Ann Arbor Energy Commission Meeting 11/9/2021

001i'm calling this meeting to order um good evening everyone my name is john mursky i'm chair of the ann arbor energy commission um i am participating from my home here in ann arbor welcome to the november 9th electronic meeting of the energy commission this virtual meeting is to affect social distancing and to mitigate the spread of the covet 19 virus we will conduct this meeting similar to in-person meetings commissioners during your roll call please indicate your current location during the meeting please remain on camera as you would be visible during an in-person meeting also mute your microphone when not speaking public comments will be via telephone only to speak during any of the two public comment opportunities please call one of the following two toll-free numbers 877-853-5247 or 888-788-0 and enter the meeting id number

002937-67516819 and these numbers will remain the same during the entire year for energy commission meetings this information is also available on the public published agenda in the public notices section of the city website and on the broadcast of this meeting on ctn channel 16 at t channel 99 and online at www.a2gov backslash watch ctn um missy would you um read the land acknowledgement and then uh move from there to taking roll huge i acknowledge that this the land the city of ann arbor occupies is the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the anishinabe including the ottawa ojibway and buddhawatomi as well as winedat peoples i further acknowledge that our city stands like almost all property in the united states on lands obtained generally in unconscionable ways from indigenous peoples the taking of this land was

003formalized 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 human flourishing and justice for all individuals all right moving into roll call consultant's office in ann arbor good evening commissioner mccomber um bridget mccomber joining from my home in ann arbor thank you mr clevy uh commissioner cleavy attending for my 100 solar home in ann arbor commissioner 11. president uh attending from my home in ann arbor thank you vice chair coleman garcia carlene coleman garcia um from ann arbor great uh councilmember briggs here in ann arbor thank you councilmember radina here in ann arbor thank you commissioner mccoy here in ann arbor

004awesome thank you so much uh commissioner oh pause i'm sorry commissioner george is in the waiting room so we'll come back to him in a second just moved him over uh commissioner carver president from here in ann arbor thank you commissioner hello everybody i'm here in ann arbor at my home great thank you commissioner juno president from my home in ann arbor thank you commissioner stevenson here in ann arbor and commissioner george uh here in uh delta township uh ingham county awesome uh chamberski you have a quorum you are also on mute thank you yeah so thanks very much thanks everybody for attending next time the agenda is the approval of the agenda uh i believe it was mailed out wednesday of last week hopefully everybody's had a chance to look at it as well

005as our meeting materials can i get a motion to approve the agenda so moved by uh krishna cleavy second by council member briggs any discussion all in favor say aye or raise your hand i all that's uh looks like it's unanimous so no no nays and no abstentions so that passes um so um next we have approval of the minutes and the minutes are posted to legistar um hopefully everybody's had a chance to look at those as well any um well first of all a motion to approve the minutes council member briggs second by council member radina any discussion seeing no discussion all those in favor of approving the minutes say aye or raise your hand i looks unanimous again thank you very much so that brings us to public input this is an opportunity

006for persons to speak for up to three minutes if if you are watching on ctn call 888-788-0099 four eight seven seven eight five three five two four seven and enter meeting id number nine three seven six seven five one six eight one nine as i mentioned this mentioned this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda 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 place mute any television or background sounds so that you we may hear you

007clearly so please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments do we have any callers we do and just very quickly i see commissioner levin is on the line and if you can hear us great i can't move him over it looks like he's only on the phone so i can't move into the panel uh so i just wanted to acknowledge he's he's with us um thank you yeah for public comment caller uh ending in 998 hi can you hear me yes we do okay great um hello my name is zachariah farah i'm a senior at the university of michigan ann arbor and i live at 2-2-2-2 fuller court you've probably you may or may not remember me from calling in a few times the energy commission on the issue of public

008power and establishing public power utility and i'm calling in today just to say that i'm very happy that the idea of an seu is being proposed i think it's a terrific idea and i i really hope that it will uh encourage business owners and residents to invest in in solar panels for their properties i think it's again a great idea i know that i'm speaking from my own personal experience like my family won't invest in solar panels because there's there's not that financial incentive because they can't sell it back to the grid because of um the pretty absurd laws we have in this state but um hopefully the sdu will be able to solve that in certain areas of our city um i'm also calling to uh to thank the the sponsors and the authors

009of this resolution that's going to be considered today at the resolution recommending uh the municipal utility feasibility visibility study um i'm really happy that this is finally uh being will be voted on by the energy commission we've been calling in for since i think february i think you would probably know better than than i would but um you got to listen to it after all so i am i want to say i've never really seen such a movement in the city with so much enthusiasm and widespread support um we really want answers uh establishing a public power utility and so i i do have a couple concerns about this resolution though although i'm very supportive of the of the resolution overall um first of all you know like i said we've been calling it for

010a long time and i i'm wondering when this feasibility study might be finished because we know that once we have the answers to our questions we need to act quickly we are running out of time to um to have some serious policy change in the city um and uh if this takes too long i'm concerned that we're not going to have enough time to actually go go and implement some of these things and that kind of brings me to my second point which is that in the second resolved clause five different policies i believe are our limit are mentioned there um again i'm very supportive of an seu um i'm very supportive of looking into public power but i'm kind of confused why uh my green power program is listed here i mean that's a

011dte 30 seconds program and we know it's insufficient we know that's not going to get us to where we need to go so i'm just wondering you know that there doesn't seem to be a cap on the scope of this feasibility study especially because it says including but not limited to so i'm afraid i guess i'm just concerned that if this feasibility study doesn't have a limited and defined scope that we're going to be waiting for a very long time to get the answers that we need uh and again we're running out of time so uh thank you very much for considering this resolution uh the last thing i'd like to say is one question i've been getting a lot is will a public power utility okay that's it thank you very much thank you

012for calling in and sharing your thoughts caller ending in 171. hi uh my name is susan perler and i live at 1356 ravenwood in ann arbor and i've been a homeowner here for about 20 years in the past i lived in east lansing michigan where we had a municipal utility in the lansing board of water and light and personally i much prefer the board of water and light over dte but that's a different discussion for another day i'm calling to support the commission's resolution for the municipal fusibility study that zach mentioned the first commenter i believe that such a study is superior to other comparative analysis and the feasibility study will be more focused more efficient and less expensive um we need to know if the economics of municipalization will work in ann arbor and

013i believe that a focused feasibility study is the best path forward um that's really all i have to say thank you for your time and consideration thank you very much yeah caller ending in two three five hello we hear you hi um my name is eric mccleary i reside at 635 hidden valley club um in ann arbor i was calling to support the municipal visibility study as well um because i i'm a new resident to ann arbor one of the things i love most about this city is that we take the initiative on issues of climate on issues of energy and this feasibility study is how we move forward we can't continue to rely on investor investor-owned utilities that put their investors and their shareholders ahead of ratepayers and this visibility is the next step

014in moving ann arbor forward and therefore michigan forward because we are the example um thank you thanks a lot thank you that's all true that's all okay thank all the callers for calling in um and i'd like to remind everybody that um there is also going to be an opportunity to comment at the end of the meeting so um if you have additional comments to offer then we will consider those just as we those considered those we just heard today and then previous evenings so um we now move into the meat of the agenda and we really just have two related agenda points both related to municipalization from two different perspectives and the first on the agenda is a presentation of an ann arbor sustainable energy utility uh there's been a lot of conversation of

015that in recent weeks but not yet in this forum and therefore we thought it's important that we do that in this forum so that all commissioners have an opportunity to understand what's being proposed before we move on to consider the resolution as the other agenda item in the meeting so missy i'd um like to call on you um i think you're presenting i don't know if you're going to hand that off to anybody else on your staff but i'll let you control things from here yeah no i gave them i gave them a night off although i see some of them on the line here they didn't take it well first and foremost i just want to say thank you for the chance to present tonight i know we have a limited amount of time

016together and while we have two agenda items would it be nice if we uh get a little bit of our time back so we'll see uh but this is uh all questions welcome for tonight and what i really want to focus on is what an seu is and how it could operate in ann arbor and potential next steps for those of you who joined our public discussion about this um some of these slides will be pretty familiar but i don't want to assume that everyone was able to join that meeting so this really is more for members of the public thumbs up see the screen okay great i see some headphones awesome so for folks that are joining in i know that the commission knows this deeply i just want to ground our conversation broadly

017in all things uh that we're doing in our local goals and objectives so as you know in november of 2019 anniversary council unanimously declared a climate emergency and they set the goal of achieving a just transition to community-wide carbon neutrality by 2030 then in june of 2020 just a short uh year plus go they adopted the living plan and framework for how to achieve that goal known as a20 so when we talk about that i'll intersperse that throughout the conversation with folks but again more for members of the public and of course key to grounding excuse me our work in carbon neutrality is understanding what our greenhouse gas emissions profile is so both the sectors that are contributing as well as the sources and what we know from our greenhouse gas emissions profile is that

018the majority of our missions come from our built environment primarily from building electricity but not far behind is the natural gas that we use to heat and cool our built environment and then of course as we're thinking about transportation fuels and the role of electrification of those fuels that's going to play a really important role and so this is just kind of a grounding as we're thinking about how to transition those sectors over we know that we need to find solutions to our built environment that center kind of local generation clean energy pathways good paying jobs etc uh so i know you can't read this and you don't need to read this the whole point is over the last few months osi staff uh and you all as the commission have systematically been evaluating lots

019of different pathways to reduce our energy related emissions and these pathways that we've explored together have included things like uh on-site renewable energy generation right things like our solarize program or the uh solar faithful model and the ppa that's been developed from that we are exploring virtual power purchase agreements and power reduction agreements which we got through the vgp uh filing that we intervened in just over a little less than a year ago we talked about community solar we haven't talked about the migraine power program but it's on our list of things to be exploring and really understand um we've had discussions about a traditional utility community choice aggregation renewable energy credit programs have kind of been on the periphery but it's something on our docket to continue discussing and of course underlying all of

020these presentations and discussions which may have felt like just presentations and discussions was really getting us to a sense of what's possible and the foundation of that is michigan energy law so the purpose of the rest of our time together is not to explore the pros and the cons of each of those options a vpa a wreck purchase my green power a traditional municipal utility that's not what i'm going to focus on for this portion of the time because the answer from where i sit is likely all of the above or many of the above solutions are going to be necessary to hit a 2030 goal and target instead i want to talk to you a little bit about the seu concept and it actually came out of this commission in our march meeting i

021don't know if you remember but we had attorney braider who gave us kind of an overview of the foot act and michigan energy law and unrelated at least in my mind until the presentation happened was a follow-up presentation from from paul fenn on cca in which he talked about the history of cca from 1.0 which really was a kind of rec purchase program the 2.0 which became large utility scale solar buys to 3.0 which became local decarbonization and when those two presentations which seemed quite different were brought together i saw a pathway and i think some of you saw it too and we sort of talked about it which was can we basically do what is effectively cca 3.0 through a complementary utility and this is how the sa seu idea sort of emerged in

022my head and why we began to explore this uh just to understand is this actually a thing that might be possible um so i just kind of want to bring bring us back for a second to what attorney greater shared with us during your presentation i am not a lawyer i'm not going to attempt to do justice to the conversation that that she shared with us but the the essence of that is she shared that the michigan constitution protects the rights of cities and villages to create their own municipal utility and they can do that either via a taking aka condemnation and the buyout of the incumbent utility in their infrastructure or via competition with that incumbent utility and today every community that has started their own municipal utility in michigan and across the country

023has done that um and just sort of naming zealand was the last in michigan to do it they officially formed in 1902 and sold in 1915 but preserved the right to rebuy and so they bought themselves back in 1935 they were the last municipal utility forum in michigan but every utility that has done it has done it through condemnation and you can imagine why starting up a full set of poles and wires to directly compete with your incumbent utility is an expensive proposition as is buying out their infrastructure through condemnation but that still may be a viable path for us but standing up and competing an entirely competing set of infrastructure without a hundred percent of the rate base is a really hard sell chances are your rates would be higher than your incumbent utility

024so that got us thinking outside of the box of traditional competition what we know is due to massive improvements in energy technology and significant declines in the cost for things like solar and energy storage which are going to continue to drop maybe competition in a different way actually is viable especially competition that focuses on generation and that is the heart of the seo so i want to tell you a little bit more about that what we thought about is what if in in our focus we center that creating a parallel or supplemental or complementary or competing utility whatever term you want to use which is allowed and what if we focus on generation don't focus on trying to duplicate the grid and all the vulnerabilities of that grid but instead be strategic with how much

025of a new grid we need to build so that way the cost of that infrastructure isn't in play and that means we can focus more of the actual dollars on renewable energy and energy waste reduction and so in thinking about that we started to model what could be possible and if that utility did focus on energy waste reduction and beneficial electrification and of course local generation through solar with storage and potentially geothermal that's district level could this happen at a pace that was fast enough to meet the goals and objectives we had was it legal was it technically possible and the answer looked like yes and so the basic narrative or one of the narratives that we sort of hold is switching from energy as a commodity to energy being a service within this concept

026so just for a second um i want to share a little bit about the the thinking behind this in terms of sequencing because there's a lot that i just said and we can't do all of it at one particular moment uh and scale up so i just kind of want to ground this in some of our thinking the very first thing is a vision of what is possible and this was important because we didn't want to kind of bootstrap something we wanted to be very very clear from the onset if we're going to try to create a municipal utility that is supplemental what is the vision what do we want to aspire for what sort of the mark that we're aiming and so the vision was a sustainable energy utility for us in ann arbor

027would be a public utility so it is municipal power that is 100 renewably powered reliable local shared and of course publicly owned and so that's the vision that we put together and as we sort of envisioned it we thought that the seo would focus first on generation so generating local clean energy energy that would feed directly into our homes businesses places of worship community centers through behind the meter systems which you can do today right and many of us have done mark just told us he's in a fully solar powered house right now and that's exciting um and this clean energy ideally uh the way we've we've mapped it out would be paired with storage and this would help improve energy reliability as we know we had issues this summer many of us lost power

028for an extended period of time for those of us that have batteries we fared a lot better than other folks within the system so how do we pair solar and storage to help address the reliability concerns but also in that phase one it's not enough just to generate we need to do energy waste reduction deep energy waste reduction work and so we modeled that being a core component of the seo in phase one and that also will of course improve comfort lower bills help those renewable energy systems on roofs go further in terms of meeting a constituent's energy needs and then in the the first phase we also want to do on build finance and that helps with some of the energy efficiency work and i'm happy to take any questions about that i'll jump

029in in a second a little bit more detail then over time the seo would grow to offer more things that are aligned with a20 that you see in the plan and we talk about a lot things like beneficial electrification uh we could do geothermal we could do transportation electrification we could do micro and nano grids and i want to be clear that when i say over time i don't think that is an extended period of time i think uh one of the things that became pretty clear is the need if we're forming a utility we have to sell energy we need to generate energy to sell energy that's sort of at the heart of what needs to happen in the seo all of those other systems can come into play and with an infrastructure build

