Ann Arbor Energy Commission Meeting 9/14/21

001so my name is john mursky i'm uh the chair of the ann arbor energy commission and uh as chair i'm calling this meeting to order at 601 pm uh so welcome to the september 14 electronic meeting of the energy commission this meeting is to affect social distancing and mitigate the spread of the covet-19 virus we will conduct this meeting similar to in-person meetings commissioners please remain on camera just as you would be visible during in-person meetings also mute your microphones when not speaking public comment will be via telephone only to speak during any of the public opportunities that will be one at the beginning and one at the end of the meeting please call one of the following toll-free numbers nine 888-788-0099 [Music] four eight seven seven eight five three five two four seven and

002enter meeting id nine one three 5783-4502 these numbers will remain the same through the entire year for energy commission meetings and this information along with two local dial-in numbers is available on the public's agenda in the public notices section of the city's website and on the broadcast of this meeting on ctn channel 16 a t channel 99 and online at www.a2gov.org [Music] backslash watch ctn so actually i just realized something that i need to change in my script and that is the local numbers are no longer appearing on the agenda so we're just using the two toll-free numbers that i mentioned um missy would you please read the land acknowledgement i acknowledge that the land the city of ann arbor occupies is the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the anishinabe and wyandotte people i

003further acknowledge that our city stands like almost all property in the united states are lands obtained generally in unconscionable ways from indigenous peoples the taking of this land was formalized by the treaty of detroit in 1807. knowing where we live work study and recreate does not change the past but a thorough understanding of the ongoing consequences of this past can empower us in our work to create a future that supports human flourishing and justice for all individuals thank you very much so where he will now go through the roll call and missy will administer the roll call but as we do so um i'd like to have our three new commissioners um jonathan overpeck also known as peck uh uh judith uh or edie uh or smitty edith sorry or edie um juno and nicholas

004cole stevenson introduce themselves as well as each one of the other or uh the former commissioners all of us presence commissioners also to give a very brief um introduction of yourself to each of our three new commissioners and to welcome them so missy if you would uh go through the roll call and as you go through the roll call um or each one of us as we respond to the roll call please also give the location where you're joining the meeting from thank you very much thank you commissioner hukham um good afternoon chuck hook i'm from my office in ann arbor today um brief background i have about 42 years experience in the energy industry ranging from design construction commissioning operation of generating plants transmission distribution building energy systems pretty much an energy group worked

005on a lot of renewable energy battery storage infrastructure as well try to support the city on a lot of policy statements i work with the state of michigan michigan public service commission a lot as a consultant and in various other fashions and i have my own consulting practice so i use that quite a bit as well so uh welcome to the new commissioners look forward to working with you all thanks michelle commissioner mccomber hi um i'm uh calling from my home in ann arbor and um i've been on the energy commission uh what i think going on five or six years previous to that i was on parks commission for two three year terms i my day job is finance director at a local nonprofit that also does work in the area of energy renewable

006energy eb's et cetera and i'll leave it there thank you commissioner commissioner fleeby first of all welcome to the energy commission it's good to have some new blood um my name is mark cleavy i've been doing my first solar project 1975 worked for the as manager of the energy office uh and at the state level work for a number of cities and counties and businesses and renewable energy and spend i'm currently representing the uh vice president of the great lakes renewable energy association which is an industry association representing solar interests in michigan um and uh look forward to hearing your thoughts on solar energy commissioner levin i believe is not with us thank you i'm john mursky i'm an ann arbor native uh went to the university of michigan i'm left for graduate school and

007moved back in 2015 i worked my entire career for robert bosch the german conglomerate where i had a number of different positions in regional and global business unit management and then also was responsible for north american corporate functions technical and engineering functions i've been on the energy commission since and have been chair for a little over a year and i'm married um my wife and i will have our 39th anniversary this uh thursday and um we have two grown children that both live outside of the area and welcome to our three new commissioners thanks jim mursky vice chair colvin garcia my name is carleen colvin garcia and i'm joining you this evening from my home in ann arbor and um i um the background in clean transportation and i currently am focused focusing on electric

008vehicle charging and i uh come to the energy commission i've been on the energy commission since and uh i was very interested in figuring out how the city and the school district were together to bring solar power to the district so that really was a great opportunity to learn about uh all the activity the energy commission was was involved in and um fortunately i was able to help get a grant for the local steam school they had they were the first school in the district to get solar power installed on their roof and um i just continued to attend energy commission meetings and then i became a commissioner and i've been active since then my most recent significant result that i helped to deliver was co-authoring with the great group here in the commission the

009the ev readiness ordinance that went into effect early this year and welcome to all three of you and during our orientation my my microphone on my computer wasn't working so now at least you get to hear my voice you very much commissioner mccoy hi everyone um my name is ember i'm a phd student at the university of michigan in school for environment and sustainability um i've been i'm trying to figure out how long i've been a commissioner somewhere between two and three years um i moved to ann arbor in 2015 and have either been a student or a staff member at seas um that entire time and a lot of i've done and continued to do a lot of energy related organizing um outside of that in the state and in other states um yeah

010i think i first came to that an energy commission meeting when i was also coming as a resident um working on trying to get dte to stop building new natural gas plants um unfortunately that plant was built um but that was my first introduction to the ec and yeah i'm calling from ann arbor thank you thank you commissioner mccoy mr george uh thank you missy uh robert george uh calling in from ann arbor uh i am a recent uh resident of an auburn i've been on the commission going on year two i work for the laborers union i'm a member of local 499 i do policy work primarily with cities and counties across the state our members do a lot of energy projects ranging from renewable to nuclear uh to gas across the state so

011um involved in that way with energy as well as being active with the parks commission and serving as a commissioner at the county level uh in that capacity uh thank you um uh missy thank you very much commissioner kerber yes i'm larry kerber i'm calling from here in ann arbor i guess i started out life as an engineer and came to ann arbor to do my mba at the university of michigan basically never left so i'm a long term ann arbor resident i've been on the energy commission for about a year my background is i've been in various corporate positions but i've spent the last five years working for a local solar developer developing primarily around washington county and welcome new commissioners thank you commissioner kerber councilmember briggs thank you i'm here in ann arbor

012i represent city council for the fifth ward which is on the west side and my day job is running an organization called scenic michigan so a lot of work on scenic conservation issues and then i have a background in a lot of sort of transportation alternative transportation issues as well as land use serving on the planning commission before it was on council welcome to our new commissioners and to everybody else who's serving as well thank you councilmember councilmember radina hey um i'm charles tredina and i represent ward three of city councils since november and have been on the energy commission for that full time as well um i live in the arbor oaks bryant neighborhood um and uh honestly i have to say i am often incredibly impressed at just the breadth of experience and

013knowledge that we have on this commission and so i really enjoy learning from folks here um prior to getting involved actually this week i've been very engaged in energy commission work at council but prior to joining the energy commission in my previous experience i was um president of the jim toy community center which is the lgbtq center here but before moving back to ann arbor i worked for state representative kate siegel in lansing and uh one of the primary things that kind of got me interested and passionate about energy work is um that her district was ground zero for the enbridge oil spill and so we dealt with a lot of that um and and the cleanup and the repercussions from that and so that's really what got me interested in this work to begin

014with so thanks to the new commissioners for joining thank you and to our new commissioners let's start with commissioner over peck hello everyone uh yes as missy knows i enjoy going by the name of peck i am um i've returned to michigan four years ago i grew up in jackson in the metro area until i went to middle school then i was uh east and then i migrated after a bunch of schooling out west where i've been a climate scientist for about um 40 years yikes and uh doing all sorts of more natural climate science but i work a lot with social scientists as well as i noted i came back to michigan four years ago i've actually married into a michigan family so i've been coming here for about 35 years in the summers

015but i came back to be serve as the inaugural dean of the school for environment and sustainability seas i'm really happy to have a current phd student on the same commission ember good to see you as well as at least one alum i believe uh edie um and uh nope two we got missy too missy and i speaking of uh are also serving together on the governor's no you're not on that we served on the president's commission on carbon neutrality so we came up with a plan for michigan university of michigan to go carbon neutral uh we're the largest university in the country research university to have such a plan and also to decarbonize our endowment let me start that process in a pretty aggressive way i am on the governor's climate solutions council as

016well and uh it's terrific that i've been invited to be on this commission after serving for a couple years on the or maybe it was just one year i've seen uh with covid every all time has been lost on the environmental commission i'm much more focused in my career now on climate action on energy solutions as well as ensuring a transition to a sustainable and just uh world so very happy to join you all and i applaud what you've been doing and look forward to doing more with you thanks pat commissioner juno hello everyone i'm edie juno um i moved to ann arbor from traverse city in 2017 for graduate school at seas where i focus on conservation and also environmental policy um since then i've been working as a professional in a non-profit focusing

017on both kind of forest policy and and climate policy kind of at that intersection of energy and natural climate solutions um yeah and really excited to meet everyone and to be here thank you commissioner stevenson uh yeah i'm a senior statistics student at michigan right now calling from ann arbor on campus i'm part of the susan's climate lobby we advocate for a carbon fee and dividend bill i'm also was an editor for the michigan foreign policy council i did most of my research uh on environmental issues in that space so you'd be using state-owned energy i could live in florida and i've worked for a lot of climate surveying uh down there for a non-profit called volo foundation um and we just did a lot of stuff on uh hurricane impacts and heat injects and

018things like that and uh happy to meet everyone and good to be here to have you and i do believe that commissioner 11 joined us yes i'm here i'm having some internet issues so i can't use a video at the moment hopefully i won't get disconnected do you mind just telling us where you are connecting from oh okay sorry yes i am still at my house in ann arbor great uh you have a quorum and actually 100 um thank you thanks and noah can you introduce yourself real quickly in your background and then missy we're not going to let you get away from saying a few words about yourself too uh yes hopefully you can hear me okay um i am also i guess sort of a seas alumni i don't know it wasn't c's

019at the time so i don't know what to call myself anymore um but that was my first introduction to ann arbor and i eventually went on to uh law school uh with a specialty in environmental law at uh lewis and clark and uh i have haven't done stuff directly on energy but more with uh clean air issues um with stationary sources as uh my background that's most related to the energy commission and uh currently live on the west side of ann arbor and i have two kids that go to steam and uh good to be working with you all thanks noah hi everyone i'm missy stoltz i know i think everyone on the line in some way shape or form i'm really lucky to be the first official head of the office of sustainability and

020innovations for the city of ann arbor we view ourselves as the caretaker varsity's audacious ambitious but essential goal to reach decarbonization by 2030 and my background is working i've worked for work around now closer to 20 years now uh with local populations indigenous populations around the nation on climate efforts including resilience climate mitigation as well as equity programs so excited to be here and to work with you thank you everyone and i'm also incredibly honored to serve with all of you i learned a lot from you not just in these meetings but in a lot of the emails that we also exchange behind the scenes and in conversations things like that so it's really great and i think our three new commissioners are going to add a lot of new diversity and experience and knowledge

021to the group so it's great um i just so you uh just to acknowledge them we have two of missy's staff that are going to be presenting later and they can introduce themselves later in the meeting um so having completed the roll call uh let's move on to approval of the agenda hopefully everybody has had a chance to look at the agenda and we can have a motion to approve the agenda along with a second motion to approve the agenda thank you and a second second second from bridget thank you commissioner mccumber and commissioner george all those in favor of approving the agenda as posted say i or raise your hand hi that passes unanimously thank you very much uh next order of business is approval of the minutes so we are approving the minutes

022of the july 13th meeting if that's by memory i think that's the right date they are posted in legistar and hopefully we've had a chance to review them as i have and can i get someone to make a motion to approve the minutes council member briggs and a second from commissioner hook um all those in favor again say aye or raise your hands i again those are approved unanimously so we knew now move on to uh new business and um first point on the agenda um prior to public input is going to be election of officers and um before i turn it over to missy to administer that she agreed to do so i just wanted to say a few things article six of our bylaws ask or state that we are to elect a

023chair and a vice chair every year in addition we also have on the agenda to elect a liaison to the environmental commission i currently serve um in that role as well as obviously as chair the official date for uh commissioners is um start date of 6 1 to may 31st and elections are supposed to take place no later than december we got a little bit out of whack with covet and so we're holding that election now it still is before december um and what i'd like to mention is that um there are also term limits of three years for chair and vice chair both carlene and i are serving in our first let's say year year and a half but i have served for three years as um environmental commission uh liaison so that officially

024does not um fall under the bylaws um in the requirement um but i want you to take that into consideration um when um nominating and voting for people uh to represent us or a person to represent us on the environmental commission so missy will you please um take over under mister this first taking any nominations and then any uh comments and statements and then administer the vote happy to you chimerski so at this point i think we should start with chair uh we i would certainly entertain if anyone wants to nominate or self-nominate someone to be chair of the energy commission would anyone like to nominate hey missy i'd like to nominate john mursky to retain his chair position if he's so willing thank you so much um and uh will go commissioner mursky are

025you willing to consider that i i am willing to do so great do i have any other nominations hearing that i would entertain uh a formal motion to appoint john mercury as chair of the energy commission for a one-year term sounds like it sounds like my duty since i nominated him so i i now formally nominate him each year commissioner george would you like to second i would sorry about that chuck that's great all right uh i'd like to take a vote at this point all those in favor of chair mursky retaining his chair for one more year please say i or him all this opposed congratulations sharomerski i think at this point i can hand this back over to you to facilitate thank you thanks missy thanks for the vote of confidence uh so

026um the next position is uh vice chair and i would like to entertain nominations for the vice chair position so i'll do the same i think carlene if you're willing to be our vice chair you did a great job last year so we'd like to i'd like to propose carleen continue in that role if she's willing are you willing charlene yes i'm willing to serve again as vice chair together with chair mursky thank you are there any other nominations okay uh do we need to actually do a formal uh nominee or a movement okay we need to move to nominate uh carlink uh karen garcia for vice chair do we have someone um that will move to nominate her and then a second i move that we nominate carlene colin garcia to serve as vice

027chair thank you commissioner do we have a second second commissioner so all those in favor of uh electing colin garcia for our vice commissioner please raise your hand or say aye all right hi congratulations carlene i look forward to working with you again we've been um i think very um both compatible but also complementary uh carlene has experience and uh approaches that are different than mine and she helps me a lot behind the scenes so thanks thank you everyone so the next position is um environmental uh liaison to the environmental commission and um i'd like to just before i um open it up for nominations would just like to say that i'm i hope somebody else steps forward i'm more than willing to do it again but what i would ask is that if someone

028does so that they obviously be a regular participant in meetings but also in working groups there's a lot of really good work that the environmental commission does and so we i think be best served if we have somebody who is going to play an active role not only in those meetings but also in the behind the scenes activities of working groups and things like that so do we have someone that's interested in doing that yes chuck do you i'd like to nominate ember mccoy if she's willing to serve as our environmental commission lazy amber i appreciate that but i do not think i have the capacity to take it on but thank you so john i'd like to ask a question um we're not going to wait until you retire to accept that fight me

