001um by the time we get to roll call hopefully everybody will have logged in so i need to go through my spiel and i'll start that then right now uh so it is june 8th at 6 02 pm and i'm calling this meeting to order my name is john mursky and i am participating from my home here in ann arbor uh welcome to our meeting this evening electric electronic meeting of the energy commission this virtual meeting is to affect social distancing and to mitigate the spread of the kovit-19 virus we will conduct this meeting similarly to in-person meetings commissioners please remain on camera just as you would be visible during in-person meetings also mutual microphones when not speaking public comment will be via telephone only to speak during any of the public comment opportunities please
002call one of the following toll-free numbers 888-788-0099-487-853-5247 and enter meeting id number [Music] 913-57834502 by the way these numbers remain the same for the entire year for the energy commission meetings this information along with two local diamond numbers is also available on the published agenda in the public notices section of the city website on the broadcast of this meeting on ctn channel 816 which is att channel 99 and online at www.a2gov.org backslash watch ct end so missy would you please read the landing acknowledgement yeah absolutely chairman thank you i acknowledge that the land the city of ann arbor occupies is the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the anishinabe including the ottawa ojibway and otawatomi as well as lined up peoples i further acknowledge that our city stands like almost all property in the united
003states our 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 before we take the roll call i'd just like to acknowledge that several commissioners term has expired and i would like to thank them for their service so mike schreiber theresa hatcher and julian singleton all of them are stepping down from the commission and i want to thank them very much for the time that they've devoted to the commission and work on energy matters um in particular i
004want to call out mike treiberg who has served many many years on the commission um going back all all the way to working on the original 2012 time in action plan and i think all of you know that he's been a key part of the commission in its work the last several years so thank you all very much and with that um because of their absence and because of the fact that their terms are up um they obviously um will not be here tonight and that obviously is affecting um who's going to be here so i just wanted to acknowledge that and missy go ahead and um do the call from here then absolutely commissioner hook him sorry chuck hook um and my home in ann arbor good evening thank you for that excellent reminder
005if you could please uh state the the city that you are residing in uh commissioner mccomber uh president and joining from arcadia michigan commissioner pleavey present and uh here from my home in ann arbor okay commissioner levin here uh at my home in ann arbor tia murski here also from ann arbor vice chair colvin garcia president and calling in from ann arbor thank you councilmember briggs present and here in ann arbor once again sorry that my video is not working councilmember radina president here in hanover thank you commissioner president uh from my home in ann arbor thank you commissioner mccoy here and in ann arbor thank you commissioner george here uh in the city of ann arbor thank you commissioner kerber larry you're muted but we see that you're here i know you're here we
006saw you saying present for whatever coming in from seattle excellent jamerski you have 100 of sitting commissioners great thank you very much thanks for everybody for attending i think we're going to have a great meeting tonight uh the first uh agenda item is or i guess we've already had a couple of agenda items but the next agenda item is public input this is the first of two opportunities for residents or anyone for that matter to speak for up to three minutes if you are watching on ctn please call 888 788-0099 or and 877-853-5247 meeting id 913-5783-4507 this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda in the video feed city staff will select callers that have raised their hand so to speak one by one i'm using the last three digits of your phone number
007in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate you desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone you will hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area and mute any background or television noise that we may hear you clearly and finally please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments do we have anyone not yet not yet well we know we have a delay of maybe 30 to 40 seconds so we'll wait for someone to raise their hand car ending in one three four i'm gonna you should be able to speak in on the airline uh thank you dr stultz and chair mursky it's ken garber 28 haverhill court um i have a question to ask really about
008the landfill solar project um i'm an outsider coming late to the discussion um and i have to admit the language of the um vgp voluntary green power settlement approved by city council in april it's hard for me to really understand um so as i read it um the city will pay for the landfill solar project but dte will own it the electricity that's generated will feed into the energy grid and be distributed throughout the dte system however the city would become the so-called anchor tenant and will sign a long-term contract for the life of the asset the city becomes a quote subscriber of last resort unquote for credits and wrecks issued from the project but it would have the ability to sponsor community solar i assume this means deciding which entities for example pittsfield township
009get to pay dte for wrecks or other credits based on solar generated electricity from the landfill any leftover credits the city would purchase so as i understand it city residents will pay uh what 40 to 50 million dollars which was the black veatch estimate to construct the 25 megawatt project that dte will own and utilize the city is anchor tenant decides who buys renewable energy credits from dte and we also agree to buy any leftover credits so if i'm reading this right dte adds to its renewable portfolio at our expense of course the public benefits by having a 25 megawatt solar facility added to the grid but shouldn't dte be doing more renewables anyway at its own cost and are we missing an opportunity here uh paul fenn the speaker that we brought in back
010in march uh suggested that the city establish a parallel utility a franchise a kind of mini muni that would start to keep compete with dte on a small scale fenn said such a city-owned utility could be established fairly quickly maybe within a year is there any possibility to incorporate a city-owned landfill solar project into such a parallel franchise just a question again i might be misreading the settlement agreement and i don't know how feasible this would be or if the settlement agreement um by its very nature um basically locks us in to uh the arrangement that's outlined the um landfill solar pilot um so i welcome a discussion of why city ownership of the landfill is not feasible uh regardless i hope you'll push for full transparency in the up upcoming landfill talks so that
011the public and energy commission can be informed and can participate thank you so much yeah thank you very much ken uh chairman we do not have any other folks in the queue okay um maybe we can uh discuss some of these points later on okay so um our first uh agenda point is um an energy education update uh from um dave campbell um former city staffer in the energy area and or member of glra do we have dave with us yeah he was just being promoted hello hello hello hey dave i got kicked off for a second so i don't know exactly where you're ready for me now we are all right and i can share my screen with this uh button down here hopefully all right before i do i just want to say
012hi to the energy commission members and uh introduce the fact that uh working with missy from you know very start of the a20 project the great lakes renewable energy association has been a partner on a number of things uh at one point missy asked for people who were interested in getting involved in community education and i joined a group of people that are doing that uh it is now we've been meeting for oh a number of months the group is pretty much myself we've got the hands-on museum the leslie science center and the ann arbor district library are kind of the other people that are in this group that have been working towards some community education kinds of things with the a20 kickoff week we aimed with very little time to try to do a
013couple of activities one which we did manage to pull off was uh oh i don't know bringing back the uh hands-on museum farmers market uh kids exhibit that was used to be on a kiosk uh at the farmers market but with the fifth avenue reconstruction disappeared for a while and uh we're busy bringing that back now one of the activities that we've been pursuing is related to the fact that before the covid the summer before kovid we had been josh mcdonald and i had been working with the hands-on museum and leslie science center to do a stem grant to bring a weeks-long renewable energy day camp to ann arbor and we ran the first pilot of that the summer before kovid and we had great results with that and one of the activities that we
014did with that involved taking there were about 14 students in the seventh grade give or take a grade or two that were in this day camp we walked them up to the top of the fourth in washington parking deck to look out over the roofs of downtown ann arbor and started just asked them to look around for solar collectors and and made a made a game out of it so we started looking at utilizing this is perhaps an activity for the a20 week the library is is going to incorporate it into their uh summer games a whole renewable energy section of scavenger hunt and whatever their renewable games we're moving forward with with these things with the idea of adding more and more right now we've been concentrating on downtown they wanted to have a
015family activity where they could come to a section of downtown and park and walk around and have access no locked doors no anything to these activities and so i'm going to show you it's the beginning of what we've come up with so i'm going to try to share the screen and somebody's going to give me a thumbs up or something when they can see what i'm talking about hopefully you can now we can alright so what we've got is something that we're calling downtown ann arbor's invisible solar which is solar energy systems visible from the fourth washington parking structure roof deck so we're working on the signage and everything that'll go along with this but it's pretty simple how do you do it you go to the parking structure of fourth in washington and you
016take the glass elevator up to the roof deck on the seventh floor and then you can walk around the roof deck and look out in all directions and you can start finding some solar energy systems the roof deck has been fenced all the way around so it's safe for families kids and even dogs so what can you see from up there uh washington county courthouse put in some solar energy uh from the roof deck this is what it looks like fourth in washington to the uh county office building over there it's a 10 kilowatt folder photovoltaic system that was built in 2011. i went over to the ann ashley parking roof deck and got some other pictures of it because you can see it a little bit better from there and that's when i discovered
017there's also a solar water heater on the county office buildings there they supplied me with this picture of the water heater on their building that provides hot water to their office building fire station number one has solar energy on it that's right across the street from the police and courts building from the parking structure you can see it it looks just like that what it is is a solar water heating system that was built in 2007 to heat the shower and wash water this is uh the firemen live here shower here everything and they really like hot water for washing the fire trucks off in the winter this is a picture of it during its construction this is a very famous picture that was put in the national planning magazine and came within inches of
018being the cover picture for planting magazine one month but what happened was the crane that was supposed to lift these collectors to the roof didn't show up and they ended up using the ann arbor ladder truck to raise these collectors to the roof of that building then we got a grant from the state and hired the hands-on museum to build an exhibit inside their museum to talk about how this water heater works and and whatever it had a real-time readout on temperatures of the water in the storage tanks and at the collectors a very nice exhibit city hall actually has three separate solar energy systems on it totaling 810 square feet on the police and courts and another 520 square feet on the offices that were built in 2010. from the parking deck you can
019see these collectors that are on the police and courts building one of two systems that are there uh one's 800 square feet of collectors that heat hot water for bathrooms and showers and there's a second system that supplements space heating for police and courts this system which you can see these collectors from down on huron street on the guy c larkin building provide hot water for bathrooms and showers in the city of old city hall building the old a3c architects building at 210 east hiron has these highly visible solar collectors from the fourth washington parking structure that were built there by a3c architects in 2007 just to introduce green technology to their clients they had something they called the urban retreat up on the roof it was a glasswall penthouse that had a solar demonstration
020and a living roof garden and could be used by government and non-profit groups and i actually held a number of meetings in that when i worked for the city this is a picture back to guard the living garden is no longer there but you can see it behind it but this is what it looked like there were six kilowatts uh demonstrating both standard rigid pv panels and thin film stick on panels the rooftop garden and they actually have a geothermal heating system with wells that were drilled in the alley behind this building the mckinley town center way down in the right corner here i've built a system that from the rooftop is barely visible at all that's all you can see of it from the rooftop of the fourth from washington parking structure but a
021google earth picture of it shows the extensive solar energy that's on top of that building this was a 19.8 kw solar photovoltaic system built in 2011 uh back when google was negotiating an extended lease with mckinley they wanted one of the things they asked for was solar energy on the building and mckinley came through with it i worked for the dda at the time and we gave them uh i think a twenty thousand dollar grant towards paying for it uh arbor brewing company is just across the street from the fourth washington parking structure and this is what you can see from there there's two separate systems on the left the solar electric just a three kw system that was used to power the pumps for the brewing process and on the right is a bunch
022of evacuated tube solar water heating collectors to provide heat for the brewing process built in march 2012 got a couple of pictures of it being built and then the owner matt breath up on the roof with that this was the upper brewing was the ann arbor's first solar powered brewer probably michigan's first solar powered brewery and some people went on to make a career in designing solar-powered breweries after this installation again this was another one that was subsidized by the ann arbor dda at the time all right there's two other systems that would be visible from the fourth and uh washington parking structure but there's a building in the way and those are the farmers market solar and the solar carport at the fourth and catherine surface lot um but you can see them easily