030that just passed we may expedite other things but in the drafting of this we saw generation storage and efficiency being critical so the the concept of the seo really is grounded in energy choice providing anarborites another way to procure a large portion of their energy usage and of course one that's coming from clean local reliable energy sources so to kind of further ground our thinking i just want to bring this back i'm not going to belabor these but we at the onsen identified not just that vision but these objectives for how we wanted uh to think about an seo and kind of the things that would have to check or whatever energy system we move forward so we wanted to shift our energy system of course from being carbon intensive to being carbon free which

031we all i think are working tirelessly on all of you i thank you for your help we want to define solutions commensurate with the time frame and ambition established in our carbon neutrality plan which means 2030 we've got to move pretty fast um and we know that emissions under the curve matter a lot it's not enough on you know december 31st 2029 for us to adopt a policy that gets to zero emissions what we do today has really significant impact so let's move quick sort of the rationale and we want to center the customer in this model right and make sure we give people the choice that they currently really don't have a whole lot of we wanted to center low low-income and historically under-represented groups in the system with a focus on affordability sustainability

032and comfort making people's lives actually better uh as opposed to kind of adding this as a burden viewing energy as a service and not a commodity that we're selling it's really about a relationship and helping people improve quality of life and of course we're improving the reliability um and eventually the resilience of our system more broadly so i sort of mentioned this earlier and i want to spend a few minutes more with you than i would uh perhaps in a general public discussion about the way we think about the sau and i broke the next two slides up into phase one kind of phase two plus so you can just kind of be with me sequentially okay so framing when we worked with our technical advisors we i mean honestly the question was can we

033do this is this even legally possible is this bonkers is it is it enabled in michigan law is this technically possible um what kind of policy changes would we need and the answer is yes it's possible no policy change is really necessary um go and so that allowed us then to go and to start envisioning what it could look like so first and foremost the seo could enable a lot more people to get the benefit of solar and the way we would do this is by directly paying for the installation on residential and business routes so they keep pointing to my roof like you should know that i have solar on my roof but i do which is that indication uh we could do this also on carports ground-mounted systems but we that we the

034collective public would be the ones owning that system so residents would uh not have to put the capital down up front they would have to come up with twelve thousand fifteen thousand dollars to install solar just putting a pin in this you could still do that and i'll talk about that in a minute and how you can stay in the sau if you actually generate your own but what would happen is uh someone would subscribe a resident would subscribe uh to purchase their energy at a rate that's based on the cost of that solar system and the cost to operate the seo and they would pay a bill like what you pay per usage you would just pay the seu and it would be coming from your roof coming from your ground mount and eventually

035in phase two through the micro grid that we hope to establish this is important right and you would have a battery on site as well so that way you have that kind of balancing of load and demand this means that residents could still have power if the big grid goes down which is happening more and more frequently and we this is already possible today right i mean i have this system in my house so this technology isn't this isn't hard to envision uh being possible additionally the seo would not be limited by current utility restrictions that constrain solar system sizes meaning 100 of your usage or the amount of solar allowed within the whole landscape aka the one percent cap those go away if we have an seu because we don't set that and adopt

036that as our regulation or our policy instead we would be able to maximize solar installations on viable locations leveraging all that viable sunny space that we have in our community and then of course the goal is over time those individual solar systems get connected through a series of nano and micro grids not the ease grid uh and more on that in a minute the second part of phase one kind of right out the gate would be offering robust energy waste reduction programs these would help people lower energy demand and improve comfort uh likely some of these services will be available to anyone just like what you currently have through gte there's base appliance rebates that you can get there's educational there's audits i hate that word audit i'm gonna try to take that out there's

037audit does not pull well no one wants to be audited so an energy assessment right to help you identify saving opportunities but the seo could also offer on bill finance which is the next point to help you make those improvements which mean you don't have to come up with a large pot of capital right up front to do your installation or your building envelope work or to help with that appliance retrofit the seo could help you do that and amortize that cost via on bill finance over a longer period of time ideally hoping to get you close to parity so your bills really don't change as you reduce usage that incremental difference could go to pay back your loan that's the ideal not always possible but that is something that we can work with constituents

038with because we have a different objective in the seo it's not about an instant roi on that process and this helps a lot more people access efficiency improvements comfort improvements renters landlords uh low-income tenants et cetera so the pairing of these two is actually really important as we think about kind of the equity and justice elements of this work and also if we're gonna get 100 renewable energy powering our community we need to lower our usage while we're also transitioning our usage to clean so these are these are kind of the core things that we think we can do right out the gate with the seu and uh happy to talk about some of the conversations we're having with peers about on bill finance and how we can leverage things like holland's program to bring

039this to ann arbor you are doing great everybody thank you for sticking with me on this for phase two what we envision is the su transitioning to really focus on micro and nano grids that would be created to enable neighbors to share power across property lines you can't do that today but if we became a utility we can we can have energy pass across those those property lines that would mean if a resident needs more power than their solar system is able to provide they can pull from the microgrid maybe that's from their neighbor or three houses down where the battery for the neighborhood is operating uh they can if you're generating more power you can send it to the micro grids a battery itself and of course if you don't have good solar potential

040but you have let's say glorious freeze we want you to keep those trees so this allows you to participate in the scu directly without having to take down those trees that are providing lots of other benefits of course if you're a renter and you don't have to say what's on your roof these are other ways that you can participate and the idea is eventually to get to a concept where the whole neighborhood can access and share this clean locally uh generated power in this phase of the seo we will have to stand up limited polls and wires right to connect households and businesses which is why we talk about this as a limited polls and wires infrastructure uh going household to household you know in a dense neighborhood doesn't require as much infrastructure as thinking

041about a community solar program or maybe it's in a park and you have to run that power to the surrounding area but that'll be an important part of this phase of work uh that that's critical to ensuring it's viability and let's see in the second phase we also can look to create district level geothermal systems although we're looking to pilot this really soon this will help transition our heating and cooling loads more sustainable uh sustainable sources of power which is important primarily of course getting off natural gas or limiting our amount of natural gas and we can support beneficial electrification programs help helping people transition to electrical appliances when they make sense for them we can support uh vehicle electrification and of course on bill finance can help us do this as well this is

042an important tool and we can pair things together so we can go in and work with john mursky although his house is really efficient but let's pretend it's not we could go in and do this energy assessment and we could talk about not just an energy assessment that talks about efficiency but we could do beneficial electrification too and then we can create a package that says let's do these envelope improvements let's also do a switch to a heat pump because that makes sense for you and let's go ahead and do that solar install and we're going to advertise that over 20 years and this is what your bill actually looks like and we'll fund the capital so that just opens up way more options for people than what currently exists on the market and community

043solar is an important piece and i sort of mentioned that before and this is the reason this is in a later phase is because of those pulls and wires and wanting and needing to stand up those electrons and then of course um we can keep growing if we own the utility whatever else happens and our community demands we have the flexibility to be able to integrate so that's sort of the concept and the potential offerings and i know that was a lot to digest but let me bring it back just for a second to the core of the seo the seu is a municipal utility it focuses on generating local clean energy fast it's about leveraging existing technologies and practices especially in phase one such as solar and storage to reduce emissions quickly while improving

044reliability it's about ensuring that all antarctics have access to solutions to improve comfort reduce bills and reap the benefits of the clean energy economy that means if you can't do solar you might still be able to do energy waste reduction program to the fcu so everyone would be able to access initiatives and the su as i mentioned before is general it's fundamentally as for about generation local generation there is limited distribution of that energy because it's staying in the community it doesn't need to go somewhere else we're generating it we're using it it means we don't have to worry about buying a lot of poles and wires at least not from the offset offset or outset and it means we're helping build some reliability to extreme events which are happening more and more frequently and

045taking power out more frequently so that's sort of the broad concept i'm going to just bring a few last points kind of with us in our discussion this was an assessment we did about how the seo aligns with the energy commission and city council adopted energy criteria and principles and the good news is it aligns well with those goals and principles and this is kind of one of the filters that we at least as staff are really running uh different things through so it passes an initial sniff test and before i close out i just wanted to share a few examples of how the seu could work and this is not meant to be an all-inclusive list of examples but just something to kind of help ground the concepts uh as as we're thinking through

046them and you are the first people to see this so here we go uh if we mess up i can't wait you'll tell me i know you will you're all really good so let's start with the example of a homeowner or a business owner that has good solar potential but doesn't have the capital or the interest upfront to install solar on there in this case the individual could subscribe or enroll in the seu as a supplemental utility the seo would work with that homeowner to conduct a needs assessment identifying potential energy excuse me energy waste reduction and electrification opportunities they might have because we're in that home let's do it all at once kind of a whole home assessment those selected opportunities would be implemented as long as the homeowner wanted of course them or

047the business owner and the homeowner would have the option of financing those through the seuss on bill financing program any rebates that the seo has or programs would help lower the cost of those improvements and then the seo would strive to create this financing package where the electric bill is as close as possible to the same or to the current electric bill that the consumer has that way um even while paying back those improvements there's not a huge spike in usage and that's the goal i acknowledge that is not always going to be possible and then of course once those improvements are paid off the resident reaps the full benefit of those improvements the reduction in utility bills etc so simultaneous with above while we're in there the seo is installing that solar and storage

048system and the resident is paying per kilowatt hour of usage similar to how they pay their current utility bill for dt i hope that makes sense that was first round of example one and thanks to julie roth who's on the line because she and hannah and our team drew these pictures and modeled these uh second example is an su without on-site solar so in this case the resident gets all the same benefits as what we just talked about in scenario one the difference is the residents not hosting solar on the roof but they can still do any electrification energy waste reduction improvements choose to finance those through under finance and they can sign up for the wait list but once we get the necro nano and micro grids up and operational they're in the queue

049to start pulling power from the system and this resident also would receive two electric bills or on bill finance bills they would have the bill from the su and they would have the bill from what if like many of you someone already has solar on their roof so in this case the way we thought about this is that the owner would enroll in the scu the seo could still assist like they did before with electrification and energy waste reduction improvements they could finance those their own bill finance they could pay up front totally flexible and then the resident would use power from their existing solar system just like they do and any excess is they have the option of selling it to the seu to go into the micro grid or the nano grid or

050if they don't have a battery the seo could provide a battery and they they put it into the battery system or they could keep selling it to dt at the current rate so they have options of how to participate moving on to another example here with renters so this is one which would be done in coordination with landlord landlords and we've had some preliminary discussions about this and this actually really does help with the disconnect that exists between who pays the bill and who actually finances the improvements because in this case if the seu is financing all of the improvements then it's not really a negotiation about who's whoever is paying that bill is reaping the benefits of the seu installed system so this helps actually negate some of the challenges that we've been facing

051about making improvements in rental properties uh so this could be done in traditional seu we're also in osi working on green lease programs on bill finance helps enable these improvements in the same way it does for other people and it helps them stay i should have said this before on bill finance stays with the property it doesn't stay with the person so if commissioner george does all these beautiful improvements so excited to sign you up he doesn't have to keep paying them when he moves somewhere else it stays with the home that he is in whether that is a rental or a single-family home that he owns or a multi-family home because they reap the benefits all the benefits stay in that infrastructure and so the cost stays with that infrastructure so this is one

052of the the nice things about arm build finance which is different than me taking out a loan to put solar on my roof when i leave that loan is still in my name uh one last i think one last example for you all is a community solar program now again this is a little bit later in the phasing of the scu and here the idea is these are larger installations that happen in the community they might be rooftop installs they might be ground mount they might be carports and here we would have a host for that solar that is feeding multiple different areas and we i i often think about i shouldn't say we i have to think about communities solar and business like parks that can feed into neighborhoods or you can imagine us

053having uh installs at schools and that could be an opportunity because the school's profile use profile is very different than what the community uh traditional residential use profile is right summer we don't really use our schools and that's where we're max generating on solar systems on schools so they could be a really important piece of the infrastructure here and what we would be doing is standing up the additional poles and wires to move those electrons from where the point of generation is to where we actually have our subscribers within the model this example is just a carport that we could do especially at multi-family sites carports will probably be something we've modeled some work in that so just to kind of close out then i want to kind of end our discussion by talking about

054logistics and and the next steps that we model to creating the seo so creating an seo is first and foremost i want to name this it is not a novel endeavor the city has the building blocks needed to administer it we currently administer our own water waste to water water recovery and storm water systems we do billing already we can leverage infrastructure that exists within those utilities we can also leverage infrastructure that exist in other municipal utilities in places like holland where they do on bill finance and what's really exciting is every element of the seo i told you about exists somewhere what is unique about the su is how we're piecing them together and that is a challenge but that feels like a surmountable challenge at least from where i said that is good

055news kind of broadly um in terms of how we structure the seou we have some initial thoughts that you'll see in the resolution this is one of the things that if the energy commission is interested in council is two we'd like to go back and actually do much more uh much more in-depth modeling about what's possible so one of the things about the seo is we could choose to staff up and have an entire staff that does these installations that manages customer service and billing or we could choose to really focus on billing and customer service and doing the energy assessments and really focusing on the relationship with people and then working with the private sector to do the installations and that's a little bit different of a model because for those of you with

056solar you know those systems don't really need a lot once they're up and so the real work is getting good installations in place with trained qualified individuals once they're up in an operation there's not really as much to do with them and so that's a discussion that we need to have and figure out what the best structure for the seo would be in terms of staffing and we also had to figure out how it would be would be governed and managed and there's a lot of flexibility here we do we could do that through a chief administrative which is administrative personnel which is kind of how we operate now our utilities we can do that through a public board there's lots of options and lots of good examples across the company so another next step

057is to kind of model and give scenarios for how this could be managed should we want to move forward but there's a lot of flexibility and that's good news and there's a lot of flexibility in terms of adjusting offerings and services to meet the needs of the community and we really do feel like uh even since we released this report we've had many many more conversations we had many before and while we were doing the report from peers around the nation who are just sharing their best practices their lessons learned their their failures in the landscape and so we're excited to keep learning from those peers and kind of leapfrog where we can so in closing um our technical legal and policy analysis regarding the seo found just a few steps necessary to move the

058concept forward should that be of interest to our community i don't want to presume that it is but if it is uh go with me on this journey first our advisory committee recommended starting a wait list to understand community interest in joining the scu this actually will help with step two which is the rate analysis and that determines what the rates would be uh to roll out the various phases of the sbu so engaging interest in the seo the target audiences that we've identified are customers that have significant energy demand customers who are efficient to serve uh due to location or high interest from neighbors and that really is more kind of phase two for the microgrid of course residential and uh commercial customers who are struggling with reliability and unequivocally low income and energy

059burdened households that could immediately benefit from having reduced energy costs so those are kind of the targets that we would want to go after but we would also in doing a weightless one i could do a broad swath we want to hit every ann arborite and spend a little bit more time and effort for example in our our communities that are suffering from a high percentage of energy bourbon in kind of simultaneous with those steps the rate analysis and the wait list you heard me mention this on the last slide we identified needing to create potential governance structures and staffing needs for the seo fourth the actual required step is the passing of an ordinance that would enable the creation of the seo and city council can actually do this uh our charter already gives