029go ahead chuck oh is that mark go ahead i'd like to ask a question do any of our yeah our three new commission um great background and a combination of environmental and energy issues and i think the you know the the opportunity to bring the environmental commission and the energy commission into closer uh synchronicity going forward in behalf of the ann arbor's uh climate plan is is the real challenge um and we have three new people with exquisite uh background in all those two areas so would any of the three of you be willing to do it and if so i'd more than happy to nominate you jonathan you want to be nominated you know i don't think i have the capacity i'm like ember i mean okay i i have been serving on it

030and uh i don't think there's any way i could do two of these uh because i think you really need to do you just it takes time and as john mentioned uh they do have the working groups i was able to be on that committee without being on a working group and you know i mean it didn't make me feel like i was shirking duty because you have some really dedicated people but on the other hand there's a wide range of issues that you want to stay up on and so it's at least a pretty busy one long night a month and uh with with some reading in separation all right that's that leaves edie and uh robert or excuse me not you moved cole either are you two interested i would be willing to

031do it well then how about you call i'd be willing to join a working group but if he wants to go ahead and do the liaison i'm happy to live okay then i'd like to nominate e for the environmental commission liaison position great uh commissioner our council member radina if you had something you wanted to say i think no no i think i think if he wants to do that that's great i i was uh i didn't see them jump at it initially so i was worried they weren't excited but but if eating is not i think i think having a fresh perspective in both roles could be really helpful yeah i would be happy so uh do we have any other nominations uh could we have a formal motion then to nominate edie and

032a psychic mode from commissioner clevy and commissioner peck over pick so i think this is a great nomination and uh by the way edu shouldn't feel bad at all i will continue to stay active in the working groups and i think it's great that you're willing to step up and serve on both commissions that's uh that's huge so um all those in favor of uh e juno representing us on the environmental commission say i or raise your hands congratulations edie that's a that's an auspicious first first night on the energy commission okay so we can now move on to the next point in the agenda which is public comment or public input and i'll read my standard statement here uh this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes if you

033are watching on ctn please call nine 888-788-0099 four eight seven seven eight five three five two four seven and enter meeting id nine one three five seven three this information is 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 and that the host assuming that the host is willing or allowing you to speak and when speaking please move to a quiet area to mute any background noise so that we may hear you clearly please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments and by

034the way i think i need to say you also need to press star nine to or personally star six to actually speak to unmute your phone so missy do we have anybody that's interested in speaking yeah caller ending in two two eight hello hello can you hear me yes we do hi my name is greg woodring i'm with ann arbor for public power i'm a frequent caller and i'm excited to see all of the new energy commissioners my group has been working for the last year now to push for this idea of a municipal utility in ann arbor we think it's a good idea because we have seen what other municipal utilities in the state do they have cheaper power lower they have lower rates on their power they have more reliable power their power

035goes down less often which in the face of these recent storms seems very relevant dte's infrastructure is extremely out of date and as climate change gets worse these storms are only going to get more powerful and it's only going to get more important that we have strong resilient infrastructure which we can do on our own terms if we take control of the utility but as i think is most important to all of us we really care about meeting our 2030 climate neutrality goals and we do not believe that there is any way to do this without moving towards a municipal utility cte has said that they will not be phasing out coal until 2040 and they will not ever phase out natural gas that is unacceptable and out of turn line with the goals that

036ann arbor has set and the goals that the ipcc tells us is needed in order for the planet to survive so i was very excited to see conversation on this topic in the city council earlier this week i was disappointed that the vote was moved back but i hope that that will allow you all to have some healthy discussion about this but please i really hope that you move forward with a feasibility study soon so that we can get moving on this very important project because we at ann arbor for public power believe it's a good idea jeff irwin and yusuf robbie who spoke at our recent fundraiser i think it's a good idea and a lot of the people in the community think it'll a great idea uh based on of all of the

037support we've gotten while going out canvassing door-to-door so really hope that you make some good progress on that issue really going to be listening closely to hear that discussion um we really really hope that we can get some solid answers on what this would cost the city to do and what kind of revenue it could bring back to the city what is uh the logistics of setting this up and what can the citizens expect if they go down this route thank you all for your time bye and thank you for your comments you see anyone else no cher mursky oh here we go we have a caller ending in one three four yes thank you dr saltz and chair mursky i'm ken garber 28 haverhill court by the way the zoom meeting idea on the

038published agenda does not work commissioner mccoy just now provided me with the correct meeting id and the previous caller got it also um anyway i also favor exploring the muni option but because community solar is on your agenda i'm going to talk about the landfill solar project this won't be true community solar because dte will own it the electricity will flow into dte's regional grid not to subscribers the city's website says there is no guarantee that the city and township would receive the physical electrons that are being generated at the solar energy facility instead we have a pilot project where the city will be the anchor tenant to presumably distribute wrecks or other credits to subscribers to allow them to claim renewable electricity i hesitated to speak tonight since everyone on console likes this deal

039and probably i'm not well enough informed to understand it and city staff has put a lot of work into it over years when i asked back in june the reason for dte ownership staff answered that there's a liability associated with a cap landfill and if panels broke and damaged the landfill individual subscribers would be legally liable for repairs and that wasn't the best way to come into community solar fair enough i wouldn't have guessed that subscribers would be individually liable but couldn't the city purchase some kind of group insurance coverage and is the liability risk great enough to justify turning it over to dte this will be a very valuable asset in terms of both power and money 24 megawatts are about six percent of our city's total power need and it's by far our

040biggest community solar opportunity any others discussed tonight will pale in comparison michael rivet dte's manager of product development told city council last year that the project will cost 40 to 50 million dollars plus or minus 30 percent while we don't yet know the true cost it's in the tens of millions of dollars of course we should make this investment but must we then give it away if the city owned the project i'm guessing that state law restricts local power distribution mr kinch may very well address that tonight but if we established a parallel utility to compete with dte as paul fenn advised back in march the city could legally distribute that electricity same goes for the full muni option so it's not an asset to be surrendered lightly again i may be missing something obvious

041and i'm very happy to be set straight about why this is a good deal for this city but right now i just don't see it thank you oh the meeting id on the calendar invite is 937-6751-6819 so it's the same phone number but it's that the calendar invite meeting id changed i'll look into that i'm not sure what actually happened there but uh caller ending in one two zero or i'm sorry one two one color ending in one two one press star six to unmute your phone hello yes okay sorry about that this is my first time doing it my name is alex nettle i'm a student in the area um i recently heard about the municipalization campaign and i just wanted to call in and voice my support for it um it really excites

042me because you know the climate is i mean we've all looked at the news right we all see the storms where i'll see the hurricanes we all see what's happening right now and i really hope that you guys move quickly on recommending a feasibility study um specifically because i um i'm sure we all remember what happened in detroit over the summer with the flooding i experienced it firsthand i got stuck in the city and it was very dangerous and i was one of the lucky ones to you know make it out pretty much unscathed other than you know actually witnessing that trauma firsthand but you know point being there's gonna be a lot more people who are going to get a lot more property damage a lot more lives lost if we don't move on

043climate change so like i said i'm very excited to hear about this feasibility study recommendation and i hope you that you guys uh move quickly on it thank you for your and time you for your comments anyone else calling to see that's all cheering okay thank you so we'll wait ten more seconds and if not then we will close that and move on to our first presentation okay let's move on so um we have a number of presentations tonight on community solar and that is timely i think also given the comments so missy do you want to introduce our first presenter and um we'll go from there yeah absolutely let me just move jenny over so our first presenter we are lucky enough to have jenny heater from the national renewable energy laboratory who's going

044to talk to us a little bit about community solar across the nation and then that'll be followed by a presentation looking at a community solar program that we have here in michigan and i believe jenny are you with us now i am here awesome okay let me make you a presenter okay create and share your screen i think i can do it now right can you see it okay uh no it says host disabled participant screenshot you are getting it now okay there we go great take it away awesome well thank you guys for having me today um it's a pleasure to learn about all of your backgrounds and what's going on in ann arbor um i was asked to present about national trends in community solar we have looked at this area in terms

045of deployment trends and also subscription trends and energy burden reduction potential for community solar this is a subset of data that nrel collects for the third annual time this year and it's part of an ongoing project to inform community solar creation across the country so i'm going to run through some slides and then yeah happy to take a q a after that so the first piece that we look at is just where and how large projects are across the country this map shows in the bubbles individual projects with project sizes from small to large and then we also see just total capacity and the state shading so you'll notice states like florida minnesota new york tend to have large amounts of installed capacity for community solar also massachusetts which is a little bit buried in

046the pink circles there as well some of the trends that i like to highlight on this slide are just differences in state policies and how that impacts deployment so some states have decided to cap their project sizes and you'll see in minnesota that projects there are typically around 5 megawatts or going down to 2 megawatts because of provisions in their policy however we see in states that have not have a not had a blanket wide say policy like arkansas and florida utilities there are developing projects that are much larger in size so going up to 80 megawatts in size that are still a subscription-based and credit-based model but not the smaller size projects like under five megawatts that some folks tend to think about when they think about community solar so overall across the country

047um as of the end of last year there were about 3.2 gigawatts of capacity and more than 1 600 projects across the country we have 39 states in washington dc covered but you will obviously notice that and we'll talk about this later the the deployment is pretty heavily concentrated in about 10 states as i mentioned ederell does gather data on projects from across the country and we work actually with the university of minnesota on this project to scan for announcements of new projects looking at utility websites for new projects that i've posted as well as in our states with a lot of deployment there frequently interconnection queues or other publicly available lists of community solar projects so i wanted to pull the list of projects that we have for michigan as you guys probably know

048there's not enabling legislation in michigan um so these are projects that have been voluntarily um uh developed by the utilities um so as of december of last year there were 11 projects that we found in michigan installed between 2013 and 2019 about seven megawatts of capacity overall um and a pretty diverse set of utilities um developing these projects so um we do typically in states with enabling policies see that that enabling policy covers the investor-owned utilities and see a lot of deployment there but our you know municipal utilities as well as cooperative utilities also tend to develop projects in some states that are typically smaller in size to serve their customers when we look at trends over time um this is a market that continues to grow year to year um cumulatively capacity has grown

049by more than 120 percent year-over-year since 2010 we do you know see this growth as basically a doubling on average year over year um i recently presented this and somebody asked me if we expect those trends to continue um nrl has not done a pure forecast of expected deployment but i do have a slide later on that talks about state queues of interconnect and interconnection queues for projects we expect to come online in 2011 or sorry 2020 and we had about 1100 megawatts come online so a lot of capacity coming online year to year still overall a small chunk of the overall solar market one of the trends we see in this space is that projects have become larger over time this is not really captured in the visualizations here but we are starting to

050see some of these very large 50 megawatt or larger community solar projects in recent years that is happening in florida and arizona previous projects in arkansas as well as georgia has some quite large projects so that is pulling some of our capacity numbers up on a year-to-year basis when we look at average project capacities though across the country they still are in that kind of two megawatt range um in terms of project size and some states have a size cap other states might just have provisions saying that the project has to be connected to the distribution system um instead of the transmission system or something like that so um consideration for just how um how folks define community solar i spoke a little bit about enabling legislation but this is a high-level summary of across

051the country which states have this enabling legislation this can take different forms some states are mandating community solar be offered by their regulated utilities other states have an approach that requires virtual net metering so it may not require a certain megawatt of community solar capacity be installed in the state but there is that enabling framework of virtual net metering that allows customers to receive bill credits from their community solar subscriptions um i don't think i put a slide in on this but we also tend to see that most of these states i think around 17 of these states have some type of provision for low and moderate income access to community solar whether that is a a carve out where they're saying a certain percentage of a project or a certain percentage of the overall

052portfolio has to serve lmi customers or some states have had targeted financial incentives for projects that include lmi subscribers or in some cases there are states who have a selection process for community solar projects and if there is an lmi component that is weighted um we're given more given more points in that weighting criteria um so that is an area that that we see a lot of interest in at the state level when we think about deployment in states that have supportive policies or enabling legislation versus those that don't the figure on the right there shows the voluntary participation states at about i think it's about 1200 megawatts and then our seats with enabling legislation total over 2 000 megawatts um there's a there's a lot of nuance here this is kind of the high

053level summary but the voluntary states are really driven on a capacity basis by those large projects in florida arkansas georgia and texas those four states cover about 80 of that voluntary participation bucket so if you think about you know michigan would fall into that voluntary participation column at 7 megawatts so pretty small compared to even those other voluntary states so when we look at this market going forward it's obviously very heavily driven by enabling frameworks and those large utility voluntary programs so this data here shows from states where there are projects that have been approved in some way or another um that could be either through a mandated framework or as the case of florida approval by the regulatory commission for florida power and light and duke energy to move forward with their projects we're

054looking at in the dark blue the operational projects and then the light blue the planned projects so um take away here is that we're definitely continuing to see growth in this market it still is pretty heavily um focused on a handful of states um the largest growth on a megawatt basis we expect to be in florida and new york florida as those utility programs roll out and new york as a lot of projects that have been approved for incentives are starting to be interconnected um that's not to say that other states are not active in this space and like we've seen a lot of activity in oregon as they work through their rules and regulatory process it's just a smaller program overall than we see in states like new york and irena minnesota okay so

055um the last piece i want to cover in my presentation is the value that folks receive when they subscribe to community solar projects this is something that nrl started to track for a lot of reasons but one is to really get a grounding in is community solar market that can save people money by subscribing and we have seen in the past a lot of utility programs that are um you know often called green pricing programs or adder programs where customers are you know paying one or two cents per kilowatt hour extra on their bill and a certain number of customers are willing and wanting to do that but we know that when products can save people money there will be greater adoption and greater support for deploying um renewable energy assets so we have a

056lot of detail behind this what we do is gather data on the subscription contracts that developers are using or utilities are using if they are the ones subscribing customers we can pull their rate tariff for each tariff or subscriber contract that we have we look at things like how many how many years the contract is for how much and how the customer pays so are they paying monthly are they paying annually and then are there any escalation rates or things like that included and then the last main piece is just how the customer is compensated for their generation so in most cases that's the retail rate that customers are compensated at but in some cases it may be more like a value of solar rate or some kind of custom rate that the utility has

057developed so we use all that information to calculate the net present value of a residential subscription to community solar and track that over time so this figure is showing in the dark blue um the average not present value of a residential subscription and we've also done a lot of scenario analysis so that's shown in the lighter blue there to vary things like discount rate utility escalation rates other things that maybe are a little bit more unknown just to explore how sensitive these net present values are to those external factors or more things that are more unknown um so what you see here is that there's obviously a trend towards having a positive net present value for residential subscribers in the earlier years we did see a lot a lot more projects that were not providing

