a wealthier census tract than in one that isn't within the city and it was interesting to see having done this for 10 years how it did actually advance some projects based on that score another example was trying to get at the idea that there are some groups that don't consume energy per se but they still have the opportunity to foster non-motorized travel as a way to decrease greenhouse gas emissions so in one of the groups they came up they called the scale user experience not sustainability but they were then looking at the kind of things that encourage uh non-motorized travel so in this group and i believe this was active transportation it's like well filling sidewalk gaps adding crosswalks adding bike lanes helps encourage non-motorized so

038we just did the same thing and set some metrics the sidewalk gap plan itself has a baked in prioritization so where did it score on that we have a transportation master plan that highlights certain crosswalks that we think will be more important to safety and to increasing mobility so we baked in where they uh would score on that and then also the bicycle network um now in the transportation plan has like critical non-critical and so on so there was another sustainability related uh criteria that a group came up with um parks and rec actually created a criteria called protect natural systems so another way of looking at sustainability issues and they when they tried to decide how do we know what projects are doing that they looked at metrics of stormwater runoff control is it

039literally impacting natural system and biodiversity you know positively or not positively and what is its impact on natural resources so they seem a little vague but yet when people went to score them they felt pretty comfortable analyzing one project versus the other as to which one was helping more another example um and this was again in parks and rec they literally said does it contribute to a20 goals as a metric and they said if it doesn't contribute obviously it gets a lower score if it contributes to now we're back to counting in a way but at least one of the a20 resilience strategies it can get to medium if it does two or more and they actually to remind people listed in the metric what some of those strategies were like power electric grid with

040renewable energy switch out appliances and so on and not all these projects could do all of these things but some of them could help also they still recognized if they did something to interconnect people in a way that didn't require vehicles that was helping contribute to the goal so they gave more than one metric at the low medium and high and again the idea was different types of projects trying to find a way that their impact could be differentiated so that was another one that they came up with then we have some groups like water and sanitary well we have two different types of projects within the group like in water we have water plant projects and we have water distribution projects and they are competing for water funds with each other so we said

041their ability to contribute to sustainability is different a plant project we can literally measure is it reducing energy load is it moderately reducing it is it significantly reducing it but we can't say the same thing on a water distribution project so they said even though they're two different things let's score the social equity as low medium high that way they're a slightly different metric but each project has an opportunity to be evaluated towards contribution to a sustainability goal and so we made a little depth there were some more i just picked some sample ones to say they they're not a cookie cutter here's how we define like if we tried to say does this project reduce greenhouse gas emissions a lot of you couldn't possibly do it therefore as a scoring metric it's not terribly

042useful but as next steps we haven't tackled particularly city-owned buildings where energy is a very direct thing um you know putting solar on city-owned buildings reducing energy loads in the buildings and so on so missy had introduced us to a group that wants to do a pilot with the city and they have some very elaborate metrics related to um carbon reduction and uh greenhouse gas emissions and all sorts so we're going to do a pilot with our city-owned buildings and airports where we have actual physical building projects and we can apply it in practice to the water and sewer plant projects but it will probably be indirect because of that strange scoring thing so this will be our first opportunity to drill down hard on the energy aspect itself for those groups and you know

043transit wouldn't be much of a leap whatever works for city-owned buildings would work for the train station but not for acute jump lane so we'll have some serious work to do on that but that's our next step and we continue to try and gather ideas from other communities on what are some of the metrics that they're using to measure so we came from to be honest nothing at all when i first came here to incorporating sustainability framework goals to using some drill down metrics for different groups to continuing that process forward so it's not perfect uh but we've made i think fairly significant strides in trying to bring it in and then the final piece that that's how we would incorporate it in the plan for the plan but where the real work and real

044change can also come in is once a capital project makes it into the plan that intervening at the design level to incorporate design metrics materials choices all those things that can affect sustainability goals and i believe out of this pilot that we're doing that we will get a lot of excellent ideas that will be more on the implementation end because when a project goes in the cip it is not designed we know what we want to you know achieve we're going to rebuild fire station number four but we haven't designed it so we can't introduce detailed metrics in prioritization but we certainly can once we start design so hopefully that gives you an idea i'm going to kill my share of where we've been where we're going and hope that helps a bit well thank

045you very much you're welcome i'd like to open things up for questions it's kind of a dry topic when that's all you hear so i i have a few if no one else does um i i didn't quite understand if um different categories i'm not asset categories or i'm not i don't know if i'm using the right term um compete with each other in effect even if there are dedicated uh funding mechanisms for example for a utility or something like that does you know something for um stormwater compete with um active transportation for example or are they all eventually in one big bucket um competing against each other they really are discreet with the exception that i was talking about that general funds can jump across a few categories but no by accounting uh principles

046and how all these utilities are set up water funds can't spend storm water dollars or vice versa or can't spend street dollars so they're competing within their own revenue source against each other so that's why the prioritization can be tailored at that last mega level where there's a handful of things that are capital that use general funds it's mostly some of our dams are funded in part by general funds city-owned buildings are heavily funded from general funds and so technically there's a little bit in the water group that could be competing with the city-owned building project but generally there's almost none of that um each revenue source is designed to support that specific set of capital improvements with that revenue source okay thank you that wasn't clear to me before and the other question um

047we actually have two questions um so it's clear to me um the various high medium lows and the the criteria that are used to define those how does sustainability weights or scores fit into the overall scoring so i assume they're being rated on other characteristics and my recollection at one time was that sustainability was roughly ten percent of the total is that still correct or is that um incorrect or been changed well you know that's a good question and it does differ from group to group so the one part i was trying not to go too far down in the weeds but when a group is going through this new setup process they call first they define the strategic values you know sustainability or something being one of them and then they do go through

048a waiting exercise and it's actually one of the most powerful parts of the elven software because uh the gentleman from university of michigan who was really behind it has a phd in decision making and he uses pairwise comparison it's like which is more important natural resources or you know condition whatever and everything gets rated on a higher lower scale to each other it helps people from trying to rig the system so to speak and when done sustainability uh whether or not they called it um in different groups there's somewhere i think it ranks over 20 you know where it's roughly equal to say if there's five the other ones so it isn't the same in every group but in general it's higher than sustainability relatively counted under the count how many of the 16 you

049score i definitely see a shift you know in thinking with the a2 0 goals and stuff that people are ever more conscious both as staff and as human beings about the importance of that in spending your money so um i it's not the same in everyone but it's reasonably high in all of them thank you you have a couple of questions councilmember briggs thanks i have one question and then one comment um so the question um you mentioned how equity be kind of being a measure of households in poverty is that kind of the only measure of equity that we have currently that we're using the prioritization score yes at present it was the only one we could get some sort of agreement on and have a metric that we could find have enough confidence

050in the statistics to use but there's continued discussion um particularly in the transportation groups as an example as access to transportation as an equity issue so i know some cogs got some metrics they're coming up with so at present it's the only one we've tackled but were very aware that there are other kinds of equity that are not economic equity and that was the first example i could come up with that's been discussed yeah that's great that's where my mind was going to because you know obviously it's important to be thinking about the census tract but particularly in transportation that sort of access to transportation and having continuity and record recognition that transportation is the second highest cost in household budgets um so good to know that we're thinking about that and then my comment

051is just um i just wanted to say how much gratitude and um appreciation i have for the work that you've done for the city i've been previously served on planning commission as you know and i've been watching these presentations for a long time and um your positivity and your approach to trying to improve the process and advocate for better software and better approaches um is definitely noticed and very much appreciated and i know it's going to be a big loss for the city so thanks for all the work that you've done over the years thank you both appreciate good evening um debbie congratulations on your retirement good luck on your second career you know you're just starting so you know this your next your next stop's gonna be a good one i think um i