060us the right to start a publicly owned utility so the ordinance is actually the only required step that we have before all of the others are kind of good governance and modeling to make sure we understand however um for five staff also recommend almost immediately uh if this moves forward that we should engage with someone to do a really detailed technical analysis of all of the details necessary to implement micro and nano grids things like power dynamics backflow two-way power flow systems what kind of density we need to have what kind of wires we want to stand up and we've actually already identified a few neighborhoods we've had a few raise their hand that want to come into the seu and we've identified some of our target areas that we would like to model very

061specifically what the dynamics would be for that because we recognize that is probably the most most complicated piece of this work it is completely in the realm of feasible uh the technology exists to do this type of work but the question is does that technology actually match up with our system in a way that's economical and how and what systems would we want to use so we've been in in discussions with folks like the national renewable energy lab who've offered a lot of assistance in this plate in this space and offered to help the advisors fast as we move into this but we would like to initiate pretty rapidly this technical assessment and then lastly uh we have to determine how we're going to fund the seu should we want it to move forward and

062to be clear when i say fund i don't mean forever we just have to get the seed capital to start the work and then the seu should must be self-sustaining and likely generate revenue for the rest of the city that could go into the general fund we could choose that for other purposes but we do have to determine where is the seed capital coming from and that could very well be from grants philanthropy public private partnerships we just passed the infrastructure bill we've been talking to d.o.e and epa about potential funding sources it could be borrowing it could be that there's all kinds of options and what we know is that if we go for debt then we do have to do a vote of the people but if we're doing a grant or we

063get some of this offset in another way we don't actually because that's money coming in so there's a potential next step with the funding source uh depending on how we want to finance this moving forward so i know that was a lot i'm sorry i talked so much at you i apologize um i just wanted to make sure you had a little bit more detail and an opportunity to kind of ask questions about why the rationale what so at this point i'm going to stop and just thank you so we're going to open things up for questions as missy stated and we already have our first commissioner george thank you chairman mr chairman uh the first question i had from missy is dealing with the last slide that you had there in regards to uh

064the startup costs um i was curious on what you know what number uh if there was a number that you and your staff had come up with to start with and whether or not uh you know if you were to make the decision today uh you know i do love the idea of being able to go and start immediately and just move as quickly as possible so avoiding going to the ballot box if possible obviously that also brings in uncertainties as well so uh it would it be within the city's budget um i mean are these grants that you referenced uh you know realistic that they we could get them quick enough to stand this up uh next year all of the above so one of the things that is both valuable and to be

065determined with an seu is we can start with anything we can start with a hundred thousand dollars and do just two installs or five installs or we could start with 10 million dollars and do many more so part of the wait list is also to understand the the magnitude of need right out the gate that we sort of have an interest in that uh so i i recognize that's not a direct response to you but it means we can start with whatever we have we do have some money in our budget that we could do some installations if council voted for this really fast i mean not a lot but a little bit and then the grant funding uh we're just not gonna stop i think the infrastructure bill i don't yet have a really

066good handle on if anyone has digested it please let me know but that that's something that i anticipate there could be some funding available and we've had people call us about this as well so we're starting to investigate what kind of dollars we might be able to unlock to bring this to fruition gotcha gotcha and uh uh unrelated question to that uh obviously you've mentioned a lot about solar you mentioned geothermal a little bit um those would be the two primary renewable generating sources uh yeah are we looking at any sort of mass uh solar field or are we looking at any sort of wind farm uh generation uh you know when we're talking about this are we talking about generating power solely within the city and the county are we looking at you know

067building uh our financing uh working with partners possibly to build some sort of offshore wind farm in one of the great lakes you know something like that or are we just solely thinking within the county in the city yeah that's a good question so we started very much with what we could generate here within the city itself and the rationale would be uh as you go further you have to build infrastructure to move those electrons right so our analysis we worked with google and did an assessment and actually found a lot more solar potential than we knew existed within our own community alas we don't have good wind potential we've done a few assessments of it so over time especially uh the seo one of the nice things about it is it doesn't preclude any

068of the other pathways we've talked about so if we grow to want to do a virtual power purchase agreement or to form a traditional utility those things can still happen because we'd have the mechanisms and we'd have gotcha gotcha and my last question um insofar as staffing capacity right because obviously to stand this up and continue to grow and so forth um you know obviously there's the cost of the actual infrastructure that you're building and you're creating and you know working with the public but you know and it does sound to some degree like you're creating and expanding a whole department right uh and so where would the money for the additional staffing costs come from uh and would there it sounds like it does that there would be a need at some point to

069go to the ballot for money no uh so it depends on how we fund the seed capital but the staffing would be covered in the rates right all the infrastructure and the staff it's part of what you pay for when you pay for your electricity kind of coming through so the answer of exactly what that would be sort of depends on how we want to staff it do we want to have the installers on staff do we want to contract that out and have really us focus on customer service and billing so that is sort of the one of the asks was doing the governance model and the staffing to run different scenarios so we could actually get to that rate analysis that includes different options and make a more informed decision we would not

070be asking for more funding and also thank you for your vote of confidence that i could run the seu probably not my skill set uh commissioner kerber yes just from an overall standpoint of the the legal standing of the seu i assume it's going to be a non-profit extension of the city of ann arbor and there will be no other external shareholders whatsoever no other investments that would have any say in terms of the direction of this unit yeah you're right um the one thing we have had some discussions about is there are tax entities there are entities who might want to take advantage of the federal tax incentive to help lower the cost and so those could be in play uh i don't know if they are but no one would have a say

071in the su this would be governed it would be a public utility and the people that would have to say are the residents of ann arbor great thank you [Music] as you might expect i probably have 4 000 questions on this one but i'll try to keep it brief um i think one of the key topics mr george raised this um mr kerber danced into it a little bit is the economic side what makes sense i think that missy as you move forward that us as a city we have to put some smart steps to make sure you do capture the federal tax credits you can get um i i think that we need to be very careful about diversity um mr george was pointing to the idea of just solar um i think most

072of you attended my session when i talked about our example where i did a study in lansing and i built the lansing's uh current solar system it's the delta solar project that feeds lbw and we also did some work with the wind side of lansing we know that their loads about the same as ann arbor's um some really bad things happen when clouds fly over solar systems and you can have the fastest largest battery in the world and guess what happens doesn't help um there's little things called inertia that come into play and a lot of electrical terms that i won't bore this audience with i just caution us to be careful and make smart steps it's it's great to be aspirational and put as much energy into something like this we can we also

073have to be mindful that um there's not too many of these that exist um there's a total of five in the country um none of them really look like ann arbor's so we would be the first of a kind um i've tried to procure financing for first of a kind adventures before the city has lots of good benefits there that we don't have as a developer but there's some issues that we need to be cautious on and public safety comes into play here if we start banking on this seo basically serving our our constituents we're taking on some risks liabilities indemnities many other legal issues i think mr levin from our commission could vouch on legal issues that might pop up on something like this that we really need to be careful of that i've

074lived my career dealing with so i'm happy to help going forward looking forward to the discussions on seo just be mindful that there are lots of sleeping issues here that weren't covered that we could spend hours on and i'll just stop there thank you chuck commissioner thank you um missy did a great job of explaining it and i thought that there were undoubtedly many many issues as we're starting to hear allusions to that we can work out later but i had really uh two simple questions one is i guess if it's on bill financing that means if you have a house and you live in it for three years and then you sell the house the costs just go with the house to the next owner that's a good question though yeah yep that's correct

075and the second one which i think i know the answer which is no is have you discussed this with anyone at u of m yet yes i have actually oh cool what's what's the context there because i think what we're doing now is we're hiring that person that we said we would hire we being you and me and the others on the president's commission on carbon neutrality uh to report directly to the president and sort of be in charge of everything um that person is we're going with the national search firm and all that so we'll get a heavy-duty hitter i think but we haven't hired that person yet so i'm just interested in what's going on on campus in your discussions then thanks yeah the answer the answer is all things are going in

076those discussions there is definitely interest and i'll say just to kind of move out of just um we've had this conversation with aps and others about the seo because we want you know large consumers within the system and i think there is there's excitement and they show me what it does for me kind of mentality and that's where we need we need to get to right which is where we need to do the rate analysis and be able to show them exactly what this would do for them and how this would impact and as you know better than anyone pack with the scope 2 goal first if we're doing an electric utility and we can generate electricity on site at a lot of these places well that's the first goal at the gate for the

077eu so i i think there was there was interest i wouldn't say there was like signing on a dotted line but the competition was really constructive great thank you mccoy yeah thanks thanks missy this was the presentation was really helpful and if julie's listening thanks for the examples because i feel like a lot of my questions were answered through the like scenarios that were laid out so that was really helpful um so thank you for that um my a couple questions i had um one i mean you meant you mentioned just now that google helped you find that there was more solar potential than um you originally thought which was helpful to hear because i remember when paul then first first presented it there was there didn't seem to be like that significant amount so

078i'm wondering if um right now it's still determined that like in the ideal scenario where you know we get as many people signed up as want to get solar everywhere that can like can ann arbor is there an ability for ann arbor to power itself or will we still need some people to be relying on another source of power um you know with this additional that you were able to find um and then yeah my other question as you were talking about thinking i don't know if this is chuck what you're alluding to i'm just wondering like how like does this just make ann arbor like a mini texas right that's like isolated from immigrants in ways that could be bad during storms or is this different than that in ways that aren't as terrifying

079um i oh do you have another one no i think i was just looking at my notes i think those were the two main questions i had okay great if if another one pops up let me know uh so in terms of the amount of power what we've we actually found and i want to i'm going to caveat this in a second is over 400 megawatts of potential within ann arbor which is way more than we thought and i we're unpacking how that happened to go from you know under 100 megawatts to this projection it's a few things one solar is just much better right and it's able to generate more than it was before but that does not mean that all of those potential additions are really economical so that's kind of a the

080next assessment right is how much of this is marginal solar versus how much of this is really good solar potential that makes sense to bring online uh our total community usage right now is about 440 megawatts so there's a gap how we the way that we modeled this was sure energy waste reduction lowers that right because we have efficiency to gain within the system but we imagine that we're picking up all of our efficiency gains through electrification right so that's kind of a display it's like a wash in our modeling and so that means we have this this marginal gap that we've got to try to figure out how to film so uh hopefully that answers that first one the exciting thing though is it's not as big as you thought it was so that

081that was something i was really excited and questioned a lot of that data and then in terms of mini texas and to truck's point of view this is a supplemental utility which means we are not islanded and that is good and bad uh the the good part of that means you still get power from dte if heaven forbid your microgrid goes down it also means if dt's grid goes down you still get power from your microgrid or if we're not in microgrid and we're in phase one you still get power from your solar and battery story so it's actually a redundant system that you have which makes us totally different than that uh model did that answer your questions amber okay uh yes i was just going to speak to that point as well and

082in 2016 the energy commission did a solar feasibility study um in partnership with the u.s department of energy and one of their contractors and chairman mursky and myself and chuck hook um worked on that and we found um you know upwards and uh two three hundred thousand uh three mega 300 megawatts worth of solar potential in uh in ann arbor of which we only needed 78 megawatts um which is uh roughly consistent with the a20 so you know disc counting the technical potential of solar stuff to get us where we need to do we've got a lot more potential and and i know that the the stuff that uh missy's been looking at we didn't even look at commercial buildings we just look at residential so um there's a huge potential um for self-generation uh

083in here i think our problem is gonna be figuring out how to um figure out which ones are the best sites versus ones that are marginal and coming up with with some kind of a system for that and the other probably just want to make a compliment since the office of sustainability innovation was created i'd probably been a rocking mrs shoe saying when are you going to unleash the innovation part of sustainability and innovation and i just want to compliment you on your apt use of innovation in meeting our 820 goals with this sustainable energy utility initiative it is uh innovation at its best so um thank you and uh great job thanks mark and just one quick point i forgot to say amber to your question and to what mark just said our assessment

084was only rooftop potential so we got 400 megawatts only on rooftop that's not carports it's not community solar ground mounted systems so we'll pick up something there that's just a little harder to model if citywide thanks mark um i i might add uh just anecdotally uh when uh we had howard lazarus as city administrator i recommended to howard that he had ad you know and innovation to the name of every single department in the city of ann arbor so maybe that's something we can reconsider again well done well done misty thanks mark commissioner juno thank you um thank you for this presentation missy um yeah i just want to echo um what others have already said i think this is such an exciting opportunity to really truly center uh decarbonization and energy efficiency and you

085know creating a decentralized grid which is going to be really really hard to do in most of the other options that we have here right so um that's the future i think in so many ways and i just think this is really um really great to see this developing um i guess i kind of have a question um too i i imagine you know this being a little bit more piece meal um either household by household or neighborhood by neighborhood uptake um uh like how do you foresee some of those kind of more social challenges um you know as we as we move this out throughout the city and how do you foresee being able to handle those or or what kind of programs or different actions might be necessary to kind of um bridge

086the gap between you know helping people understand this is something that could benefit them and getting them to actually participate in a program like this yeah it's an excellent question and i think we would unequivocally welcome guidance advice and leveraging of networks in that space some of the things we've initially kind of mapped out and again nothing has been decided in this no one has told us we're doing this so this is just us preliminarily planning uh everything from of course every single resident mailer boots on the ground using our ambassadors knocking doors giving testimonials of people who are excited and who have signed up uh showing theirs their actual energy bills and the utility uh and the use of the utility the use of uh the seo and how it's improving their life or

087not and uh i think the the we're gonna have to use every tool in our toolbox to reach people in this there will um if i speak very candidly from our office standpoint we really want to emphasize low income and energy burden folks so i expect we're doing like our team is door knocking in that way our team is having meetings in those communities and investing a lot of time and effort and i would turn to my council colleagues too and say they would i imagine if council directs us to go we're working real closely with council to make sure their constituents know about this opportunity cool or excuse me sorry um commissioner stevenson thanks uh hey misty um great presentation i thought i really explained a lot of stuff for me um so that's

088new um i'm excited to see this you know go in ann arbor and maybe hopefully reach somewhere my question about um the reliability aspects i just so if we're not buying holes in the wires which is what i usually think about when i think about improving liability um are the main factors of this like and like you know the degree of reliability from this like the micro grids and like the locally you know controlled and local access stuff like that or where can you speak to that a little bit more for me yeah there's two levels of reliability so in phase one it's by having basically a redundant system so or dt becomes your redundant system if you will where you've got solar and storage on site which means you are able uh to if

089you just have solar you don't get the benefit of solar if the big grid goes down because you can't push electrons out onto that grid right you can't you can't harm workers on the grid if you have a battery however what you can do is have your shoulder feed that battery and the battery feed your house right so the big grid is down but you're still getting power so that's kind of phase one how we address reliability phase two is through the microgrid so big grid goes down microgrids could still function or micro grid goes down big grid's still functioning you have that redundant system in operation thanks commissioner 11. yes uh thanks for the presentation missy a few questions uh so first of all i mean we've talked about doing this feasibility study for