058a positive net present value some of these were smaller projects so they're they're higher cost and these are projects that were developed before some of the big virtual net metering programs began to roll out in colorado minnesota massachusetts and new york so we do see those states as having value for customers and as those states deploy more we are starting to see that npv come up for residential subscribers so the next couple of slides are some of our new work focused on energy burden and we wanted to really answer the question of how can community solar reduce the energy burden of low and moderate income consumers we know that low and moderate income consumers spend more of their annual income on energy than other income groups we have a lot of data at doe and

059nrel to help us understand that framing there's a department of energy lead tool it's called where you can explore energy burden by income group by location it's really cool tool with a lot of data sounded like there were some data folks in this group so if you haven't seen that it is a pretty cool tool um but we wanted to layer into that essentially not just understanding how much people are currently paying and what their current energy burden is but then layering on what would that look like if a consumer in a different energy or sorry in a different income bracket were to subscribe to community solar and also subscribe to community solar with a low income adder as is the case in massachusetts and then we'll also talk about washington d.c so there's a

060lot on this figure but the key takeaways are in the blue bars that's where customers are at now what their energy burden percentages are now and then in the orange you're looking at how much lower does that get if you add community solar and then in the green it is um how much um you would be at with community solar with that low income matter so a couple key takeaways for me for this is that energy burden is more than just electricity so there are certain things that a community solar subscription will not address which means it's really important to think about uh for community solar subscribers what else could they be doing to address their energy consumption whether that's weatherization or efficiency to lower that heating load typically and then also if you focus

061on your lowest income brackets so the zero to 30 percent income bracket your reduction on a percentage basis is just going to be much greater because uh just pure math of expenditures over income so there really are you know some a lot of data layers underneath this but really allows us to illustrate the point of um our lowest income consumers need help the most and thinking about ways to target programs or policies to reduce their energy burden not just from community solar but other energy needs um so i think actually yeah two more slides um so this is looking at the same data but in a different framework we wanted to really frame out how much an example uh lowest income person or household might be spending on energy including electricity gas and fuel and

062then looking at what are the reductions in those yellow bars that come from community solar and then from that low income adder so you can see that overall for this modeled energy consumer this person is paying about 1100 a year and then if you look at what their reduction is it's about 400 a year so purely just on an electricity basis if we just look at electricity and not gas and fuel there is quite a large reduction in terms of the the amount of electricity bills that this consumer would have last example is one from washington d.c washington dc implemented a solar for all program which offers free community solar subscriptions to households below 80 of area median income the subscriptions are designed to offset approximately 50 percent of electricity bills for those consumers um

063so when we look at this program again in the blue we see the energy burden kind of business as usual and then adding in the solar for all subscription and green similar trend just based on economics and what what customers tend to pay but that zero to 30 percent income bracket sees the largest reduction i'm down to about 8.8 percent um but everybody is saving money if they are 80 or lower of area median income so that is the end of what i have today and happy to answer questions on this or what else is happening with community solar across the country thank you thank you jenny commissioners like to open things up for any questions that you might have commissioner over pick and then commissioner thanks that was a great presentation really appreciate it

064um uh what i'm interested in is the low income adder it it sounds like you're saying or implying implicitly that there might be better savings if the money is put into energy efficiency is there a comparison between giving uh you know essentially the low income adder uh for energy purchase or putting it into energy efficiency in the house or the dwelling yeah we have not done a comparison as part of this study you certainly could do that and look at the cost of installing efficiency measures versus providing a community solar subscription a lot of that will depend on like which which energy efficiency measures you install and are there existing state programs um that that provide money to do that or things like that um my my main point was that like let's not do

065these things in isolation so if you are offering a low income community solar program um don't just do that like make sure that the house is efficient and weatherized so that you can really target deep energy burden reductions thanks thanks mr cleavy then commissioner yeah um i was interested and what you thought um of all these models which ones are um at least most interesting for for michigan and what we're we're facing i appreciate washington dc models one of the few things i've seen them able to come together on in washington dc um i've been in meetings in lansing where dte energy has actually suggested that people who do energy efficiency on their house be charged more for their money because they are quote free riders so it's hard for me to see a way

066where our investor owned utilities are going to offer solar at below market rate retail rate um to anybody in in in this state um so we have an uphill battle here where where should michigan of all these different models um which ones you really work well with investor owned utilities um and and have have any of those investor-owned utilities actually done real community solar where subscribers are they're actually customers as opposed to you know blue chip stockholders um and are they actually uh passing on those dividends to those subscribers i.e ratepayers in the form of lower below market retail rates for fossil fuels is that actually happening or not so it is happening um and it can happen in a couple different ways um so you have the minnesota kind of model where as also

067happening in colorado with excel energy they are legislatively mandated to offer community solar and compensate customers for the wrecks associated with those projects so when you do the math customers in those states are saving money compared to just staying on their regular rate that's that's kind of the legislatively mandated model and you guys know more about michigan context and what dte or other utilities might push back against in terms of whether that is you know a feasible pathway the other model that we see is investor owned utilities who are offering these voluntary offering these programs voluntarily um so i mentioned florida power and light a couple times their model is slightly different in that they are very large solar projects and they're nearly 80 megawatts in size but they did work through a i would

068say pretty lengthy negotiation process with stakeholders to craft their program so that it does have a low income component to it i think there's like 30 or 35 megawatts that are dedicated to low-income consumers um i believe those consumers can never see their bill go up their provisions in there like that and then for the rest of the capacity i want to say customers are expected to save money after like seven or eight years so it is a a longer term investment from the customer perspective but you know if you think about the life of that subscription being 20 years and you start saving money you're seven um you will save money overall but there is that investment that customers need to make um so yeah i would say those are the the two models

069that we tend to see um uh there are variations particularly with like municipal and co-op utilities where they tend to you know have smaller projects and kind of want to pilot something out and see if their customers like it and some of those projects were developed really before solar was more cost effective so those customers may not be saving as much money or saving money at all but the co-op is kind of or muni has you know wanted to test out that approach commissioner i think you have raised your hand is that correct yep thanks john and thanks jenny for your presentation and to enroll for all the things you do for us to help us understand renewables and integration and so forth um the state of michigan is working on distributed energy in terms

070of um making it more accessible and i suspect that we're going to see some rules changing in that favor um if a if a city municipality had a say a 24 megawatt solar project they were looking at and wanted to go community um solar base from a concept point of view um could you just speak briefly on on how that's being facilitated financially are is it municipal bonds being used have you seen anything creative in terms of keeping the debt service and cost of those kinds of projects down so that the community solar subscription fees can also be lowered um that is a great question and not one that we have analyzed um so you're saying this 24 megawatt project would be owned by the city or yeah okay um so yeah i definitely not

071i'm not a municipal finance expert but we do have folks like that and hell um so if you want to send me a follow-up i'd be happy to connect you with some other folks my understanding is that there are ways to uh that cities have to finance projects in a more cost effective way but the challenge is with getting the investment solar investment tax credit and finding a way to um you know essentially that's like the price to be right um so that's kind of my high level understanding but i don't know if there are things beyond bonds or kind of a standard set of mechanisms for cities to use yep fair enough the tax credits really critical and if the city could find a way to structure that so that it would be financiable

072in a community solar environment i think there's projects out there that could be worked that way i think one of our other public speakers had a question on that so thank you for your comments appreciate them commissioner overpick you got a question again uh well just a point about this i mean there are um when the university of michigan was looking into this we have a couple economists in the school who did a study and they worked closely with folks at mit who were already doing this buying power purchase agreements and of course that's a way to fund a uh for-profit uh power developer um solar developer who can then take advantage of tax credits that a university its non-profit can't so that's an advantage of course you have to pay something to that developer

073and then you have to pay the debt unless you have some magical way to grow money on a tree or something like that um so that's a possibility the thing that they also uncovered however is that the cost of generating solar up here in michigan it's a lot more expensive than doing it in florida or texas or tennessee or anywhere down you know further south just because we don't get enough sunshine and when we do get sunshine in the winter it's you know it is a the sun's at a lower angle and that cuts it down too um what you're asking i think chuck is figure you can figure it out um and then you could do an rfp and see what you get then the other thing that got became an obstacle uh was

074that um unless you own the transmission you're going to pay for the transmission too and so uh dte in this case would have us uh you know have a choke point on our ability to get that energy from the uh landfill or whatever it was to the customer all this adds up and my guess is it adds up too much and that's probably why and if you have a funny feeling missy is thought it's all through um that's probably why we're thinking of your own municipal power and then we own the lines we own you know everything but then still is solar cheap enough to generate a good deal for us at this high latitude and i don't know the answer that's why i'm here i'm sure we could get the answer right missy mr

075cleavy did you have another question or yeah i just i just have a comment at chuck's point and although johnson's also i mean the the purple rates for third party fine are embarrassing low and every rate case that i see that comes out of lansing they're asking for it to go lower so you know generating to the utilities at somewhere between three and five cents a kilowatt hour as opposed to building it and using ourselves and offsetting electricity at 15 cents a kilowatt hour is a is a totally different situation so municipals that do this you know they're they're replacing expensive energy with this and 15 cents a kilowatt hour but you know for us to go float bounce and and be get in the game of building power and selling it on the open

076market to dte for you know under purple rules um you know i i i defy any economist even a university of michigan economist to figure out where the sweet spot is in that kind of a deal even with a 25-year life span on the on the power so um yeah i mean we're kind of stuck where either we convince you dte energy to sell us green power uh at a reasonable rate or we subsidize that power and give it to lower income people or we figure out another alternative municipalization has been posted as one alternative hopefully we can find others that uh work work even better but um you know we're stuck being rocking a hard place right now it seems to me on this this whole issue so i'm looking forward to figuring it

077out mark anyone else we have another presenter on the topic and so we might i mean i think missy also is going to make some comments too possibly um so i think maybe we'll move on to the next presentation which is i think more michigan-centric um jenny you're certainly welcome to stan and maybe there's some follow-up questions that relate to the material that you presented that come up later in the evening missy do you want to present our next presenter i see that john is waiting in the wings yeah hi um bye john thank you for joining us today next we have john john finch who actually carlene uh gets credit for really identifying jon as the speaker to talk to us a little bit about what's happening locally here in michigan with some community

078solar and so i'm going to attempt probably poorly if anyone can help me make sure you get audio when i play this video for john does anyone know the secret of zoom audio playing through youtube i'm gonna assume you don't hearing that okay so this may not work if not i will drop it here we go we're going to try can you see it okay you can't hear it or see it we can't okay missy when you shared did you select um share system audio when you shared your screen that is yeah yes i knew that was the thing to do you are the best this is now let me try again ready [Music] so [Music] thank you missy [Music] i'm going to give you a b-plus on the on the av stuff okay okay

079a minus b plus somewhere in there so thanks i was going to say um hello to jenny we are a part of the national community solar partnership and we've been the recipients of a couple technical support grants and it's been a great experience working with jenny and others across the nation uh with this with this opportunity with nrel and the doe and so forth uh i think one of my takeaways jenny from this and you probably have the same one is that uh no two community solar projects are the same uh they're all very different and they're all peculiar for a number of reasons and i see some experts on this call that i recognize chuck holcomb and mark levy uh among them and that we have all kinds of different situations within our communities

080as to what the regulations are and the policies are regarding energy whether it's um where it comes from the utilities whether or not you yourself can generate self-generate where you can locate it on and on and on and on so community solar is really about threading a pretty pretty tight needle to get that to get that right and i'll just tell you a little bit about our own experience doing this um and and then we can have a little bit of conversation about it i think a couple of my major takeaways from this and you saw that our hard work eventually paid off the project is in the ground it's producing electrons it's um working working pretty well we were recognized by a large trade association the state is having um the project of the

081year in 2019 we actually built um beat out a large wind farm project so it was a little bit of a david and goliath story our project is modest in its size it's only 345 kilo kilowatts but we got this going five six seven years ago now and at that time that was a relatively good sized project and moreover it was a project that could fit on the particular site where we're located you saw how green that site is it even looks prettier today because as part of our on building out the solar project we included habit habitat restoration we have pollinators and native grasses that we planted there and it's taken us a couple few years to get ahead of the invasives and the weeds and now i'm proud to say if you go

082out there today you're going to see black eyed susans and milkweed and all kinds of forbs and grasses it's quite it's quite beautiful and we're we're very pleased about that and there's actually an upside to planting this kind of vegetation around solar panels and that upside is that we don't have to mow that site we don't have to get in there and cut grass because these these plants go to a certain height they're not affecting at all the panel's productions and they take care of themselves so it has a kind of a twofer to it and then i would add a three-fer to it if i might the site we're located in east lansing and some of you may be from east lansing or know it um i i guess there's a university there somewhere

083as well i actually went there my son went to university of michigan i worked at university of michigan so we're all one happy family um that's actually a capped landfill it's a closed landfill that we located the project on so it's a site that's never going to have any redevelopment use you're never going to put in tim hortons on that site you're never going to put a daycare center on that site and and it happens to be wonderfully proximate to distribution lines of the board of water and light they were an important partner of ours actually chuck so you know right in that corridor on our side of the street bwl has distribution line on the other side of the street consumers energy has a distribution line so locating community solar i think is an

084interesting exercise in that i think that we can identify among all of our communities in the state of michigan legacy industrial sites legacy mining sites legacy dumps that could be good candidates for community solar because community solar is like i said ours is 345 kilo kilowatts which is small um one to five megawatts i think is a good guesstimate to say in terms of what a community solar project might be how big that would be and roughly speaking if it's a relatively intact site you can get about a megawatt on five acres six acres of property so in our case we're taking up a couple acres out of a 24 acre site that is kind of lightly used by the community for hiking and walking your dog and doing things like that and like i

085said we're right there on the distribution line um so we're local and that helps to supply some good services as well um that happens to be a distribution line a circuit that has capacity so one of the challenges of locating solar especially the big stuff and again chuck knows this is where you put it because the transmission and the distribution grid might look the same from standing on the street looking up at it but it isn't the same in terms of how it's functioning there's capacity in places and there's congestion in other places you don't necessarily know where the best places to hook a project up to so we had all kinds of those technical hurdles to get through like any solar project does identifying the securing the site identifying the site working with the

086local utility if they'll be willing to let us put those electrons on the grid do an interconnection study in our case because we're on a landfill doing all kinds of environmental impact studies storm water studies on and on and on and on and then you have another conundrum with community solar that's the community so we have 150 participants in this project that's 150 subscriptions participation i have to keep track of and make sure that people are getting their money back out of the project getting the credits on their on their bill so there's a lot of churn there there's a lot of things to take care of and pay attention to and it isn't something that you do lightly we did it lightly we just kind of said hell yes we can whoop the british