023from the ground this is just a quick picture of what the farmer's market solar looked like a thin film solar collectors that were glued to the metal roof this is a picture of it during construction this is mayor hifja holding one of the roofing panels with the stick on solar on it we again hands-on museum we got a grant to hire hands-on museum to create this educational kiosk about the farmers market solar it had interactive buttons that kids could push to find out how much energy was being produced and how the system worked and this particular this is a big heavy piece of bronze that is what's being saved and we're working to get that not mounted in another kiosk like this but mounted into the wall of the market office building itself on the
024outside so people can come by see it realize their solar energy at the market and learn about it finally uh the solar carport in the parking lot was built just a few years ago in 2018 it's 13.4 kw carport it was at the time billed as a demonstration of concept as the dda was looking at the rooftops of all their parking structures and wondering how much solar they could possibly build on those rooftops so we put this here as a demonstration and to learn about how they work it has three publicly available electric car chargers underneath it where you can public can come in and plug in their cars and run their cars with sunshine 100 pollution-free carbon emission driving and then just one last fun fact in 2017 ann arbor was one of 13
025cities that were in the first selection group to become a solar america city we received four hundred thousand dollars in federal funds and support to implement six hundred and thirty thousand dollars in a community-wide program to promote renewable energy in ann arbor mariha was quoted as saying this award is another indication that ann arbor is serious about achieving renewable energy goals and continuing our leadership um so that's you know what we're trying to do is bring education and awareness you know not only of what is in the city but a lot of the history behind this effort that we are now pursuing in ann arbor to uh you know become carbon neutral by and uh i just thought i'd share that with you guys i'd uh be surprised if you didn't learn something from that
026that's my presentation i'll take questions if you want thanks steve um that was great i had no idea how extensive the history was uh dave thanks so much for for informing us about that um i'm wondering if there's going to be any opportunities to provide um on-site uh interactive educational displays uh so like for example at the north side uh community center installation um or other areas throughout the city that are planned like the resiliency centers that are that are gonna be going in the way we're feeling right now the uh the people that are involved in this group from the librarian from leslie science center hands-on museum are all really enthusiastic about this and and we're just we're just this is our first toe dips here what i showed you we think it can
027go a long ways and we think that what we're we'll warn missy now uh yeah we think that as we move forward we'll be presenting some form of a grant application to say let us expand this out further and certainly things like north side community center uh there are many many many spots around the city where people could become aware of that we're already been doing some solar there and learn how it can be utilized you know in their own life commissioner phoebe david how are the how were the grant funds that you mentioned 650 000 was that allocated to these projects or how else was that spent do you you know is there any left yeah i don't uh you know those grant funds came just as i was leaving so you know you'll
028be happy to hear the clean energy coalition was uh heavily involved in how those were spent um part of it was spent you know 140 000 of it or so was spent through clean energy coalition for a solar plan for the city another large chunk of money was spent for a small solar energy system on top of the michigan theater i you know i was not around for how that where all that money went but it did you know the point here is to just say that you know it what missy has done is come along and kick this up to the next level or three but ann arbor has been uh working at it for quite a while also member grace thanks yeah great presentation um definitely learned a lot it seems like from
029the dates that at least for the downtown solar there was kind of a big boom kind of in the around 2007 to 2012 and then there's been at least from the view of the fourth and washington deck a little bit of stagnation and so just curious if any thoughts on why kind of the downtown business solar you know hasn't continued as soon as i retired from the city of ann arbor in 2008 i got hired both by the downtown development authority to run a downtown energy program and by italy iclei to run their national energy office program but what it meant was that downtown development authority was heavily involved in energy programs for the four or five years that i was working with them and we did oh i don't know 140 audits of downtown
030businesses we followed that up with a 50 uh support up to 20 000 for energy improvements at those businesses and a number of those businesses uh use that 20 000 towards uh putting solar energy on their roofs as one of one of the things they did so i think that some of that is because we had incentives available anybody will tell you anytime you want to give out incentives you know actual money people like it thanks uh commissioner mcquy please uh yeah that was great information i definitely didn't know a lot of it um my comment is more of a sad update to the presentation at least for me personally but my understanding is that ann arbor brewing co closed last year their downtown ann arbor location so it's cool to know that they were
031brewing with the with the solar panels and i hope whoever moves into there if they haven't already is able to utilize those as well and be an attractive thing to them but thanks for the content anyone else i just have a quick comment dave look judging by some of those shots you'll need to also mount a little telescope there at the top of the washington parking deck and maybe we need to have one of those uh mountain like panorama signs where you can look at all the peaks and you point they point out where this is the system in that system so um and one one last comment from my side uh my recollection isn't maybe you can confirm this dave uh mayor i think around 2005 um declared a goal of 5 000 solar
032installations in ann arbor by 2015 and i think we probably got um maybe a tenth of that if we were lucky and to council member briggs's uh question certainly one of the the issues was if you look back at solar pricing per watt um back in that time frame um the people that were doing this were doing this for altruistic purposes for the most part um because there really wasn't particularly a great financial payback and that's probably another reason why we saw a drop-off in installations not only downtown but just in general across the city um so those are just some thoughts from my side i can see that commissioner cleavy also has a comment just a quick thing on ann arbor brewing i think there's somebody in we see staff or some place but
033we have an opportunity here to see if solar improves the real estate value of a building or what impact if anything it has on a commercial building i don't know if they're if they've moved that array or they're going to move that array if they're just going to leave it as part of the building and include it in the sale but it would be interesting to see what impact if any it had i know on davis house for example he had some difficulty selling a house because people didn't know how to how to manage it or run it et cetera so you know what what impact if if any hopefully positive impact it has on the sale of that building because it would be an interesting question to get asked and answered does anybody know
034is the building for sale or just is it just up for lease right now i i don't know um by the way i would also um note that if i'm not mistaken commissioner cleavy and former commissioner apple yard and maybe some others um maybe commissioner hookum helped put solar on the rooftop of the arbor brewing uh facility in gypsy isn't that right mark chuck my pe stamps on both systems i ended up taking over uh interesting collaboration of parts and pieces in matt graf's basement to put that up on the roof and get it built with another gentleman so i'll take a little bit of credit for it my knowledge is that that's a lease building and i'm not sure if it's attached but we did a pretty solid job of attaching the solar somebody's
035have a hard time taking it off we're good legends knows that uh there were some people that were very active to get those initial solar app installations up and running and um it's great that we have julie doing the solarize program and she reported today in a webinar um how numbers are really just going out of the roof so um i think uh she's gonna present again in two weeks if she's not missy um on the implementing eight to zero at noon um and i think give um a fuller update on on solarize is that correct that's right yeah i can i can share that after the meeting with the commissioner yep okay thank you very much dave thanks for all the good work and we're looking forward to uh see what finally the uh
036the product is and uh um hopefully that what that doesn't in terms of accelerating additional installations so the next uh point on our agenda is a proposed resolution um and we have two guests uh so this is a resolution on low enviro low embodied carbon materials in construction uh and we're going to have her presentation um from jan culperson and from luca henron henriette and then i will together the three of us will introduce the language of the resolution um and uh walk ourselves through it and um the idea would be that we would um vote on it we could vote on it tonight but depending on the discussion um we may uh postpone that until the next meeting so uh jan or luka i think luca you're the one starting off correct uh yeah
037that's right uh yeah but if you're so much if i could share at the screen that would be great yeah jan go ahead hold on you should be good now jim um i would ask that both of you introduce yourselves i don't know if that was part of the plan anyhow but uh yeah great uh [Music] wonderful um well uh as as uh chairman mursky said uh my name is luca henrien um i am a postdoctoral research fellow in the global co2 initiative um in the audience today we have uh alexander reese who who will be assisting on behalf of the global co2 initiative with this as well um jan if you want to say introduce yourself good evening everyone i'm jan culbertson i'm leadership chair of the ann arbor 2030 district and an architect
038and dan would by the way was uh responsible for a lot of those installations that we saw in the former a3c uh office building so thank you dan go ahead hook up all righty um well thank you all so much for for having um having having us today um jan if you want to go to the the next slide um we wanted to briefly explain to you um how this resolution came about um so as i said i work at the global co2 initiative at the university of michigan which is an on-campus initiative um if you want to go to the next slide i have a little bit of information about it our mission is to get co2 capture and use recognized and implemented as a mainstream climate solution as a global umbrella organization we
039convene and accelerate research development and deployment by working with research organizations which are in the academic governmental and commercial space and um we work with funding sources as well so angel investors institutional investors government and commercial investors throughout the world my work um in the global co2 initiative has been working on local state and federal policies that support carbon capture and utilization in this work we have focused on the construction sector jan you want to go to the next slide um so here you'll see a diagram that shows what are the market potentials and the gigaton co2 mitigation potentials for co2 based products this is a road map study that the global co2 initiative has put together and you'll see that i highlighted in red boxes concrete and aggregates which are both important sectors in
040the construction space um and so we see a strong potential um in the construction sector uh for carbon reduction and storage as i reviewed policies um that are affecting this i saw a lot of different movement um but i had seen some small resolutions that have been quite effective in helping promote the use of lower embodied carbon materials one of the really effective ones had been coming out of a village in new york and they had begun with a small resolution that had led to some projects in the city actually reducing their embodied emissions through their newer projects and i thought that a similar resolution in ann arbor could motivate action on this often overlooked piece of the emissions i presented this idea to chair mursky and he was interested in it and he connected
041me with jan culvertson as she was undertaking a similar project on behalf of the ann arbor 2030 district um so both the global co2 initiative and ann arbor 2030 have been working on acknowledging and finding methods to reduce the embodied emissions of construction materials to do this we came up with three important steps first we need to find ways to highlight the importance of embodied emissions um which jane will talk about then we wanted to find ways to develop local expertise and local methods to reducing these emissions and then finally we want to find the best ways of communicating these widely so first things first jan will provide an overview of the embodied emissions especially as they relate to construction materials thank you luca and really there are pieces most people are really familiar with
042operational carbon um that's the building energy consumption which also includes um water use and then embodied carbon though is a little bit newer uh that we're kind of looking for looking at and being able to quantify and that's the manufacturer transport installation of construction materials life cycle tends to also include the full life cycle of bill of building materials most people are pretty familiar with this pie chart by now about the global co2 emissions by sector but if you look at it building materials and construction is a full 11 of global co2 emissions um and you know that's kind of small but why is that important and uh basically as we really work on reducing our operational energy the pie the slice of pie of embodied energy does not change and so it becomes a
043much bigger piece and uh there have been some calculations done from 2020 to 2050 if we continue to build as we um have always built um that operational carbon would be as as big as the embodied carbon the embodied carbon would be almost as as large as the operational carbon so it's really important to start paying attention to this because we're building now and that embodied carbon stays forever strategies uh reuse reuse our buildings don't tear them down reduce the embodied carbon and the materials and new construction and renovation and then sequest carbon in building materials and building operations um this is sort of an interesting graph and it talks about if you decouple the material impact um uh from volumes you really see that you know like pvc and some of the plastics have
044a much higher impact um than concrete but what you also have to factor in is how much of that material is used and concrete is huge it's used all over the globe and so uh in the 2030 district and as architects um you you start with the the stuff that can you can make the biggest impact the biggest reduction and the building structure and substructure is about 55 of a building's um carbon footprint and we're talking about mostly commercial buildings here and the building enclosure is another 33 so that really led me to to think about well how do we building structure and substructure the highest embodied carbon concrete and steel wonderful um yeah and to emphasize that i mean concrete is uh one of the most important and widely used resources uh in the