090a municipal utility and i'm wondering is this like another option that we could consider at the same time in that visibility study is that going to cost more than kind of what we were ballparking before i am excited about this as i would say a more likely scenario and a lot less uh legal issues that would come into it um yeah there is the liability issues as chuck mentioned but we'd have that either way for a municipal utility but i'll let you answer that first yeah you bet uh so there's actually a resolution that we'll talk about uh after after this that integrates the two so what is nice about the scu is we don't actually need a feasibility study because the report answered most of those questions what we need is a rate analysis

091and so if we were going to go out and do a feasibility study those firms i would hope i mean qualified firms do rate analysis as part of that and so we would ask them to do the rate analysis and we simultaneously would be doing the wait list because the rate could be influenced by how many people are ready to subscribe to the system okay uh my next question is about the landfill solar partnership that we're thinking about are we assuming this is going to kill that deal also that's land we might also potentially be able to use for a you know in the future if we do the seu so i'm just wondering how that plays into things no um landfill solar is regulatory i mean we we have to we have to move

092forward on that project both parties have to agree to terminate it and this is one of those projects to me that's about uh getting emissions down fast and so that project is moving and we might actually be breaking ground in 2022 on a 20 megawatt install in our community that's next year and so um we wouldn't preclude the option of eventually acquiring it as part of the seo when we stand up to the community solar phase and we put up the poles and the wires and we buy that and we use that as part of the system uh but we don't have to we can still get that project moving uh we'll know more shortly about whether or not that's economically viable doesn't doesn't kill the project but dt can't kill the project on their

093own is that what you're saying that's correct okay and then uh are we allowed i don't remember from the previous presentations if we start this up would we be bound by the city uh limits in terms of customers yeah good questions yeah yeah so this that that's right so we have a franchise as a city of ann arbor and that's what allows us to do this is because our franchise is non-exclusive that said i will tell you i'm in conversations with many people in the area about how they could explore their own seo but we might be able to do customer service together or billing together or contract work together so there's there's some gray because currently we sell water to people outside the city so in theory we have a connection that we could

094maybe leverage in the future to cooperate with ceramics yeah this may be outside of i you might know better than i do and are i will go to our attorneys but what i have been advised so far is that it's a really big it's because it's through the franchise it's what the boundary franchise does no i mean legally yeah they're separate kind of things that i just might if if in the future like you said we could cooperate maybe with uh another scu for pittsfield township for example or whatever then we'd already have the billing mechanism uh set up for outside communities but anyway i think maybe when you're talking about the the newer uh information you got from google how does that compare in terms of like uh the peak and the solar excuse

095me the peak in winter versus like i'm sorry the peak in the summer whereas in the winter we're getting a lot less obviously do we have information on that i do and i'm happy to share it i don't have it at my fingertips right now yeah apologies okay thanks i'll let other people speak up mccoy do you have another question yeah i think one of them might have been just what noah asked i was wondering if you could share the like analysis around um the solar increases that you found or like where where there could be places and like notes that i've been interested in seeing um if it talks about winter versus summer um and i mean i think it's also helpful and interesting to know that it's just for rooftop solar i mean

096one question i have that maybe goes beyond this conversation and is maybe more for city council is i think there's an ordinance like that prevents like ground solar um front yard i'm wondering if um sorry would you say it's just front yard front yard oh okay it's just front yard so i just wonder if there's also like considerations of thinking about if there's other down the line if there's other city ordinance that might need to be changed to like even increase that number more as we consider different potentials can i piggyback on that real quickly missy um are there hoas in ann arbor that might limit that i assume that there are and that might be something that we should also just know we analyze at some point yeah yeah and we're really great commissioner

097quite really great point about front yard solar and i think that's something we've talked about as staff in kind of things we want to bring to council anyway for reconsideration sorry council members it's coming uh and then for the hoas this is actually something we've been working with our state representative on because hoas can ban solar they can also bend other sustainability things like line dryers outside clothes uh hang your you're drying out and that that's just kind of counter to what we're trying to do broadly so we've been working with them on some legislation and last time i checked in with representative robbie i mean it's drafted i think he's just waiting to introduce it commissioner and then commissioner yes just um as a practical way of understanding what this would mean to a

098business a business that has a very large roof a roof that's capable of supporting more than just their current load so if they focus on just offsetting their current load by building out a system they get the investment tax credit they get depreciation and so forth and they can sell the excess uh over generation to to basically to the grid in this scenario they what would be the value proposition for the seu coming to that same small business and convincing them to build out 100 of their capacity when they're only going to be using half what's the incentive for them to do that yeah so yeah absolutely and if i fully understand your question one would be they're not building out their roof right the seo is so they don't have to lay out that

099capital at the beginning and then they pay back on their usage based on kilowatt hour usage so the i guess the incentive for them is hopefully more reliable sustainable power that they get with some battery storage on site and then they get to be in the green business space the value for the seu is we get to leverage that extra roof space to generate more power to go to their neighbor or wherever else we may need to move in well i see the value for the seu yeah sure i'm just really trying to understand what it is for the small business person as opposed to taking the value for themselves to giving it up to you yeah we would be i think the honest answer is if they can take it themselves and already have

100we would want them to i mean that's absolutely fine and then excess generation would come to the seo um the the kick i could see in that model is it won't make economic sense for them to over generate much unless you would not allow them to overrate much right but if they were paying outright for the install for example i i think the economics sort of break for them as an individual to generate 200 if the roof was capable of doing that whereas that the sau could and would want us to maximize that generation so i think that needs to be further kind of explored how to make that value proposition really clear thanks for naming it um but the intent would be to maximize if we can and help help more commercial enterprises small

101businesses take advantage of renewable energy that just can't pay the upfront cost today okay thank you mr briggs yeah um on the hoa discussion i just wanted to um let you know missy that um might be attorney um uh mcdonald has actually been having conversations with him about his recently that's come up on a different issue and i had a little bit on the we should move slowly on this but maybe we should actually be thinking about a little more quickly um and then on the discussion of kind of what number suggested it um i think it is probably useful to be doing a brainstorming session on how you know what types of other ordinances this might um we might be wanting to think about or where we might see policies that might challenge each

102other for example there's certainly a lot of interest i think right now to realize some of the the benefits of increased density in our community to get more folks living here and yet as we densify a little bit i can imagine that there could be some impacts on solar access and so what what does that mean for our community might be something worth exploring thanks um this is definitely an exciting opportunity um missy you mentioned the having done some modeling around solar potential and for in for generating energy i was wondering if any um modeling had been around for the energy efficiency piece um what kind of potential for reducing demand is is in that part of this equation yeah so we did well great thank you for asking that question because i think that

103often falls off of people's minds when you think about generation so we took uh existing household bills you know we picked like representative uh different houses looked at their bills looked at their energy audits and kind of came up with some estimates we did uh i'll pull up the model in the background but i believe we we projected to 25 uh reduction potential through the kinds of improvements we're talking about and it is different for different types of houses so i'll go look at that in the background as we move into the next phase of conversation and i'm happy to share the specifics with you but we know we have significant energy waste reduction potential in many of our older homes well most of our homes are older homes in ann arbor so we have

104a lot of potential did that include commercial space as well are you um because i i don't know square footage wise how residential square footage compares to business um are are you guessing 25 reduction potential for commercials building i don't have that number on top of my head right now what we did um we've been working pretty closely with the 2030 district who's doing all of these energy audits in commercial spaces and kind of stratifying those based on what we have is potential in restaurants versus office space and so we're going to take that kind of nuance to really figure out potential across the different markets whereas residential is a little bit easier there aren't as many categories do we have any idea what percentage of res residential buildings have been maximized from an energy

105efficiency standpoint oh i can't imagine it's high uh based on what we see i i don't have a number for you but i i don't even think we're at a percent i don't think we have a good way of collecting that yeah right now but this would be something that potentially the seo could collect well any other work we're doing the benchmarking you know that that past council will help us with commercial and multi-family sites really understand where we have high performers and when we have potential if the home energy uh label goes through that's going to give us the sense of like much i mean not a sense it's going to give us actual data about how our residential units are performing so we will get that information to be much more strategic uh

106in in kind of how we intervene in the market that'll give us a good sampling that we can look by neighborhood and get a better estimate of by neighborhood um what kind of potential there is so i agree um can i just mention with a 2030 district my recollection is that they're targeting a 15 uh 50 reduction in energy use by 2030 if i'm not mistaken it's a very very aggressive target um but you know i think what missy is saying there is a lot of potential both between residential multi-family and commercial for energy efficiency i would and if you think of that that we saw at the beginning you know if you were to say somewhere between between 25 to 50 of that but then took the natural gas part and took the elect

107the transportation part and electrify all of that those are that's that's a that's a huge huge amount that we still have to power um so we still have to hope for you know a lot of a lot of other good things to fall into life bridget did you have something else to add to uh well just uh one other follow-up question to that so for somebody who doesn't have solar potential in their house but could do a lot of energy efficiency work the way it would work through an scu it sounds like it would almost be like a pace program meets michigan saves um so that they would be if they joined the seu and got the energy efficiency work done they'd be paying a certain amount of money every month and i guess everybody

108is hoping that for that homeowner the amount of money they're paying every month would equal the money that they're saving on their energy bill is that yeah so it would be like our pace like residential pace i think that is one way to think about on bill finance the the other sort of thinking that's the goal commissioner right is that like people either have savings from what they pay even with those improvements or kind of lock in but we would be able to i mean we would be working with the homeowner to model their options and put together the right package for them we can't you know we can't force them to make other choices we wouldn't want to do that if we'd really want to customize to some people may want to do it

109all and are okay with this life premium others may need the savings immediately and we're really going to focus on what has the most savings potential up front to that point about um uh the savings um i worked with a lot of contractors indeed the one that worked with my house i did energy efficiency on that and financed that through michigan saves it's fairly standard practice now for you know reputable contractors when they they go in with a michigan saves loan that in order to get the loans through michigan saves they actually have to show how the energy savings will meet the loan payments on a monthly basis or at least on an annual basis so that analysis is done um and the state that's i mean that's pretty much state of the art so

110um you know i assume the city would you know follow a similar protocol in a project you know we michigan saves could be the the partner on a uh on this kind of a program as well so um you know there's there's as i said this is standard practice um and indeed on solar solar installations as well it's the same question you know well that if you're going to borrow money does the solar system generate uh sufficient output to pay off the loan payment on an annual basis um and if the answer is no then there the the lender michigan saves um slams the brexit so i think that's that's good that's the good news uh bridget do you have another question again okay um anyone else i had a few thoughts i wanted to

111share first of all thanks for everybody's great questions uh you're you're you had a lot of questions that that i didn't think about and i really appreciate everybody uh illuminating the discussion um lots of details and maybe a few doubles in some of them one question i have missy is and maybe it's just something that also like a few others you had to note down is how do we structure an scu so that it is also socially and environmentally just in terms of who it serves in what order it served serves them and i can imagine you know if you get 100 000 or 10 million dollars and you get a list of people and you know um a bunch of people on commissions and city council say oh we're interested in doing this um

112and typically we're people of privilege how do we you know how do you how do you then determine who gets in the front of the line who is in the back of the line um and you know these things become then potentially very political i'm wondering if you thought about that at all yeah and the answer is simple and complicated uh one is who we choose to reach out to really targeted right so there's already people on a waitlist we are we already have a waitlist going folks that have demonstrated interest but who do we spend time with and who do we knock and and whose community are we in and that that is where i think we can really focus on the economic and social justice aspects of the work also we're creating something

113so we can create it with the tenants that we hold and the values that we hold more complicated that was the political question and that is hard um it's hard i i don't have the answer to that and i think that's something we're going to have to discuss kind of more broadly that one thing of name that i think about is what happens if i center a large area of low-income folks and it's not in a council ward it's in someone else's word what does that mean for how the seo functions and how we support it and that's a real question that i don't have an answer to and i think i need i need to have guidance from you know our elected leaders from our community about how we want this to really look

114and roll out and i have one last question for you and maybe for chuck and that is with regards to reliability and resiliency to really have a high level of both it seems to me we're going to have a lot of additional wires connecting homes in ann arbor is that not general truck is true but it seems to me you know if i'm if if we're talking about connecting rooftops and batteries and um you know on individual residences on uh carports uh et cetera et cetera commercial entities and then providing resiliency by connecting all those together then in effect at some point we almost have a redundant set of connections uh between structures in the city do we not technically there's a risk and a risk is related to how power flows to get you

115know again i'll get into the electrons and voltage and power quality that's where you're gonna find probably find straight currents you're gonna find outages that cause other outages and cascading events so the devil's in the details john if it's laid out right we could probably mitigate a lot of that but it has to be laid out right and there's cost to make sure that we provide that reliability to our ultimate customers if that's the route that's taken okay yeah and just picking up on that i think obviously chuck knows way more about the mechanics here but part of what we need to do in the micro grid study and why that's something we want to move forward with is we want we know the neighborhoods i know the neighborhoods where i want to start it's

116working where from an environmental justice standpoint we've already been engaging and working and so we can look at that neighborhood very specifically and say can we underground what kind of wires how many wires how much connection how many poles and get the specifics and yeah there will be some redundant infrastructure but it'll be limited uh in terms of that redundancy to what we actually need and that's what we need to answer in kind of the next phase of the work okay so uh and by the way hold your don't hold your breath john too long we'll have wireless power before you can blink that would be wonderful uh so we have another significant part of our agenda that i'd like to move on to and that is the resolution in front of us i'm going

117to turn things over to missy in a second but i just have a few comments that i'd like to make as chair first of all i want to thank all the people that have been come come coming to meetings um watching um them listening um them and also providing public input i think it's helped us better gauge sentiment in the community as well as understand what some of the issues are and i really want to say thank you very much for everybody that's done that also we've had really some excellent presentations including missy's tonight um and in commission meetings but outside of out of this meeting there was a really good presentation that missy and her team did um in a public forum and so i think that's really helped illuminate uh our discussions um

118tonight and then going forward for the rest of the evening and we we now have a resolution in front of us with another resolution uh from city council that has asked us to weigh in on a feasibility study by the end of the year and i just have a couple of requests as we go into the discussion and i think this is just a continuation of the way we've conducted ourselves up until now um and i'm really proud of the commission i i want all of us to be open-minded um i hope that we continue to as someone smarter than i or wiser than i said seek first to unders understand than to be understood and another thing is i i'm hoping also that we can work towards a win-win solution um i think we

119we see that that's a convergence that we've had here in the last weeks and months and i i definitely hope that we can continue on that path so that we really do end up something because i think everybody that's in this group as well as people that have been calling in as well as calling following it really have the same goals the same passion and i think that can hopefully lead us to a good conclusion so our objective tonight is to hopefully either tonight or at the latest uh in our december meeting uh finalize a resolution um you know i guess we could say we we aren't going to vote on any resolution or approve any resolution that's an option too i have a sense that we're coalescing around a resolution and we have um