087and we went in there and took us five years but we actually were able to pull it off but it is it is a learned skill and there's a number of other community solar projects around the state as well and each one of those i think informs the next one in terms of what you've learned works and what you've learned doesn't particularly work i know that ann arbor has the project that you've queued up with dte and the idea that it'll be some community solar there as i understand it and some of it will be just generation that goes to the utility but i can't emphasize enough that if you're going to be thinking about doing true community solar you have to do three things really well and really early you have to line up

088your conversations with the incumbent utility because like it or not you're gonna have to put the power on their wires although there is a model and jenny knows about this work we've been doing about there might be an alternative model to doing that but i won't go into that right now so you need to work with a local utility you need to figure out who's got the land i think the best candidates for land are local units of government they have brown fields that are sitting there underutilized we can put solar on those sites thirdly then you have to work with your community and figure out what they want and what they don't want we spent a lot of time in front of community forums and i was naive enough to think community solar it's

089like a warm puppy who's going to be against community solar right um but we took some shots in these community meetings we listened to people who were not happy about the idea who were questioning the wisdom of doing this we're concerned about the city getting involved with this and perhaps 10 20 years from now being stuck with a mess that they have to clean up on city property so those are real three important pieces you have to get right now we did this without the benefit of any kind of statute to back us up or provide any kind of blocking other states and jenny's uh slide presentation showed you that other states are going gangbusters minnesota i think has something like 450 last time i looked megawatts of community solar 450 megawatts of community solar

090we have and this is a generous guess two megawatts maybe four megawatts somewhere in there we've got marquette we've got lots has got a small project cherryland consumers has a couple we've got one and then you're about done so if people ask you does enabling legislation make a difference in energy policy i would say hell yes it does it makes a big difference and so right now there's a coalition called my community solar alliance and i can drop the url in the chat although i don't see the chat here but nonetheless this is a group of a number of organizations and and folks that are pushing the adoption of a couple bills that right now are within our state legislature that would do just that they would make community solar carve out among this kind

091of crazy energy world so it's not rooftop it's not utility scale it's something else and this carve out would provide some definitions and some parameters and some expectations of the utilities so that more of this can be adopted and i just would encourage you i know um certainly one of your representatives robbie i know him pretty well i'm sure he's on board with this but you may have others where you are or have contacts with those folks who encourage them to take a look at these bills and support these bills i think they're pretty good and what's nice about being michigan is that we're we're almost never first in when it comes to energy innovation type stuff we kind of hang back as good middle westerners and wait for somebody else to make the mistakes

092and do the hard work and that bill is based on a lot of good community solar bills that are elsewhere in the country colorado minnesota new york illinois and i think we've got a pretty tight argument right there with our bill so i'm going to pause missy and um you tell me what i whiffed on that i should have mentioned or what folks might be most interested in hearing more about i don't think you have done anything i think chairmanship should we just go to questions yes can we open things up for questions then for john kennedy um go ahead chuck uh john great presentation is normal love working with you you guys are great um probably if i were to say one thing missing the only thing really would be the alignment of community

093solar and its scalability relative to carbon reduction right i mean it you could put a lot of solar on people's roofs across our community and and not that that's there's anything wrong with that but when you start getting reductions in in carbon remissions you really start looking at scalability and the more you can build a scalable community infrastructure that can be taken advantage of by you know lmis all the way through people who can't build solar on their property because the shading whatever it might be now you're starting to build that um mindset that we can do some some differentiating with respect to greenhouse gases and i know you're you and i are working on larger scale stuff together but that's the one potential additional additionality maybe you call it for community solar that's a

094benefit maybe you could comment on that brief yeah that's a great observation chuck what this makes me think is this we have a lot of cities around the country but let's pick on michigan in which councils mayors others have put forward ambitious goals whether it's 100 percent renewables to power the city or it's a net zero goal of some kind of or you know um becoming carbon neutral by a certain date and that's great because that does set a goal that doesn't push us to figure out ways to make these kinds of things happen i think the challenge with those is oftentimes with people is like well what do we do then do we buy s-rex from texas to get ourselves there and i think what's nice about something like community solar is that it's

095you know kind of like a goldilocks situation it's not too big it's not too little it's kind of just right that a community can figure out how to do those kinds of projects together it can be a tangible action on their part to reduce carbon to green up the grid do any number of things like that and you can be really hands-on with it i mean it takes it takes a village it takes a community to make this kind of thing happen because we had to get all kinds of things passed within city government to even make this happen right we had to change we had to change the way things were done within government to make this kind of thing happen and that you know if you're just relying on some go-getting smallish kind

096of non-profits to make this happen you're probably hanging back too much a conversation i've had a lot with utilities around the state and they tended not to be the industrial utilities they tended to be more the municipalities or the cooperatives the smaller guys if you will where i've come to them and presented to them hey let's do a community solar park in your neck of the woods i won't name any cities holland and what they say to me holland is they say well that's a good idea holland but nobody from my community is coming to me to say they want you're saying it's a good idea but i'm not hearing from my community so commissions like you guys what you can be doing is like hey community i know this has already happened in ann

097arbor but you got to make noise you got to have conversations with your utility and your civic leaders because if it's not coming from the community it probably isn't going to get done mr herbert yes i was going to say john that you know i uh as a solar developer i have so many people quite regularly come to me with property that they would like to develop some form of revenue stream if you will or in the case of community solar and of course they're all in my case all in dte territory and i have to tell them that because of the monopoly control over energy in southeast michigan that dt will show no interest in that solar being developed and being available for other people so they're and they're always disappointed and they're always

098scratching their heads in disbelief but am i wrong oh you're you are right and again i'll track back to those house bills that are currently in committee and um i can always follow up with you mr later on and give folks the link to all that so they can see them themselves those bills for force the hand of the investment utilities to make community solar happen period they give they give the requirements of it they define it and they make it a thing and one of the one of the one of the ways i think that we can you know make it happen is is to try to kind of level set if you will some of the the costs around all this um chuck mentioned lmi um i think it's great work that nrel

099is pushing in terms of looking at adders when it comes to lmi or when you get to a certain point in your plateauing with the energy efficiency that you're driving within your community and then if you can add solar to that then you've got even more potential for savings for those customers you certainly have a hedge against the future so if you can provide a solar price point for somebody that's good for the next 10 15 years against rate increases over the next 10 15 years that's building community wealth in my estimation and a good thing to do but you're absolutely right one of the one of the foibles of of michigan for the most part is that your destiny is determined by your incumbent utility if you're in dte's territory you live by dte's

100rules you're in consumers territory you live by their rules if you're an immunity or a cooperative different set of rules there as well you know we only have in our state 10 percent of electric choice so to speak and that queue is around the block and then down the street across the state for entities lining up wanting to take advantage of that so we really don't have choice uh john welcome uh john serves with me on uh glrglrea's board directors and we're really happy to have him on board and be part of that john i wonder if you could speak for a minute about you you raised the question of choice and i guess what i see is the you know if there's a potential confluence between community choice aggregation or electric choice and community

101solar if if we merge these two things together uh could bypass the you know the until the intransigence on this stuff and create a market for community solar that is beyond just the municipals where it's being put in um do you do you see a it's such a confluence is a possibility i mean community choice 2.2 is you know might just crack that electric choice law open yeah and i know that you missy mark and we've certainly talked about this in glra as well about community choice aggregation um i mean ohio has something like it right something along those lines i it's a legislative fix as i see it i mean i don't know what can be done within the puc within the michigan public service commission in terms of rule making to make something

102like happen i don't see what a local government can do to make that happen maybe there's some moves that local government can do it certainly seems that that's in statute and in order to fix it we would need to amend the statute could the utilities agree to that on their own and and let it happen is part is a part of their irp for example maybe will they i don't know but you're right i mean i think some of these i mean i guess what i would just step back and say is is that the the change in the the utility industry and chuck knows this better than i do because he's been in there for a long time you do too much the the change in the last couple years in utility industry to

103my mind is equivalent to what happened in the previous 20 in terms of what's going on you know with batteries coming on and thinking about ders and thinking about the utility shifting this business model to perhaps be more providing a bunch of services and other kinds of supports to the grid and making it all kind of work because somebody's got to make it work because it's complicated unless thinking about selling commodity to you and i just think whatever was true two years ago isn't going to be true two years from now but i'm not sure what that two years from now looks like but it's going to be more change listener george uh thank you mr chairman um firstly i want to thank you john for your presentation you know it was nice to bring

104it down to more of a michigan-focused approach um so i my question um you know i feel uh just a quick aside um you know we we do a lot of conversation in in this commission about policy and policies that we would like to do um and then we have the issue that we run into there's a party that controls our legislature that is very uh difficult to work with and is going to prevent us from doing a lot of these policies so you mentioned those bills um that are in committee right now um and more broadly speaking you know my question is both narrow and broad um you know firstly do those bills in committee have any chance of being you know i don't know if you've been following them uh being enacted this

105legislative session or if anybody else has an answer to that uh and two more broadly um if those bills are not enacted what is the path forward under current law for community solar okay um second one first so um roughly every eight years or so we open up our energy law and do something with it so 2008 and then we had it up to 2 000 well was whenever the one or 16 whatever was 2016 maybe perhaps 2016 and yeah so 2008 2016 so we're kind of due again you know and and that's going to be a thing and there'll be all kinds of wrangling and all kinds of you know discussions and things will go on and i'm just going to bet that that if that law is opened up again that we're going

106to see some really dramatic changes in what the legislation legislation is going to is going to say about what our energy policy should be i mean to give you know credit i mean consumers where chuck is you know those guys are blasting through this 20 goal of having renewables as part of their portfolio they're gunning for 40 50 i mean i think at least 40 maybe even beyond that i mean they're and every time i i tune into the news about consumers they go from saying we're gonna put in four gigawatts to five giga loss to six gigawatts to eight gigawatts and that is an amazing you know exponential growth and solar alone that consumers is intending so i think keeping an eye on that is an important thing and i'm just going to say

107about the community solar bill itself um i've been involved with the back end of that um i helped provide some of the technical language and you know reviewing some of what was put into it like i said i worked with a group of good people that learned from other states and most recently and again this is a modest contribution i hope it makes a difference we've had state legislators out at our east lansing community solar park because we're not too far from the capitol and i've walked people around and pointed things out and explained to two of them and showed them the black-eyed susans and we even had deer one day running around the site and um in terms of acceptance interest and seemingly being positive it was bipartisan so it wasn't just the dems

108that were getting their heads around this and thinking it seemed like it was an okay thing now what happens when the rubber meets the pavement i don't know but at least i think that we're helping people get their heads around what it is i think you know if you don't see something you can't see it touch it taste it walk around it it's pretty abstract and community solar like i said it sounds like a warm puppy but it's really not a warm puppy it's something much more serious and much more complex than that so i hope that you know we're going to continue this push coming into the fall and that we may see something come out of that committee that's positive and fingers crossed um just a couple of quick uh follow-ups there uh

109mr chairman if you don't mind um so uh on the reopening of the energy code that you mentioned i'm a little familiar with what happened in 2016 um so you're expecting that to happen 2022 2023 well i mean if if any if looking backwards can provide any trends then maybe there may be there may be an appetite again for opening it up and taking a look at it and and there were some substantial changes from the 2008 to the 2016. one of the important changes was that the municipals that previously were obligated to have energy efficiency as part of their utility mix and part of their power mix you know treating energy efficiency as a source of power megawatt if you will the 2016 law allows them for um at the end of this calendar

110year to opt out of having any obligation to do energy efficiency programs anymore for their customers so and a number of those utilities may in fact just do that so those incentives those rebates those kinds of things that they're having place for residents in commercial they simply go away because that utility has decided they don't want to do it anymore and they're not under the aegis anymore of the michigan public service commission and that's not obligated to do that gotcha gotcha so i'll take that um to my question you know earliest that that might be complete you know maybe sometime late next year just so that the commission is aware of this broader timeline that we need to work with as we're considering other options and and so far as the second part uh about

111you know the current legislation that's in in committee saying everything goes well and swimmingly uh and things move out of the house and they get into the senate um you know that probably wouldn't be enacted until probably what mid of next year at assuming everything goes well i think that's probably a decent timeline to provide to put on this yeah i would i wouldn't disagree with that i just would say in terms of you know opening up the energy legislation let's not forget the legislators are elected to office to legislate to to write bills and to write policy and do those kinds of things so maybe they're just going to get itchy fingers in a couple more years and want to get back into that and do something substantial thank you two brief comments from

112my side maybe just one actually um there was a webinar today uh sponsored by the 2030 district about the energy code updates um that's actually an administrative process it's been already initiated um the dates um for all the steps past the one that we have completed so far are all tbd but the projection is that that process would likely be completed by the end of 2022. um obviously um go ahead john did you want to say something no go ahead obviously i think um you know everything that john said is right um but um you know um it's it's a big question mark as far as changing in the legislation i mean that could happen in a matter of months and that could also be dragged out into a matter of years and obviously a

113lot of different parties potentially even ourselves included will have influence on that process including also through political contributions and lots of other things so i think it's pretty hard to to put any kind of timeline on enabling legislation what i'd like to do is bridget has a question or comment and then i'd like to move on to missy um and um hear a little bit about projects locally um so bridget i'll let you go first and then of course we can go back and rehash anything that jenny or john said after also missy talks so go ahead bridgette um thanks i so um john you were talking about the two bills which i'm assuming are about enabling community solar as well as it sounds like other things um do does anybody know where dte stands

114on those if they if anybody's approached them to find out if they support them oppose them has anybody tried working with them [Music] well one these carve outs for community solar are pretty specific to that so they're not about a lot of other kind of renewable energy issues so they're pretty specific to that um two from what i've heard from the alliance and i that that's not my day-to-day job so we're part of this alliance and we've helped out with them but i'm not you know i'm not government relations i'm not in the state house i don't spend all my time with this particular issue or paying attention to it but i i think probably the assumption is that you they're probably going to be resistant to it um there for any number of reasons

115one of the potential issues is that um they're suggesting that at least half of whatever gets built that's called community solar is built by third parties not the utilities themselves now in the case of consumers they're already kind of doing that themselves based upon their own irp but i'm not sure we can say that about the other ious in the state i think the expectation is that the utilities are probably not going to be real excited about this or supportive of it that may change but i think that's kind of the word on the street i see um can we head things over to you you have uh i think some um certainly comments and maybe slides prepared to talk about what what's happening locally and um i would at least personally appreciate you addressing

116some of the questions um that ken garber uh addressed and um also i'm at least personally also interested in um all these things are interesting from my perspective about what's going on locally and in the state of michigan but without enabling legislation what it seems to me it comes down to is the negotiation between whoever wants to put in a consult a community solar project and um the investor owned utility and of course there are a lot of other elements as john talked about talking to the community and everything else but uh you know the eye of the needle that the project has to get through is um negotiations with the ilu and so i'd be interested in you commenting on the status of the project and what some of the peculiarities are and limitations