045world and so obviously just the volume that it's used in is the reason that the embodied energy is such an important component of that embodied carbon excuse me um one of the most effective methods that we have seen to actually help reducing these emissions is to assemble uh groups of stakeholders across the sort of construction landscape um to have them all communicate on what is currently available um and what will work and we were lucky uh and and i was really lucky to to meet jan and that um she was working with the aia of huron valley the washington contractors uh association and the a2 2030 district in assembling a group of these stakeholders um and the group's primary charge was to develop recommendations for concrete and steel specifications that will lower embodied carbons in
046our steel this group assembled different ways to reduce embodied emissions and concrete using locally available methods so methods that we can use today and the group even went as far as creating a local best practice that we've been able to test and jan will provide you more insight on the sort of results of this task force all right so we gave the task force a charge to develop uh recommendations for concrete specification uh that will immediately um reduce the embodied carbon and concrete and then also develop recommendations that may need further research and market transformation or before we could actually implement them and then also to discuss policies that would reinforce and promote these materials so we did do an initial uh presentation and um there's a um a link to the full uh presentation
047that we did uh a couple minutes about a month ago and this is sort of the task force and what i learned uh with this task force is you really have to um get together owners the designers the engineers and also um the researchers have been wonderful um and the contractors and we pulled in associations and so what we went after is this is is basically um cement is the big the big black person in the black i should say the big um [Music] sort of dark shadow um around um um in body in body carbon and it it's about 13 of a typical concrete mix but it has a full 70 almost 80 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions in it so a ton of cement equals a ton of co2 and um one
048of the first recommendations is um there's a different type of cement it's called limestone cement and we found that it was actually being manufactured up in charlevoix in michigan and what it does is it increases the limestone from about five percent component to about fifteen percent component um and it's accepted by um the department of transportation etc um the other thing is if you uh specify well-graded aggregate okay this is different size stones right um the you don't have as much volume of cement in the mix as well and then we're already using some supplementary cementitious material so it was interested in in looking at them and we found out that fly ash which is in a lot of specification is really um hard to get right now and and as the coal plants are
049closing it's going to be even harder to get although they're thinking about perhaps mining some of the fly ash that's been buried but it would have to go through a whole process to be able to be used also slag which is the next supplementary supplementary cementitious material is like um uh more readily available but we also found out that um the it's often the best flag is from blast furnaces and we're trying to get a the conversion of the steel industry into electric arc furnaces because it reduces the global the co2 emissions by about 50 just by using a different furnace um and as steel production moves to the electric arc furnaces slag maybe um a little harder to get and we also found out that slag is being imported as far away from us
050as turkey so that's that's kind of uh disappointing um and so what we found was evolving to use recycled materials and one of the one that is closest to uh it's actually being produced in in connecticut right now that's the only one we could find that was actually in production in the country but it uses um a hundred percent post-consumer glass and it's processed and and used not only in cement but some other materials so we're uh working with that company presently and uh doing some testing and hopefully look at a feasibility of bringing that into southeastern michigan um we looked briefly at what was the um reduction that we could get now and it was about a 37 reduction um if we um uh one used the like portland limestone cement um used slag
051and uh then also looked at what the projection was if we used a ground glass paslin and um we think we can get uh with the ground glass paslon about a 50 uh reduction in the embodied carbon and concrete how much is that okay well here's a a building that um is uh going to be constructed in ann arbor and we calculated that there was about 3 000 cubic yards um 40 if we did that just the 40 percent replacement this isn't doing uh ground glass puzzle on um we'd have um the equivalent of a car circling the earth 38 times or powering almost all of ann arbor for about 11 hours so that's in one building so there's a significant amount of of co of of co2e reduction that we can make by just
052changing how we specify our concrete another option uh opportunity that uh is being worked on is how our urban trees are being processed um and if if you chip a tree you kind of you know that carbon is is released so uh what is the best way that we can um kind of keep that carbon sequestered and that is processing the uh the urban lumber that currently now mostly gets shipped and turn it into usable materials so there is a urban ashes if some of you are familiar with with them they're working with the city to look at a different type of of um model for how wood is used in the city so those are two examples dealing with um what would be waste and also dealing with directly changing our specifications there we
053go um alrighty now that uh we've talked about uh the embodied carbon and the importance of it and the task force and the results that we've seen the important step now is how do we widely communicate the importance of embodied emissions and methods to reduce these emissions uh slide so we arrive finally at this resolution that we're really excited to be sharing with you all today which uh in addition to some of the work that we do in the task force at the global co2 initiative and that a lot of researchers and and stakeholders within the space are doing nationwide we hope that this will help communicate the importance of embodied emissions to this broader audience and cause some action and hopefully here in in ann arbor um this is our adoption curve and we're
054hoping that pieces like our resolution and work of the task force will help people be early adopters and these types of technologies in ann arbor so that we'll get that local expertise um it was really exciting to see that presentation of solar projects over ann arbor i'd be really happy to see low embodied carbon concretes all over the city and people can go to the top of the bridge deck and instead of looking for solar power panels they'll be looking at looking down at the concrete below them which could be using recycled materials recycled glass storing concrete storing co2 in itself um and so that would be that'll be really exciting um slide we're lucky that uh this type of work is actually being performed nationwide uh so in the top left here we have
055marin county it's in the bay area they have a low carbon concrete code they have a specific county code that allows them to have a higher a threshold for embodied carbon the village of hastings on hudson on the top right they have a low embodied carbon resolution similar to the one that we'll be presenting today and they have this resource page where they provide opportunities for people to find out more about how they can reduce their the embodied carbon in their concretes the bottom left we have portland which has been working on a low carbon concrete initiative where they piloted some new low low-carbon mixes for their sidewalks and then finally by clean california which is a statewide policy which uh sets an upper threshold on embodied carbon unfortunately biclean doesn't have concrete in it
056currently but it has a lot of important building materials and it sets an upper threshold for the embodied carbon in those materials um slide one of the important pieces of this resolution is the creation of a resource guide we're hoping that the resource guide will be hosted by the city and that it will answer some of the practical questions of actually using embodied carbon so here we would outline what's currently happened what are the locally available solutions but also highlight um new potential technologies and highlight local projects that are actually using these and provide some answers to the questions that people have when they start getting ready to tackle the problem of embodied carbon we hope this guide in conjunction with this resolution will ease the adoption of currently available low embodied mixes and eventually
057will lead to the utilization of co2 as a component of concrete especially in ann arbor we hope to bring attention to the work of the task force and continue to grow local expertise on methods of reducing emissions and i'm really happy to introduce this resolution as i truly believe it is a complementary piece to the plans for ann arbor to address the burden of climate change given all the local stakeholders and worldwide experts in the ann arbor detroit area we are really well suited to be ground zero for a revolution and low embodied carbon construction thank you all so much for your time thank you luca jan did you want to say something yeah i just wanted to to also say that this is um becoming very much a part of both structural engineers practice
058and architects practice so i don't want people to think that there aren't resources out there and that'll be uh more expensive or more extensive to be able to do this um se 2050 is structural engineers it has all sorts of resources around that engineers can use to lower embodied carbon in both steel and concrete tally has you know a lot of free webinars the ec3 is a free tool that um talks about life cycle analysis they also have a tremendous amount of resources there architecture 2030 has a materials palette that they're developing the boston society of architects has a week-long course that you can take just in embodied carbon so it is is really front and center of of um building design and practice uh at this point so i would really encourage ann arbor
059to take the lead because if we're going to work on this transformation it it it really does need um owners to be drivers thank you great so uh what we'd like to do now is share the draft resolution with you and talk through it uh get your comments on it and uh will talk at the end about potentially taking a vote on it uh missy is can you share the resolution yeah hold on i'm just trying to download it in the background um do you want the the one as posted correct well i i can show i have the one that uh is the original one that's posted also with um highlighted potential amendment um that we haven't posted just the idea to change it came up last night and was confirmed this morning i
060have i have it i can share it or if you have it yeah if you give me a second i'm just going to pull it up here okay great do you want to talk um talk through it while i get ready for you yeah i'll just talk through a little bit um real quickly first um so this was a process that lasted probably luca what a good six or eight months so we sent the original draft of the resolution to missy to look at and also share with others within the city then there was this task force that was created and it met several times um an output of the task force was the idea of this resource guide so that was changed or i should say added to the resolution so i i can
061see it so i'm assuming everyone else can see it looks like it yes so um this it's rather long i don't want to read through it word for word hopefully everybody can do that so um the first portion is basically just some high level uh recognition of some basic issues related to climate change and reason for climate change if you can go back real quickly or a little bit missy the one thing that we wanted to change compared to what is shown on legistar is this um whereas clause that is highlighted um in yellow so the original formulation is crossed out that was what is posted on legistar um but um i suggested last night that we modify this uh based on actually essentially the same document that's quoted in or referenced in the other
062warehouse clause and i just wanted to point this out that there is within the 2018 ipcc report there is a carbon budget that is based on a 67 probability of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees and if you use that as a basis and take into consideration of the rate at which we are releasing carbon into the atmosphere for the last couple of years basically we're now at the point where uh co2 emissions have to be reduced by 65 by 2030 and to net zero by 20 40 to meet that 67 probability of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees and i just wanted to point that out because typically in the public domain even amongst ourselves we're talking about 50 reductions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2050 and actually the situation is a lot more
063urgent and dire than that i also call your attention to the email that i sent out linking to an article this afternoon so um basically this now transitions into what we're doing in ann arbor we talk a lot about concrete and we talk about whoa can you go back and see yeah yeah so you know concrete and steel making up um the the major portions of that um that some analysis um from mckinsey uh which i think we all know as a consulting company showing what the percentages are of contribution to emissions um obviously what jan said before concrete is the most widely used construction material in the world um particularly in china i think i read not long ago that china in just a handful of years used more concrete than what the united
064states has used in something like the last century so this is a global issue and anything we can do here will certainly lead to impetus to other entities and countries around the world doing things um outlines here you can see in the center um about the importance of um cement um and what we're trying to control here um this new um category of low embodied carbon um and how it's uh defined and it's measured by the global warming potential which is i think everybody's familiar with um and then some of the strategies are outlined here that jan covered at the bottom of the page and obviously that by employing these techniques that there are some higher costs but they can be offset by lower material costs and then transitions towards the bottom to talking a
065little bit about steel and what we can do to reduce the body power green and steel and um then basically now we're getting into um some a little bit more background information in terms of how this can relate to the state of michigan and you can see uh about referencing the global co2 initiative and what it's doing at the university of michigan um and what i talked about and what uh luca talked about earlier is helping to develop um this resource guide and hosting that through the city of ann arbor not only just for the city's use but hopefully also for the university and other entities um in in the region and hopefully at the state um and then also the involvement of uh the aia uh local group here in huron valley the contractors
066association etc um and then finally we we want to be a leader uh what luca said we um want to be sort of an early adopter and push the curve so here are the the resolve clauses and i guess i can read them alouds um so people that are listening can hear the key elements resolved the energy commission requests anniversary council to direct the city of ann arbor so that it encourages and will work to promote the use of low embodied building materials in building and infrastructure projects involving concrete and steel where the utilization of these materials does not significantly increase the cost of or delay project completion and where utilization does not compromise either construction integrity or public safety and be it further resolved the promotion of low embodied carbon materials could include but