120obviously tonight sometime we also have time on in the december meeting if we need it and i would just ask people to consider as we enter into this discussion that we have sort of two competing uh objectives if you will and one is that we would like all of this to move forward with speed on the other hand i think we want a precise resolution that really gives city council uh direction on what to do with the feasibility study and if we recommend the feasibility study what's considered in that feasibility study so we we can discuss this very very quickly and move forward quickly but then we have the risk of leaving things out of the resolution that we may regret later on so i think we'll all have a sense of that uh as

121the evening goes on and then we can decide another hour or so from now um how we want to bring this to a resolution do we vote on a final resolution tonight or do we want to do some additional crafting um taking into consideration people's comments tonight and take a vote in the december meeting where we lose a month but as i said maybe we gain some precision in the wording of the resolution that we all feel is is really important so missy i'm going to ask you to introduce the resolution uh i asked missy if she would do that because we're actually considering a slightly different resolution than what we considered and was had a first reading on in our july 13th meeting and so i wanted to have missy talk a little bit

122about what took us to where we are today and then maybe we can pull the resolution up and discuss it have questions make proposals for wording changes etc how does that sound with everybody great john i have a question do don't we need to make a motion before we move to the discussion phase um because we have a new resolution in front of us it's not the other one yeah so why don't missy why don't you introduce it and then we'll take a motion and get a second to consider it and then we'll open it for discussion thanks mark i appreciate that yeah absolutely well uh to start off i also want to thank commissioner cleavy and commissioner mccoy who worked really hard on this behind the scenes and to all of you that sent

123comments in over the preceding few weeks so what uh is before us is a resolution that marries a number of things it marries uh the ask that we've received to do a feasibility study for a traditional municipal utility it marries next steps for a sustainable energy utility that was on that last slide that i shared and it brings in an options analysis which is something a number of commissioners have asked for which is understanding more than just those in particular the traditional utility uh kind of understanding the pros and the cons of other approaches uh primarily when we get towards things like the rate analysis and what it would cost you that work i recognize this is a lot to process we really try to kind of harmonize those three different asks and so i'll

124pull up the resolution uh it is it is different in form also just adding we did clarify uh what would be in a feasibility study so the original resolution we had asked for a feasibility study and i think thanks to folks like commissioner mccoy we really added more clarity so that it helps with for example should this move forward the drafting of an rfp uh so let me oh boy i'm gonna end up sharing my whole screen don't judge me if that happens uh let's see can you see the feasibility state the resolved clauses so high level i'm not going to read these the first resolve clause focuses on the traditional uh utility feasibility study and this is where we add more description of what we would expect to see i would say this isn't

125exclusive but these were the kinds of things we would want to see in an actual study itself so this has been added uh and i think i will turn that to commissioner mccoy to tell me if it changes the spirit of anything but it i don't think it changes the spirit of the initial resolution but instead provides clarity to it the second was the pathways analysis that some folks have asked for on the commission kind of understanding how does the purchase of an existing iou infrastructure traditional feasibility or traditional mutualization compared to these other options that we sort of been exploring broadly the third resolve clause then says that if any other options are analyzed they have to go through kind of a similar economic and technical feasibility study to what we outline for the

126traditional utility to the extent that's possible the fourth resolved clause says uh that this is kind of like our filter on the study that anything analyzed we want to understand how it aligns with of course a20 equity sustainability transformation and those energy criterion principles since we've decided and adopted those as core elements of our decision making process we want to be able to look at them through very parallel lenses and then of course we want this to be done uh this is the fifth i think result uh by a qualified firm of course we all want that to happen using kind of best practices in case we've missed something in the field has evolved since other studies have been done and then the last resolve clause that actually is about the seo and it says

127simultaneous with the above we want to move forward exploring the governance structure of the staffing registering public interest starting with a technical study for the nano and micro grids and uh drafting the ordinance of just starting that process to actually create an su doesn't mean adopt it but let's start that one but marries a lot of things and uh was a herculean attempt perhaps by many many people to try to bridge a lot of um a lot of great comments you've had so i'll stop there so thanks missy uh can i get a motion to consider the resolution in a second and then we'll open it up for discussions and comments second a bunch of first and seconds um i think first was um commissioner mccoy and then commissioner uh garcia and then a bunch

128of other ones uh after that so thanks um i i have before we as we open it up i have two things that i'd like to mention that are really just minor grammatical things um just so we get those out of the way i might have caught them chair okay but go for it yeah okay um one two three four in the fifth whereas um will we talk about dte um instead of saying who i think we need to say which because it's not a person and then my green power is capital m capital i and then green power when we refer to that further down those are the only two changes of that nature that i saw so i'll open it up then to everyone else for other kinds of comments and proposals etc

129so first commissioner mccoy great thanks um yeah so as missy and jen said too i think you know this goes back to noah's question earlier like part of the goal of this new resolution was understanding that like the seo can be a step towards full municipalization depending on um the feasibility study and also like just the ability to do this through one resolution to start getting working on the seo now while we consider other options that will take a little more time to weigh um one thing with the new resolution that i feel i personally feel should not be in it um is the second resolve clause looking at the pathways option um i feel that way because i'm worried that adding this whole feasibility analysis of all these other options some of which we

130haven't even discussed as a body yet like michigan green power missy said that's potentially on the docket for future times earlier in the meeting but we haven't really had a large conversation about it yet so i'm worried that having that clause could make the feasibility study take significantly longer and also cost a lot more money than we originally had estimated when we were considering a feasibility study and instead i would recommend to just replace it with a resolve clause that um asks the study to include a preliminary rate analysis for the sustainable electric utility um missy said earlier in the meeting that the seu doesn't need a feasibility study um which is what that second resolve clause would do that really we just need a rate analysis so i think we should replace that clause

131with something along those lines and really focus this study on the seu and municipalization and then if we want to um pass something that's looking at other options as well we should do that in a separate resolution um and i also feel that way because i feel the res that clause also kind of pits them against each other it wants us to weigh the options in compared to one another which i think a lot of us would agree that in the end we're going to need a lot of these options um working together and so i don't think a study that compares them to each other is actually what we want or helpful i think we want a study that can compare um specifically uh the municipal electric utility and um to how like dte

132our current power main power provider would be not these other options that could be components of it thank you can i can i reframe part of that and ask for an explanation from misty or anybody else uh that that's with us and that is if i look at the second resolved clause um a vppa and migraine power are are they not both options available under a municipal either either form of municipal utility they would be open to the seu as they would be open to municipalization through condemnation so if just if we look at that list in taking at least those two do they need to be called out because essentially they are a subset of the options available to to both is that correct or incorrect they're also an and like oh or i'm

133sorry not an and they're an or um that you we could choose those pathways instead of other pathways or in addition to other pathways so we could do a vpa right now without having a utility okay okay we can't do a ppa but we could do a vpp right and migraine power individuals could do but the city on behalf of individuals could i mean i'm just wondering to if we look at that list just to shorten it down and be more precise do we do we cut out migraine power because it frankly isn't something that's we could do now but it could be done either under municipalization through condemnation or through an seu maybe i mean if we if we take dt's infrastructure we're not enrolling in dt's program well this is perhaps part of

134the intent um and i did not add this so i i will leave the floor open for the commissioners who did recommend this change that i think there's some there's some nuance to this question that needs to be explored about what that would look like okay maybe we note that as as an open point can i also ask them while we're on that same topic um cca uh could someone and frankly i think i was in musings um in my own head and then talking with other people i thought it's something maybe should be on the list but i'm wondering what is the feasibility study going to tell us about cca given it's not legal and we we don't know the pathway or the pathway to a cca other than what we i mean what

135do we expect to learn more about through the feasibility study other than what we know what the political pathway is parallel statement that this was something that came from the commission so i would welcome commissioners sharing their thoughts one would be uh we could i could imagine a use case of understanding pricing in ccas that are like us or going to the market to get a sense so if it were enabled we could have we could at least have a discussion about how hard we want to push for that kind of legislation and maybe have more information to go to our legislators about why but again just that that's my thinking on something that was added by some other folks okay no i think that's that's a good point i mean um in the end

136a lot of this comes down to economics and if if that illuminates uh if the economics under that illuminate the economics with the other options that's that's an important input okay sorry for interrupting um got a bunch of other commissioners lined up here carlene all right thank you very much um so i'm also going to be asking a question about uh the uh resolved two clause as well as uh how it connects to resolve three clause and the final uh clause which is the the sixth the sixth clause so um the the sixth clause which uh states that uh the en the energy commission recommends that something is with the above actually the city continue investigating the creation of a sustainable energy utility by and then it lists um the different approaches um [Music] what

137would be different from this versus um studying uh pathways to meet or with what's proposed and resolved clause number two it seems to me that we would look at how much it would cost um to do the things that resolve clause number six is instructing um um council to initiate right away so we would be studying how much it's going to cost while doing it at the same time kind of having a hard time articulating the question does it want me to understand if i if i understood you correct or the essence of the question it's really kind of what are we asking for the seo because it's in its own kind of separate resolve cluster why is it also in two and uh that was because the rate analysis is the part that we

138need we don't really need any of the other kind of assessments but we do want help a firm that was doing kind of this assessment should be qualified to do a rate assessment for the seo okay so then possibly then it would be um my suggestion would be to specify doing a rate analysis then for the scu in um the second result clause or or adding it to the list in the sixth yeah i'll just jump into it that's why i suggested like you know both john's comments and carlene's comments are why i suggest taking out the second resolve calls and just replacing it with a resolve clause that explicitly states asking for a rate analysis for an seu and not including these other options that might not make sense for a few disability study

139okay that was pretty much my my question it seemed a little bit redundant thanks commissioner hook i'm sorry yep so thanks missy for presenting this um i really think as a body we really need to revisit this idea though in terms of combining lots of thoughts and moving parts here we've got the seu that missy presented we know it's structurally different than a cca or that it's different than a municipality we also still have the dte option which i'll just say on the table is our as our is our base point right and i always think about somebody raised to stephen covey point earlier today one of my favorites is begin with the end in mind what are we going to try to accomplish here are we going to try to recommend that the city

140do something different at the end of the day than where we're at today and i think that's the case i think it would be foolish for us to spend a lot of time writing resolutions that don't result in that but i think we need to be mindful of what is that finish line what are we trying to accomplish and how do we best get there people have identified speed is critical um i think quality is equally critical in making sure that what we produce is is a sound um that we don't recommend um option a and option b is the one we should have picked how do we avoid that from happening if we don't study the options um cca is out there we can do a high level screening if you want to see

141which whether it holds muster and feel comfortable that the decision we make relative to the other options allows us to say the cca's not going to work and we have legal issues we know that we've heard that i'm aware of them i've worked with ccas in california i know how they operate what i'm getting to is i think we really need to distill this resolution into two parts i think we need to focus one resolution on an scu it sounds like we don't need a lot of funding for it it sounds like we don't need any kind of a a council recommendation or cha transition we don't need a feasibility study per se paid by a third party consultant because we've already had some folks look at it but it's a totally different set of

142pathway it's a different set of people it's a different set of responsibilities it's got a different budget so i mentioned it's probably got a different schedule it really belongs on its own and this resolution we've been talking about for since march or whenever we brought this up as far as the municipality really should stand on its own because it's going to need funding and we're going to have to find a pathway to get to that funding and make sure the scope for it is appropriate that's not going to be an overnight process and we know how long it takes the city to fund things like this so um this is not a slam dunk and i don't want to wait install the seu activity waiting to figure out if we can even do this municipality

143study let's get moving and let's let's transition from a large pretty complicated lots of resolution um engagement to very crisp written resolutions that focus that one on a municipality one on the mscu the municipality really needs to hold its muster against the other options it can be done in parallel to the seo but at some point we need to sit down and figure out is the seou the right approach or is there an option coming out of the study made by others that looks better and is a better solution for the city and i'm afraid until we really understand that and get on a pathway that gets to that date let's say it's it's may 1 2022 that we make a decision we need to set that end date and understand what it looks like

144and how we're going to get there and i don't think adding them both together in the same body of a resolution works for me you know i could step back and and provide technical comments to the resolution as written it's a lot of effort i think to get to the finish line with this it's really the first reading of it tonight and i prefer that we think about splitting it into two parts and i'll just stop there thank you do people want to discuss that or do we want to move on to the next question how do people want to handle that i i i sort of prefer talking about a topic and resolving that before we move on to the next topic i see a few nods um so i'm gonna i'm gonna address

145chuck's at least topic of two resolutions versus one and i i wonder what the practical benefit is of going back and having a whole bunch of weird whereas clauses that are going to be the same and having a resolve clause in uh one resolution and then another bunch of resolve clauses that are different in a second resolution rather than simply having um two different resolve clauses that define exactly what we want all in the same resolution as we have in front of us right now i don't see the benefit of splitting it does can somebody else or chuck speak to that commissioner briggs or councilmember briggs did you want to comment on that yeah i agree with what commissioner hook um is saying in terms of just there's we're sort of um bringing together there

146these are two different paths or maybe not two different paths but they're two different concepts or multiple different concepts that are being brought together in one resolution but we're also we're having this conversation simultaneously in our community and so i think that there's um there's a fair amount of benefit in just having going to council because because the council discussion is going to um likely address all of these different issues at once it's it's nice to actually have had a resolution that kind of does that and have the recommendation of energy commission all at once saying you know this is what we support the path that we support um and there may be it may be you know because they're broken up into different resolved clauses i think it provides the opportunity to say okay

147that's eu can can get moving um you know hopefully with usability study if this moves forward can get can get going but they're they're not necessarily time dependent upon each other um i do think you want to make sure that they don't get um you know slow down on one because um or you don't need to i guess it's my general thoughts do other people have comments on this before we move on i do john i think that i i i guess i would i understand what chuck's concern is um i don't think i would be in favor of breaking it up either so let's say we have a this this document i think is uh covers covers what we need to have done to move forward to you know finding a pathway to getting

148a20 completed and getting carbon neutral by 2030. this is the energy generation side and um you know i think we we need to do a bunch of these things so i i guess i wouldn't support that i also have a comment about the resolve thing that started this i can come back around or i can do that now go ahead so um i think um i'm in favor of of us looking at the options that we have before us because i don't see of the 41 utilities municipal utilities that are out there and the models that we have that any of them meet the the goals that we're trying to achieve um and if you look at the history of them most of them were were done because there wasn't service available to them or

149it was an economic consideration but in large part um you know the decision was was financial we're we're looking at an emissions based decision tree here um trying to figure out how we can um you know zero out our emissions at the same time maintains levels of prosperity and all the other things that we're doing so to narrow this down to when we're going to look at two options i think or hurts us i think we need to look at how the options fit together so i'll just use myself as an example i have solar panels on my house but i don't generate sufficient energy because of my poorest foresight to be able to meet 100 of my electrical needs so i meet the rest of my green needs by buying power through my green