052have a two-parter for you um the first part of the question um it seems like this new process you've embarked on is a little bit more of a collaborative approach where the project team basically does the scoring and then you just have an output that you're looking at and comparing um i'm involved in a lot of sustainability uh programs with infrastructure behind the scenes and we actually use it more as a screening tool not so much as a collaboration tool or a scoring tool wherein we're looking to eliminate projects if they're not providing some sustainable benefit to the community it just falls off the map completely so a thing like avoiding resurfacing a road if you can avoid a that's a huge source of carbon it may not be you know positive for the future

053we may have other forms of roadway used in the future maybe bikes or other traffic don't need to resurface you know use it as a deferral tool has that been has that been considered is it ever a part of the process i'd be curious on that and then secondarily maybe in the same breath can a citizen that has some experience in this actually participate in the next round of revisions do you know where that's headed because we'd love to help on the first question no we have not used it as an elimination because the fact that the project has been identified kind of by default says there's a need to address so rather than saying no we're not going to do it at all using your road example one thing we're already doing is drilling

054down hard on the right fix at the right time philosophy and trying to do smaller fixes earlier in the life of the pavement to avoid those big fixes that are expensive they're you know carbon unfriendly all of those things but we as you know public sector dollars saying it doesn't meet uh something so we're not going to do it at all is not an approach we've taken um on the second thing um any input on these you know kind of changes and criteria are also always welcome and if they're sustainability related probably um sending them through missy as your principal staff contract would probably contact would probably be the best way to figure out um and she would work with kayla coleman my replacement to see how in this process that could fit in but

055any more expertise you know that is helping come up with these kind of metrics that people already have yay any other questions i have two quick ones folks for missy missy i know what an a2 0 strategy is i'm not sure i know what an a2 resilience strategy is we we don't have them they were the eight zero strategies okay the seven overarching really the sixth substantive yeah i wanna make sure i understood that and then the other quick question was it sounds like you've done a little bit of benchmarking on how sustainability is worked into other municipalities cips and that's what deb referred to where you provided some information about how another governmental entity is is doing that and that's what's leading to these pilots that mentioned you is that correct uh ish so

056the pilot that deb mentioned actually came from a very different conversation that someone who has worked overseas to help people integrate sustainability kind of into their capital planning process and is looking for kind of refinement in the u.s market they have a tool and so we're we're more uh bleeding edge of that to figure out how this actually works you could be applied within our system uh to your question i mean we constantly are trying to figure out like how do we do this better and i think deb hit on this really well and she always has to remind me that uh the cip is but one process the actual design of the projects is really where we can go deep hard and fast in a lot of selection um and for what it's worth

057the sustainability team sits on most of the working groups and the assets so we have representatives who you know we don't do water system planning but we're there asking questions to help prioritize the projects that they're bringing forward okay great again thanks deb um have fun in retirement and maybe we'll see you sitting on this side and you're never not order commissioned someday or something like that not necessarily for ann arbor but who knows what some other entity i appreciate and i'll let you get on to your solar farm questions so thank you so much i'm gonna step out have a good rest of your evening all right i just wanted to welcome cole cole thanks for joining us and we are now moving on on our agenda to a presentation on the uh solar

058uh installation on uh the wheeler or the wheeler center um solar park and um missy's going to present that and um looks like we also have someone from dte joining us so missy we'll let you take it away and make the introductions yeah that's great thank you so much uh everyone excited to be here today and i will start by saying the project that i've always referred to as landfill solar does have an official name so you saw it on the agenda as the wheeler center solar park so that is the name broadly that actually has been moved through dt system and apologies i hear tears in the background so we will likely have a visitor momentarily uh in terms of the presentation we're just gonna walk through some general slides i know we have

059some comments we're gonna try to address most of the comments and questions that we heard we might get some people will grab them in a q a so i want to thank mr rivet from dte uh for joining us we're gonna tag team the presentation and mike just very quickly should i do you want me to elevate randy or kayla into the panel i think we're good for now we can we can pull them in sounds great uh perfect so let me just pull up my spies for everybody well welcome this uh project is moving slow and fast in all ways it is the very first project that i took on when i joined the city and i'm excited to see where we are today it's been through a lot of different iterations and so

060for our time together we just want to talk briefly more from members of the public about how this project aligns with a20 uh we got a lot of questions about why collaborate and so we want to address those and talk pretty openly about why we chose this path about the process that we've been through give you kind of an overview of the project broadly talk a little bit about subscriptions and uh guess what there's new developments because there always are otherwise this work would be easy and it constantly is hard so we'll share a little bit about kind of what's happening within the landscape so to kick it off i'm going to start with 820 which i know we're all familiar with you know we have seven strategies there's really six substantive and the seventh

061is a cross cut that covers every single topic things like equity community engagement metrics so the six substantives the very first strategy is about powering our community with 100 renewable energy and under that are four actions that were identified action three i'll go in reverse order is to start a community solar program that is not legal uh in michigan we can't just start it because we want to so that came up of course we're pushing for community solar legislation it really really matters but we don't have it today so reframing community solar if we were to do it would be illegal unless we worked with our utility so community solar is one of our programs our actions that we want to see promoted action four is explicitly this project the landfill solar project which was

062called out in the plan and kind of uh if you've read a20 you know there's an entire section on uh these two different elements so our goal was to see both of these move forward and we had an opportunity presented us to do that so i'm gonna i'm gonna talk about that kind of opportunity in the framing of why collaborate and i'm gonna kick it over to mike in in terms of why collaborate one the site is complex right uh landfills are fabulous locations to build solar from an intellectual standpoint from an environmental standpoint i think from a land use standpoint and there is a reason they are not developed frequently they are complicated there are a lot of rules and requirements there are we are taking notes uh we often joke that we're gonna

063write a paper maybe even do like a netflix movie special and all the things that keep coming up on this project you know there was a box turtle that was seen in 1906 and we have to do special things because no one has seen it since 1906 but maybe it's still there who knows right so there's just a whole bunch of additional layers of complication associated with this project but that doesn't mean not do it right as people have uh commented a number of times we don't have a lot of undeveloped land in the city and we do have energy goals and energy principles and of course h20 that ask us to reduce emissions and to reduce emissions fast to prioritize local where we can and this is the plot of land that we have

064available to us to do scale and so we keep pushing through and trying to find ways and navigating kind of that train broadly so this is a complex site and having a partner with us is important we want community solar right it's one of the actions in a20 and right now the only way to do any kind of community solar program is with our utility we got agreement in the vgp or section 61 filing for this project with the city being the anchor tenant meaning we'll be the off taker and that's how we got community solar to move forward through through the project and we've been working on designing that uh kind of in lockstep with what's also really neat is that we can connect to dt's distribution lines so you heard some callers mention

065that yeah we did pay for some of the initial studies every development pays for those studies we however because we thought we might have some room on the dt distribution lines not the transmission lines we were able to do an assessment and the answer was we did there is room on those lines with some updates which are built into the project costs but that means a lot of things one it means we are not in a long wait line the itc to get on to the micro market and the transmission lines that is a really long list we're talking years um and not one or two many many years because lots and lots of projects are coming on so you have to go back to the end of the queue it costs a lot more

066money the studies are very that you have to do additional studies in this process so we knew if the dt distribution system wasn't capable of taking this we were going to have to go and get in the queue if we wanted this process to move forward and because it's in the distribution network the energy we're producing is likely to be used locally right it's not likely to go somewhere else in the big transmission system and then another reason is we care about scalability transferability and being a leader in the space this allows us to demonstrate what's possible through multi-institutional collaboration and that's not just with the city of dt pittsfield township has been beside us in this project you know this land that we're talking about was uh and is in a pud with pittsfield