117um in terms of um negotiating positions we've encountered so i'll turn it over to you thanks chair merski and i don't have slides i'm happy to put them together and to circulate for folk but i thought i would actually just walk through the project one more time it's evolving very fast so if i put together slides and even change today in good ways as we're moving forward so to kind of ground the conversation first and foremost i want to say that the city is in support of community solar legislation it's something that we've asked our city lobbyists to work on it's something that once um you know once it's reintroduced and once we can get movement we're working we plan to testify to the extent that we can and coordinating with other municipalities that also

118want that and i think that gets to what jenny was sharing about our state right now is is really a voluntary state right because we don't have requirements around community solar so acknowledging that we're a voluntary state we as you know intervened in the voluntary green pricing program and saw that as a mechanism to do a lot of things one of which was get movement on community solar and in the settlement that we received we did get that and so um i don't know if folks caught this when jenny was talking about the different types of community solar uh there are direct off-take where you're taking the energy but that actually doesn't happen a whole lot um in most of these cases it is a community asset in which that energy is going onto the

119grid and then it's being distributed and you get a credit like virtual net metering for that system itself it's not behind the meter like the solar that's on my roof right now you know flowing flowing in and then access goes elsewhere so we wanted to afford with this project for numerous reasons one transferability right we wanted to demonstrate the community solar as possible we wanted to get it through the vgp program because we want it and we know that our public has asked for it a number of times and we knew that we couldn't require dt to do this and so the voluntary pricing program was the mechanism by which we did it and what we did was uh we had kind of been looking at the landfill solar or the landfill for a long

120time saying what are we going to do with this asset and we're not going to develop it and forgive me there is a storm moving through as many of you i think now so sorry for any background noise we looked at that asset we said this would be a good place uh we're really interested in seeing what is potential here uh for a solar asset we don't have behind the meter solar on site uh to take that off so we would have to inject that energy into the grid and so we started kind of inquiring about this and in preliminary discussions before we intervened in the bgp program we talked to dte about it and realized that there's actually two lines running there's dt's line um their transmission line and then they also have the

121miso line not far away so that's good news because that meant there were two possible points of interjecting that power into the system and we had done some preliminary analysis and you know we saw this to be a pretty decent sized uh project and we brought it to dt and the first time there wasn't a lot of interest the second time we brought it through the regulatory process and there was a lot of interest in that uh happening the price point and what we ended up doing was an interconnection study to dte system because that is number one a lot cheaper and a lot faster and shop can talk about the myso grid connection and how long of a delay it is to get onto iso so we'd have to get in the queue right

122because you first in line is who's going to interject into that system first so we wanted to understand if dt's lines that were there had any capacity and if so would we need to do any updates to those grids uh to that grid itself to be able to take the power that we projected and we have done a preliminary study showing about somewhere between 20 and 24 megawatts kind of depending candidly on floating solar and its viability on the project that's a lot of power to interject at a site and what we found through the very first interconnection study that we did which anyone would have to do any developer has to do an interconnection study was that dt's grid could take it with some upgrades uh not massive upgrades but some notable upgrades that's

123good news number one that the project was viable and we didn't have to wait three years plus in the mysoq so good news and step one then we began to analyze okay how are we going to get this this project actually moving forward so i recognize we're having a conversation around municipalization but let's start with where we are right now we don't own polls and wires so i can build a system and i can't move the power i can't use it on site so that's not a super viable project for us to invest 30 million dollars to not be able to off take that energy so we negotiated with dt and said we want to do this as a community solar project in which the city of ann arbor is the anchor tenant by that

124i mean we are last in line so we want to open this up for subscriptions and we're negotiating and right now we have uh agreement we're looking at the details the agreement that what would happen is people can subscribe to this in one of two ways you can subscribe just for a certain dollar amount because i just want like 10 equivalent offset from that system or you could subscribe and say i want 100 of my usage to be from this and then you would pay a levelized cost of energy which is basically the cost to build the system your percentage would be what you build and then you get the credit based on how that energy sells on the market right so you do get the credit on your bill so this was important because

125it is kind of that is a model of community solar that exists within the system so you're getting the benefit but maybe you just can't have it on your roof right you subscribe in that way we also asked for an lmi program offering so we're still designing what that would look like so that we will have a carve out for low and moderate income households to be able to subscribe at a discounted rate for that program and then the city of ann arbor agrees to take whatever is not subscribed for so one of the nice things about the size of this project if it does come in at that 20 to 24 megawatts municipal operations today is about 24 megawatts so we could subscribe and technically have that match city load we don't expect that

126to be the case though we expect that we'll actually not get a lot of the project and i want that to be true excuse me i actually want us to subscribe the whole thing and then to use the city's demand to go and send the next build out of a program in an asset so just a last few things to kind of share broadly about this uh the timeline is really important we are hoping to get an rfp out in weeks and i mean that in like three weeks um hitting the street so we can actually have developers bid on this project and know what cost to come back to council this is really important one with our climate goals we need to get assets online fast and this is one way to do that

127number two we're gonna safe harbor assets which means we're going to secure the 26 federal tax incentive and that's going to make this project that much cheaper and more viable to move forward and if we are talking we don't have a final cost so any number we throw around really is just that um but you know if you're talking anything in a million a 26 reduction in that is really significant so that'll help make the asset that much more viable and useful for other people to subscribe there will be a third party that builds hence why we're going out to rfp so it's not that we're going to build this or dte is going to build this um and i'm trying to think what else [Music] i think those are sort of the main points

128so we can't do a ppa in the traditional sense like i can't have someone else just go build this asset they would have to use dt's infrastructure anyway and we'd have to work with dt on this project we just cut out the middle folk we just went directly to the source to make this happen so um dt is now required for our regulators the michigan public service commission to move this project forward in good faith we have the option of walking away if the price tag comes back too high and it's something that we don't want to develop but this has to move forward in good faith is that helpful thanks missy i'd like to open things up for commenting questions again not just for missy but for anyone else um including for each other

129uh peck i miss you i don't know if i got it and i don't know if you have the answer um but how does this compare how will the cost compare to dte's uh green power migraine power plan yeah so to be determined for two reasons one is in that uh settlement the that we intervened in we also negotiated a lower rate for the migraine power program so dt still has to file with the michigan public service commission what their new rates will be based on some merging of different asset classes which douglas jester gets all the credit for figuring this out for those in this landscape you know douglas he's brilliant uh so to be determined what is different in this is you're not just paying a premium for an asset you're also getting

130the credit of that asset and that credit will be real-time miso markets so whatever that energy sells for it'll be i bel we're still negotiating this likely a monthly average cost because the energy sells on the market whatever it sells for on the market you get the credit back on your bill the premium will be the subscription subtracting what that energy sells for on the market for the renewable portions but do you really think people will subscribe i mean because it's it's almost um i have a phd and i can't figure out what you're saying i do think people will subscribe to this we already have a number of uh tenants or folks who are ready to come in uh and subscribe for a certain offset this is pretty common in kind of businesses especially

131those with clean energy goals we've been talking to folks like aaps the university of michigan um pittsfield township and others who have have these goals and objectives and this is a local generation project that allows them to have the security to know a certain percentage of their emissions are offset okay but still they don't know how much they're going to pay for it we'll know as soon as we get the bids back like that will be determined it's just we don't have costing right people haven't bid to build the project okay then we'll know okay yeah then we'll know all right so i'll just wait i support it if i can add to what you just said if the new energy code with the xero code appendix is adopted by the state of michigan there

132would be the possibility of ann arbor adopting the zero code and with the zero code you have to offset energy use through a number of different means and i believe missy correct me if i'm wrong that um that would um be most likely a source of demand for community solar from the site correct could be a demand certainly from that site i think our initial eyes are on big bigger users that are you know again like us and pittsfield township other municipalities in the region those are those are kind of google maybe you know others who have the goals and would like to be giving dollars to the local economy right mr cleavy the new york uh george i should say and then um so just a couple points one is a i my home

133in harbor springs i have 100 uh solar from the voluntary green pricing program up there and it it works incredibly smoothly um it was and uh because we were 100 but they actually took some other things off the bill and it's worked out to be essentially a wash so um once it gets moving it's it's fairly fairly good but there was a glitch and i don't know if you've how you guys plan to deal with this glitch or not some people have solar on their buildings and theirs their grandfather did not full net metering and it's not clear to me if if i went or someone went and signed up for the voluntary green power pricing program and they had solar on their building what how that relationship would work out um would i have

134would they have to give up the fullnet metering and then you know get money back based on what they put into the grid at the rate of the negotiated vgp rate or would they have two separate rates or it's not clear to me how that would work um and you can answer me offline on this issue but it's it's definitely something that's that's going to come up in ann arbor and the other issue is if you're going to be issuing an rfp we had a wonderful uh presentation this week at glrea and low carbon solar and it's kind of disturbing that chinese solar you get a seven year payback on finances but it's a 45 year payback on emissions reduction because they use coal to make the make the solar and so uh you know

135whether or not low carbon solar is a required in your rfp or not it's worth thinking about thank you just to the first question quickly would say that people have the option of subscribing in different ways at least that's how we have two journeys so if you had like i'll use my house right most of our energy use is offset through the system that we have but i could subscribe for five percent because i know that roughly five percent of mine is still pulling from the grid so i could i could subscribe to just a percentage i don't think we would be capable and i don't think we'd want to get into like a really conflated billing system acknowledging that might get tricky so the meter would what we put into the meter under net

136metering would still go back to dte but we're buying volunteer green power i guess from dte it's it'll be interesting to see how it's worked out i'm happy to take that offline too to more fully understand yeah mr george thank you mr chairman uh missy uh so i i've got a couple of questions for you um you know as someone that has not uh had the ability to study intensively like mark and chuck and some of the others on this some of what you said uh kind of went over my head so i just wanted a couple of quick clarifying questions um so you mentioned obviously uh the city is pursuing this uh the solar project and the main reason that the city can't uh do it on its own in the context of you

137know you know some folks have mentioned municipalization is because uh you mentioned i believe the wires right and the transmission and the battery storage is that a correct understand understanding of that yeah if we generate that power we have to move that power to a place that could use it and so we would need the polls and the wires to to be able to do that to transmit it to ourself and then if we ever had to interject it into dd's grid we'd have to have their agreement to put it on to their grid we can't just generate and put it on their system okay um and i i guess you know within that uh you know you mentioned that this solar grid would power i believe uh you would provide all the city's needs

138on paper uh would meet that that number that you mentioned has there been any conversation about um uh you know trying to use that power uh and and just channel it and almost like a scaled-down municipalization as the city is the primary purchaser of the power and using and purchasing lines directly for city use kind of going around bt in that instance you could imagine a scenario in which that's possible but work with me on this that most the only real site that we have next to this is the public work center so you're gonna have to run poles and wires everywhere across town to use it on the municipal sites right so you're gonna have to run pulls and wires all the way to city hall and then you're gonna have to run poles

139and wires all the way to the fire stations across town um and to the water treatment plant into the wastewater treatment plant and so you're basically acquiring all of that infrastructure all of that debt that antiquatedness to run that utility i think we're going to talk about this a little bit later too that staff have been working on some kind of more non-traditional non-pools and wires ways to think about municipalization and we're kind of working on some ideas to present to the commission in november on that too but no we'd have to you base like it's not simple enough just to put them across the street because it matches load we'd have to go across gotcha and uh my last question um as a just a regular consumer that you know pays my dte bill

140um is this uh will i have the opportunity with the public have the opportunity and what you know if you could just briefly summarize like if i want to get all of my electricity that i use in my apartment uh from community solar and from this project way maybe just briefly describe what that would look like for a consumer yeah absolutely so it's going to be posted on the my green power website as a subscription alternative where people can apply uh modify they can sign up for this and then receive the credit as well so that's going to go on the website everyone who gets information about my green power will know this is a project that they can subscribe to and then the city is going to do additional marketing and outreach okay thank

141you so you can yes there's so much information here and i think i missed part of what you had said missy so if you wouldn't mind clarifying you said that the city will use the end but the 26 investment tax credit can you describe how if um and also there's an rfp that's going out for the installation of it but did you say though that dte was going to be installing i i i kind of got a little bit confused there yeah fair point so dt is dt in the city are running the rfp to build so we'd have a third party developer we're gonna have third parties bid to actually build the site itself and then if well assuming that goes forward right like we'll have to see the bids and we'll have to

142do the pricing we'll have to determine that this is financially viable so let's say that it is when it comes back in then what will happen is it will be built by that third-party developer taking taking they will take the federal tax incentive into account so they will depreciate the asset over time they will go into vte's books but we will all get the benefit of that 26 going into kind of the cost of that asset okay thank you for the question oh thanks thanks appreciate that anyone else if not missy i'd like to return to ken garber's question so um amber go ahead yeah i have a quick follow-up question from um robert's question like theoretically the city could own it if dte you know out of their goodness of their hearts wanted to

143let us use the transmission line right it's just that like we have to have this like part of the negotiation with dte is that they wanted to get something out of it too right and then also because dge owns it we get the tax credit and we wouldn't if the city owned it that's those are components as well right the last part is i'm not sure i have to think a little bit your question is a good one i want to think about what we would own would we own the panels because we own the land so is that that the thing that we would own and then dt would still own the transmission and distribution lines yeah i don't know that that's kind of my question okay yeah i mean i think theoretically anything

144would be possible in that space we would still have to that's i need to i need to unpack that a little bit because none of those things work independently right so it's the the music comes when the orchestra plays when all of them interconnect and work together so i guess your the answer is probably theoretically yes but devil in the details on that one i'd love to follow up and kind of hear what you're thinking commissioner cleavy go ahead yeah just a comment amber interesting eraser the goodness of their heart i actually didn't realize that dte had a heart but given the fact that you think they do perhaps we should ask the dte foundation to put up this um because that seems to be where their heart is and so if they put up

145you know 50 hundred million dollars and put built the array and plugged it into their grid and then sold it back to us at below retail rates like some places are doing in around the country that would just be stellar that'd be wonderful and they could they could even talk about that in their annual reports i think that's a fabulous idea that that we should pursue let's ask them to do that pretty confident that the ddt foundation cannot be uh investing in the things that the corporation makes money from but with that the one thing to consider is we could buy back the asset right like over time being depreciated so that is something we could consider um if folks will bear with me for one second we've been working on this for a while

146in almost two years like seeding the idea too and so we have an opportunity to put 24 megawatts of solar on the ground next year is the development timeline and so there is there is definitely discussion starting to happen which would be if we move forward you know in some way shape or form with a traditional utility or a sustainable version of a utility or whatever we're going to move forward with if we do that asset could be on the books and could be something that we could price out for taking over to so there's a little bit of there's a lot of a dance that's happening right now no those are those investors they're when they don't want to cash out in seven years or six seven years so you're right there's a real