150power so between the combination of my green power and my solar systems i get 100 um i think we're going to need to to understand all of these options how they fit together at some point we may want to you know we got a 20 megawatt uh solar system up the street we're putting in boulder colorado showed us one thing that as you start moving down this track you get more leverage and perhaps we could induce dte to offer that to us through their migraine power at a reasonable and competitive discount that would meet our needs at some point or buy it outright or whatever but to say we don't need to look at anything but you know these two options traditional municipalization and scu and that's it i think we're we're cutting off our

151notices spider face um there's movement on on uh you know community choice aggregation there's there's movement on that last week there's movement on you know how we would do if we would need power purchase agreements or virtual power agreements if dte throws up a bunch of barriers virtual power is an issue we're going to have to understand this and it's part of the of the cost so to to me i think saying we're saying here you know we need to look at a20 energy related emission reduction and clean energy goals that should be driving this and these are the options that we have in front of us traditional municipal seu but all these other things are out there as well my green power itself we need to be able to unleash the innovation side of

152this program and let us come up with the optimum mix of these things so i'm not in favor of saying oh we're not going to look at these other things because it'll slow it down i you know i'm with chuck i think we need to be thorough and if something if next week something happens on community choice segregation that changes this thing a bit i want to have the i would be really mad if we say well we're not going to look at that we're going to go as fast as we can on this other model because we've agreed to that and we limited ourselves i'm not for limited in fact i'd be open to saying you know the combination of these and other options that impact us in the future i would expect that

153that missy and her team would look at all options and leave no stone unturned so i you know i appreciate the the drive to you know make this as simple as possible and get it done so we can you know hit the deadline which for for the election november but that's not my limitation my limitation is a two zero that's what i think should be driving us thank you um i think council member dina was next and then edie or right after thank you chair mursky um i'm gonna follow that up by by agreeing um almost entirely with with commissioner cleavy and in part with commissioner huckamaldo i also wouldn't support separating this out um i i as i read and and i welcome kind of other commissioner's thoughts because it seems that others maybe

154are interpreting this differently but as i read that second resolved clause i took it as as exactly what commissioner cleavy was suggesting which was that you know this is a complicated issue and there are likely going to be multiple solutions that we need to undertake in order to achieve our a20 goals it's not just going to be one that solves all of our problems and and so what i'm looking for in in particular as i look at kind of the second half of that first result clause what what our goals are in undertaking this feasibility study with an emphasis on the cost to power the utility with 100 renewable energy um the assessment of the quality of those assets and to repair and replace um all of those things um what we may come back

155with is a recommendation that there is a combination of these things that gets us there and and i think that's what this that final phrase there in the second result resolved clause emphasizes for me is we are truly interested in getting an answer on what is the best solution for ann arbor to get to 100 renewable and decarbonization by 2030. that should be the primary focus of what our work is is and what is driving this work and so i i think that's the important part for me if if that if i am i'm trying not to come at this with a with a an assumption of what the outcome of this feasibility study will be and in order to do that i want to make sure that we're exploring all of our options but

156also centering that in our goal our this body's goal the city's charge as laid out in the a20 plan that was adopted is not moving us towards publicly owned power while that may be a positive outcome of this work the primary responsibility that we've established for ourselves is renewable energy and decarbonization by 2030 and while i don't think those things have to be mutually exclusive in this case i think it's important for us to to emphasize that it could be an all-of-the-above approach and we should not put all of our eggs in one basket thank you mr juno thank you um yeah i have kind of three main points um following up a lot on what um mark said as well i think the first is right if we're undertaking a feasibility study um the

157marginal costs of adding on the different um things are it just seems like a better use of our funds and i don't think especially when we're just looking at the cca and mostly the legal aspects and with the seo at the ratepayer question or the rate analysis um you know i just don't think it's going to be double or triple right it's going to be a lesser investment um my second point is that i think that there's something to be said as well for presenting these in the same report and in the same resolution um uh with regard to public um knowledge public awareness public understanding of these issues um i think that it could be a disservice to separate them out and expect that um you know a lot of residents are going to

158have the time um and capacity to really fully dive into these multi-page reports right i think this is a public good when we can offer um and make this clear for for folks to understand um i think the last point i'd say i'm very sensitive though as well to embers point about we don't want to pose these as opposites and i think that that's probably a question that can be addressed within the framing of the report um at the discretion of our contractors or whoever is working on the report as well right and they might also have you know the ability to address some of the other questions about migraine power or vpas they don't have to put it all on the same plane um those can be shown as kind of you know supplementary

159aspects rather than a main pathway per se um so i just think that we do have some discretion probably that would happen anyway with um you know any experienced person undertaking this sort of analysis so just wanted to raise those points thanks very much um well i i'm not getting much support from my splitting so i won't bark at you all about that although i may sway my vote a little bit later but um i think a couple things missing in the current resolution if we focus it on singular um it doesn't really talk much about authority who makes decisions who who controls budgets who manages the effort who gets the results who interprets the results who makes recommendations to the city council there's a lot of authority slash accountability slash implementation i think we

160need to put in here it can be done without four thousand thousand words and accomplish what i'm i'm trying to state so i think that's really critical that we add some elements of that in here um there's some language in here about how osi and energy commission are going to work together that should be the fundamental i think if we if we don't do that we'll miss out on providing a valid recommendation um we talked a lot about one size doesn't fit all we may need to look at multiple steps here on what solution fits the bill i will tell you i've been working with michigan council on climate solutions their state-related activity on how do we solve the whole climate issue but as a state there are solutions that are going to come out

161of that the potentially may disrupt anything the city is doing um a classic example might be if you look at the offshore wind study that was done a number of years ago by michigan state that i was participated in we could generate all the energy we need in michigan with offshore wind and forget about local solar if we really wanted to that may be the cheapest alternative low-cost carbon solution and how does that fit into the structure of a municipality that we would that we would own an operator how might that work with an scu would we buy power from somebody that's generating offshore we don't want to shut off the future because the future may have quite a bit of different look than it does today and i think us as a little community

162is it's ambitious for us to do this we're leading the rest of the state right as far as what we're looking to do um we want to start a movement we want to start activity but i don't want to get ahead of the cart here i want the horse leading the cart and i want to be sure we're riding the right horse and and we're up against this time clock so we do we need to think thoroughly but let's not overlook um how we're going to do this and who's going to be accountable for this thank you thank you jen can i just respond to that really quick yeah yeah i think um i think there there's a lot of really good sentiment in what chuck shared um but i do think i have to

163reiterate that the energy commission is an advisory commission to council and that is sort of the role it's very clearly in the charter and i think that we should be doing this collaboratively but i think that is i just feel like you have to reiterate that there is a professional staff that will do this work with council and the commission as an advisory commission to help make strategic decisions and give information to council well taken i think just to combine those two points um and to to leverage off of or jump off of chuck's chuck we can always weigh in on chaffs on staff's analysis of the report that's something we can still do but i think missy's point is is we advise and staff is is going to be the primary entity which evaluates

164um the the feasibility study and comments on it that's that's my interpretation as well um commissioner mccoy and then commissioner 11. yeah thanks um yes and sorry chuck i agree i think that they should remain in the same um in the same resolution and i also think that like you know i think your concerns are valid about like not wanting anything to hold up any one other thing but i i that's also why i appreciate like part of the resolution around the seo is is saying specifically you know to urge um city council to you know start looking into these other components that they can right now so i think we can also consider that what we're asking for in one resolution also might come out in different places when city council like takes it

165from us as well um and i think erica made those points as well but um i think you know having having similar issues talked about for us in one place is helpful um i appreciate all all of what all of you said a lot of you said about um you know wanting to make sure we have a thorough analysis that looks at all of our different options and like i said at the beginning too i think a lot of these different things are very likely components of each other and i think looking at different pathways is important i just wonder if what is posed in this resolution gets away from what like a feasibility study is and what it's needed for for a municipal electric utility and gets more towards like a desirability analysis you

166know like the goals of a municipal feasibility study are to look at these like very specific things some of which are laid out in the resolve class prior um you know being able to to look at the legal um analysis looking at the cost of acquiring the wires like you know if we're able to do that down the line um and it's not necessarily coming into like choosing that as the option still so i i feel like that's where my concerns still lie in that second resolve clause is that it moves away from a feasibility study in that sense and that i think we do need to figure out how these different pieces are components of a potential you know traditional utility of the future if you will right like mark says there's not one

167like even what we're proposing here um but how it moves away from like the technical needs of a feasibility study for a municipal utility um and in if looking at this multiple pathways approach and looking at these higher analysis of you know michigan green power community choice aggregation is like something that we don't want to be saying is a part of this feasibility study if that makes sense and so i wonder how the wording you know even could be changed to like rethink that if not removed entirely thanks um i have a number of others and i'd like to maybe jump in after um edie so noah mark edie chuck me okay so initially what we were tasked with here was just whether or not we want to recommend to city council to do a

168feasibility study i think we're without polling everybody i think we're kind of on the same page that we want to do that it's just i don't think we need to lay out exactly what the feasibility study is going to look like it sounds like the sort of consensus is that we want to not just have it you know originally we're talking about municipal utility but now we want to expand it and say we don't at the very i don't think we i guess what i'm trying to say is we don't need to over complicate this too much in order to get it to city council at this stage maybe later on um when the rfp goes out or whatever you know the request to get the study especially city staff would be more directly involved

169in tailoring exactly what we want at that point but maybe at this stage all we really need to say is that we want a feasibility study and we want to generally consider the various options that we have and then we can kind of indicate you know the ones that we think might be good to look at and maybe whoever does the feasibility study can also have their you know throw in their possibilities and in the end i think what we want though is maybe not one thing this is what you should do but here are a couple different options and here's the pros and cons of each of them and but like i said i don't think we need to get too hung up right now because this is just saying city council we want

170this study to be done thanks noah mark so i think that's exactly what the second clause does first of all it is part of the feasibility say if you look at the results it says it says we want ann arbor to authorize and fund to study to determine feasibility of establishing municipal electric utility including sms gtes reverend da da da and the second one says you know those the study recommends that this study that we just talked about in resolution one also look at the other pathways and other options that could impact this so i it's hard for me to i i would never vote for a feasibility study that said we're not going to look at other pathways and options that could impact the cost of this project um we're not saying go out

171and do a my green power feasibility study and spend 150 000 studying my green power i i no one says that it is these are the these are the things that are happening and they'll be other things that will come up while we're doing this and we should factor them into the feasibility study that we do that talks about that and ann arbor recommends that ann arbor city council authorize and fund a study you want to inject the word feasibility study in front of study okay but it says study to determine the feasibility of establishing these things and it says look at these other things that should be part of the feasibility study i don't i don't see how this is i don't get i i don't understand the concern here um it doesn't make

172sense to me to say let's do a feasibility study but don't don't study the feasibility of these things in writing in a resolution we're saying don't do it i'm seems crazy to me i'm missing something i'm you know maybe somebody could elucidate me better i don't get it uh chuck and erica and then i'll chime in mark i think we're missing what are we what are we recommending um you know a feasibility study this could be a billion dollar feasibility study what are we asking them to look at specifically all the technical this could be an endless barrage of activity and i think we really need to be more crisp about what this feasibility is expected to deliver to us it will eventually lead to a scope document that is written for an rfp i

173suspect for consultants to bid on who will then will select from right and i'd like to have some visibility in this as it was pointed out if we're an advisory committee to or commissioned to the city council hopefully they trust us a little bit to have a neutral voice in how this shapes up and moves forward i think that's pretty critical i agree with you i agree with you i would why don't can you give us language in the first resolve that would say a you know a stage one scope feasibility study or let's let's put a label on this that has you know that's that's recognizable by all parties of what it is we're talking about we can use a stage gate approach which is pretty common in industry to do this it's a

174stage one activity we can be very precise about it i think we also need to be realistic about what kind of schedule are we requesting here you know i think the city council is looking for us to to recommend a study but you know how this is not a three year event we need this to be done pretty quickly how does this get done and we should recommend in this resolution somehow what the end date should be and how do we get there what's the pathway to get this done there's nothing on schedule in here and everything i do in my life is schedule dictated thanks um i did just kind of want to go back to the resolution that council passed in terms of what was asked for out of um energy commission and

175i don't read fully every resolved clause but from the ones that are pertinent pertinent is that you know we're asking whether or not the commission believes city council should undertake a visibility to understand options related to creating a municipal utility including traditional and non-traditional models so that's kind of that does lead to some of these other components that are earth within this resolution that the resolution explicitly discusses how the utility aligns with our with our goals the criteria that's in one of here and that um you know it's explicitly discusses how it's um it aligns with our values which is also in here so council has asked for the commission to weigh in kind of you know potentially on both traditional and non-traditional i guess a question to um missy if you don't mind i

176think council also will have a little bit of discussion around this and i anticipate this is what you would be um staff would be working on next in terms of um there are questions here around kind of scope and how that might balloon into cost and and schedule and so kind of how do you anticipate you know this um this is fairly broadly worded right now um you know making sure that when if the commission approves this and then council ultimately approves this um the staff has enough guidance to make sure that this isn't a monster study with no timeline yeah so the way that i can think about there's a lot sort of in there which is a great question one that these studies happen so we're not sort of writing something from scratch

177we have a lot of template language to be able to pull from from others who have done traditional municipal utility feasibility studies we're adding an options analysis but we're saying do a parallel like robust analysis of things and this resolution actually does a lot of things to us about the things we're going to ask for we're going to ask for them to evaluate it based on the energy principles and criteria we're going to ask for them to evaluate it based on timeline we're going to ask for them to evaluate it based on transformation and equity and sustainability as values we actually have a lot um inherent in this resolution that gives direction about what it is we're going to write in an rfp and send out tickets to get bids on but i don't feel

178a lot of ambiguity i think that the ambiguity i have is about what else is in the requests that we put out to the market and and i think that sort of centers are we doing an options analysis or are we really evaluating one thing and that's where i think i'm looking for direction from this body amber go ahead and then i'll i'll comment after you yeah um sorry i was switching between i have notes in two different places but um yeah i mean i think i think mark or sorry i mean chuck articulated like some of the concerns i have around like um like it does this become a billion dollar study right or like a study that takes three years is if if we're not defining the specificity of like what feasibility study

179means for the other options like so the the first resolve clause no i lost word oh it's in my word document okay the first resolve clause like very specifically um like articulates some of the things that are needed for a feasibility study of a traditional municipal utility but not necessarily all of those things make sense for the other options so it says like it also like it becomes more broad for what we're looking for for the other option so i think that's something that could be written refined more that like mitigates some of my concerns about like what is analyzing the feasibility of michigan green power mean right and i think that's where i still like don't understand or like what is analyzing the technical feasibility of like community choice aggregation mean and maybe to

180noah's point like those things don't need to be articulated in this specific resolution but it also means like how do we control then like this spiraling from something that we think might cost 120 000 and could take you know less than six months to something that could be much more and i think that's still where like i don't understand like you know where where that difference lies um or like the fact that you know missy said that we don't really need an scu feasibility analysis because we already have that from the technical experts so but we're asking for that in this study or in this resolution as it's written right now and so i see some like questions and dissonance in in those places um and i think just what missy what you were just