067may not be limited to identifying and highlighting local low embodied carbon concrete and steel product options making embodied carbon materials educational materials more accessible recognizing local projects utilizing low body carbon products promoting other low embodied carbon strategies like the use of high recycled material content materials and the use of mass timber which is also referred to as cross-laminated timber when appropriate and sharing ann arbor's program successes and lessons learned with other towns and local governments in the state and region and be it further resolved the energy commission requests ann arbor city council to direct the city of ann arbor to engage in work encouraging the city planning department and commission to urge developers and property users to reuse and repurpose existing buildings as a means of minimizing the net total carbon footprint of construction and
068be it further resolved that the energy commission requires anniversary council to direct the city of ann arbor to lobby the state and other entities such as the university of michigan and the washington county road commission to adopt robot embodied carbon strategies related to the built environment so that is the proposed uh resolution can we get uh someone to here i've got first of all let's um get someone to move to consider this in a second and then we'll open it up for discussion assuming people are willing to to do that today can we get a motion from commissioner cleavy a second from someone from commissioner zucker so let's open things up for comments and discussion commissioner cleavy i think commissioner hockham was before me okay go ahead you can go mark if you'd like it
069doesn't matter um just a couple things i i wished i would have known about this um there's a large movement afoot i think missy's aware of it it's um ase has got a standard on infrastructure that's coming out on sustainable infrastructure i've mentioned it in the past there's been a tremendous amount of work i saw some some alignment with what's been done today by what was presented earlier there is a tremendous amount more information that's available i think dan pointed some of it out i'm part of sc 2050 there's um like i said a ton of information out there one of your resolutions is great which is avoidance we're all focused on this if we can avoid infrastructure construction we avoided the whole co2 piece um i i think we need to really focus on
070that and the whole concept of our capital improvements program i know mark you've looked at that in the past why not have tougher screening with carbon i mean that's one way to get rid of some of these issues right out of the block i think that'll go a long way on the private side certainly some of the things that we mentioned are great i have had a lot of discussions with the ready mix institute a lot of work with the structural engineering side a few things in a resolution are cross-tied across disciplines we've talked a lot about buildings what about the rest of infrastructure we've got roads pavements all kinds of things transportation infrastructure where co2 is important we could really do a good job of reducing our carbon footprint in those spaces also the
071thing that we've really looked at in at a national level is not just the embodied carbon but also all the other greenhouse gases that come into play when you're working on an existing building when you're working on an existing car you're dealing with refrigerants that are tremendously bad we replaced cfcs with hfcs hfcs we did for a reason because they're not such a harmful element to the ozone layer but hfcs are big greenhouse gas and we need to take steps in that process not just carbon but all kinds of other bad actors that are out there that are part of the program um we mentioned nitrous oxide that's out there that's that's found in all kinds of products we need to worry about sf6 uh um so sodium hexafluoride is a really bad gas it's
072in a lot of our electrical equipment we're making strides there so i think we need to look at the resolution a little broader talk about some other things that we could really tackle to make it a broader based approach what could really hit home locally i could probably talk for a few hours on this but i'll stop um i would like to be a part of it going forward like i said the ase e7 is going to have a lot of information that's replicable it could be adopted right out of the box here for the city i know nobody's seen it yet it's it went through public ballot it's going to be published here shortly as a standard but i'll just stop there thank you thanks um commissioner cleavy then council member briggs then council
073member george i think that's what i'll do i just want to pick up on uh lucas uh statement about accelerating the innovation cycle incur because i think um part of what we're faced here with this is adoption barriers and we can't afford you know business sort of business as usual adoption uh for these these kinds of technologies so bear with me just a moment to put it in perspective in 1995 i was hired as a consultant to the national institute of standards and technology that were creating a large grant program called advanced technology program and i was brought in to work with the michigan concrete association and portland cement and of others to craft research funding programs to look at ways to embed other things like ground glass and other things in so you know
074we've looked at the science of this back to 1995 and here we are in you know almost 2025 and we're still talking about adoption cycles so i guess i love everything in this and i agree with everything that's said i would agree with chuck that i think we need to you know broaden it a bit but i would suggest that we pick up and on the innovation part of the office of sustainability and innovation and embed innovation into this resolution and not use language like promote but uh ask the departments to develop innovative ways to implement so i you know i think that that having uh a uh you know an assessment embedded energy assessment embedded pollution assessment uh as part of the purchasing program for the city makes an awful lot of sense but
075you know i think if we're going to have the city push on this we need to move beyond education because education is is got us into a 50-year adoption cycle on technologies and we can't afford that anymore it's been 50 years since i did almost 50 years now since i did the uh solar project with dte and consumers energy and lansing board of water and light to do the first utility interconnected solar pv thing in the state and we're still talking about whether this is going to destroy the utility system if we plug solar into the system um this is where citizens can make a difference we're not going to invent new stuff we're going to do those things but we do have impact on the innovation cycle and the adoption cycle so i need
076i think we need to get the word innovation into this i think we need to ask uh the individual to work with the office of sustainability and innovation to develop innovative new policies how these planning department how these other departments work how exactly are they going to do this i'm not interested in education promotion i want to see how they change their way of doing business to make sure that this embedded carbon issue gets addressed and nothing gets built forward where it isn't addressed so i would say let's push let's let's stop being so passive on what we're doing here we know what needs to get done we need to crank the system up force it to react we have an office of sustainability and innovation and let's unleash this innovation part of that office
077and let's get this done and next year let's find out have stand back and find out you know what difference was made in the buildings that were built and really push this to the resolution with action not ever resolution with let's promote and educate also member rates thank you um so great presentation i learned a ton um and appreciate all the resources and definitely gonna be doing some more um reading on my own um and i a few points i think me as we begin to to work on this it may be helpful to to break some of the part as a memo and some of it kind of reduce the resolution and really focus in on what are the key resolved clauses that we want to drive home there's um i understand the point
078um that mark was just making around not wanting to to focus too much just on education but getting things done um i do think we have to be um we have to be cognizant of the sort of the framework that we're operating in um in terms of the tools that we have as a state and and also the planning department has we can't require anything from the planning commission side um and so it's a lot of um incentivizing and so education does become really helpful i know when i was serving on planning commission a lot of the a lot of times that just the fact that commissioners began to talk about things over and over again really did begin to shift has begun to shift what kinds of projects were seen in the city um
079but i do have a little bit of concern around the third resolved clause um which is around reusing and repurposing existing buildings which is great i think we all know how important that is um but i also think we need to we are different than hastings on hudson um in terms of the the framework in which this is going to come into and the discussions that are currently happening locally kind of the context that a resolution like this might fall into i think we need to be realistic about the existing conversations that are happening and how quite honestly how this might um how this resolution might be used and how it might be weaponized honestly um and that is that we are having huge debates around development in our community we're having huge debates around
080transportation and and how we should transform our transportation network and so i would love to see maybe a little bit more work or a little more thought given to um including in within this how for example um to use an example that came up the planning commission last night there were large debates around valhalla development um i don't know how many folks have been have been following that but it was a 454 unit development that was on on south main street close to kind of bushes over um over that way um and a lot of a lot of questions about the density of that development a lot of the the benefits of um having more people live closer to where they work and not have to commute as far and so what i don't want
081to see us do in ann arbor is start kind of pitting these silos against each other sort of construction versus transportation emissions and i think we have to figure out how we can talk uh complement how those how these conversations kind of can complement each other and also start talking honestly about the trade-offs um because those are what kind of i think where many in the community are ready to go with this as well how much more beneficial it is is it to build a large development closer where people work and where they can live car free like lifestyles versus the embodied carbon in a building um so and then on transportation side i am really excited to see um work being you know considered around um rebuilding our our infrastructure system but i can
082imagine every project now coming forward and having conversations around well the embodied carbon in that concrete is um actually derailing our transportation or our carbon neutrality goals so sorry being very long-winded but these are some of my concerns and i think this is great and i'm super excited about and we have to start talking about it but i just kind of wanted to start weaving some of those other ideas into this as well thank you commissioner george thank you mr chairman um i want to echo some of the councilwoman's points that she made uh but before i do that i want to thank uh you know our two presenters there i also learned a lot from that and i appreciate the time that you put into that um for uh context i work for a
083construction union uh on the management side at our state council and one of the main things that my members do we represent 13 000 people across the state of michigan and we build things and a lot of the work that we do is concrete and steel related so you know when we're talking about these types of things uh you know this is very uh both personal for uh my perspective is something that i see on a day-to-day basis uh and it's something that i know affects a lot of livelihoods across the state so i want to kind of start out with that type of context i had a couple of questions for presenters i didn't know um i didn't i hope i didn't miss the question section of that but i did want to ask
084either luca or jan if you know if you did some sort of um a cost comparison for some of those alternatives to cement uh i i know you mentioned cost there a little bit at the end but i was just curious if you had some sort of you know maybe a top-line kind of statistic for cost yeah um that's a good question and we don't have the um we don't have costs for the ground grill as possible on but the limestone cement option it limestone cement is slightly more expensive right now um but you use if you use less of cement less cement the mixes as a whole are they're pretty neutral um as far as costs go um and the goal would be at and mca says they want to roll this out and
085make sure that the plc is used almost universally around the state within a year that that's one of their goals um and they actually because of this task force implemented their own task force so we're really trying to you know like like mark said some of this stuff has been known forever but it hasn't been implemented implemented in the market and and and that's what's critical and it's got to be owners and it's got to be uh designers with their specifications really really changing it so and and cost is important and uh that's why we had owners in in the group gotcha yeah i recognized uh a couple of the the contractors that you uh listed on the screen are a couple of our signatory contractors uh so uh it's great to see that um
086and you know i think that uh you know that's great to hear on the movement that you're referencing there jen um and especially i i also wanted to ask that question in the context of as some folks probably know the the construction industry has like many other commodity uh impacted industries that there have been a huge uptick in costs um partially driven by general commodities as well as labor shortages because everybody seems to want to build right now um so you know that's very good to know that it's basically cost neutral and even if it's marginally more uh expensive that the the savings um on the carbon side would outweigh that but i would say um that when we're talking more broadly to folks um you know when we're trying to you know broaden this
087coalition um you know really trying to make sure that that is um spoken about in a way that is inclusive because uh you know when people say uh when you know people say that projects are too expensive and so forth they often want to cut on the labor side you know we want to make sure that we're not trying we're not having a lose-lose situation here so i did want to mention that briefly i also wanted to mention that in the responsible contracting policy that the city enacted last year there was green language in it in the draft form um and then it never made it into the language that the city council enacted so i'm i really wasn't quite sure why i didn't make it out um but there was language in that um
088and i don't know where it went um i don't know maybe missy if that's something that you can maybe find out um and maybe dig a little deeper on i don't know how broad it was but i know there was a section about um green um kind of um items in it uh that didn't make the final cut so um and then i also uh just wanted to uh make a point um i also share the councilwoman's concerns about the third resolve section um i've seen this a lot uh from two different angles one from the concern that um you know we're trying to stop development um because of the environment environmental impacts of that which uh is extremely unequitable for a city like arbor and the areas that surround the city when we are