147window of an opportunity there bring that back yeah you bet so you know as you know missy uh university of arizona of michigan which one i'm still saying that uh university of michigan university arizona did something a lot cheaper but university of michigan bought wind and it's all from it gte and we ended up paying extra for our energy because we did that everyone feels good because we're lowering our carbon footprint substantially in other words we're well ahead of our 2025 goal because we've done that uh you know hit it like this year um and so but nonetheless we're paying more for it and what i i'm guessing here is that there's a chance that we'll be in the same boat with what you're talking you're describing is in ann arbor and your subscribers will

148pay more than they're currently paying for their electricity but they will have the um the bonus of being able to say they've cut their carbon footprint by a substantial amount so there there's a chance right we need to see what the numbers come back in and we'll be able to answer that the market the the solar market this last year did not cost folks money in michigan which is unique because we didn't have enough generation and so solar was at kind of a premium for green product yeah it's a it's a weird thing how they bid into the market and i'm going to go outside of my expertise if i go much further i can get someone in to talk to the group about kind of the might the market will have chuck you probably

149know this was like a this was a gang gangbuster year for for solar and renewables period so there's a possibility on both sides and honestly each year could change you know one year you might pay a premium the next year you might actually make money on this asset that's one of the the things that we're going to be really transparent about when we have costing for people to be able to see and also on their bill c here's what it costs for the levelized cost to build this asset and here's the credit you got on the market you're in the red or you're in the black but what you're doing is you're assuming you know and i'm just trying to understand it yeah not trying to criticize or anything because i do think the carbon

150uh reduction is worth it but uh who is there any guarantee in terms of how large the downside could be probably not well we'll know that guarantee when we get there's no there's no requirement that we move forward when we get the bids we'll have that guarantee like that's that's when we start the negotiation on the pricing and we understand the ultimate downside and the ultimate upside we don't know like that's what we won't be able to understand but we will be negotiating an ultimate downside because you know when we talked about university you know when we made that the bid here to get university of michigan to do a ppa somewhere south where it will almost for sure be a lot cheaper um to build um and dispatch it's it's possible that there would

151be enough uh alternative energy on the grid uh that was also really cheap that all of a sudden we could um you know the energy would not fetch uh what we wanted in others the downside wasn't really protected um and that was that's a concern welcome to our our grid is different right from a grid like in texas or in oklahoma where you've got wind pushing wind off the grid itself because it's such a cheap form of generation here you know we're talking about natural gas and when that the well and coal like those peaker plants are coming online so we have a i think a different scenario and i probably should stop and let chuck respond to this because i know he knows better but let me say um last kind of framing especially

152for our new commissioners is when the city adopted the energy criteria and principles this was one thing that we talked a lot about too was the importance of local we don't have big pieces of land locally this is kind of it if we're going to have a local demonstration project you know we can do rooftop we'll do we're exploring community centers and other places but nothing like this and so this was the project that really sort of spoke to people is like the iconic draw that we have that's place based other things other bigger projects if we move forward we'll likely have to be outside i mean not likely we'll have to be outside if we're doing a large install chuck i feel like i just want to say did i mess up anything horrifically

153we'll be here all night if i start talking so i'll i'll not they'll not support you missy but i will say that that additionality that locality of of generating is exactly what compelled lansing to build delta solar that we own we sell power back to lansing um for that same very reason at a reasonable price in their community it's additive the ups and downs of tying off to the market micelle market is a speculative business i'll just say that there's no caps you're pretty exposed unless you can work out a rate structure that maybe has some caps to it but it'll be capped both sides you won't get the benefit then either somebody else will um so i'll just stop there but more more on that later if we have time thanks everyone um anyone

154else i have a question and a comment if i may but anybody else i want to go first and by the way i appreciate everybody's time investment in this and frankly um i would anticipate our next couple of meetings being longer ones because we're going to be dealing with some really significant topics that are going to have real importance to the 820 plan and to residents and costs and things like that so thanks for sticking with this i i want to bring up a point um that our former chair uh going back a couple wayne appleyard would say if um he was here and as wayne always pointed out um what we need to always be thinking about is the area under the emissions over time curve and i think one of the things that

155um missy is trying to do here is she's looking at and i want to put words in your mouth missing you can comment on on my on my words later is we're looking at what can we do that's additional and that reduces emissions as soon as possible and you know there are other things um as uh ken garber mentioned earlier that you know this is this is a potential asset um but what is that potential um asset of value um and under what time frame and if we and one other thing that we have to think about um in terms of what missy is doing she's also operating under a climate action plan that council approved and that is basically her marching orders and um we also approved as did council as missy mentioned or

156someone else i think was missy we have the renewable energy um criterion principles and those are also um things that should be guiding us in in these actions so um my i guess my question is missy if you would comment on this um if we were to look at this in the time in the framework or in the context of reducing emissions over time and looking this at it as um in terms of additionality we could include this asset as a part of a second franchise we could do it a part of cca we could do it a part of municipalization but as my understanding is certainly the last two have very long time frames um it's my understanding that senator irwin and representative robbie um feel that cca may never pass um obviously we

157have it in our plan um i it's my understanding they think municipalization could take 10 years so waiting for something like that to happen um as opposed to doing what the city is doing right now is really violating in a sense what we're trying to do is minimize the area under the emissions over time curve and the only question at least from my side is if there is a second franchise a different way of creating a municipality that might be different because it may not run up the same way against some of dte's primary interests but even there the time frame may be significant and so i'm wondering if i characterize this correctly and if you have any points or counter points to what i just said or anybody else for that i i mean

158i think that that's right this project is also explicitly called out in a20 as a project to have move move forward so it we're moving it forward until we find it's not viable yeah right so if if for example we were to say well we think that's the wrong thing then that is a major revision to the eight to zero plan and that would have to go back through council and council would have to revise the plan and say no don't proceed with this project um as it was framed in the plan and as approved by council is that correct that's correct and just to share the viability is like what we've been testing right the technical viability the environmental environment and viabilities we've been doing through the environmental assessment now we're at the final

159phase which is financial viability and so that is something we'll bring back to you and to council i think that that's real we have to test that viability any other comments questions closing thoughts if not we have one more major topic and then some other just clean up kinds of things at the end of our agenda right so just pivoting over i think um zac got pulled into a planning commission meeting so i think thea is with us thank you thea for staying with us as some of you know in a20 we have disclosures so we talked previously about the benchmarking commercial bench trucking multi-family benchmarking which actually should be before council uh first meeting in october we're just finally finalizing where it goes in the ordinance for weed so thank you for your support

160of that the next um ordinance was home energy labeling program and so zach and thea have been working on this uh in parallel and they're excited to do kind of a presentation overview of that and the first introduction of the resolution potentially in support of that so with that video would you like to take over i will could you allow me to share my screen please okay thank you sweet um can you all see that okay yes okay um well thank you um good evening kind of almost good night um but thank you for having me uh for those who i don't know my name is thea jaeger letter i am an energy analyst with the office of sustainability and innovations um like missy said i'm here tonight to provide an overview of one initiative

161that our office has been working on um which is a single family home energy labeling program uh just of note previously the energy commission worked on this program and at the time i think it was referred to as time of marketing so i just wanted to clarify it's the same project moving forward we're just um starting with a title that better reflects the actions of the project um so i apologize for any confusion um but just clearing that up um so tonight i'll run through what we hope to achieve with the program how it'll work and then our anticipated impacts um and so we looked to create a program that will encourage and create an incentive to to improve the energy efficiency of our buildings so we know that energy efficient efficient homes are more

162comfortable healthier safer safer sorry and more affordable to live in um this program specifically has the goals of clearly communicating information on the energy efficiency of buildings to prospective home buyers and by doing that allow energy performance and expected energy costs to be included in their decision making in addition the program has a goal of recommending cost-effective home energy improvements and connecting home buyers and owners to resources at an opportune time which is when they're buying their house as i think all on the line are aware the city of ann arbor adopted the a20 plan that lays out seven strategies to reach community-wide carbon neutrality by 2030 one of these strategies is to significantly improve energy efficiency of our buildings and under the strategy the a2c area plan also includes an action to benchmark and

163disclose the energy performance of our buildings um this represents an entire suite of programs with the goal of improving energy efficiency across our community the energy commission previously had me in to present on uh the commercial multi-family um and public buildings commercial benchmarking so you're well familiar with that one um and so this program is another tier that three three tier suite um aiming to create an incentive for energy efficiency improvements in single-family housing um so we're talking about this now we have a lot of work to do we're not moving fast enough we need to move faster um residential buildings represent one-fifth of our total community-wide emissions so it's a significant piece of our pride that we're looking at um so we know the city is looking to improve the energy efficiency of our

164buildings but why and how should we support single-family housing so when the national association of realtors released the results of their 201 2021 survey of their agents it was clear that the majority of realtors saw the value of energy efficiency and utility costs in buying and selling homes however less than half of realtors were comfortable discussing energy performance with their clients which is a big gap so and it's understandable between needing to understand green features how they're evaluated and how to explain them to clients it's a lot to become familiar with in addition at the time of buying a home it's a really key opportunity to incorporate energy efficient improvements one you haven't moved in that in yet and it might be easier to add insulation or other more project-based improvements and it's also a

165great time to pursue green mortgages and wrap in that financing when you have that opportunity every home has green features but we need to find a way to clearly communicate those um that and that information to home buyers so the home energy labeling program looks to leverage the does home energy score to provide that consistent information to our community both on the energy performance of our homes and then also to clearly communicate cost-effective opportunities energy efficiency improvements those that aren't aware the home energy score provides information that helps homeowners understand their homes energy efficiency and how to improve it so after a one hour assessment homeowners will receive a score that uses a simple 1-10 scale and that scale is based off of percentiles so as you can see in the u.s the distribution of

166energy performance is not perfectly normal so there's a bit of a skew going up but it's just on a simple one to ten scale to make it simple for the you don't need a degree in uh building science to understand how your home is performing um so after that one hour assessment homeowners receive that one to ten scale um i wanted to also point out um not only will it show your scale or the um score at that point in time it'll also recommend cost-effective improvements so improvements within a certain number of payback years and then it'll show what your anticipated score is after doing those improvements um this runs through other information that'll be included as well and so when selling a home uh your home entry score would be included in your home

167is listing and then your home is you would need to provide your home energy score report to the buyer at the time of sale um so i said the home energy score requires a one hour energy assessment um that does require assessors trained in a home energy score for those already carrying certifications in residential building and energy professionals it's pretty easy to get the home energy score typically a training that's provided for free the due has made this process really simple you work with a home energy score partner they take you through the training you work with a mentor to do one home in real life just to make sure that you actually know what you're doing and then you incorporate that home energy score into your business model um so it's pretty streamlined is

168well developed and it leverages these partner organizations that help folks get trained for free in terms of when we're planning to implement this program earlier this year we leveraged the energy commission's previous work we looked at results from cities that had implemented this program and were brand new when we were just looking at it and now we actually have results from so places like portland oregon um we've taken that refined the policy of it and then we started some stakeholder engagement this summer and we'll continue to that stakeholder engagement and some policy refinement based on their feedback and then with the end of this year we have to take that refined policy into legal review final public input and then kick off the ordinance approval process and then finally that last block should be folded

169with all the fun of implementation um so i showed this chart previously before with commercial benchmarking because i know it's a little complicated and i hope this breaks it down a little bit the buildings that are specifically covered under the home energy auto disclosure or the home energy labeling program are residential units so there's no crossover with other programs looking at commercial buildings and multi-family buildings these are really buildings that aren't being covered by any other energy efficiency program that is in that suite that we have but specifically only certain single-family homes would be covered um this is based off of the capabilities of the home energy score itself and it's all the only buildings that are eligible for home energy score are single dwelling units on their own lots or those that are connected

170uh horizontally but not stacked vertically so that's the definition of the covered homes and the ordinance um so who benefits from help it's a bit of a trick question because everyone benefits um for the home buyer it's an easily communicated energy performance and costs information so they're better informed and making one of the biggest decisions of their life and also the information they get on cost-effective energy improvements results in more affordable comfortable healthier and safer homes to live in for the homeowner that's selling their home it's an opportunity to showcase the green features that all homes have it's also an incentive for premiums for energy efficiency homes so we do see that homes that score that are highly energy performing can sell at a premium there's also no evidence that low scoring homes are devalued

171in the same way that high scoring homes see an increased value so it's a win-win and the science behind that is that appraisals assume the bare minimum of energy performance and so any improvement to that increases the home score for um for real estate agents we see that homes with an energy score regardless of that score sell faster we also see that the home energy score provides easy talking points and a clear easily understandable tool to communicate those green features of the home um in a way that they can be more comfortable talking about it without requiring extensive research or training but the community at large will also see progress towards our goals through our increased reduction of carbon emissions from buildings and a bit of our tagline but healthier safer more comfortable more efficient

172and more affordable homes to live in so also see an improvement to our housing stock overall now that i've covered how the home energy score communicates energy performance information clearly to home buyers sellers and real estate agents i'd like to talk about what impacts we'll see from doing that um so when the home energy score assessment provides these cost-effective energy efficiency improvements it's also an opportunity to link up those uh opportunities with existing rebates and programs um it's something that i think that we could do we can improve how we do that and it's a great touch point um for folks who we may not our office may never get in contact with otherwise um and that all results in higher participation and energy efficiency programs and lower energy use and energy costs for those

173occupying those homes we see real results from other cities as well and portland over 60 of respondents that use the home energy score report um they use that to inform what projects they would invest in um i think before portland we saw about a seven to thirty seven percent um implementation of energy efficiency improvements using the home energy score um in chicago we saw that homes with the home energy score um spent 20 days less on the market than those that didn't have it and austin saw also saw an increase in energy efficiency improvements of buyers that um bought a home with the home energy store so we see the market improving positively and creating an incentive for energy efficient homes energy efficient improvements um we also see benefits to those living in those homes

174uh the ac triple e just released a report that reveals that moderately and severely energy-burdened residents increased dramatically in 2020. um coven really hit people hard and now more than ever it's really important that our homes are affordable to live in um jenny who presented earlier also touched on the importance of those living in homes with high energy burdens um experienced by lower income households it's super important or energy efficiency is an important piece to reduce their energy burdens so we see um energy and cost savings and that's really really meaningful um especially for those in our city that are struggling to afford to stay here we also see that energy efficient homes are healthy and safe safe to live in i know we all know this i'm sorry for going through it again but

175you know when we remove um things in our home that are burning fossil fuels in our home we're much healthier and safer and these improvements support our local economy um we also with the support of rmi were able to more specifically estimate um the projected impacts of the first year of implementing implementing the home energy labeling program they asked that we would need roughly four assessors to rate the 4 thousand over four thousand homes that would be sold in a year we would see roughly 900 of those become retrofitted and then those are associated energy savings cost savings and co2 just of our first year um an increased real estate value so we anticipate a true change coming from this program um i know it's late i want to thank you so much for your