067and so we've been working with them on design doing public engagement uh within the community in pittsfield township and pittsfield township is excited to be one of the off takers of the project itself and so there's lots of collaborations that are coming forward and i would be unequivocally remiss if i didn't know that in the section 61 agreement which is that third bullet point the vgp we also designed this program and got approval to make a low-income solar offering an option what this means is we can in fact buy down the cost of a number of subscriptions so that people don't have to pay the premium they get the credit on their bill and they can subscribe low income eligible qualified people can subscribe so we've been working on two mechanisms to make that manifest

068although we're open to lots and lots of other ideas and folks have them one is uh dt is working on a low income solar program broadly right now where people can contribute funds to a low income this pool of money and then projects get financed and the credits for those projects go to different low-income residents in their distribution network or in their service territory the other is we've been exploring at the city buying down if i got uh hypothetically two million dollars in funding somewhere if i get a grant can i put it down towards that project and reserve two million dollars worth of output for residents and so we're working on all of those structures uh in collaboration with dt but that's part of what excites me about this project too so kind of

069big picture bullet points we don't have to stand up new infrastructure by doing this which is a long time and if speed is a criteria which we all said it was when we adopted the energy principles and criteria this allows us to move fast to get renewable energy on the grid it is additional this does not count to dte's credit for their renewable energy uh portfolio in terms of like their requirement to meet this is in a separate section a separate filing so this is new this would not be built if we did not bring this project forward because it is not my can can share more about that but it's not at the scale the dt is looking at it's a complicated site so why would you start at this site uh and so

070it is fundamentally additional to what would move forward and it's the only way we can get community solar so we're excited about the project despite all of its complications most of the time i'm excited about this sometimes i cry a little bit myself but mike do you want to take over now i'm going to go and mute for a dog park great thank you thank you missy and i i do not enjoy following missy because she has so much energy to bring the table and is so enthusiastic about this project but i will try my best to keep that going dt is extremely excited to be a partner on this and missy talked a bit about the section 61 and renewable energy plan settlement which ann arbor was a part of that was a really

071important step to this process i know a lot of you have read news articles and mlive articles and et cetera around kind of this process along the way from 2019 and so we partnered before we we actually had approval from the mdsu to move forward on this we started partnering early to really drive down to the details and understand is this feasible what can we put there how much would it cost um can it tie into the grid and so a lot of that leg work was was taken on by both dta on the on the call side but also in arbor as a partnership in the beginning and so coming out of that settlement we were able to really have the approval to move forward on a framework and so that framework laid out

072how we were going to go out and bid this and it was going to be an open rfp we brought in a lot of requirements from the city to make sure that we were aligned with how the city would like to uh conduct rfps and and those uh those aligned well with us so there really wasn't any complications there we did issue an epc which is engineer procurement construction uh rfp in october 2021 and what that really is is we had a tabletop design that's what a lot of people saw numbers were put out you saw some drawings that tabletop design needs to be taken into a full final design we need to go through and do finalized permitting uh finalize the electrical interconnection and etc to make this into reality and then obviously procure

073and construct it and so we issued that rfp in october 2021 it was originally a four week rfp we extended a fifth week as we saw more folks coming into the mix and they were asking for a quick week extension so we were able to give that week extension and we received a great amount of bids 10 bids from very qualified ebc contractors um we were extremely happy from the gt side to see the the names and the the size of companies that wanted to come in and compete on this and i think a lot of them were just excited about the project it's it's a large um large local project it's not the largest of projects that you'll see in solar a lot of a lot of the universal scale projects are 100 megawatts

074200 megawatts but this is really unique high publicity and really cool aspect with the landfill uh we did go through and and typical to rrp which aligns with um npsc approved processes we did review those and went down to a round two where we brought those select uh four bids into conversations and really dialed into their bids currently we are down to one single apc contractor that's going to provide the best value for this project and uh we're currently in the middle of negotiating with them to finalize that agreement which would ultimately decide the pricing and uh give us enough information for us to work with the city to understand whether or not we can move forward on this and at what price point so looking at the project and let me minimize what i

075can see here so i can see the slides as well um so looking at the project you can see uh four arrays here and i'll talk through kind of the specifics around those arrays um this is a 20 megawatt project i know there are some questions around it used to be 24 we heard um it was a touch larger we did end up um you'll see there's not any solar arrays on the floating around the reservoir there's no more floating on solar missy i think can speak a touch more to that as ann arbor was pretty well involved on that portion as well but it seemed like we were not going to get the approvals needed from our regulatory bodies in the environmental side of the house um to have that go forward and so

076it's a it would have been a fascinating thing from an engineering perspective and sustainable perspective but um the decision was made to drop that portion of it so what we're left with is 20 megawatts and 20 megawatts is jammed really tight in there this is about 70 acres and on 70 acres uh 20 megawatts is no small fee as you can see with the row spacing if you're familiar with solar it is tightly packed um which is great for the city uh it's great for that dual use land i'm really excited about that piece as you're really getting as much value as you can out of that that portion of land um some other uh discussion points i want to just touch on here financing the project dt will finance this project this will be

077a utility capital project just like any other generation project we have so there is no capital output from the city from pittsfield township or any subscribers and so we have the ability to to finance this and offer it at a subscription rate and that subscription rate is that levelized cost of energy that you'll hear in the new here in some of the news articles and missy and myself have talked about and that's really it's a it's a cost recovery mechanism that we put into a tariff just like we would with a migraine power project if you're familiar with our volunteer renewable energy portfolio we do expect to qualify for 26 itc uh investment tax credit that is and that is being baked into the pricing as as we're currently working through it right now so

078i know there are some questions around whether or not we qualify and whether or not that would be passed on to the city and to the subscribers it will be and then additionality i won't touch too much on that i think missy did a great job in talking about that the the approved megawatts that came out of the renewable energy plan settlement those megawatts are for customer domain those are for our voluntary renewable energy program the city of ann arbor happens to be one of those customers demanding negligence and so those are incremental they're additional they're not going to be built otherwise without customer admin and uh just talking a brief you know brief more about the slide here so construction is expected to to start in early 2023. um what we're looking at is

079it's a commercial operation date of end of 2023 and that would mean that we would expect generation in early 2024 um as we finalize a contract with the engineering procurement construction firm that will solidify that schedule a little more but the the expectation is to finalize the the construction end of 2023 and have generation ready for 2024. and then looking at the the picture on the right you'll see the the four arrays a b and c are arrays that are sitting on greenfield development so those will be your traditional um post mounted uh solar arrays uh ray d is on the capitol landfill so what you'll see with the ray d is there will be no ground penetration there those will be ballast mounted um basically sitting on concrete blocks that would be on top

080of the cap of the of the landfill so no penetration of that and just quickly i want to add a few questions that i saw come in to how come we're not more on the landfill regulation um basically what ends up happening and we designed separately then we found a nesting bird so we had to downsize so we're really maximizing every i mean every it feels like foot that we have any viable solar potential on site making sure we're not interfering with other uses especially natural system uses that are on site there was also a question about pollinator habitat and we are working really hard with dnr to make sure we can have that now you can imagine the cap landfill is really regulated there are a lot of things we cannot do on that

081landfill there are put more potential in the greenfield sites but even in that space because of permitting issues we're i mean we're committed to doing as much pollinator habitat as we can i just can't tell you today what that looks like because we're still working with dnr to figure out specifically what species would be allowed and uh when we're gonna be able to plant kind of broadly and then mike teed up no floating solar once again here was another one we learned this water is considered waters of the state because of how big it is which means it's regulated by the state which means the only way we would be able to put floating solar on it is by demonstrating there was nowhere within i believe it was a five mile radius in the city

082that solar could go and it had to be this spot we can't right because there are lots of places solar could go so instead of fighting that fight we decided we were gonna take that off of the project and we're working instead with the eagle to try to change those rules because that's prohibitive for a lot of potentially good use cases going forward so it doesn't mean we can't eventually add floating solar it just means for the sake of speed and that fight that that was a fight that we were going to take in a different direction for another day so just wanted to share why that fell mike you want to take subscriptions yeah yeah we'll do um so what this will look like to to everyone including the city pittsfield township and subscribers