089facing housing and apartment shortages across the area as someone that rents as part of the majority of ann arbor citizens that rent in this city that as we're seeing rent prices go up every single year sometimes significantly over five or six percent because of the demand and so the idea that we need to you know reduce or you know significantly curtail new construction is frankly it seems like that um you know the generation that was able to buy in and buy houses in the city is able to say that well as the generations that have come after them haven't had the same opportunity it seems extremely unequitable to me and as someone that wants to see the city could continue to grow and we've added you know 6 000 new residents since the last census
090and uh calculations there that you know we need to be uh cognizant of that when we're having these conversations and when i walk around downtown and walk around the city i don't see a lot of buildings that can be reused uh frankly speaking so you know i i wanna make sure that what the council woman said about it being weaponized especially if it would be great if we could avoid the development debates on council if all possible with something like this and focus on some of those solutions that uh were proposed uh and about that resource bank that is where i would love to see this resolution really focused on um so i do apologize for the the length of my comments uh but i wanted to make sure uh i got a lot of
091that across thank you mr chairman thank you great comments uh chuck and then mark and then i'd like also to provide an opportunity for luca and jan to comment on um maybe some of the more important questions and comments that have been made go ahead commissioner so for robert's question on substitute materials on cement like a dry fly ash or ground granulated blast furnace slag those are almost not zero so the cost to replace cement with some of these products is effectively nil to mine the fly ash that exists in the ground today which is a substantial source unfortunately produces more carbon and mining it so you have to look at the what i'll call the a carbon balance when you're looking at a system somebody brought this up earlier you have to balance whether
092it's proven to do one thing at the behest of something else so i think we have to be cautious on those things it's a little bit scientific i will take us to task on this concept of has the city grown enough i think we've invested a lot in the city we're trying to lead by example i share your concern about housing being limited i think we really need to look at it the density piece is important but i really think we need to start focusing on have we have we grown enough we've built these green zones around the city where is our carbon footprint going to end if we keep allowing growth we need to consider that and i think equity comes into play but i think we really need to focus if we're going
093to march to the drama we need to reduce carbon we might need to consider whether we're the right position to offer that up or not so i'll just stop there thank you commissioner cleavy i just thought i would inject a little bit of levity into this conversation um back in the 1990s the national institute of standards technology had me under contract to go around and do a series of seminars on their new funding program to do research on cement um and so uh people had in the audience were were uh phd people with cement anyway this is one of the jokes that somebody from the audience told me about uh this this and here's the question what can a really really really small duck teach us about cement yeah you want to take a shot
094at that you got me you got me stumped duck i can't believe again micro quacks i'll just leave it at that thank you well hopefully that won't be an issue with these new materials either in steel or concrete uh luke and jan do you want to respond to some of the questions and comments i would be happy to to hop in um [Music] um remember hookum and cleavy thank you so much for your comments you both mentioned um uh hfcs and cfcs um and i think one of the that's definitely a component of it i think one of the ways that currently exists to calculate and measure embodied emissions is the environmental product declaration that's sort of a standardized procedure a nutrition label for your different building materials and in that it includes um not
095just your global warming potential but obviously also includes um you know like hydrogen and and and uh and hfcs and and uh nitrogen and ozone as well so i i think that would be a good way um as an existing framework that would allow um those things to be considered as well in the in the procurement process um if if a policy that was looking to to be sort of more than educational was looking for a way to do that and consider more than just co2 um the environmental product declaration would be definitely the direction that i would point you in um i i think uh on the uh on the the third statement in the resolution um i think for us you know one of the things that we've noticed just you know as
096a researcher one of the things that i've noticed a lot is um that there's a lot of embodied energy in repair um for of of construction as well and obviously in new buildings there's an enormous input and so i think that was included as a way for us to um try to motivate people to as much as possible reuse but um i i hadn't really thought about it in um the environment of ann arbor and the impact that that would have um so happy to have further conversations about that um uh other than that i really appreciated your your your comments um and uh jan do you have anything that you wanted to add i think um just a couple things one i think it may be with the the um the whole idea around
097reuse um it's not just that the whole building but we don't do a very good job right now of construction recycling uh we need to definitely there there's a lot of things that we can reuse or reprocess um and i think that might be able to be able to be balanced in that in that resolution um the other thing around labor i just want to say that um one of the things that we are doing with the concrete piece is uh some training and as it turns out um these materials tend to be uh easier once labor gets used to placing them and so you can really get i think a win-win when you really look at the supply chain uh the designers the owners and uh and chuck i want to talk to you
098about steel thanks jan and luca i see jay has his hand up i think chuck and robert if take your hands down if you're done leave them up if you still have another comment go ahead jay yeah and i just had a quick question or comment of maybe seeing if we could tie this into our recycling in the city i i don't know if we've rebuilt the material recycling center yet or the process side of it but if if there's some way we can make a connection kind of the circular economy of our you know who we're selling our glass to or something if we could get our glass recycled from the city going to one of these you know glass glass ground glass places or even if you know maybe we can promote a
099company you know starting up a factory year a little closer than in connecticut or something so maybe there's some way to tying it into our own waste stream to tie back into the city i can suggest you go ahead luca um so yeah that's a a wonderful idea uh jay thank you so much for bringing that up we were thinking um the same thing we had talked to the company that's working in connecticut um and we brought those samples because the the hope was at some point that that could be replicated um obviously transportation costs would be astronomical if we had to bring everything in from connecticut and it seems like there would be you know a suitable glass environment in the michigan area to start something like that um so you know we're i
100think the tests are still ongoing with that concrete so we want to see the performance before really moving forward with that but it's something that we're um the task force is really interested in moving forward with in in any way anyone else i have a few comments um and then a suggestion uh so i made some notes hopefully i cover these all um first of all uh i will um uh the blame or whatever for uh initiating the resolve clause about um reusing buildings and i'll give you a specific case that i had in mind and it really had nothing to do specifically about the city of ann arbor but it's my understanding the university of michigan intends to tear down the fleming administration building um you know that there's obviously a hell of a
101lot of embodied carbon in a building like that and that would to me be a prime case where the university should be engaging resources including even student design teams to look at how that building could be redesigned repurposed whatever so that it doesn't have to be torn down and i agree completely with some of the concerns that council member briggs mentioned about you know weaponizing this and i think either possibly eliminating that clause and dealing with that that issue separately or refining the clause to make it clear that you know if you're looking um at replacing a few small one-story buildings with hundreds of units where people will be reducing their vehicle miles travered where that building is being built to high environmental standards in the city of ann arbor where it would be built
102outside the city of ann arbor to much much lower standards with with the commute that if you look at the total life cycle of even losing the embodied energy in those few buildings um and building a brand new building the total life cycle emissions are much much lower and we need to argue on that basis and i know there's a professor at uc berkeley that's done analyses of urban lifestyles versus people commuting and shown that the the overall co2 balance is definitely in favor of of urban um urban density um so um just this is not in any order um i think i may have mentioned this before as you know i'm your representative on the environmental commission i'm in a working group that is working on a construction and demolition ordinance so the idea
103you may know that the solid waste resource management plan has a small section on construction and demolition primarily about um just basically capturing data but we'd actually like to um get to an ordinance there are a number of ordinances in the country and so we're working on that as far as the glass issue recycle ann arbor is really a mission driven vision driven organization that we potentially can work with on recycling glass and getting it to a processor that can potentially use this glass or with with its context so that might be a possibility um then refrigerants uh refrigerants we looked into that's that's in the 820 plan reducing the use of these higher global warming potential refrigerants as as commissioner hookum pointed out most of those things are controlled by the epa and also
104the us government has recently indicated that the really high gwp uh refrigerants are to be ruled out and so in terms of maybe influencing recovering practices we might be able to do something there with education but the sense was at least my sense was that we probably wouldn't get a huge um return on our time invested there since there's um sort of outside of our influence of our sphere of influence um and then um just one other thing that i think as we talk about changing the resolution we could add certainly a lot more to it um there is a specific reference to working with the washington county roads commission so um roads we definitely want to take as a part of what we're targeting here um and i think the other thing that we
105want to do when we look at modifying this is diluting our efforts so we can have a resolution that says we're going to educate on um 15 different things um but as jan pointed out the real the really big opportunities are in concrete and steel um and potentially with mass timber that's more farther down the road so um what what i was going to propose is that we put the resolution into a google doc or we actually have it in a google doc that we share that um with the commission and that we allow people to propose revisions um and comments and maybe set a deadline to that and then hopefully take up the resolution again in our next meeting and i wanted to put that out there for um people's comments um obviously i
106didn't clear that with jan and luca before i said that but i just wanted to run that by everybody to see if that makes sense so i see uh council member briggs has her hand up and then we'll take other comments as well thanks and i appreciated the thoughtful comments and replies on this um on my comments and it makes sense in terms of next steps to to be getting getting input from everybody i did wonder if considering what a big role planning commission and planning staff will have in this um in the execution of this if it might make sense to either obviously share this google doc with planning staff and get their feedback or maybe actually do a depending on what their this what their availability is for a work session to actually
107go and make this a similar presentation there and get a little bit of feedback about how they might see this playing out um so that we are kind of building this out the most productive way possible i leave it up to you to figure out what makes sense but i certainly think that the education around this and um figuring out how we can um do more than educate but um and be innovative but uh and really push this would be great uh but i think their their buy-in and their their input might be helpful great great idea um i have a question of missy missy we shared the resolution do you know if it was shared with planning and if they came back with any specific comments it was only shared with staff in planning
108it hasn't been shared with the planning commission and just because i have before i'm going to share i'm not confident that you can be working on a resolution together deliberately i think that you might be capable of sharing a document and adding comments but you can't deliberate on them i'm going to check i'm sending a note to legal right now to confirm process forward just to make sure like we can't have discussion back and forth i know that great i appreciate you doing that and certainly um keep us informed of what we can and shouldn't be doing um commission or council member actually missy just covered i i wanted to make sure as well that procedurally we were okay um because i know that sharing a doc like that and having the entire body work
109on it can probably get deliberative if people start adding comments rather than just suggestions and so um so yeah i i would be interested to hear what missy hears back um obviously comments could be accessible to the public um if that document was shared in its entirety but i'm not just not sure on the rules on that so i just want to make sure that we're okay um and i also just wanted to thank everyone for the conversation on this i feel like i'm learning a lot tonight and i think it's just helpful right great so um i would suggest then before we take any action we get some feedback um from legal through missy and any other recommendations um sleep on this for 24 hours and then we will we will get back with
110you as far as what the process will be going forward um one other thing i'd like to react to commissioner clevy's comments and i agree completely educating cajoling etc only gets us so far i would say that probably the michigan building code may provide some limitations but we should see what we what we can do up to and to stretch that um and we'll try to incorporate that also into the document jan you you're going to be an expert on that as well as potentially luca as well john i think specifically the capital improvements process that's what i'm thinking most specifically to to include um you know embedded carbon in the evaluation process for cap okay okay luka's got a way to do that great that makes it simple good thank you um anybody else
111have any suggestions or want to modify that proposed approach great uh somewhere several people said it and i'll even add even though i've been working on this with jan and luca i learned a lot tonight also about different perspectives and the way this can be interpreted so i think it was a valuable conversation and i see that we're building momentum and i sense that we have a lot of support which is really positive so i think once we have a good product that hopefully this will sail through certainly our commission and then hopefully we get an endorsement from planning and then it can go to city council for their review any any other comments so join me in thanking luke and jan for all their efforts on this and for joining us tonight and you're