176time and open up to any questions thank you very much for the excellent presentation and for your leadership on this project uh we already have a couple people lined up robert thank you mr chairman um so i just uh thank you for your presentation uh thea it's very good to know as part of the roughly 50 of the folks that rent in the city i was wondering how something like this could be applied for renters totally ann arbor is unique one we have so many renters but we also see that we're calling the single family homes but a lot of them are rented um so when they are sold they would still be under this ordinance we are also working on developing um we'll just sorry for one second the um commercial multi-family benchmarking ordinance

177would cover multi-family homes that are over 20 000 square feet so more um larger buildings and homes i guess at that point um and then we're also working on developing a green rental program to also specifically address rentals since we know that you know half of our city rents and they're also more likely to experience energy and efficient homes and have a harder time paying to stay there i i just would just add briefly to that it would be great uh for folks uh that are looking at a potential rental lease to have that as a piece of information that's included about the property when they're considering whether they're going to rent in one location versus another i you know i think that would be very beneficial hey thanks so much thea um question so

178it states that the score will be presented um on the mls and then the details a detailed report will be given at the time of purchase um like how how far before the final purchase will the details that the report be presented because it seems like it would be beneficial for the the pending purchaser or the person considering purchasing the property to know you know the the potential expenses of you know improvements um that that would be made or could be made yeah and i want to apologize i um i'm picking up this presentation and i think i misinterpreted how that slide was written um the way the ordinance is written um as the house is being listed we would require that the home energy score and the report be listed in any um marketing

179for the home um the way that works out is usually you can't literally include the report in the mls you include a link so it does require this like extra step and initiative to really check out that information but it's there for those that are definitely interested um and then the report itself would also have to be available included in the package at time of sale that was a question but i apologize for that that was on that was my error councilman remember breaks thanks um three questions um so the first is i think you said it takes an hour to complete one of these assessments and i was just curious how that gets stunts briefly how that gets done so quickly because having done an energy assessment and things sometimes they take a lot

180longer than that so that's one question um the other one is just if you've thought about how this applies to accessory dwelling units um would that be two scores or you know is that like would that be covered by the the rental program you know just that sort of interface and then any how kind of realtor's been responding to this type of work in other communities or in our room sure um so how does the score only take one hour um the home energy score is not like a home energy audit and it's not as technically detailed um as what you would probably need to do some really intense energy efficiency improvements but it's an easy first step that gets kind of like the brunt of the information out that you just need for an

181overall assessment um so they've really pared down the information that you need to make that initial assessment so they just you know they look at what equipment is there they've really or the doe has really filed down you know the streamlined um set of information that you need for that initial assessment um and that's defined by the home energy score that's not us making that up um i think also with kovid they used to be exclusively in-house assessments i think when kobe picked up they also figured out how to do them virtually um and then in other cities like portland they've also found that um accessories that provide the home energy score we're also able to do a same-day turnaround so it seems like magic but it's been proven that it doesn't take very long

182um and people that find that it's their business model and what they provide they've you know successfully really made it a streamlined process um how does it apply to accessory drawing units that is specifically in the ordinance i would have to check if it's a separate um energy score or rolled into the um score for the whole building but i believe the adus are covered but i will have to follow up with you on that um and then how have real estate agents um kind of like perceived this um one i think it's a new thing and it's an extra step so initially i think people tend to have a little bit of hesitation around it however we found that really once we ex or once other cities explained um and kind of like took

183away this level of being scared of something unknown and new but we're able to present um information and results from other cities and kind of just understand what people's concerns were see if those were legitimate or if they hadn't really um arose in other cities so we've really seen that um a lot of pushback from realtors were actually from either fears that never happened or or fears that would would never happen um for example uh there was a lot of pushback that having a home energy score would take a lot of time to sell a home either getting home ready to sell or having a home on the market and we found that one same-day turnaround test or home energy scores are available and two that homes of the home energy score regardless of the

184score sell faster than homes with that one so we've really been able to see that um there hasn't been much impact on the real estate um process of selling a house did i answer all of your questions you did i thought of more but i'm going to let others go thank you welcome it's a little bit late in the evening to be talking energy efficiency i think but i'll try my best here um the key is going to be adoption right so i think we need to test this a little bit before we start adopting it in my mind i know other communities have adopted it it sounds fairly simple you get to an energy efficiency score and you can kind of correlate the two how it directly impacts greenhouse gas emissions could be quite

185different i think we need to understand the correlation better obviously i know a lot about this subject but um how this translates into actually being effective i think we need to kick around a little bit so i would suggest we look at it a little bit longer but i i think this may be something that could be adopted the real estate agents are going to have to really buy into it or else it will not survive but um i'm hopeful so anything we can do to help let us know great thank you i'm going to comment real briefly on what just talked about chuck knows this because he's on a working group that is working on this topic and that is there is a group under fungus leadership working on energy concierge services and um

186we have a real opportunity um to be able to link this ordinance with contier services so that if someone gets a home energy score and a list of potential improvements um that that individual then could go to the concierge service and we're looking at an online resource as well as a essential essentially a consulting service um that's obviously going to depend on funding availability and things like that but by connecting these two to chuck's point this would have the potential of greatly increasing the adoption rate of some of these suggested improvements so the two fit nicely um together council member regina thank you trimerski um i hope this will be a relatively quick question because i think i know the answer already but i just want to make sure that i know um so so

187i know i think i saw an earlier version of this that kind of tied a home energy score to action and it kind of at some point it might require there was a proposal at least being discussed that would require a homeowner to potentially make energy improvements prior to selling the home that is not included in this proposed ordinance correct correct that is not included okay all right i just wanted to make i wanted to make sure on that because i think while it's important for i think information to be out there i think it's also important to kind of allow that negotiation to take place between buyers and sellers and obviously there might be give and take um in you know what what is important to some home buyers versus others and and while

188i think it's important from a community standpoint to have more energy efficient homes i i wouldn't want us to get into the business of kind of negotiating those terms in that as well so i thought so and i just wanted to thank you for confirming hello uh yes uh thanks for the presentation um do we have any estimate of how much uh one of these would cost to do um a home energy score yeah yeah i'd have to pull up the estimates i think portland saw um their costs settle at around 150 dollars per score so very low cost um i think people thinking of like the more technical home energy audits or home or her scores tend to be a bit pricier but this is really um you know a low cost low time

189intensive um solution okay and one other quick things i'm as i understand it this is really just about efficiency changes you could make to the house i just had a thought that uh probably this isn't part of it but has there been any thought of also maybe analyzing doing a quick analyzation for how feasible it would be to add solar or as well as how easy based on the utility hookups you already have for i'm not saying this right but for ev charging basically like how easy it would be to add a level two charging to the existing setup in the house has that been thought about at all yeah yeah i also just want to quickly go back to your previous question um just as clarification the home energy score the price of one

190isn't set it's these um assessors that are certified by the partners and it becomes this like competitive business so they set their own score so the price i quoted may not be the same price everywhere it's unofficially set price um we have thought about that it's not in the ordinance right now um but the home energy score report that you get the score is set by the doe but the information that you include in that report is up to the um the partner or the city that's requiring it so if we wanted to include information on other initiatives that we're promoting such as getting solar and including a solar estimate um or recommending electrification improvements rather than fossil fuel efficiency improvements there's flexibility there for information that we'd want to include thanks bridgette thanks um

191would this be mandatory or voluntary and if mandatory there would need to be some sort of an enforcement um uh procedure and i'm wondering if that's been thought through yeah so we homeosquare exists and we're not seeing very many in ann arbor so this is this would be a mandatory um policy that when when you sell your home and market your home this is information that you have to include um the enforcement mechanism would be uh at time of sale requiring that the information is included um it's already an existing process that we have existing mechanisms to enforce on whether or not you include information or excluded information that's required so i think we're looking to rely on that existing process as this place for enforcement so would a sale be held up if this

192hadn't been done um you know i would have to look more into if it wouldn't go through or if it would just um result in um pursuing until the information is provided i'm gonna jump into support theo too i don't know if you caught this zach was actually tagged to be the lead presenter on this but he got pulled into the planning commission so apologies for that and sorry thea um i can see if he's free and bring him back in so i'll check bridget did you have any other questions otherwise mark but mark yeah just uh quickly when uh i ran the better buildings program for michigan um a while back ann arbor was one of the participants in that program anyway um to know his point we gave a rebate on the uh

193price of the energy assessment to homeowners that um went got with a contractor and actually had the work done so if they move forward on the recommendations um they got a rebate for the cost of the audit maybe worth throwing in there it may it wasn't a lot of money but it seemed to make a a difference to people yeah and i'm sorry you broke up a little bit on my end that was a rebate for doing improvements after having the audit we the better building program we rebated the cost of the audit back to homeowners who implemented the the recommendations so typically they want got a michigan saves loan or or whatever but um when they move forward there were a whole bunch of rebates that came along with it including refrigerator rebates from

194the utilities and hot water things and da da da and just one of the rebates that they got was the better buildings program covered the cost of the audit and rebated that back to them great thank you did you have another question okay uh the i have a question hopefully you can answer it tonight if not you could provide it because i think we will approve the resolution of support tonight i think it's just a first reading and that is i'm wondering if you can uh go over the timeline a little bit of when this is done in all the steps and when it's disclosed and things like that so um let's say i'm a homeowner and i approach an agent and we decide that we're going to list and we know that the market

195is very hot here in ann arbor i recall a slide saying that the home energy score will be included on the listing is it a precondition for being included on the listing or is only a precondition that it be available at the time of sale and how do we incent the homeowner the agent everybody involved so that we really truly have the kind of disclosure that when you walk into an auto dealership and there is um the label on the car and it says 26 miles a gallon that you would have the same kind of at least ability to do that at the time of interest as opposed to the time of sitting down and signing and finding out oh my house is a 2 or my house is a 10. can you can you

196and i i realize that every house sale is going to be different and things like that some houses sell in 24 hours and some sit on the market for weeks or months so i'm wondering how how the timeline in the ordinance actually reads and what's what's required yeah so whenever the house is marketed whether that's a listing or an open house whatever format it is it it would be required that the home energy score and its report would be included in that marketing and if a home didn't have it they would not be in compliance with the ordinance um the that information also would have to be provided at time of sale and if not provided then then an enforcement mechanism would take place excellent um and the homeowner would be notified that they were

197not in compliance with the ordinance if there was a listing without the home energy score included great good by the way i just might mention um he and i worked on this starting how many years ago three years ago maybe with wayne and a couple of other people and it's great to see this come to fruition and um the way you've described it tonight and answered that question um i'm i'm elated so let's let's uh let's see if we can get this thing through any other questions i think thea you might present uh a resolution for our consideration or miss you you're gonna share that so that we can have a free first reading of that and theo would you like to or would you like me to take that i am pulling it up

198right now so if you already have it up everyone talks about it also if anyone has follow-up questions or things that we weren't able to answer zach is still answering questions at the planning commission who is having a very detailed discussion about electrification tonight which is very exciting just email those to us and we'll get them out to the full uh we'll we'll take your individual questions and we'll circulate responses to the commission just remember not to not just start dialogue as a full body but we'll get responses missy um correct me if i'm wrong but the way the agenda i read for the planning commission was essentially something to the effect of how can planning activities better support eight to zero is it something that correct so it may be something that some commissioners

199might want to go back and listen to or watch the recording of because it's obviously yeah this this came up really last minute i believe i got the request for this on friday night um based on how the recognizing the buying time here the planning commission has had a lot of questions and and they really are i think embodying a20 asking developers a lot of very pertinent things and it's just raised some broader discussions about what is and is not possible they get different answers from different people and so they wanted to kind of have a working session to really explore some of that in depth um unfortunately this is the time of their working session so you can't be in both places so i too will be watching it and we'll be happy to

200share a link with the commission if you'd like i agree mark travis you have a quick question probably pulling that up yeah no i actually haven't so i know the resolutions in our packet missy is the actual ordinance available somewhere is that drafted yeah yeah it is we'll circulate that to uh to the group uh just know of course i think people will pick this up we don't have the chapter you know like those kinds of things will have to come in from from legal at some latter point but the content is um so we'll get that out to the the group i'll go ahead and read whereas the city intends to raise awareness of energy performance through data information and transparency with the goal of unlocking energy and cost savings opportunities increased comfort and

201health benefits for residents and whereas data shows that improvements to energy efficiency will spur economic investment through reduced operating costs and increased asset values and whereas buildings are the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in ann arbor and energy efficient buildings will consume less energy resulting in fewer greenhouse gas emissions and improved air quality and whereas reduced energy costs will create an efficient building stock and maintain affordability for residents whereas benchmarking and disposing energy usage across the community was an action identified in the unanimously adopted 820 plan resolved the ann arbor energy commission support the 2021 home energy labeling ordinance resolved the energy commission encourages city council to adopt the 2021 home energy labeling ordinance and to get implementations missy i'm curious we already approved a resolution in support of the commercial and multi-family

202benchmarking and disclosure ordinance i assume um that the two ordinances are structured very similarly in terms of whereas clauses and things like that just the resolved has changed to reflect this particular ordinance yeah and the memo is slightly different that accompanies that yeah okay great great so our to-do is to circulate just to kind of close that out we'll circulate the actual language of the ordinance for the commission and then folks will respond to questions right um can i get a motion to consider the ordinance in a second and we can have a little bit of discussion and then we'll vote on it the next time mark still moved so moved from mark second from someone from bridgette um any questions and discussion um we'll vote on this as uh discussed uh next time um

203in the second reading but anything else for thea or the resolution specifically that people want to talk about yes go ahead bridgette um it seems as though this is going to require a degree of staffing to educate realtors and be available to educate homeowners um roll it out [Music] ensure that people are certified to do these assessments these are his assessments and um i mean i love the idea and i agree with john it's great to see this being rolled out but i still see some details that haven't been flushed out and i'm a little hesitant to approve a resolution that doesn't touch on some of those details because i think a lot of those details i was on the committee with john and wayne um i think if we leave those details to chance

204we could alienate realtors and home buyers and anybody on nextdoor knows that not everybody in ann arbor is completely positively disposed to the government um so i'm just wondering if you could feel some of those concerns yeah um you know i we'll pull up the zack also in the mention of the budget in here um but one of the things with the home energy score is it uses these partners that do a lot of the staffing that otherwise would fall in the city which is i think one of the reasons why we're interested in the home energy score so that process of um training require you know making sure that people that are doing the home energy scores are qualified to do it quality assurance making sure that the scores that are coming out are

205accurate um you know we're looking at ways with a partner to to balance that that workload um and that's a partner that does supports um it wouldn't be something that we would be creating um there's some ones that already exist in michigan like the green home institute so would their services be free to us um right so the way the partnership works with doi and always have to double check on this um is that we don't need to be the partner for them to do a home energy score in ann arbor um we would just need home energy assessor to come to antarctica to do a home energy score but who would roll the program out and you know get it kind of do the first round of education for realtors and be there to