083um so this is going to be a subscription model like migrant power as i mentioned before dt will finance the entire project so there is no capital outlay so what will happen is um we'll mold this into a levelized cost energy subscription model and the way that works if you're not subscribed to migraine power is you have a subscription price that's based on the levelized cost energy basically the cost of the project um drives that and that's a it'll be a dollar cent per kilowatt hour and you'll also receive the financial benefits of the project so that's the community solar aspect right you subscribe into it you're paying for a portion of the project but in return you get the benefits from it the benefits come in terms of our market value of the capacity

084credit and the energy and so that's uh that's what we've been doing with migraine power it's an approved method and so that's the piece where inside the settlement the mpsc our michigan public service commission uh was very generous in improving this as well uh it's it's already there it's a it's a defined method that's that's put out there for these types of projects so we don't have any regulatory risk in getting this move through them or we have low regulatory risk in that nature um as we've talked about before gt is going to be solely responsible for the operations and the maintenance of the site and what's what's neat about this is because it is a subscription model on a cent per kilowatt hour or a dollar per megawatt hour if it doesn't produce we

085don't recover cost and so the onus is on us to keep this thing up and running to keep this thing pushing out as many green electrons as possible and that's really a cool aspect from the customer side is dt is on the hook to keep it running thanks mike so new development because this work is never easy um some of you may know and i think actually chuck you could probably talk about this more than the rest of us that the federal government recently opened an investigation into potential tariff penalties pretty significant uh penalties for the solar market and there is a lot that we do not know it is moving very fast what we do know is that um this is a potential reflection moment some are calling it an existential crisis for the

086solar industry and for those of us trying to move renewable energy forward this is you know like days in the development so we're all waiting to figure out what this is going to mean for all kinds of projects broadly we are seeing industry-wide cancellations costs are escalating on projects because of this uncertainty and this potential 200 percent plus tariff you know that's a that's a really big deal and we don't have a sense on if it's fully grandfathered if it's going forward what's in what's out it's quite a complex landscape so we're sharing that uh what we've taken the stance on is we're committed to this project we are going to continue getting as much information literally we're getting i mean last week we were getting calls by the hour trying to figure out what's

087happening within the market we're committed to moving the project forward we are waiting on a little bit more clarity about what's included in this investigation what the tariffs are likely to be and we are obviously looking for as any panels sitting on a shelf somewhere that happened to be made in the u.s because that's great but the us is a very small manufacturer of solar panels and so this is painful reality that we're sort of in at the moment but i want to reiterate that all of us we've had multiple calls between all the project partners and we are we're committed to this project we just have to see we just have to learn more about this investigation mike is there anything you want to add no miss i i think he covered it it's

088a it's a very dynamic marketplace and there's a lot of supply demand shortages and risk in terms of this tariff so a lot of uncertainty out there yeah yeah absolutely so just to kind of close out uh for next steps we brought the project forward to you i know we brought the resolution because our initial attempt uh our initial intent was to be a council on may 5th and we had already pref we prepped council members we prepped the michigan public service commission that we were coming shortly thereafter and uh we have a little bit more time as we're seeing the impacts of that last slide in this investigation that's taking place but we wanted to bring this project to you hear your thoughts uh should this be something you're supportive of that's great we

089can we can move you know forward as soon as we get clarity on what's happening with the investigation uh but just so you know what comes after we will go to city council for consideration of the project uh i don't have a date certain again because of the last slide but we will come as soon as we can come and feel really confident with the pricing mechanisms we will have a public information session for folks to kind of listen learn more share feedback we then file with the michigan public service commission for formal approval uh we've already briefed them and prepped them we've answered questions we we hope and i think our soft expectation is that was pretty quickly because they're really supportive of the project and then we break ground and uh while we're

090doing that we're recruiting people uh to sign up into the program or just letting them know that it's even an option to sign up into the program and then we produce and we reduce emissions so that's the that's the timeline kind of broadly and i'm sorry i can't give you certain dates i wish i could i could have two weeks ago but the world is changing so with that i'm gonna stop and see what other questions you have so questions and there have to be some or or maybe um i might ask uh mike and missy uh you received um two emails um hopefully you have those emails in front of you or can pull them up um i did my best to sort of look through them to see that you have addressed most

091of them but i'm wondering if you can look at those and rather than us going through the formalities of calling on people and everything like that um if you can see if there's anything that stands out to you that maybe wasn't covered that members of the community or members of the commission already submitted in advance that just might be more efficient yeah you're gonna see us reading them i think because we tried we tried to integrate them so i ask one question um it sounds like the dte is responsible for operations and maintenance does that mean dte is also assuming liability or what liabilities are resting with the city and which if any are lying with dte that was one thing important to us um and also in terms of advising city council that we

092thought was important how's that being handled the split of liability make you want to take that i'm getting the next one ready sure um so john thank you for the question so we have we are in final negotiations as well with a special contract which would govern this agreement um what it's so i can't speak exactly to how it's going then but um dt has been the developer we would take on the risk for the development on top of the cap landfill the duration and longevity of that risk is obviously going to be something that's in the contract but as you can imagine the developer would be responsible for what happens online as we're constructing the solar array i see another question that uh there's two i'm sorry john i can't see you because i'm

093looking at the questions better you look at the questions than me no no no no if i cut you off just please tell me no no that wasn't intentional um there was kind of a two-part question one about the cost and the truth is i can't answer that right because the market is topsy-turvy at the moment so i can't i know people want to know i just can't give you that answer um the other was does the city reserve the right before you leave that topic um i assume that at some point there might be an out that the city that's where i was going to take as well as dte and say this this project is no longer viable or we cannot provide um the cost that makes a project like this make sense

094and at that point there would be an exit ramp and um there would be you know no no further cost to the city or the dte that's right yeah thank you for taking that's where i was going to go the second part of one of the questions was that like what if the price is too high so you heard um mike also say that they were still in final negotiations with the epc the contractor so like final pricing is like being negotiated and then the market adds that uncertainty so that's random but we reserve the right in all the contracts to walk away if the pricing was too high where we were two weeks ago was it wasn't i mean it was reasonable here we are now we've had lots of conversations about what too

095high means and like what does it act like 200 of a cost of an asset like we're out like we all know that like dt can't justify spending that much money on an asset we can't justify spending that much money on an asset but is that the truth you know so uh we to the essence of your in the core of your question yes both parties have the right to walk away if the pricing gets unreasonable and we have agreed to kind of eat our own costs you know we've all put in a lot of time and effort that have not been reimbursed paid for up front we've agreed if if in good faith we walk away okay i don't want to walk away john don't make me walk away like just fix the markets

096please i'll just ask a couple of questions at the top of my head i'm trying to turn it off but i think this is pretty clear um dte owns the asset right so it's not the city is not owning the asset we don't we continue on the land obviously yeah but the dde right okay um let's see and what what how is the power generated going to be shared between the various entities i think originally part of the energy generator was going to be um going to be uh essentially offsetting or going to pittsfield township for their municipal operations is that still the the part of the three-way contract yes it's not the contract each contract is individual with dte but what we've negotiated in the special contract that goes before the public service commission

097is pittsfield township gets the first megawatt of production so they would well roughly they would subscribe i know i see mike's face because it's more nuanced than that but generally speaking they get the right in the first kind of rite of refusal within that system and then others subscribe and ann arbor is effectively the the cleanup we come in whatever as a city is not subscribed and we off take which is why there's i mean hence how it sort of works for community subscriptions mike what do you want to fix no no not fix anything i i'll add a library just to touch on the subscription so it is uh it's going to be set up as a percentage based subscription for everyone except for ann arbor and arbor as mrs said will be uh