181saying also made me think like you know i think we want to evaluate these options against like the a20 goals against um you know the other things you were saying the timeline and things like that but one thing that i had originally written in is like we also want to um determine the feasibility of a municipal utility based on um you know it's its ability to plot a supply power relative to dte and also like thinking about the revenue that's coming in from the city so i think that's also something that could be re-added around like you know we're also still at the end of the day dte is still the current provider that we need that we need to be also basing off of these options i think too which michigan green power being

182a component of that but not the only component go ahead edie it's okay john you can go first oh that's all right um i guess one thing that um i'm hearing kind of from what ember's saying and and what others are saying you know is there's a lack of clarity around on the second clause you know is it a feasibility study or is it not for these additional components and so maybe there's a language modification we can make that really indicates that it's more like like you were saying number a desirability uh comparison or something that's specified that it's more like legal framework and technical capacity of these subsequent things and not a full feasibility study to kind of um reduce concerns around ballooning costs and timelines um maybe that's you know maybe a little

183bit of clarity there um because i don't i do agree it doesn't seem to say feasibility study so i don't think we should read that into it necessarily but maybe we could be more clear to to really um indicate that that's not a full feasibility analysis for those other options so if i may weigh in before you commissioner george hopefully it'll help uh bring us to some um closer resolution to this point um so i think maybe just going back in history we were requested by a2p2 to look at a feasibility study of municipalization through condemnation period and i think we're now from what i'm hearing at a different point and that different point is something that frankly i'm used to um having worked in industry and um when things like this come forward typically

184what is done is we're asking for a some experts who do this all the time to weigh in and provide us the relative value propositions of the options that they feel are the strongest and best options for us with input from from from us of course and to evaluate that proposition on a number of parameters based on the values and the criteria that you know that missy talked about that was passed by council last december um talking about carbon neutrality by 2030 i think something that chuck stated earlier is very important um there are other parameters like the reliability that's important like the cost that's important etc and to provide us a an analysis of the various options that they think are the best without us being in my view overly prescriptive because if we're

185overly prescriptive then the experts then are not in a position to be able to say this is what we recommended you know i mean they may still do that anyhow but if we're overly prescriptive they're less likely to do that and i think we we want them to give us what the value propositions are what the relative risks and um pros and cons are and the way we bound that is by putting a price tag on it which basically tells them how much resources that they can put into it and we also bound it by putting a time frame on it and that's as somebody else said earlier exactly what happens in business and industry is someone says we need an analysis along these lines you tell us what the best options are you tell

186us the relative uh value propositions are you tell us what the risks are you tell us you know the likelihood of success you know including for example you know if we do municipalization by condemnation i think we also want analysis of what's the likelihood of success how much money are we going to have to put into this upfront um in terms of education in terms of marketing in terms of trying to convince the residents of ann arbor to vote for condemnation i mean i think all these things are are a part of this value proposition and so my my sense is is that somewhere in the wording we want to talk about the relative um what a bunch of what are the different options that that the the the party that does the analysis lays

187out various options tells us what those very various value propositions are and they do it in a certain time frame within a certain budget and then we sort of leave it at that we don't tell them just to do one option like we were talking about at the very beginning but we asked them to tell us with all of their experience what's the best way forward commissioner george thank you mr chairman um i appreciate all the debate that has been had on this um i would like us to come to some sort of resolution to this conversation uh i think that we've uh highlighted that there is some uh disagreement over what the language is uh i think you know the question on this is whether we want to vote this through as it is

188as it stands tonight or are we gonna take another month and have the folks that have been shepherding this uh continue to work on some of this language to try and get and make everybody happy so you know i prefer we move to that conversation so that we can continue to move this process along i personally think that you know i'm very torn at the moment uh i i think that i i i would be i could vote for as it stands right now i could vote for it in a month um i you know i do uh hear some of the concerns that have been raised but um you know i think that we really need to make sure that we're staying on topic here about what is exactly in front of us and

189are we actually going to take action on this tonight or are we going to punt it for another month and have more language tweaks as a number of folks have suggested so i would encourage us to steer towards that conversation thanks for bringing that into focus um commissioner peck and then commissioner cleavy commissioner mccoy and i think we should all take commissioner george's uh advice into consideration so go ahead yeah so i will i'll agree with that and i also really liked what you had to say john but everyone here has had uh some very valuable comments so it's a thoughtful conversation um just for a reflection uh i compare this with what we did at u-verse 2 michigan for our carbon neutrality effort and we did put out our rfp asking for a consultant

190firm who does this for a living to weigh all the options and give us the pros and cons but also to do it in a way that was uh give-and-take and discussion with uh our team and missy was involved in this um so she could has a firsthand idea of how it can get a little frustrating at times but at the same time how it could really work and i do believe we have uh staff uh particularly missy but her other you know other staff and other members of this team even um who can interact if we write the rfp right uh and i don't think we should be writing the rfp tonight or ever i think we should leave that up to the staff uh we just want to say let's get it out

191and uh let's consider all the alternatives and let's have a option while we're doing that whoever's doing it uh to to be able to um present and then be enqueried and then provide answers to those queries because i think if we do that staff will get the information city council needs to move forward with our advice thank you commissioner george i very much appreciate what you're saying and so i gonna offer a suggestion so my suggestion is this we take these resolve one and we take resolved two we take resolved one and we say resolve that the anarch energy commission recommends that the city of ann arbor authorize and fund to study two and eliminate everything else that's in that section drop down to the next section take out take out the first line of

192that second result and begin pick up and say to second line analyze and propose multiple potential pathways the city could meet take to meet its a20 energy-related emissions reductions and clean energy goals period and eliminate everything after that and and we take that and we vote it through so again take the first resolved keep everything keep the first line and the second line up to the word to kill off everything else in the first resolved drop down kill off the first sentence of the second resolved pick up two analyzed and proposed multiple potential pathways the city could take to meet its a20 gold mission goals reduction clean energy goals period kill off everything else and resolved number two keep everything after that and we send it on i think that meets all of our the

193needs we were talking about where we've already made the decision we're not going to endorse a a resolution that was given to us um that is calls for a single uh traditional municipal utility feasibility study and nothing else so we'd be pretty clear that we don't want to do that so with this it it ties us to 820 it says let's do a study and find the best pathways and if doing that study we're going to be looking at rates values we're going to look at everything polls we're going to analyze everything and come up with a decision about the best way to achieve that goal that's my suggestion we're seeing this for one clarification just to make sure i get this edit before it's considered um mr clean what was the first two that

194you ended in the first resolve clause was it after sorry after the word after the word two mid-sentence second line um to and fund a study two and end at study and at the end at two t-o and take out everything else in that i don't think that sentence makes sense in the first resolve clause resolve that the ann arbor energy commission recommends the ann arbor city council authorize and fund a study to and then eliminate everything else after that and the first line of the second resolved so then it reads to analyze and propose multiple potential pathways so it's one resolved merged into two it's one resolved emerging the two throw out the stuff that uh amber is concerned about the excess detail it leaves it open enough that we can look at multiple

195pathways we d we say and the other ones you know do a thorough study pick a decent contractor make sure that the whatever it is the goal the community wide carbon neutrality by 2030 820 plan and energy criterion principles that those things are included and then we say and we don't want to wait so we want to move on the sau now and here's what we want to do right now because you know it's further developed than these other options and we don't we don't want to wait and it's compatible with as far as we understand is compatible with any other option we're going to look at including traditional municipal utilities missy i have a question are you able to work in word and modify this with strikeout or whatever so that we can actually

196look at something just before we vote uh if if the commission wants to take this one out for sure i just i just made the changes in a separate document um i'm not sure if it's friendly to the body so i have it sort of as a side but yeah i can do that if we feel like we're close yeah so chuck may have a friendly amendment to add some some technical language about stage gate or whatever if you want to put some some scope around that study that would be a welcome addition that's my suggestion commissioner mccoy commissioner hook um commissioner juno yeah i was also going to recommend something based on what robert had said but it was different in that i was going to suggest we um like move the conversation and

197vote on this in december um but one thing that i i found challenging over the course of the last month was like only having the conversation via email with like a couple people due to the open meetings act limitations like i couldn't get feedback on some of the additions or like why people wanted certain things because i couldn't talk to other commissioners about it so i was gonna suggest trying to move to have a public like working session sometime between now and the december meeting um to work on this for like a subgroup of people who want to contribute to it um uh so that we could do it not like offline um in a way that could like the conversation can continue with the people who want to and can contribute to it um

198and then vote in december okay before we leave your suggestion can we take that up briefly my understanding is is that we could have a subgroup that does the editing if we decide indeed to take that path forward but it would have to be less than a quorum of the commission is that not correct or is that correct so we could agree tonight that you know persons a b c d and e could meet to hammer this out and then bring it back for a vote in december is that is that i just wanted to clarify that that's possible is it not i saw a few nods but i didn't okay it sounds like it's possible okay so commissioner will come yeah john to capture your thoughts i think we also in this in this

199sharpening the spa to use another stephen covey word we should add something in there something along the lines the energy commission recommends a maximum budget of 200 000 to be applied and that this work be completed by june 1 2022 as bookends the council can take us up on it or they can change the numbers but at least we're recommending this get done in a reasonable timeline for a reasonable budget i'm open to changing some of the numbers i could probably go lower and faster but i think we need to give bookends in the recommendation i would support that too um i i want to throw out one other proposal um and that is that we can uh craft a resolution vote on it approve it but that doesn't mean that that has to be

200exactly the same resolution that our council liaisons take to council that's my understanding um they they would most likely present our our resolution but the final resolution that council votes on could potentially um if we're if we're really trying to accelerate this process we could vote on something tonight that is uh you know a 90 solution and then take this offline in a smaller group that then works uh with council to draft the final resolution where council would be able to say this is the product of the energy commission um we we recognized that we wanted to move forward quickly and therefore we didn't try to craft the 99.99 solution but we did we took it to this point and um these are some of the open potential issues and we're going to include those

201and address those in the final resolution that's considered by council so i'd like to throw that out there as another option and council member radina go ahead and riff off of that or anything else you want to talk about yeah i mean i i think i just wanted to to comment briefly on the idea of kind of going into a work session and then coming back in december and and i think my thought on that is i i think everybody at the at this table this virtual table has expressed a lot of of thought and interest in this topic and and i guess even if we were to take some additional time and have a work session a sub quarantine working on something i guess i wonder to the extent that the december meeting is

202different than the conversation we're having tonight where folks who weren't at the table might have additional thoughts and want to change things and tweak things um and so i i guess i i in part agree with the sentiment that um i think you can probably work out a solution and keep this moving forward on an expedited timeline to the extent possible um i would also add just simply to i appreciate um commissioner hookum's comment about kind of adding some bookends to to this i guess the the other thing i will add is while i would ultimately encourage us to to emphasize kind of the the the urgency with which we want this completed i am also hesitant to support a a date where we are dictating to to the person that we're doing this work

203to by when it needs to be completed because i think we want complete work i don't i don't think we want to be rushing towards a specific date um while i would like it as quickly as possible um unless we are certain that something can be done by a certain timeline i i would hate to put an arbitrary deadline on it that that couldn't be met it breaks yeah i would concur with what councilmember rodina suggested which is you know i think the budget will somewhat be limiting limited by our available funds um and uh you know i i i worry about studying a kind of an arbitrary date because i'm not sure exactly when the rfp is going to end up going out and you know i think there's some challenges around that but

204um it sounds like to me in terms of kind of there's there's been a lot of potential wordsmithing around this but ultimately um i've only heard i guess i've heard a lot of different sentiments but it seems like the major struggle has been around around considering if if the second resolve clause creates um with sort of the options um listed in that if that is too broad or or not and i think that's something the commission needs to wrestle with and and should wrestle with tonight i mean it's um you know are our folks comfortable with with um with asking with asking council to do more than a traditional um feasibility study or or do we just does the energy commission want to see to see more out of that study um those are that's

205sort of i think at least part of the advice that that i'm i'm seeking to take back to council commissioner yeah councilwoman briggs could you give a little guidance there on budget and what kind of limitations we have i mean do we have funding to get to 200 000 or is that a big stretch we have some precedence about what other consultants have charged other cities for similar studies we know that what that looks like is that something in the realm or are we talking about 50 000 or something different i might punt that a little bit more to dr stoltz here who's been probably thinking a little bit more about the budgetary impacts and and where that might come from so i don't know do you mind speaking to that yeah well one we

206should say that this was never budgeted right period any of these studies a traditional utility what we're talking about now didn't that that's not in the budget so whatever we do we're going to have to find the money for period uh so to the extent you want me to give you an estimate of what that's gonna cost i can't uh right now but it has become very clear you know i've started to look at the budget to find space for this kind of a study and i assume this will come from our office's budget so mr when you said whatever we do but but that does not include moving forward on the seu because we can work move forward on that within budget correct right with the exception that i still would want to do

207a technical study on the micro grid yeah yeah but everything else no we can move forward with existing budget if i can also just jump in really briefly on that point because this is something that i i talked to our acting administrator about and it's something that i is on my agenda to talk with our interim administrator about um i am also interested in trying to pursue budget options that do not take away from the existing work that osi is already doing um and so i i would um i am going to encourage us to explore other funding options as well and other other places in the budget where we might be able to to find some savings so that we are minimizing the impact that a feasibility with study would have on all of

208the other competing work that that osi is doing and so i think that is an ongoing conversation is i guess all i'm trying to add to that i i think it's a good discussion i think we just all have to realize that there is some opportunity cost somewhere at the end of this equation you know it's coming out of somebody's budget it's coming out of um you know cities reserves or it's taking away from the city being able to do something completely potentially unrelated to 820 so it's not that this is just um you know money that's uh falling from heaven to be able to just to fund this and i think that's one of the things we need to consider as council certainly will so i what i'm going to ask missy is that

209if you could put up the document based on what i consider to be um some in the form of friendly amendments we haven't actually voted on them and then we can maybe um actually after looking at something um see whether or not we can get a vote on a friendly amendment and move forward on this or if people just feel uncomfortable with resolving this tonight and prefer to take this offline with a smaller group where we're still within the bounds of open meeting act and come back in december with a an alternative formulation so um my understanding is we haven't changed anything um in any of the resolved classes other than the one or two little things that were mentioned at the very beginning of this discussion and i think the main thing that we

210see here is what commissioner cleavy has recommended although commissioner cleavy i don't what i saw on red wasn't i don't think exactly what you said let's see this is the original formulation right so this is this is what i suggest that we do yes oh okay okay this is it right so fold in those two like that and that's that's what i'm recommending we do because we've mentioned we said above it you know there's a people have said the whereas about doing a traditional utility and then there's a whereas about this of sustainability and whereas these are not mutually exclusive or collectively exhaustive but both necessitate additional investigation typically conducted then we say okay so therefore and this is the new resolve that follows on that so it's both broadening and narrowing we're not dictating