206field questions from homeowners right so that would be a staffing requirement that would be that's that's budgeted for that's a clarified that's budgeted for and then we have funding budgeted to cover the training for realtors and contractors about the program and then the partnership is with someone like green home institute who would actually do the audit once the marketplace understands what the market or what the audit is and the requirement around it so we built that into our budget okay and um have we had conversations with realtors about this they're currently ongoing um and i think will be scheduled sometime this year to to get some input and refine the policy based on their feedback um so just personally from my point of view it would be helpful to put some of that information in

207this resolution because again based on everything i know about time and marketing or what you're calling help um really getting community buy-in is critical to the success and again i i it would really help me feel confident supporting some as much as i want to support this i would rather see us um lay really good groundwork so that the rollout is smooth and supported then rush to roll it out and have it end up backfiring and you may have all of that planned out and be taking that into account but it would be helpful to see that written into a resolution if i can piggyback on that i agree with bridget and i like my dad we did have meetings with the board of realtors um in the past and i think if there could

208be some indication of the level of support or cooperation from them and also in terms of education and marketing things like that in the resolution that would be um something that i'd like to see as well erica yeah um i get kind of on bridget's point um so the um the actual assessment is going to be done by a a third party a private third party or multiple third parties right and so the cost of that will be determined by how much competition there is in our community um and it sounds like it would require a minimum if i was reading if i remember those slides correctly for individuals in our community to handle the um the anticipated workload for this do we have a sense yet if the um the market can provide for

209first for this do we have um let me try and see if i answer your question and if not let me know um what other cities found is they dropped this program and people saw it as a job opportunity and really flocked to it um so initially portland oregon who has a very similar ordinance um this is very much based off of it they had twice as many home energy score assessors than they have now um so there was definitely demand for people that wanted to be home energy score it was just seen either for those who already do it as an ex already do um you know energy audits or other energy performance evaluations as another form of income um what ended up happening was that there's also only a certain number of homes

210sold in cities each year and so that number eventually um kind of normalizes for a number that will sustain that that amount of realtors as a solid income um and so initially we might see more than four be interested i actually anticipate that we would see much more than four um but that's roughly an estimate of um you know a stable income for those four people um i'm just going to say that the michigan energy efficiency contractors associations was one of the benefits that came from the better buildings program for michigan where we upgraded energy efficiency auditors into at a much higher level they're certified the michigan energy efficiency contractors association it's all of its members are certified and contracted in in this kind of work um in fact i think i think the utilities

211all require uh certified contractors in this work for both dte and consumers and and a handful of municipals that i know so i dare say that an unqualified energy efficiency uh contractor would have a hard time making a living in the state um so i'm having the contractors if we put a program together believe me the best of the contractors will be here because this is where the action is going to be because our housing stock is is worth a lot and they know that the market here is filled with people who who believe in energy efficiency and and contractors and if we can provide them with a way to embed this value-added option into their houses we will move more houses and believe me the energy efficiency contractors they know this and so that

212we don't have to worry about um qualified people coming in here to fill this market gap um you know all we have to do is set a level playing field and a set of rules which this ordinance does and the good contractors will be here they are here fully agree um zach greetings they let you out of the planning commission alive i'm alive thanks for joining us i think we're basically at the end um i don't know if anybody um missy or thea any particular question that you want to post to zach um going back or should we um table things and um just plan on having a second discussion it's getting late um anybody else that has anything that they want to make sure they uh bring up now if not um certainly contact

213thea zach or missy in preparation for our next meeting anything else anything really urgent okay great so um we can move on to carleen go ahead this isn't really urgent but i think it'll be very beneficial for us to look at the actual wording of the ordinance so between now and our next meeting it'll it'll help a lot thank you okay we're now on to the ramp down to the meeting we have time now for a report from osi as well as from commissioners so i'll start i guess with missy and missy i think you have a couple of things to talk about right yeah there's a few things and sorry i'll go fast like our meetings tend to go along so uh here we go uh green fare just want to share it's october

2141st it's going to be our first autumnal autumnal i can't say that word in autumn uh we're excited about it so if you have an opportunity any of your organizations want a table the deadline is tomorrow um that staff are working on a heat pump workshop which will be held next week it's actually at the distilling company you can come in person or you can join virtually i'm pretty excited about that event we're also working on a biggest loser competition and working on some contract language uh to help you to lose some mmbtus this fall as we get ready for winter so stay tuned we'll be announcing that shortly and then our free tree giveaways um many of you probably know the time to plant pieces in the spring in the fall so we are

215um we're sprinting at a whole bunch of plantings if anyone wants to volunteer and join us we have a free tree giveaway on october 2nd the day after green fair we'll be at leslie science and nature center all of the trees that we had to give away for free went in about 16 hours and that was 750 trees so we're obviously going to increase size going forward but they were just taken doubled up and then the following weekend we're doing a tree planting in the bryant neighborhood we were able to get a grant to buy trees for free for that neighborhood um and so if anyone would like to join us we could use some extra help kind of going out digging some holes blending some trees um hopefully it will be a very lovely

216nice day and then i just wanted to share some other things happening our aging place efficiently work is going really really well and all things that pilot is teaching us how great the need is for low-income seniors in our community right now so i would say if anyone happens to find some grant opportunities can you please let us know really scale that program to give you a sense of magnitude we have roughly 8 500 to invest for household and helping uh do efficiency work and aging support and our first few houses need about 15 to 20 000 so we got a really big gap here and so we're having to prioritize and find new mechanisms but we are um and the partners are fabulous and not work so that is going it is going well

217we're learning a lot and understanding the magnets because um and then our rooftop solar program we're getting to final design i can't wait to bring them back to you uh my little excitement is that i expected somewhere between one to maybe two megawatts and i think we're gonna have double potential uh generation on rooftops which is really exciting for municipal facilities because i'll be behind the meter uh solar so uh stay tuned as soon as i get as soon as i get information i'll happily bring that to the commission we expect in the next few weeks and then i just wanted to share that we are thinking about some sustainable ways to continue generating energy within the community and this is something that came out of an energy commission meeting actually the meeting with paul

218fed and val greater we've been like toying with some ideas and we're going to put pen to paper and bring something to you all shortly for that especially in reflection of council's recommendation that we come by the end of the year with a consideration on a municipal utility so we want to make sure that we think about a municipal utility in all the ways and all the values that we hold so uh we've got that scheduled for tentatively in november to come we're sprinting trying to get this up but acknowledging how late this meeting went the idea of doing it in october feels miserable so we'll try to get back to these problems those are just some of the updates um i actually one last thing i think julie's gonna kill me i know she's

219listening we are getting really really close uh took one and a half two megawatts of solar through solarize so i just saw some numbers coming today she's gonna text me in a second i'm just waiting for my phone to light up but uh it's looking fabulous so stay tuned i'll let you know since we have the two megawatt mark awesome commissioners points of interest council member lee ethans commissioner george uh just very briefly uh missy uh for some of those dates for the events uh are you gonna be able to put those out uh via email oh you're on you sorry um yeah i'll send them out to the group via email they are on our website and they are in our newsletter uh for folks if anyone in the public is listening thank you

220see there's there is i believe a web page specifically for events on the osi website right yes yeah but i'll say i'll send that webpage uh very very briefly and thanks to our newest commissioners this does seem like a particularly long meeting um but thanks for sticking with us um i just wanted to give everyone update that uh council also kind of worked through just a series of calls with dte as a storm update um a post storm update i guess and kind of the the power outages and things like that um it very much council member briggs and i actually ended up being on the same call but my understanding from from a few offhand conversations is a lot of the calls went very similarly which it turned very much into conversations around um

221you know at one point dte acknowledging that a lot of the problems were were exacerbated by climate change and and stronger storms but then also struggled to commit to us that um that their that their time frame for committing to renewable energy and combating climate change wasn't unreasonable um so at times i will say it got a little combative um but but i just wanted to give you that update as well that that we are pushing them in kind of all sorts of ways to try to to make additional improvements here um councilmember briggs also challenged them a little bit on some of the the nature of tree trimming um in order to uh the ways that that has been happening um we talked extensively about the migraine power program and our desire to see

222that not cost consumers more in order to invest in renewables if that's truly a a priority of the company um and then also really just talking about there there was some conversation around an effort to hopefully make uh or come up with a solution that ann arbor could contract with dt to have a 100 renewable energy for the city and just wanted to acknowledge that as part of our you know a20 goal that that would need to be something that could be replicable and that it wasn't just a solution for ann arbor simply because we're the problem child right now um and so challenging them to really be thinking about broader solutions so that as soon as other communities said wait we want that contract too they didn't say actually that was exclusive for ann

223arbor um so i just wanted to give you that update because those conversations are happening um and and relevant i think to a lot of the discussions we're having here piggyback on that real quickly um i could send it to you but um i don't know if you pronounce it lazard or lazar they do a levelized cost of energy and that's something that you can certainly take to a meeting with dte and show them how competitive renewables are um with more traditional power generation forms so for that argument about trying to get migraine power costs down that's that would be a great tool i can send that if you're interested commissioner cleavy sorry um just quickly um uh last on thursday we uh had a last semiconductor um on solar energy and embedded energy uh

224and embedded carbon and solar there's a great talk about how not all solar is equal some of you were part of the signed on there were 50 some odd people who did across the state um i think it behooves us to remember that hemlock semiconductor is in michigan midland michigan it's one of the largest largest solar manufacturers in the world and that when we buy solar low-cost solar from china it has embedded energy in it carbon in it because they produce their energy with coal and they're adding it and when you make a solar panel with coal that embedded emissions goes with it and travels with that panel and again you may be able to buy a panel from china and it pays for itself in seven years but it takes 45 years for the

225emissions to pay for payoff because of the fact that it was made with coal and dirty coal and in an energy inefficient way so um if you are interested in this topic um there is a youtube channel glra's youtube channel has the the presentation i urge you to look at it we have if we have someone a worldwide leader in low carbon solar manufacturing and they have warehouses of solar in midland michigan and we're going to be spending tax dollars to john murski's point if we need to speed up the emissions process if we're going to do a solar program um we need to take into consideration how these solar panels are made where they come from and if they're manufactured with electricity generated from coal it's probably not a smart investment of taxpayers dollars

226thank you thank you council member briggs i'm going to ask you to talk about the and our lighting ordinance very briefly yes it is a good update um so council did adopt um the the lighting ordinance um which um john was the the energy commission liaison i was the planning commission liaison during the development and then um also sarah mills was also one of the other liaisons from planning commission and then we had some good community uh participants as well sally ue from the university of michigan um was very influential in terms of the development but it was great to see it finally get it get to council and get adopted and um and i think it's if i remember correctly maybe this september 26 is the date that it it goes into effect and

227we're going to be hopefully meeting with the u of m to see if we can uh push similar kinds of lighting improvements on u of m campus so anybody else um you know what i'm sorry just for by way of i know there's three new commissioners for those who aren't paying attention it was a dark skies he missed this um it was a dark skies um revisions to our lighting ordnance to try to make sure that we were directing light where it belongs which is on the ground as opposed to up in the sky great so now we're at the point of uh second public comment and i understand that the meeting id um was potentially incorrect and i think carlene did you girls missy do you have the correct meeting id was it the

228one that i read off that is correct or is it incorrect on the agenda yeah it's it's posted incorrectly but yeah we have fixed for future meetings but let me get you the idea it's right here the number that i have is and i think it's the same all year 91357.834502 it's nine it's 937 six seven five one nine three seven six seven five one six eight one nine six eight one nine okay so i'll repeat that then along with all the other numbers so this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes uh please call [Music] eight 888-788-0099-487785 three five two four seven and enter meeting id check me if i'm right missy nine three seven six seven five one six eight one nine this information um is not properly

229displayed on the agenda so um i'll repeat it again nine three seven six seven five one six eight one nine um and city staff will select callers that have raised their hands one by one using the last three digits of your phone number in order to raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak press star 9 on your phone you will hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak and you press star 6 to unmute your phone when please speaking move to a quiet area and please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments do you have anybody that's hung with us that long missy not yet here not yet okay we'll wait a few seconds i see commissioner creeby's hand up but that's all i see

230i think that mark left his hand up from before okay oh it's down now yeah and no one chemistry pardon me we do have one no okay okay we can come back to somebody if they come but in the interest of time um let's move on to items for the next agenda missy do you want to talk maybe first about that because we have um speakers um speaking on the topic of municipalization you might say where they're from and who they are and then a few other things may be about the topic we're going to devote the meeting to that in october yeah you bet so our meeting in october has two guest speakers lined up we have city manager randy knight from winter park florida and jonathan cohn who's the interim director of climate

231programs in boulder both of those individuals either worked extensively the entire time on the municipalization efforts in their communities or are overseeing them in the case of uh manager knight right now in uh overseeing the municipal utility so they're on doc uh to speak with us next month and in advance of that we did circulate some questions three questions hopefully pretty straightforward we just want to get a sense of how best to use that time and so the questions um what i'm going to do is compile them excuse me i'll share them with our speakers i'll also share them anonymize back with the group so we can get a sense of what it is we want to know to use that time as effective as possible we can generate questions that folks have and see

232where we have similarities and differences and then getting to the council has asked us to consider a feasibility study and having i'm so sorry having an understanding of what that is is really important and so we have a question um there is no right or wrong answer in this we just want to understand what do you think a feasibility study is and what would be useful for you to know from that so share anything you want um and again we'll we're going to aggregate and send back out so everyone can see what other people are thinking in this and then we can share it with the speaker so our time is useful as possible and the due date for that is the 24th i believe right missy uh i'm going to trust you on that

233yes yes it's the 24th yeah it is the 24th i just saw it so some of you have already submitted questions it's not obligatory to do so but if anybody has specific questions please get those to missy with a copy to me anything else i guess we may consider missy do you intend to put a second reading of the help uh resolution on the agenda you want to wait until i'm gonna propose we wait if folks are okay with that i feel like that's a really heavy topic and we need to read the ordinance and talk about it um so i'd like to give you more time if that's okay maybe we could have i'll be available to do q a if there's any like burning questions that you had but to keep this really

234focused maybe we just focus on i was happy at hand so as a reminder to everyone or maybe for the few of you who um weren't connected in the last week or so um council passed a resolution asking that we take a position on a feasibility study and do so by the end of the year so that doesn't mean that we have to do it in our december meeting it could be done between now and then my guess is that we will have two very interesting presentations with a lot of q a and that may lead to some more robust discussion possibly in our november meeting and december meeting but that's something that we as a commission um will need to talk about is when do we feel that we're ready to to take a

235vote on whether we support a feasibility study or not so that we meet the request of city council is that fair in the way i've represented that council members radina and briggs okay good so that's our next meeting and that means we're done through with the agenda and that means you can all say goodbye to each other and i want to thank all of you for your service and for uh your dedication to this topic we've got a lot in front of us over the next decade you