098the remaining amount of megalod hours not subscribed to but pittsfield township has a section and a right to subscribe to 85 of their load which would plus the 15 percent of renewable portfolio standard would take them to 100 percent right [Music] so that that makes sense i mean basically once the project is go ahead and we can lock in the contracts and that includes also for the panels and everything you know what prices there's essentially no risk that um the pro the uh the energy generators is not going to be used i mean that you have clear off takers in every single case where ann arbor sweeps up anything that may not be taken okay good that's clear um i i'm i'm gonna recognize anybody else that has a question um if you want to

099raise your hand um missy and mike is there anything else to see i'm looking yeah i'm looking i mean i think we hit most of them but people might want to go in more depth um i do want to add we might talk about the financing that dt is financing and there's a lot of benefits to that one also being we're not taking on more debt that frees up municipal debt that we can apply towards other projects whether that's portal housing uh infrastructure projects etc so that's another thing that we haven't touched on yet uh wanna drive home we're not stopping with community solar and i know i mentioned that uh community solar legislation at the state everyone at dt knows this we talk about it all the time uh that is something we care

100a lot about but it's not legal now and think what else i i had someone from the community emailed me today had looked at the presentation and um they had a question about the power generated i think it was 35 million megawatt hours per year and the question was um that seemed high to this individual and i'm just curious is there tracking or are these bifacial or what kind of things are we doing to get that high level of generation good question let's go for it mike sure so so it's 35 000 megawatt hours oh sorry is expected in the first year of generation and they are they are likely going to be bifacial uh panels they will not be tracking and the reason they won't be tracking is the the size the land constraint

101we have your best bet of about getting value out of it is to jam pack as many fixed tilt solar panels in there as possible very good the tracking just takes a lot more lane do people that know a lot more than this than i do with their hands up so i'm going to uh let them pose some questions commissioner hook up i i could go into a lot of questions but it is typical i will not i will be kind tonight and just stick to a one or two um i was going to ask kind of about john's question but maybe to carry it a step further is there a pv sys model or some model of the infrastructure that might be available would you mind asking again we got some feedback so i

102just want to make sure we heard that yeah i got real bad feedback here um i assume that dte modeled this in a couple different ways it's not single axis track but it's fixed tilt but there's a whole lot of other modeling parameters that we look into and things like density pitch you know two portrait two landscape all kinds of ways to stack these to create the density that you're doing um how much exercise was undertaken to fit that it sounds like a lot mike can just kind of give us a feedback on is this p50 p70 p90 what kind of outfit conditions are you looking at yeah thank you um so so the part of the short list uh work that we did with the four epc vendors that made it through the first

103round was we did refine where how they were designing it and uh and asked them to run pvsys models and provide those to us uh based on uh two criteria one being um optimize and levelize cost energy but the second one being output and so really looking to maximize the output on that on that portion of land with the lowest cost of energy possible uh i don't recall what the probability um confidence interval is and i would i would guess once we once we strike the deal and we move forward the pvsys models can could be made available upon request thank you commissioner kerber with all the bluebirds in the background actually they're swallows tree swallows anyway as far as the community solar offering is it going to be i mean you already have my

104green power that you offer as as an alternative is this only going to be made available to residents of the city and pittsfield township people in the county what what is the area that it's going to be offered in yeah yeah it was like a race to mute uh the way that we have talked about this is it's offered to anyone in dt service territory now from our standpoint like the city's standpoint we're going to be working really closely with pittsfield to make sure our residents know about it and have the the chance to subscribe kind of first in line but anyone in the service territory will have the opportunity to sign up for so it'll have to compete with my green power yeah i mean you could think of it that way could it

105cannibalize my green power i i don't think i understand how that would even happen like supplant demand for migraine power you mean yeah i mean if i'm on my green power and i'd rather be on this and does that mean that my green power gets reduced and this goes up there you have glitching like theoretically it could but i think demand is high for renewables such that that is unlikely to be the outcome i think what's more likely is more renewables get built because it demonstrates people have a high desire for local renewable energy systems but i guess theoretically mike do you i completely agree with you missy it's it it could technically cannibalize some of the migrant power customers that are and we have a a good portion that are living in the city

106of ann arbor but i i don't see that as being a concern we are our program's expanding every day um and we're running out of capacity so adding more capacity for customers you know to subscribe this is a complimentary offer so i view this as a really good addition to the program and it's it's local all of our projects are mission based um but this is a little closer than some other ones o'shea was really close to folks in detroit and right off of 96 but yeah i think it's just another complimentary offering that helps us increase our consumption across thank you i guess one question i think for members of the community that might still be open is an explanation missy from you possibly of when this project was started there was not even

107the idea of an seu oh i see that we have questions from um edie and ember but i'll go ahead since i'm halfway through there was not even the idea of an seo now there's this idea of an seu it's not a reality it hasn't been approved by city council for that matter it's not funded you know there's lots of steps with that um but at least there's this dangling idea of an scu out there and people are i think projecting that idea onto this project and thinking well why wouldn't we take this as an asset and i think you've addressed this um but maybe i'll let you address it one more time so it's clear to everybody why why not associate this with the scu um and you talked about speed and things like

108that but i'm wondering if if there's anything else that you've thought of in the meantime that really addresses that question yeah so there are many ways about that when we don't have an seo right so we while that is something we are actively you will hear in staff updates starting to get feedback on very exciting that is not that's not an instrument that we have second is speed third even if we do have an scu we don't project community solar until much later in the process and the point is to do distributed systems rooftop solar and storage systems first very limited pools and wires you know because the goal is not distribution the goal is generation and so this would not come quick in that process so the speed plays itself in multiple ways like

109speed of seu speed of emissions reduction speed of renewables on the grid and then the last thing you know we've i've been really open mike knows this um we talk about it with them that if the community moves in the direction this is an asset that that could be an asset that the seo acquires you know that's just real i won't pretend that that's loved by everyone but you know it's an asset that exists that doesn't that would exist that doesn't today and so in my mind i don't understand why we would wait if the objective is to get as much renewables as we can on the grid and this is a way to do that and i think the other thing is is that we don't really have a load that we could connect

110to i mean people have mentioned well we could do vehicle charging we could do bus charging we could do the city doesn't have buses you know we don't have a bus facility there we don't have a university michigan bus system there so this is not really as i understand it and i'm i'm asking you and others to challenge this um but it seems to me there isn't a practical load that we can transmit to and you know even if we had an scu they're going to be people scattered all around the city and i don't know how we would we'd uh essentially transfer that power to all of these distributed uh demand points you'd have to set up a really intense uh distribution system to do that and it is true like we have looked

111at how to maximize on-site and we've thought about we're getting our two first electric refuse trucks can we set up a charging station there but it operationally doesn't make sense given how the trucks come and go and so that doesn't quite work wheeler is one of the sites for the roof the solar projects that council funded through arbor funding and we have at a 97 offset you know like it we just we don't have usage on the site that makes sense and that's really close by it's kind of the push in the pull of the most viable land that we have for something like this just isn't next to our heavy users mr juno thank you um i just wanted to clarify i mean i in the fact sheet on the landfill solar and in

112a lot of the coverage it looks like they are referring to this as something within the migraine power program so is that not the case and are we just kind of or it is a separate entity yeah uh mike you wanna do you wanna take that one yeah i can take it over and feel free to chime in if you if you have a different take on it um so the migraine power program is our umbrella brand over our volunteer renewable energy program which is normally referred to as section 61 which is just a legislation that enables it so to dt this looks and feels the exact same as any of our other migrant power projects except for it is a project that's priced specifically based on one location as opposed to our migraine power