112welcome to listen in um we're going to have a presentation that you might be interested in certainly jan um about um action um on an ordinance uh for an energy benchmarking ordinance i think jan maybe even been involved in some of the work on this so um we're gonna have uh i think is it zach and thea right that are going to their their they're listed there there we go they're appearing so um missy maybe i'll turn it over to you to introduce um them in the subject and um should be another interesting conversation yeah thank you so much chair mursky uh well i am really excited to kick it over to our experts in this landscape now on osi zach and thea they are both members of the office of sustainability and innovations and
113they've been working for quite a few months on a commercial multi-family benchmarking ordinance as well as the home energy disclosure ordinance but today we're going to focus on the benchmarking and next month you're going to care about the home energy disclosure ordinance so with that i think uh in terms of sequencing they'll tell you a little bit more about this this will be the first read of a possible resolution of support similar to what we just did and then we can deliberate uh with the intent of the commission considering for formal uh vote a resolution support for benchmarking along with the ordinance itself that would go to council because we're nearly there with that i'm going to kick it to the end zach to tell us a little bit more about what's in this benchmarking
114ordinance we've been working on great can you see my screen okay cool already zach cool uh well good evening everyone thank you for having us um as missy you mentioned we're here tonight to introduce to you the commercial and multi-family energy and water benchmarking and transparency policy say that 10 times fast um the agenda for tonight has the draft of the ordinance attached but we're just going to present an overview of the background of the ordinance its intended impact some of the specifics of the policy and then a few notes on implementation so we'll uh definitely leave some time at the end for questions but of course feel free to jump in if you have any during okay so um we'd like to start at the beginning and sort of address why we have a
115proposed benchmarking and transparency policy to begin with um i'm sure as most of you know uh the city of ann arbor formally adopted the a20 plan to achieve a just transition to carbon neutrality by 2030 um and it was just a year ago last week we regularly track our communities greenhouse gas emissions and we are far from reaching the pace of emissions reductions that are needed in order to achieve our goals so we need to take specific action to accelerate that progress buildings are the single largest source of emissions in ann arbor they represent over two-thirds of our total greenhouse gas emissions the 820 plan includes specific strategies to not only power our buildings with renewable energy but also to reduce the amount of energy consumed community-wide through energy and energy efficiency improvements this benchmarking
116ordinance that we are presenting on tonight represents one policy in a suite of programs that together will ultimately cover all building types and uses throughout the city of ann arbor so this uh policy covers commercial and multi-family buildings and we set out to find a way to improve the energy efficiency of these buildings and it turns out that increasing efficiencies improves a lot of other things as well buildings become more affordable on a day-to-day basis there they become safer healthier and more comfortable for all of its users the the tenants occupants etc and lo and behold these all translate into fewer turnovers and longer tendencies so people want to stay where they are because they're more comfortable for longer i'd like to point out that we're not setting any precedent with this policy and theo
117you can advance to the next slide we found a best practice of benchmarking and transparency policies amongst over 35 other cities in the u.s and that number continues to grow year over year this map is small but to give you a sense we're talking about cities the likes of seattle new york chicago and l.a but also some smaller cities like des moines st paul columbus and berkeley and these policies mean that at least a quarter of all u.s commercial building space in the united states already actively benchmarks their energy use and these policies have proven results cities who have benchmarking policies see a three to eight percent uh reduction in their overall energy use just through a benchmarking policy um to bring that locally here in ann arbor that correlates to over 2.2 million dollars
118in savings for our community um so when a building owner benchmarks they use basic building information like the size and use type and combine that with their monthly energy and water use to measure their building's overall performance uh and so these two these are the two elements that make up this policy it's the benchmarking and the transparency and so when you are looking at a building's overall performance it allows easy understanding of relative performance uh which means that it makes it comparable to other similar buildings and it also highlights opportunities to cut waste and save energy by revealing low hanging fruit for efficiency improvements so that that's from benchmarking on the transparency side of things when credible and consistent information on the performance of an individual building is shared with the public through transparency that
119helps people who use the building like renters and tenants and occupants to include that information in their decision making when choosing a place to rent um a very apt and common analogy that you hear when talking about benchmarking is like the miles per gallon of um of rating cars during our stakeholder engagement process we after holding a task force we put the draft policy out for public review i just want to touch on a couple of the points that that came back from a survey that we did um and and these kind of highlight the importance of a benchmarking policy um only 25 percent of the respondents agreed that proper property owners currently have the information that they need to easily identify energy and cost saving opportunities in the building so there's a lot of
120uh room for improvement for getting that information into their hands even fewer people agreed that tenants have a high consumer awareness of energy efficient buildings um and are able to factor that into their decision making that touches kind of on the um the transformational side of this we definitely want to make more tenants aware of that um and 61 of the respondents say that this policy will enable the market to value energy efficiency in buildings so um we we demonstrate here a clear need for this policy um so how does benchmarking benefit users um commercial buildings are unique in that their the performance from one building to the next can vary wildly depending on its size depending on its use etc um you compare that say with the average single family home which tends to
121have a pretty consistent energy consumption and so there exists a need to fill this data gap and to establish clear steps and criteria to identify these opportunities and also to celebrate our successes as we move forward with this policy um examining the energy use of a particular commercial building empowers building owners and property managers to take control of the energy they use through an easy to use online tool to manage their properties and thea will tell you a little bit more about that tool here in just a moment oh and i have another side here so what are we trying to accomplish with this policy um you can come back to that goal slide sorry about that um some buildings in ann arbor currently benchmark voluntarily but there isn't yet enough participation to see for
122us to start seeing the widespread benefits and so by using a benchmarking and transparency policy the goal is to scale these benefits to the entire community and include all commercial and multi-family buildings and with more participation we can streamline the process of giving building owners that access to their building data and improve their experience and then we can also increase the demand for energy efficient buildings um um through the market transformation cool trying to get my house to work uh thank you zach for that background and showing why benchmarking has been adopted in so many cities energy benchmarking is an easy to use tool and i'll briefly explain how benchmarking policies operate to provide powerful data to building operators to help inform energy investments and also to provide the data to the market to enable
123factoring energy performance into decision making i know this is a bit of a an overwhelming uh process so i don't mean to go through all of it but just as a general overview um in a benchmarking policy the building owners of certain buildings are required to share uh benchmarking information with their local government they do this by they do this benchmarking by gathering details on their space use from tenants and energy and water data from utilities and then they input that data into the energy star portfolio manager a free online tool and then once a year building owners report certain information from energy star portfolio manager to the city in return they receive individualized and actionable information to help when deciding what investments make sense for their buildings some of the information is posted on
124a public-facing website like an interactive map to help renters tenants occupants and any other building stakeholder incorporate energy performance into their decision making um so we keep saying that benchmarking is an easy and fast process this is because it leverages energy star portfolio manager a free online tool and also a best practice used by a quarterback commercial space in the united states as zach mentioned um a building can be entered for the first time in energy star portfolio manager in only a few hours and after that initial account creation each year energy data is simply uploaded and that's made even easier when that can be um automated which is currently being piloted with the anne arbor 2030 district and dt get energy star portfolio manager also creates an energy star score which is a one
125to 100 numeric score available for most building types that summarizes how they're performing um the energy star score shows what percentile a building is operating in by normalizing for any factors that might affect energy consumption to compare buildings across the national population and so any building that goes scores over 50 is doing better it's performing better than 50 of its peers and those scoring over 75 are considered top performers um and can even get an energy star certification just like some appliances in your home might have um epa has found that buildings that start with lower energy star scores and higher energy use achieve the greatest savings buildings with scores below 50 save twice as much as those starting with higher energy star scores so it's a really quick and easy way for building owners
126to quickly understand how they're doing and understand if they have a great opportunity to start making improvements so starting with these best practices from over 30 over 30 cities across the nation that have a benchmarking policy we further refined what an energy benchmarking policy should look like for ann arbor in particular we reached out to stakeholders to define to define the opportunity co-create policy recommendations um and develop evaluation criteria and so we uh that's where we are now but i'll run through some of the things that we've done today as well one of the first forms of public stakeholder engagement was a task force which was conducted specifically to co-create that policy language with the community we worked with multi-family and commercial building owners and property managers the housing commission energy efficiency contractors city staff
127including those from the building and planning department um and through the process as well we had an open email account so even if somebody wasn't on that task force they could still email email us with any feedback or questions to what we were posting online once the policy language was drafted using recommendations from the task force we put forward that to the general public through an open house that was recorded and it's available on our website and we also ran along an accompanying survey which zach has already mentioned some of the results from we'll be meeting one last time with the task force later this week to share our final recommendations uh with that background zach is going to introduce some of the detailed recommendations for the annaber commercial energy benchmark coordinates starting with what
128buildings would be required to benchmark unmute okay all right thanks thea um so yeah the uh when we were talking about this policy what buildings actually are going to be included in that we determined based on best practices in other cities and on ann arbor's particular characteristics that all buildings greater than 20 000 square feet should benchmark um this will maximize the energy savings potential while minimizing the burdens on smaller buildings and city staff um and it would technically cover any building greater than 20 000 square feet uh this is regardless of the building's use meaning commercial industrial institutional or multi-family in the case with buildings uh with housing units the building must have at least four units so the the intention here is to not cover small multi-family buildings um of course the city
129of ann arbor cannot mandate anything of buildings that are not within our jurisdictional hierarchic hierarchy so meaning state federal public university or public buildings um etc we will recommend that they all benchmark but we cannot actually enforce participation that said we'll work with them as much as possible um and all city buildings of city of ann arbor buildings will will benchmark um i would also like to mention that the university of michigan already does their own benchmarking um for what it's worth why are we including benchmark uh fam multi-family buildings in the benchmarking well that's because in ann arbor multifamily buildings represent nearly half of all commercial buildings uh once you whittle that down to the 20 000 square feet or larger that proportion only increases so in order to include the majority of large
130buildings that would benefit from increased access to data and support from to inform energy efficiency improvements um we decided to include multi-family buildings um why did we choose to set that threshold at 20 000 square feet well we we sought to balance the intended outcomes like emissions savings and financial savings for a community with the number of buildings that would be included so that we could provide the best level of support possible so looking at uh these graphs here um the the top lines on either of these we've got emission savings on the left and financial savings on the right the top line on either of these uh represents the savings that um a benchmarking policy uh would would present and you can see on that top line kind of in the middle there there's
131kind of a nook at the 20 000 square foot threshold um and so you see that the the savings kind of begin to level out as you go below 20 000 square feet the bottom line in either of these graphs it shows the total number of buildings that are covered at each square footage threshold after that 20 000 square foot mark as you move to the right you can see that the number of buildings exponentially increases after 20 000 square feet um so there are some other cities that with existing benchmarking policies that found owners in the 10 to 20 000 square foot market really struggled to comply with the policy at the same time the city struggled to provide enough support additionally from a building science perspective buildings that are in the 20 to