211exactly what that means but we know what we want to end up with can i get a motion to consider this and discuss it with some potential tweaks can i do that yes well i think i did right i put forth that motion section george um so comments on this mr mccoy um yeah and thank you for putting this on the screen this makes it easier um so i think this is this is now actually back to like what was originally sent to me when when i think after missy um compiled a bunch of commissioner's comments it's very similar to what i saw a couple weeks ago and the reason that we added like i asked to add the paragraph that's now removed the resolve clause that's now removed um which i don't know which

212you gotta miss if you can show what you deleted all right this is confusing um yeah so the reason i asked to add those things is to ensure like those are like those are important components of a traditional municipalization feasibility study and so like i i wanted to make sure they were named and like those are things that are going to be assessed in that component of the feasibility study um and so that's why like i inserted that paragraph last week um so i think like i understand like the streamlining of it but i would just want to ensure that like that's still a component of the feasibility study that like those pieces that are unique to a traditional municipal utility um are still a part of the feasibility study that is funded by the

213city um and then it doesn't just become an actions analysis so like i i think it's also just like a difference in knowing that like uh a shorter resolution from us that has less detail like also means that there's more like things up for interpretation right and and so i think and i think that's also some of the conversations that have circled tonight it's like we're reading the same piece of paper differently right and so i think that's like where some of my concern comes in is just like wanting to make sure that those pieces that are essential to a traditional municipal feasibility study and are unique to this are still part of whatever ultimately comes through at the end of the line no matter what the language is and what our resolution passes tonight

214if that makes sense can i offer something i know there are other hands so i apologize and then yeah mr cleavy after that go ahead commissioner real quick one thought would be i think i really appreciate what you're saying is there a workaround where we take the sentiment that's highlighted right now that gets to that specificity and put it in a whereas clause so it's defined what we mean by a feasibility study and so that way the results can be more succinct but the the description is above draw from mccoy you have a thought on that yeah i mean i think that makes sense if we say like where is a it's like hard for me to think about um like yeah if we say like whereas like a traditional municipal feasibility study like like

215we define what that means for that component i think that would work yes so we know that those are the components when we say we want a traditional municipal feasibility study you know including all these things that aren't are we all we mean that's what we mean yeah sorry the words are not coming to me very very well so i just let me throw my two cents in on that so i think of the of all of us sitting here the only person that's ever done a feasibility study on a traditional utility is chuck hookum so i guess i have two questions to chuck one is do we need to actually tell you how to do your job or tell somebody else how to do the job um that does this and by by being

216this specific um are we actually limiting ourselves because we're leaving out important things i mean is there is there a it seems to me that feasibility study of a municipal utility is is a is probably you could find that in textbooks and it would describe it so do we have to do we have to do this do we have to describe this i don't we don't describe how a solar cell works um so i'll turn that over to chuck it's a question to chuck i'll do i'll go with whatever chuck says i'll be glad i'm sure missy and her staff could probably put together the right words to make this happen i was trying to understand what our budget limit was because this is getting pretty specific and pretty detailed and will take time and

217budget to get done i also would like to take this moment to say i think we're still mincing words and shaking things around a bit and it's nine o'clock at night and i don't have little kiddos to put to bed but i'm mindful of everybody else and i would suggest we're not under any time crunch let's have a small group get this pulled together offline and have it ready for december that's in a better form commissioner briggs thanks um i am struggling a little bit to understand why we would um remove those first two resolved clauses in in the in the way that they currently were i think um they provided some clarity to the to the community and into council about what exactly the energy commission was expecting out of um out of the

218study and it it it takes a lot of the meat out of that so i i understand it's it's providing it trying to not create any artificial limits to the study to the options analysis potentially but um i'm worried that it's i guess i i have a few concerns around that but i'll i will this is recommendation to council so i will listen to wherever energy commission goes on commissioner george uh so just from a process standpoint we have the amendment uh the language amendment on the floor uh i think that we should either take a motion to table uh insofar as what commissioner hook um said to allow this whole thing to be brought up back in december for a further vote uh and discussion after a working group has been has met and

219so forth or we take a vote on the uh friendly amendment uh and that goes up or down and then we then take a vote on this um so i would encourage us um to make that decision so mr chairman i would encourage you to uh uh ask uh for a vote one way or another uh i think council member briggs you had your hand up from before right so i think that's a good counsel i think the way that you presented it was maybe first to take a vote on tabling the issue and taking it back up after a smaller group works on this in our december meeting um robert's rules we have a motion on the floor for an amendment and we need to vote on that which is uh what marked this

220language the mark proposed so i think we have to do that first okay so um we have a motion we have a second on on mark's amendment i don't know that we did everything second second okay george seconded okay so um all those in favor of making the changes as we see not here is this i guess this is it as shown here everything crossed out right you were toggling between two different documents so i think this this is what we're voting on i was toggling between two different views of the document so this is the same document it's in crossout is what's been merged into the if it is here i can try this okay yeah there you go there we go yep so um all those in favor of adopting this language um

221in this this case i'm going to ask that you go off speaker and so that we can and also but to raise your hand so we can get a better sense and see all those in favor of this this change um say i and raise your hand hi i'm sorry can you keep your hands up i gotta do a roll call on this one okay got it all those so i'm gonna ask who's against and then just uh for abstention so those those who are against please raise your hand bye can you keep your hands up okay okay got it so i i guess i have a question are we voting on this as a resolution pass or fail or are we going or we also have a resolution we also need an amendment it

222was only the event only the amendment okay right yep okay good so as i understand that the amendment passes for me there are six against that's and there were seven four so now we can call the question which i do because so then then there's the second the second question um do we table this look at what we have discussed tonight in a smaller group bring it back in our uh december meeting potentially in the exact same form as it is right now potentially modified um and then vote on it in our december meeting edie you have a comment first yeah just a process question because i i mean i guess since that just passed what would we do going forward um in terms of the work group i i guess there might be a

223lack of clarity there too i guess that that's essentially what we would be voting on is do people want to recraft this and tweak it a little bit or do people feel comfortable um as it is i mean some of the things that are still on the table that haven't been considered in this amendment are is are we putting a limit on this in terms of budget are we putting eliminated on in terms of timetable um are we taking into account um changing the whereas clause we didn't we cut it out um it was one suggestion of potentially moving it into a whereas clause um that was ember's suggestion so those kinds of things potentially would be considered and potentially others um between now and december does that answer your question that's at least my

224my understanding amber go ahead well edie can answer if it answered your question first or me i i didn't know if there was a response from ed first no um yeah i was just gonna motion to table this into a working group to talk about those questions that you just outlined john so that's a motion do we have a second second from bridging okay we have some couple of seconds so um the motion is to table this tonight to take it to a working group and bring it back in potentially exactly the same form or another form addressing some of the the questions that i outlined potentially others for consideration by the commission in our december meeting all of those in favor of tabling uh raise your hand and say i can i please have

225hands back up again this is gonna be a good one thank you oh man the oh man i'm not sure what that counts as a boy okay so all those against you can also abstain or so against one more time just to see it's um commissioner george radina did you get commissioner juno i i'm not sure where commissioner juno were you uh he's a guest against did someone have stain okay i think we have to do a roll call though because i think we just i think we got a 7-7 so roll call do you want to do a roll call then this year i guess i do the roll call uh if you can do roll call i can capture notes yup that's that's easier so i'm just going to go as people appear

226on my screen i'm gonna go last on commissioner cleavy no this is um no yes yes to table and no means to take take a vote and finalize this tonight commissioner no no commissioner mccomber yes commissioner george no commissioner garcia yes no i was that a no does it know no commissioner stevenson yes mr juno no mr hook um yes mr mccoy yes councilmember breaks yes mr levin no no mr kerber no commissioner over peck yes and i vote also yes uh motion uh passes so um what what i would then ask since um this essentially is tabled now is could we get agreement on who would be interested in working in this subgroup i'd maybe like to keep it to i mean missy i would obviously like to include you i think um and

227i would recommend maybe we keep it to something like four commissioners does that sound about right so who who would be interested in in doing so i would be wanna just raise your hands so commissioner cleavy commissioner mccoy commissioner hook um i'd be interested as well anybody else has a burning desire that doesn't mean you won't have an opportunity to weigh in in the december meeting obviously and we would get this out well in advance so that you can consider it so i think we have four people um plus missy to do this i just want to be really transparent that there is not a lot of free time on osi's side for these meetings to take place so we're going to we're going to have to be really creative as a working group to

228make this happen this is above and beyond at the point well it's almost we can do a christmas that's not far off from the availability i have uh yeah merry christmas that we are interested in entertaining okay so um we're going to table this and um i i will take it um as a task to set up a a meeting i'll put out a when to meet poll and hopefully we can get at least an hour to to work on this and to uh whittle this down hopefully maybe i'll even try to set up two meetings um so that we we can get through this well in advance of december so that's it with um our two um agenda points so now we have a couple of other things as sort of cleanup i'll just

229go ahead and read them all off reports from osi and news from commissioners and it's not mentioned explicitly but also city council liaisons working group updates and report from the environmental commission and then public input and then items for the next agenda so missy do you want to start first with reports from osi maybe you can keep this short by just saying you issued a report correct you just issued a newsletter yesterday you all should have received it please enjoy updates from osi at your reading pleasure so news from commissioners anything burning from commissioners uh news from and announcements whatever from city council liaisons yes i guess uh just uh on the embodied carbon we're we're working on uh finalizing some language and um chairmaski should probably see something there soon i would appreciate that

230because we've talked before in the other context about limiting living this time wise and this has been in discussion since also july so june actually i think so yes i would appreciate that okay um working group updates and from the environmental commission um carlene anything to report of substance from transportation electrification no not at this time okay um i don't think well there is a small working group that's working on energy concierge services very briefly um we have a meeting with boulder tomorrow to talk about some ideas and so we'll be able to give you some feedback in the next meeting we have what we think is maybe a creative approach and hopefully it resonates with the folks at boulder that already have such a service in place um edie can you give us update

231uh with highlights from the environmental commission yeah thank you um at the last environmental commission we had some presentations on plastics use in the city and also a presentation on um sort of operationalizing or making more tangible some of our zero waste goals which certainly would play into um some of the city's energy goals um but i think that should cover the report out for today thank you any questions people feel free to circle back to edie um so next is public input i'll get my old script here just a second somewhere let's see where is it here we go so this is an opportunity for persons to speak up to three minutes if you're watching on ctn please call 888.7 or 877-853-5247 and enter meeting id five 937-6751 six eight one nine this information

232is also displayed on the meeting agenda and 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 announcement that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area you need background noise so that we may hear you clearly and finally state your name and your address how many people hung with us missy phew uh caller ending in eight one eight hey can you hear me we do uh my name is chris lewis i live on 7th street in ward 5. i've been listening into the discussion and and appreciate everyone's

233thoughts on this issue um one thing that it seemed like there was some differences on that it didn't seem like there were a lot of clarity to me is what our technical questions that a consultant for the city should be answering versus what are political questions that that voters or their elected representatives should be deciding so for instance it could be that there's more than one way to meet the 820 goals and maybe some of those ways are more expensive but might provide benefits in terms of electric reliability and others are cheaper and might not have those benefits and i think a consultant in a study would be well suited to explaining those trade-offs but in terms of like recommending the best approach i don't think that's what a feasibility study or any other kind

234of study should focus on i think that's the decision either through for voters through a referendum or for city council and i would just encourage that to be taken in mind going forward thanks thank you good input caller ending in two four five color oh okay uh this is tattoo murphy speaking um i live at 3 15 in the vicious street in ward 5 and i've spoken to you before about some of these matters and um i've been following very carefully the uh discussion tonight and um it seems like it's gotten very complex and it looks like people are trying very hard to um get to the bottom of it and align things so we can everybody can be pleased with what comes out in the end i just want to say that um i

235have originally been very much involved in the support for you know municipalization feasible studies and um because i think we need to know if it makes economic sense in an arbor and i hope that the um resolution as it's now worded will be able to get at that i think one of the things that i mean maybe i should first say the discussion um in the presentation that you just felt about the sau was beautifully done and the people in ann arbor for public power also believe it's a good thing and should go forward right away but i think also that the um the things that we had thought about for what was what you're calling the traditional means would be that um uh it would it would take it would um let the community

236manage and responsibly service the ratepayers and it takes the elected grid out of the hands of bte which is cooling unreliable and has very limited plans for getting rid of fossil fuels as sources of energy communities could also give back the money it earns to service the ratepayers rather than a dte giving it back to investors that is it could stay in the city and not be paid out to shareholders this last year in lansing and traverse city earned over a million dollars each which they could reinvest in their communities the muni in winter power florida which um spoke at the energy commission meeting last month they use the money they earn to start undergrounding lines so i think these concerns relative to dte and really relative to concerns about fossil fuels should be should

237stay in the conversation so i look forward to the meeting next month thank you very much thank you anyone else missy a car ending in 134 yeah thank you dr saltz and chair mursky this is ken garber 28 haverhill court uh i appreciate the serious discussion tonight the problem with the options analysis is it conflates feasibility with desirability as commissioner mccoy said first let's find out if a muni is feasible that's a technical analysis then only if it is we can decide if it's desirable especially since we should be pursuing all options for the foreseeable future we don't need to choose certainly not at this stage an seu we know from dr steltz's great presentation is both feasible and highly desirable we also know it's not enough often told you back in march that only

23810 to 20 percent of buildings are optimal sites for microgrids and seu can help us meet our clean grid goal but it can't get us all the way there we're probably even close the muni on the other hand can execute power purchase agreements including for offshore wind to meet that shortfall which the seu cannot do because it lacks the necessary polls and wires so the s eu and the muni are complementary cca is currently illegal in michigan that can wait and vpbas and migraine power aren't a big part of any clean grid solution the muni feasibility study has to be well done with defined scope as commissioner hookum pointed out it should include a detailed engineering assessment and system analysis engineers make site visits to all dte substations also look for transformers look at transformers

239and lines to evaluate their age and their condition economists will calculate average and peak system loads based on regulatory filings and city data they'll apply ferc and mpsc filings to evaluation using both income and cost approaches now model future coal gas renewable prices and derive comparative cost and cash flow for dte versus muni scenarios all this must be done accurately so you can trust the results very few consulting firms out there have the necessary knowledge and experience there is ees and new gen and maybe a few others the idea that they can do this new expanded study for under 200 000 or even half a million is wishful thinking and there's no need because we should pursue every option at this stage not spend scarce funds comparing them the muni is the only one whose

240economic feasibility we don't know let's find that out while advancing the seu so any resolution should be about feasibility thank you that's all anyone else missy nope nope okay lots of good discussion lots of good insights good comments at the end um thanks everybody for hanging um with all of us through the whole evening and hopefully we bring back to you a refined resolution in december that resonates with everybody and we can get this on the council so thanks very much and with that it is 9 20 what is it 24 and i adjourn this meeting thanks very much thank you you