113portfolio is cost average together and as we bring new projects online we bring that pricing down as as projects are cheaper and if they're not cheaper than we will probably build another pricing portfolio that starts off with a different price point but the goal of migraine power portfolio is really just cost averaging and keep everyone's uh rates as cost-effective as possible mccoy sorry just really quickly adding on to that last piece is that the that is right like from how dt is thinking about it from our perspective yes and is how i would respond to that community solar if you look at nrl's definition is not there isn't one flavor of community solar there are multiple different manifestations and it works in different regulatory contexts right minneapolis is a different construct and a different ability

114to be able to move than we have here which is different than what's happening in massachusetts but they're all sort of framed broadly for us this is about the community being able to make some decisions about how and where and and the systems that it's constructing to be able to power its operations or its life so that's that's a really important kind of piece to us is that that co-design and being at the table actually figuring out what systems look like and getting the benefit of those systems but also bearing the cost of those systems right like that's that's part of the equation of the project thank you uh commissioner mccoy yeah thank you um i have two questions i guess i'll ask the first one um this one first because it relates to edie

115and larry's comments about mind green power i'm just curious mike if you could talk about like the current demand for my green power relative to its capacity um so i'm curious how like adding this project to that um you know may influence that like if it's likely that a lot of people outside of ann arbor in our marketing will want to take it up for example um i'll start there and i'll second one after that sure yeah the the demand is unprecedented for migraine power we uh as shown in the section 61 and settlement that we talked about we we asked for another 300 400 plus megawatts to support demand um we're currently oversubscribed in terms of large commercial customers um which is great and that's really the way the program was set up was

116uh to to pull the subscriptions in or the contracts in first and then go out and ask for google and build those projects to come um because the the mechanism is there to just completely fulfill demand as it comes in we do have some opening in our smaller non-contracted non-contracted program which is what residential and small commercial would subscribe to that is quickly filling up um we in the settlement we had a small update to the program that allowed us to blend all of our projects together so that small customers residential customers and large customers all buy into that same portfolio which is really great deal for our small customers and residential customers and it's uh it's driving the the price point down and it's really bringing a lot of demand and so um this

117project will continue to push that i think i think what we're seeing here is there's more to it than just price price is a big driver for a lot of folks but there's some folks that really like that locality and the in the solar aspect of being being able to see it feeling and know the electrons are being pushed to your distribution okay that's helpful thanks and now i have a follow-up question so i actually have three questions um so nathan you had mentioned that like you know the city will do a lot of advertising to try to you know make sure that local residents know about this new opportunity so i'm curious like are are we going to be able to access this like exclusively first or is it just that we'll be able

118to get ahead in marketing you know before other people have the opportunity to fill it up or will it be open to everyone and we're just hoping our marketing means that residents will get to it first yeah good question we we know about it before everyone else knows about it so the way we thought about kind of the initial subscriptions is once the public service commission approves it it won't be available for other people to subscribe to yet because it won't be listed anywhere right it's not producing but we can start forming the waitlist by doing the outrage and the engagement through the city and in tandem with pittsfield township so that's the way we thought about it although now i'm intrigued about thinking about exclusive rights i think our lawyers will kill me if

119i come back with another edit to our contract but i'm going to hold that thought so thank you for it okay thanks um and then my other unrelated question was just that um you know because dte did the request for proposals i know you walked through the elements that were a part of um that from dte's perspective but i'm just curious um if you could speak to i guess this is a question for missy how that compares to the new request for proposals pro process that we just enacted i know like the timing is so that you know this i don't think this would have fallen under the new law anyways had i never done it but i'm just curious um how they compare to our new policy for that full alignment um in fact

120gta is more aggressive than what the city has because we can't they can have requirements that we can't have as a private entity so if you think about like the responsible contractor uh work yeah it all made its way uh all that language made its way through the the contracting process and then they took our non-discrimination clauses they basically took everything else that we have too and that was part of the language in the contract everyone had to prove every better that they were in adherence with those policies okay great thank you other questions so mike i want to thank you and the dte team for partnering with us and i'm sure missy put you through the ringer and we did a little bit of that tonight both you and missy missy again thanks for

121your comments um i think unless i see any other hands raised that we can move on to the resolution and what i would like to point out is uh i we attempted to go through uh all the questions that were proposed both by commissioners as well as in the email um from a2p2 and we may have missed the one or the other act question but this is not the only hurdle and we saw that there are several next steps and this will also have to go eventually to council and so if there's something really important that's been missed i would just say to members of the community as well as to members of the commission that we have an opportunity to weigh in with our questions and concerns before this finally goes through so this

122is not the one and last opportunity for us to to pose questions and make sure that we're doing the right thing in the interests of the city as well as um voters and uh property owners here in ann arbor so thanks very much for tonight's presentation you see do you want to move on then to the next agenda point which is the resolution of support yeah absolutely and i want to emphasize too that we put this together assuming we were on the timeline to go to council at an upcoming meeting um i think realistically we could view this like normal resolutions that this is just the first time kind of considering and getting general feedback and we can bring it back if that's fine with you chair um because we don't i i don't think

123i'm going to be standing in front of councilmember briggs and rodina on the fifth with a project and the markets have sorted themselves out but if i'm wrong i apologize in advance and i'm so excited uh but yeah so maybe i'll leave that to the conversation i mean this this is apparently may not have the sense of urgency on the other hand if there's not a lot of concerns um then we can talk about that and maybe we go ahead and take a vote tonight so we'll leave that open um but why don't you bring that up i think everybody's had a chance to look at it it's been posted since late last week it's relatively straightforward missy i'll let you run through [Music] the document i don't know if we need to go through

124the whole thing um hopefully people have had a chance to look at it sure i'll just share um we i know at energy commission meetings we don't often have this memo this memorandum is background it is something that we give to council so we just decided to go ahead and draft it especially because this project has had a life and some of that life was earlier than some of the commissioners so this is just background uh to be fair and then the resolution itself looks pretty similar to the presentation uh acknowledging that we've got our carbon neutrality goal strategy one 100 renewables two of those actions under strategy one as we talked about our community solar and the landfill solar project that we've been working on this for a while to design it and we

125intervened in the rate case i'm sorry not the rate case uh the vgp section 61 and got the settlement that we got acknowledging that the community solar if we want to move it forward is really it is only possible through collaboration with our industrial utility dte and then uh goes to i mean punch points that we just talked about but the final result is just a support and asking council to move it forward in a timeline that gets to the fastest ground breaking possible if possible in 2022 that's my goal but yeah thank you for that quick overview i'd like to ask for a motion to consider the resolution and a second if there is indeed a second and then we'll open it up for discussion a move mr chair and a second uh commissioner

126juno seconds so commissioner george and then commissioner juno uh comments questions uh comments of concern comments of support how do people feel about this it's not that late everybody i love it john so i i'll i'll talk for a second not very long i've i've been on commission now for several years um and like missy said this goes back now several years um i was one of several current and past commissioners that attended a public forum um out in uh pittsfield township um presenting this and oh and no i'll get to you in just a second um and um i i think um as with any major project like this um these are not black and white projects where you know it's either all bad or all good um and i think what we've seen

127here is that um while there are some concerns and maybe there are some things we would have liked to have done differently um my personal opinion is is that we need to do everything we can to accelerate uh greenhouse gas emissions reductions um this is one way of doing it some people might argue that we could just steer people to my green power but i think actually we're going to get a lot of additional subscript subscribers by having our own program and going this way um i'm i'm supportive of the project um commissioner levine uh yeah i just wanted to also go ahead and say that i am also supportive of this project i i do also understand some of the concerns that have been raised most by the public and people on the commission

128and particularly when with respect to the additive properties of this project and how it will you know whether or not we're just moving electrons closer to ann arbor and stuff like that and i i do think the way misty described it really makes it clear that a project on the landfill is complicated um it probably won't be happening at all right now or at least for you know three or four years however long it takes if we weren't going to do it this way so you know i do really think that it is important to get projects going and you know from what like john kind of said you know every avenue that we can to get more renewables i think is a valuable way um it doesn't totally i don't think it you know