13225 000 square foot range are on the low end of the threshold that benefit from benchmarking similarly to what these graphs illustrate and the smaller buildings all the way down to single family homes tend to benefit more from asset reviews like energy audits than they do from benchmarking um so in looking at ann arbor's building stock uh you can advance uh this this table um the best practice is to phase in the requirement of buildings to begin benchmarking and phasing is driven by square footage as written by this policy uh we generally start with the largest buildings not only are there fewer larger buildings to support as we build our implementation but larger buildings also tend to have dedicated building managers and increased staff capacity so it's usually easier for them as well to get
133started right out of the gate thea will touch on this in more detail in a moment but ann arbor's policy would start with city buildings initially after a year we would do hundred thousand square foot buildings and larger a year later we do fifty thousand and larger than twenty thousand and larger um and what we wanna point out with this table is that these thresholds as they've been chosen at this rate these phases um it about doubles the number of buildings that are covered each year each time we hit another threshold what happens if the buildings are below 20 000 square feet um like including single family homes as i mentioned earlier smaller buildings can benefit more from things like energy audits which help them identify energy investments without requiring them to annually monitor their
134energy consumption so a home energy audit disclosure policy which is something else that we're working on would cover single-family homes and horizontally stacked housing units like condos when when those homes are sold a similar policy to that could cover commercial buildings the smaller commercial buildings uh and finally we're also working on a green rental housing standard that would protect renters by ensuring a bare minimum of comfort and utility affordability uh i did say earlier that all buildings are covered but there are some exemptions that building owners could apply for uh they would have to apply for these exemptions annually and these exemptions were decided upon with the help of the task force and based on legal recommendation so just to touch on these briefly buildings that could be exempt from benchmarking include those that are
135unoccupied obviously if nobody's there under occupied which means that if it's a multiple unit building that 50 or fewer of their uh units are occupied or buildings that have plans to be demolished there's a demo permit pulled from the building department and finally buildings that are solely owner-occupied with no tenants could also apply for exemption from benchmarking but there are some buildings that can still benefit from benchmarking but could face harm if their information was made publicly available through the transparency element um so there are exemptions for that as well these buildings these include buildings whose energy might might disclose trade secrets like some industrial buildings or or those that may reveal critical facilities like data centers for instance great thank you zach for that explanation on the choice of covered buildings to match like
136we said maximizing impact with the capacity of our community and our staff um so commercial benchmarking and transparency not only fills the data need but it also incentivize incentivizes building owners to start making smart energy investments when building owner's benchmark over 80 percent plan or implement efficiency improvements some of which of those are behavioral or operational changes that bring immediate and low-cost reductions in energy consumption over 60 of facility managers that benchmark use it to help justify energy efficiency improvements and a 2012 u.s epa analysis of over 35 000 benchmark buildings got an average annual energy savings of two point four percent which increases up to seven percent when they benchmark consecutively for seven years or for three years i'm sorry um along with providing uh useful information to building owners market transformation driven from
137transparency is perhaps the most important benefit of energy benchmarking to our community and it's now a standard best practice included in nearly all recent benchmarking orders ordinances in other cities um when we share information with stakeholders that's credible and consistent they can start valuing that and including um and budgeting for their expected utility costs and their decisions into their decision making it also allows us to celebrate those buildings that are high performers and inspiring those who aren't currently high performers to maybe see how they could become one um lastly an incentivizes building owners to improve building performance by providing but through that market transformation by providing um real benefits um to making improvements and having a more desirable place for folks to rent or um when we look at transparency in our public survey we
138found that 80 percent of our respondents um thought that transparency would increase energy efficiency improvements and 70 thought that it should be included for most buildings um and just over here on the right side is a little example of some visual visualizations of what other cities have done and they usually take the form of interactive maps so what would benchmarking and transparency look like in terms of timing um as zach mentioned we're looking at doing um three different phases and before all of that leading with city properties to show our own leadership and just to resolve any barriers or difficulties that might come up the three faces are spaced one year apart and they double the number of covered buildings each year there's a deadline that's based in may for each year and that's based
139on a national standard of may and june deadlines so that if folks have uh properties that span multiple cities that also have benchmarking ordinances they're not dealing with uh deadlines that aren't similar to each other you'll note that the initial transparency begins one year after the initial benchmarking for each phase which gives building owners a full year to see what their benchmarking results were and make those low-cost improvements that can improve their score our task force recommended a longer timeline which we felt did not meet the 820 goals and lost the benefit of market transformation so we're continuing to work with our task force to create a system that meets the goals of h20 while recognizing the needs of our community um for building owners tenants occupants in the market that is using this this
140data it's important that it is seen as highly as high quality and dependable which means that it needs to be accurate um some of the actions will pursue to increase the accuracy of data generated through this policy include prioritizing adequate training and support streamlining the data upload process and providing support there as well reviewing any extreme values and outliers and revisiting them leveraging the built-in data quality tool and energy star portfolio manager and also incentivizing that buildings verify or certify the results using energy star portfolio managers uh certification process um so kind of getting into how will you track progress um so we will check success of the program first by measuring compliance of buildings covered by the policy with a smart goal to reach 80 to 90 compliance of all covered buildings by 2025.
141and so to reach this our priority will be to increase the number of buildings performing by providing support and identifying and resolving barriers this includes working to expedite and simplify access to data and supporting buildings getting started with benchmarking through webinars trading strata jams help centers and partnering with the 2030 district in cases where buildings consistently do not comply with the policy or might intentionally intentionally submit false information enforcement in the form of fines will be used so our small our smart goal is based on compliance and the policy was also incentivized energy efficiency improvements so in general an energy concierge can help uh step buildings through a process of doing an energy efficiency improvement and help secure financing through local resources like michigan saves or pace and so energy concierge is something that our
142office has been working about developing and hopefully can be starting to get set up by the time these buildings are starting to benchmark and then information from energy benchmarking can reveal what building types are the best candidates for energy efficiency improvements allowing for more targeted supporting programs or incentives to be developed lastly there's a few other ways that we can track progress as well through energy and financial impacts awareness on both the building owners side and also the market side um and then more widespread impacts like economic impacts on jobs and local economic development or workforce development and education so i know it's way past uh eight so i want to thank you for your time and open it up for questions thank you zach and uh thea that was an excellent very professional presentation
143and um really reflects the great work that you've done we've got several people that are interested in commenting i'm just going to go from the upper left in my screen commissioner mccoy okay um yeah thank you that was really interesting um and great to see so thank you for your work on this um and i definitely agree with what dia said at one point in the presentation that i think for me transparency seems to be the most important aspect in this um my only concern was that just that there seems to be a lot of homes in ann arbor that are converted into multi-family units i've lived in one that was a multi-family home that was more than four units shockingly um and there's also a lot of existing buildings that are smaller than um
1442000 square feet um i think every i've lived here for six years and i think four different places within those six years if not more than that and all of them would not fall under um these uh like that threshold that you determined um and i think my concern particularly comes from it seems that these multi-family units seem to be generally much older than the bigger units that are available or the bigger buildings that are available and so i would make an educated guess that they are also more inefficient so i think i think if you're confident that um you know this will be covered by a green rental housing ordinance like that you know concern is fine with me but i just wanted to voice that um and i hope the green rental housing
145ordinance comes before us soon i know we've been talking about it for a long time um and then my only other comment would be that um for the task force i i think i would like to request that a tax force that you know involves a policy that impacts renters includes them as a constituency group i hope the same for the green rental housing ordinance we're often left out of decision making processes that impact us even ones like this that would probably impact us in a positive way so i just hope to see that um included in the future thanks thank you commissioner zucker say thanks again that's great presentation and just couple quick comments of i mean the in the data age i think just just the collecting of this data is so valuable
146um just to learn from and that hopefully we could also maybe use this in connection and cooperation with the previous topic the of to help kind of guide decisions for when to reuse versus to rebuilds maybe there's some kind of connections we can make between between the data gathering and the embodied energy moving forward thanks jay uh commissioner hook um and then council member briggs yep a great presentation appreciate that um just a recommendation you know age is a lot of times a telling point for where we should be looking but i've been on a lot of buildings in ann arbor i can't even count how many that are in the 20 000 plus square footage probably over 100 easy and um the telling telling issue is if we could get a drone mounted infrared
147thermography camera we could do it ourselves and pretty much find the buildings without getting too discriminatory but really infrared tells a tremendous story particularly if you can get the roof component in that's going to give you a lot of data on where things are at with a specific building and where to start so good work and i also wanted to add the energy concierge program is a great place to go to for helping assist in this space thanks thanks chuck council member briggs yeah thanks um great presentation and um sounds like it's going to have a lot of great outcomes i just wanted to ask a little bit more about sort of the process that was being set up in terms of the reporting i know the goals is to create accuracy so and how
148that data might be able to be compiled differently instead of having kind of multiple faces um so dte i know sends me a a monthly benchmarking report against how i fare against other homes and so i was wondering if there was an opportunity for the city to get that information directly from dte if that was an opportunity or if that's the first question i have yeah i'm happy to answer that now yeah um yeah unfortunately uh larger buildings can be a little bit more complicated than single-family homes which is a huge frustrating part and actually a gap that we should have talked more about um so in multi-family buildings have multiple tenants building owners don't automatically have access to information on how much energy their tenants are using or how their tenants are using that
149space um so it can be a bit of an involved process getting all the information that they need and then also we are working with dt and making that process uh easier with automatic data uploads looking at looking at sorry we're looking at starting doing aggregation thresholds so if there's a certain number of tenants uh building owners wouldn't need to get explicit authorization from each tenant while still perfect protecting data privacy of all those but i i do see where you're coming from um i think out there all of the data exists and it would be great if we could just get it all in one place and it would be easy um but it is also balancing um additional to the energy consumption information um also some information on how the building is used
150yeah okay okay and maybe and that's part of it i just wonder if there's you know if we're having to work with dt already to make it easier for the building owners to get that information it seems like it'd be easier for them just to have provide authorization you know we up front about providing that information to the city and then some other information that we compile with it and then almost the city provides information back to the building owners on an annual basis as opposed to trying to get the information to the city and then get the information back out to the public so if there's a way to streamline that um and make it easier for folks it seems like we end up with more accuracy and then i wondered obviously we have
151we're the water utility so obviously we provide it i was just looking at my uh my information um it seems like we should be able to kind of create an algorithm where we have that information already ourselves rather than asking maybe just asking for some baseline data to help inform that is that could you help me understand more kind of that process too sure um so i think the powerful point is that providing that information in a way that's useful for building owners and the market to [Music] consume and so right now from a legal standing i don't believe we can do the easy route of just asking bt for everyone's data and just um you know sharing everyone's uh information without first working with them um so that's one thing that we're working through
152um but i i do think while we do have the water data on hand it's also helpful just to make sure it's in a really useful um i don't know a format for building owners to use and then starting to get it also if you're renting i want to know you know am i going to pay a lot for water in this building having a bit more of an idea of what your expected utility cost might be yeah no i understand that i'm just trying to make it i'm just trying to understand a little bit better the the process of instead of having acquiring that information kind of trying to drag that information out of folks and then communicate it back out to people if we can somehow incentivize making that making that easier and