129prevents us in the future from doing something else within scu or other other ideas that we might want to do and you know it it's it's just going to be a lot faster and then waiting and i i do support going this avenue at this time others uh there's people on the commission that um i imagine have a viewpoint and have a lot of experience and or or maybe no experience but still a viewpoint does anybody else want to weigh in uh commissioner peck thanks you know i gotta support it too um probably like everybody it feels like a darn poison pill or something what dte is doing to on one hand partner with folks all smiling and doing their solar and then at the same time are really doing grave danger or damage to

130the state of michigan with their political activities and the way they spend our money against our best interests it really upsets me but i think we do need to go forward we got to say you know one way or the other we're going to do this climate action can't wait for the bad actors all to get on board so let's do it and i am a my green power guy you know that's that's uh i spent a lot of my extra money on that and i will want to switch over to the ann arbor one um but i'm happy to get my green power either place and it's obviously pretty darn symbolic but we just need more we need more solar panels in the state of michigan thank you more solar panels and less natural

131gas plants right any other comments any thoughts or preferences on taking a vote this evening or postponing and having an opportunity to put this out to pasture for a month and taking a vote in may i think uh mr chair i'm in favor of taking a vote on it now i don't hear anyone opposed to that so we have a oh commissioner i would only say an opposite maybe that we didn't have a chance to read this until fairly recently you know the whole project's kind of evolving i'm i'm a little bit concerned about the subscription rate that's going to evolve from this you know if it if the subscription rate from a singular project comes out and it's it's high even if we want to be symbolic and buy that power it's going to

132be more costly than migraine power and to larry's point maybe earlier there will be some dissension amongst the ranks as to how this gets dealt with um it's a little bit confusing being the first one out of the block i think having an opportunity for i'll call it community solar light is good i think we all need to have access and a lot of people don't so i'm cautious i'd i wouldn't mind having a kick at the resolution once and and seeing it passed in may i don't think losing a month is a big deal just my two cents thanks for weighing in i have a question of you missy and that is and maybe this is putting you on the spot but if the costs were to come in higher than the blended typical

133migraine power costs would that be potentially or likely a reason to take an exit ramp on this project well i mean i don't imagine why we think they would not come in higher of course they would come in higher because it's a landfill and there are more complications it's not you know 100 greenfield hundred megawatt system so no we've already assumed they're gonna come in higher that doesn't scare me i mean what what i often hear from stakeholders is they really will prioritize a local project and maybe not everyone will but i think that i would be shocked if it comes in at the same price as everything else okay excellent sure it's also expensive right so think about location too so there's just elements there right i guess one one advantages is that dte

134is not paying for any sighting fees or anything like that that's one but that's probably a small small amount in the grand scheme of things yeah if we had them pay sighting fees we would just have to pay them back because it would just get built into the cost so yeah so we have um two opinions uh what i would recommend is that we take a vote and um for those who would rather wait until may uh that you vote no that's just my recommendation you may vote no for other reasons um and for those who feel comfortable enough uh voting on this now and to move this forward and comfortable enough with the process uh going forward and being able to intervene at a later point in time if we any of us think

135that's necessary or as a body and we could also come up with a whole new resolution that says hey um we recognize something else has gone on um then we could essentially rescind or modify what we what we act on tonight any comments on that i think that makes sense man okay great so um all those in favor of the resolution as drafted um and missy made a small revision that hopefully you all saw um please say i and raise your hands i i and all those opposed so commissioner hook um and commissioner mccoy and any abstentions oh and and uh commissioner kerber so we had three three negative votes so the uh the uh the resolution passes and miss missy oh he's i just have to get it for the notes so bear with

136me for a second i think we can go we can proceed though because okay good yeah so that uh is all the major um items on the agenda um missy is busy right now but she's next on the agenda so okay i have to wait for her and that is an osi report out yeah um well hi everyone it has been whirlwind as i feel like maybe is the new normal in our lives a few things to share well a lot of things to share with you all uh council last monday approved arpa spending which included a 4.5 million dollars for solar at city facilities so we have uh we've got those projects designed we did we just had a meeting today for final park sites kind of landing on those projects but what we've

137got is over four megawatts of system design and uh we are meeting with our contractors to understand the department of commerce investigation and how that's impacting them on thursday if it is all good to go we will be coming to council in may for final approval of those contracts meaning we'll be we'll be breaking ground on those projects and all summer long into the fall you'll see kind of ribbon cuttings for those systems which we're really excited about so that's uh that's that's really great we are uh also green rental housing was slated to come back you know we talked about that a month or so ago excited to come back next month but i wanted to share that public comment is now open on the draft standard so we'll be coming back to the

138commission to share what we heard from public comment but we also want your public comment so please take a look at those standards it's only open until friday end of day uh spread widely through your networks we want as much feedback as possible on that particular initiative i'm going to go back to osi but before i forget i want to acknowledge two other things happening in the city we're uh in the process of updating our multi-hazard mitigation plan of which climate is centered in that work and we actually picked a form a firm that brought on a climate scientist uh to help us because we're not that's not optional as we think about hazard impacts we just opened that up for public comment and feedback too so i'll send a note to all the commissioners

139i just got the url for for public comment shortly before the meeting so please uh share that too with your networks those who are interested other really exciting stuff to that's kind of going on is we soft launched the public outreach on the sustainable energy utility last week we are formally launching this week we're working on a mailer that will go to every household and business within the city we have social media kind of pushes and the whole point is to get the public's feedback on the concept of the seo and whether it's something they'd be interested in you can go to our website which is just a2gov backslash a2scu and you can see a whole bunch of materials we're working on a psa with communications right now but we have uh short faqs longer

140faqs we've got videos and the link to the survey is there to register feedback it's four questions really short and then it's the traditional demographic question of the city i also wanted to share last week the options analysis including the rfp uh for traditional municipalization was released so that's out for public comment i'm sorry for bidding at the moment that closes in a few weeks i don't remember the exact date but it's in may but that'll close so that's out too so both of the kind of big initiatives and then the overarching kind of energy options analysis that this body move forward uh for recommendations to counsel they're on the streets so we're getting feedback we're getting input we are uh running at those different initiatives we are also doing an electrification expo in july

141we're working with a bunch of partners to bring that together it'll be at the farmers market more details to come but just wanted to share in case anyone is listening we know electrification some things are sort of hidden for folks so we want to really daylight different appliances equipment and ways people can transition over i don't think i shared this with you because i think it was right after maybe i did we did submit a two million dollar proposal in partnership with the county to fund uh decarbonization efforts in the bryant neighborhood so i want to just take a moment and thank all of our collaborators community action network elevate uh the washington county office of community and economic development we had ibw 252 helping us with workforce training we had banks who are helping

142us think about intergenerational wealth accumulation it is a long shot but you can't wait if you don't get in the game so we submitted our proposal everything is crossed including my eyes but that manifests itself and we continue to run at that project which i i love and then i think last two things to share a20 a week uh you're going to start to see a lot about that coming out it's june 5th through june 11th begins with the dexter ann arbor uh race if anyone's running it we are helping it go zero waste this year all righty good for you we'll be at taste talking about delicious local sustainable food uh and then we're gonna do a tree event then we've got events all throughout the week and then we culminate on saturday with

143ann arbor summer festival uh saturday will be a 2-0 day at summer festival so uh we've got a lot of fun activities hope you can join us for some of those fun festivities and lastly i want to thank chuck hook uh chuck is uh i think we're trying to make this his last official meeting not because of anything bad but because we are likely going to hire chuck to come on board as a strategic energy advisor in the office and that would be a conflict to serve on this body and that body so i just wanted to take a moment while we had it to really thank chuck for all of the service that he does and share how excited i am to really get to dive much more deeply into his expertise and leverage

144it to do just transformational work so thank you chuck for your service on the commission for all these years and i'm sad to see you go from this body but i'm so excited to see you yeah kind of come a little bit closer to osa that's all sure you missy thanks chuck for all your service would this indeed be your last meeting i'm not sure you know i i guess i have to work that out with missy i don't know what the rules call for so i'm a little bit unclear on that but yeah it's been a pleasure working with all of you i've been on a long time it's um all old horses typically get led to the pasture hopefully my pasture is a little greener than some of the other pastures where horses

145go but i'm not too old i'm still young in the brain and in the heart that's what counts i guess so we'll keep trucking and hopefully our paths will all cross again i'm sure they will um keep up the great work on the commission i'm i won't be missed somebody else will jump in and have a lot more ambition than i do i'm a little bit stretched at times and maybe i wish i could have contributed more but i really enjoyed the time and um hope i made a little little bit of a difference thanks but chuck we're going to invite you back to make a presentation and when you're done we're going to say we're going to start with with a comment well we can ask a million questions about this but but we'll

146spare you okay uh we are now two updates from uh council liaisons and from commissioners we'll start with uh council members any updates i i don't think that i have any updates beyond what we've heard tonight that would be necessarily relevant to this group specifically um a city update of excitement is that our new city attorney started this week and so that is of note and so we are excited to have her on board i don't see commissioner i mean councilman briggs raising her hand so i will open it up to updates from all the commissioners is this the time where um the committees can report john go ahead yes indeed okay great thank you i'd like to uh provide a quick update the transportation electrification committee has been requested by um osi to provide

147an outline and an overview or inclusion in the city's standard specifications for design building and construction resources of installation of electric vehicle charging systems in the public rights voice so like the street side charging and what this will do is it will enable future um development and uh availability of street side ev charging at some point um in hopefully the near future but it uh regardless this is the beginning of what um it helps building inspectors it helps engineers it helps installers know what the requirements are for installing uh av charging stations both uh level two and uh dc fast chargers so that's the update for now thank you any news from any other commissioners i'd like to pass on one item of note that i think is important uh council members and missy correct

148me if i'm wrong but the pud for the ann arbor housing commission development at 350 south fifth which is the former y lot next to the blake transportation center has been approved by council and that foresees or has sustainability requirements including um just at a 30 000 foot level that it be in all electric um net zero development so i think that's i'm very positive and hopefully um as we get uh that goes out for requests for proposals uh that some of those proposals will potentially even go beyond that uh i think all of us remember that we passed a resolution encouraging um construction projects to use low embodied carbon materials um so hopefully some of the bids will reflect uh that desire and so i just wanted to mention that and i see that

149we have two hands up so that was the only thing i wanted to mention uh commissioner overpick quick and dirty i think the governor's substantially revised my healthy climate plan will be released on earth day so since that'll be after this and before our next meeting keep an eye out for that hopefully everybody will be smiling a little more as a result and missy i'm sorry i forgot two things that i just want to show the body knows obviously earth day uh please join us in a series of events and activities throughout the community that i can circulate what those are but also a piece of good news that i forget because i learned so late in the process as did jen hall but we got a three million dollar earmark to do solar and

150electrification and energy efficiency at affordable housing sites housing commission sites so that was a an iraq request we worked on together and we are super excited uh that we've we won it that is good news indeed council member briggs i think there must be more good news yeah i did think of one one uh small thing that might be of interest here um this came out of the environmental commission but um we did pass at the last council meeting that uh may will be um also known as nomo may so um if you would like to um not mow your lawn and get a little more time on your hands and do something good for the environment and help our pollinator habitat um that is something that we're promoting this this coming may joining with

151other cities across the nation to do this we can't cut our grass i like that you could and feel good about yourself i want to feel good by sitting you know sitting at my butt thank you i might mention i just did or had a prescribed burn done in my backyard this afternoon so just before our meeting so um i don't won't be doing any mowing back there either any any other comments from anyone i just want to give kudos to commissioner hookham for all of his work that he's done with the transportation electrification committee and uh there's no way we can be making the progress that we've been making and that we are making still without your participation and uh you're the gracious sharing of your experience and your deep deep knowledge thanks so

152much chuck thanks carlene you you way over blue what i'm providing you're doing a lot of the leadership i'm just kind of filling into little words and pieces so happy to do so very good oh commissioner juno yeah just real quickly um as as many of you are already aware the newest uh installment of the ipcc report came out this is focus on climate change mitigation has a lot of relevance um to the work that we do and and um to energy systems in general so um hopefully that's something we can essentially talk about at the next meeting in a little bit more detail and keck and i are planning to do a demystifying the ipcc report as well and the date for that and time has been set for may 12th 6 pm 6

153pm right yeah very good it will be so great and we look forward to seeing you all in attendance right um missy i just want to reinforce one thing um i don't know if all commissioners got it i think i knew of one or two that didn't um and that is you talked about public outreach for the seo and if any commissioners are interested in doing that there were two training sessions but i think most of us are pretty well informed and you didn't miss a whole lot so someone's really interested in being a part of that public outreach as also an energy commission commissioner that would be certainly welcome i think from osi side and missy if they're interested they should email you correct okay great so that ends uh updates from commissioners unless

154i don't see anybody else and then we can move on to public input so this is our second opportunity for public comments for up to three minutes if you are watching on ctn please call 788-0099 or 877-853-5247 and enter meeting id three seven six seven five one six eight one nine this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and video feed city staff will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone and you will hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to quiet place mute any television or background noise so that we may hear

155you clearly and finally state your name and your address at the beginning of your comments caller ending in 2 2 8. hello can you hear me yes thank you uh my name is once again greg uh woodring uh i'm the president of banner for public power calling in just at the end uh to say first of all thank you for the fantastic presentation i think that was very informative and answered um at least the vast majority of the questions that were raised so really appreciate that um just wanted to chime in with the perspective that i got after this presentation i think this is shared by a decent amount of the members of a2p2 is that essentially uh the argument is that we are going to pay more for this project in exchange for speed

156that seems like a reasonable trade-off in many ways though i think that the devil kind of lies in the details there i think that to really evaluate how much more we are paying in exchange for the speed you'd have to take into account for one the city could definitely borrow this money cheaper than dte is capable of doing i understand that there's an argument that that debt would not be on the books for the city however that debt would be offset by an asset right not only an asset but a revenue generating asset and the future value of that revenues should be evaluated with the extra cost that we were paying for this speed um i wonder exactly what the speed gain is as well how long would that myso connection really be and would

157we be able to stand up infrastructure that would allow us to consume that power right presumably the water utility could use most if not all of this power what would the cost really be to stand up that infrastructure to be able to supply the water utility with this power it seems like it would probably be considerably less than the value of the future revenue stream that such a project could bring in as well as the benefits from the cheaper borrowing power of the city in my opinion uh the city would still be far better off owning this asset on its own um so i understand that this is certainly not a completely black or white situation and i appreciate all the hard work that staff has done to bring this forward but i really think

158that the community should evaluate whether with the new plans with the seo and the potential of a full muni coming on board whether this might be much more valuable for the city to own on its own so thank you for your time and thanks for calling in and thanks for contributing to the conversation and uh yes missy anybody else that's all here okay so we will move on to the last point which is items for the next agenda and we um already missy carlene and i um have uh set up a few things and i believe missy we're still planning on a presentation regarding energy concierge services at least that was at least the target i mean we'll verify that but that's sort of on the docket is there anything else i can't recall off

159the top of my head yeah so we had green rental housing coming back to the public feedback and then we did tentatively talk about doing an ipcc uh discussion with concierge as well yes right so um does anybody have any other items for consideration for the agenda okay seeing none that concludes our meeting it is 8 20 and i appreciate everybody's uh service and contribution to the meeting tonight uh it was a good meeting and i hope you enjoyed it as well and i wish you all a pleasant rest of your evening thanks everybody the meeting is adjourned you