153also doing some of the legwork on our end so that that is um that we're making it really easy for people to do that um since we're since we have the water utility data i guess that's i just maybe want a little bit more information about kind of that moving forward we could talk about it if i may council member yesterday on that too yeah so the analogy there's no question we can legally do benchmarking the analogy that's been given to us is like a relationship that you have with your pcp that i can't call and get larry kerber's medical records but larry could give permission potentially for me to get his medical record he could give me his medical record yeah so that's the the legal landscape utilities are operating in and so we're
154trying to figure out how it's not it's not a legal question it's a programmatic question so then zach and i are kind of working on staffing like how many interns how are we partnering with the 2030 district what's the role for the concierge to really make this easy for people to get there it's a heavier lift on our side than would be ideal but how do we make it an easier lift for the buildings that are disposing yeah and that's sort of what i'm gonna i assume we couldn't just automatically get it but i that was kind of the piece around having the opportunity for them to authorize it as opposed to having to give us data on whatever you know time cycle that we had wanted it um at and then there was remember
155if there was one more question on this oh i guess the other piece is obviously um if there isn't compliance what does enforcement look like and i know you mentioned fines but realistically what is what's that look like yeah we have a backup slide that i'm happy to pull up um so it'd be helpful if i didn't overshoot it apologies for this cool so the current fine structure is based off of recommendations from other cities and so it's set at a level that would potentially be more expensive than paying someone to benchmark for you um and so that's why the starting level is every 90 days after 30 days of written of a written notice of not being in compliance um and additionally um we also understand that there might be some difficulties or burdens
156getting up and running so we really want to focus on if someone's not in compliance helping them get in compliance versus um just defaulting to only loving a fine okay thank you yeah and i guess you know my hope out of this is that i mean this is this is a great program i think it's going to offer the outcomes are really good just making sure that we are not sort of i guess uh the government is being seen as sort of a partner that's um really helping to facilitate and make this easy and to help um help building owners and make better choices in the future as opposed to kind of being yet another thing that sort of people groan that okay now the city needs us to do this you know and it's
157and it's becomes really challenging to find the staff and the time to be able to enforce effectively so those are my those are my only concerns with that commissioner kerber you're muted thank you for the presentation it's um quite interesting one of the things that i just observe in visiting buildings is just how much energy is wasted and i've seen estimates that the amount of energy that's wasted is in the neighborhood sometimes 30 to 40 percent you see it just going out the door some doors are open i mean so much of it is just just not being taken you know seriously so this is certainly a step in that direction but when i saw the presentation and i saw the average building that does benchmarking gets down to gets two and a half percent
158savings and i'm kind of shocked i mean that seems to be a relatively small number considering how much energy is actually going out the door how much being wasted so i guess my question is once you have this data what steps would be taken to get that two and a half percent to something really really more significant two or three times that would be the minimum in my opinion um because there's so much that's there that could be saved see or zach you want to tackle that or sure oh go for it zach we work together a lot can you tell um um yeah so what could potentially happen is a there could be a follow-up policy to this that would implement standards that would encourage folks to go beyond that um beyond what the
159benchmarking reveals through um the low low hanging fruit but um for now i think we're focused on giving um building owners the tools that they can use to manage their data i think that's a really critical first step to any other anything else that could eventually come down the pipeline if it ever were to um we want to make sure that we're setting building owners up for success in a program like this um and are equipping them with with the data management tools that they would need for for that to be successful anyhow um see anything to add to that yeah i go go for it all right um i just wanted to say there's a lot of great processes once the building is benchmarking not reinventing the wheel to uh start incrementally making improvements
160um and so having a city-wide policy puts us in a really great position to start knowing who to help with that policy or not policy with that process um but i know their books have their hands up missy yeah i just wanted to jump in on that and say i think it's a really good point larry into councilmember briggs kind of question about support what this will give us is really much more nuanced information about our if you will have flyers and our areas for significant improvement and so we can then be much more surgical with limited resources and helping those folks improve and that's information we just don't have today so i think you're you're right if my understanding is from the research this is what happens on its own without a supporting ecosystem
161as you know we want a supporting ecosystem so we expect further deeper faster improvements uh we just don't have there aren't a lot of examples for us to point to with data so we'll have to we'll have to be on the vanguard on this one okay commissioner cleavy i just want to encourage you guys to not underestimate the amount of hand-holding that this is going to take when you start working with these companies um so um just just make sure you budget for enough time and resources and stuff because i think that's going to initially suck up more time than you think and we averaged when i was at the energy office we found that it took roughly an hour and a half to get per account to get the data from the utilities that's
162after being put on hold and dropped calls several times um and uh when i worked with the energy star earlier iterations on portfolio manager we found the same thing that you know unless you got a full-time energy manager this is hard and um so i think the energy considers is a really important thing and i encourage you to to think through how much effort you're allocating for hand-holding and helping people get into this system initially if i can comment on that quickly before i go to commissioner mccumber uh jan culbertson was mentioned earlier and she's been involved in this and some of you might be aware of the fact that the ann arbor 2030 district is doing a lot of work in this area i'm interfacing with dpe and energy star portfolio manager and um
163they're working on some um processes that would automate some of this mark and hopefully address some of your issues i'm sure they're going to be handholding in the beginning but they're they're paving the way for that obviously on the back end of this is probably going to be a lot of hand holding as well too to help start helping people commissioner mccomber um yeah thank you john um you kind of partially answered my question or addressed it which is um unless i missed it i didn't hear that progress had been made on talking to dte about creating a data bridge my understanding is that that's a kind of a critical piece of the successful benchmarking ordinances in other cities so i'm wondering if um zach and dia can talk at that point a little more
164sacrifice you want to add to what i said just do any more additional details to share yeah i mean so it is a currently a pilot underway where dt is explicitly working on making that automatic data upload from their system into energy star portfolio manager um so it's a work in progress i don't think it's as beautiful or as seamless as everyone wishes it were but we're excited to see where that goes um you know um i think also we're not the only city now in michigan that's looking at doing this and i think as we see more and more cities starting to come up with these ordinances over the next couple years that there'll be more and more pressure from utilities even if it's not set up right away for them to set it
165up soon because there'll be a lot of demand for this data so it'll be uh perhaps a customer service providing thank you any other questions i have a few hopefully um that we can take care of a minute a piece a one minute update on the timing for the home energy audit disclosure ordinance what's that was mentioned um what's the timeline yeah so that also went through legal review and i think we had a good clearing um so our next step is going to do some stakeholder engagement based off of that um and then i'm not sure what the timeline was for bringing this mandatory commission i'll bump that back to i see yeah next month we had planned to have the first reading of the resolution okay great um a uh a couple of
166comments um that hopefully are helpful well first of all i want to thank you for um an explanation on the threshold um and what i would encourage um some related to that but just in general is that since this is a new program that there's something that triggers whether it's in the resolution or whether it's just someone going into their calendar that we review um this ordinance um for how successful it is where there's bugs where we can improve it whether or not the threshold being should be increased or decreased or whether we should uh take stretch out the timeline but just maybe something that reviews this um once a year for the first couple of years or something like that and then finally i just wanted to i think it's finally um yeah i
167think it's the only important thing the university in michigan has a office of student affairs and since the university of michigan has also declared a path to carbon neutrality and set some targets that that office has an off campus housing website and it seemed to me we could collaborate with them to potentially get some of this information out to renters pushing sort of going back to maybe a little bit to commissioner mccumber's statements um to get this information listed on that website we've also talked with simi about potentially getting listed also on that website whether or not they have eb charging um it's just if if we start to trigger uh landlords to start to think about oh this information is starting to get out in the public domain then that may start to encourage
168them to actually take action so just wanted to offer that up as a suggestion um with that um unless somebody else has any other comments um we can start to wrap this up with the reports um thanks again then zach appreciate your burning not quite the midnight oil with us but nevertheless thanks a lot thanks for having us okay okay we're we're gonna get this meeting done so that um it's not dark where noah and missy are sitting so next is energy report news from the office of sustainability and innovation and also from commissioners and missy if you would like i'm gonna give you an opportunity maybe to address um the caller's um questions about um the landfill solar so if you want to you can do that now or we can maybe do that
169some other time depending on time yeah for sure absolutely i know we're running late so i will share with the commission after this we just released to counsel last night a one-year report on a20 that chronicles some of the major things that we've worked on and what's coming next i'm just going to send that to everyone uh the highlights are we're coming off of a really fun and exhausting 820 celebration week we had 23 events last week over six days we got to interact hundreds of different ann arborites and it was really invigorating and delightful uh i will share i think it might be an interesting this group john referenced it earlier that we just did a data poll and we're automating a lot more of our data and one of the things we noticed
170is as of days ago i think it was as of yesterday we have almost the same number of solar permits sold that we had in all of 2020 so we're six permits short and it is june that was as of june 7th so we will absolutely continue just blowing the roof off of solar permits multiple solarize programs running we've got some big ones coming down the pipeline so it's looking really great um the other thing i wanted to share to mr garber's comments is tomorrow the michigan public service commission has their meeting in which they will make a formal ruling on the settlement and the vgp case of which settlement was recommended by the parties involved and then there's one issue that the administrative law judge pulled on and just want to share so we
171think about the the landfill solar project that's in there one is the cost estimates were really generated absolutely randomly by uh folks in a conversation uh especially with the media so sometimes people talk about 40 or 50 million dollars we don't have cost uh where we are in that process is we've done the technical studies to show that the the site actually can take an injection of 24 megawatts which is a lot of power at a given site and so we understand the upgrades that would have to happen at the at dt's power sites in order to take that infuse and we are about to go to council at their next meeting asking as part of a traditional contract with tetra tech a small pretty modest roughly 60 000 increase to do the environmental impact
172assessment at the landfill which is the last phase after that comes back which i'm going to assume is going to come back pretty great because we do a lot of monitoring at the landfill we already know a lot about that site because of it being a landfill then if everything is cleared we go to bid and we start getting actual pricing so at that point we'll be able to talk about what this project would cost and whether we want to proceed it is true that we did negotiate with dte that they would own the asset this time and the reason for that is because it's a capital landfill the liability associated with the cap landfill you can imagine if uh mr cleavy was one of the subscribers and his his air quote panel broke that
173cap landfill he is legally liable for all of the improvements on that landfill and we didn't think that was the best way to come into community solar and so instead we have offered it up as an anchor tenant program where people can subscribe and get the benefits of that without having the liability associated with that asset it's also a bridge to true community solar where we have actual community ownership and we're excited to be working with a number of different stakeholders on that as part of other initiatives that we're working on but this is um this is kind of that that bridge it's also the largest undeveloped property that we have in the city and really the only site we have that's viable for this kind of volume of energy production uh so it is
174not a go it is not defined but what we got and hopefully what we'll get tomorrow i think around three o'clock is when the ruling will come down is permission from the commission an agreement that dg and ann arbor will work in good faith to see this project uh through to final costing and make a decision about how best to proceed and that is something we cannot do outside of this filing we dt there is there is no need for them to have to say yes this filing is how we got to that point and there are other things i know we talked about in our last commission meeting that we were able to get through the intervention those are just some of the things i wanted to share um we're really excited to see
175the rooftop solar work progressing and hopefully by the end of this year you'll see even more solar on city facilities stay tuned for more thank you missy uh mark i see you have a hand up and then i'll also open up to other commissioners for news important updates etc go ahead mark just quickly i just want to remind everyone that the great lakes renewable energy association was the first organization outside the city to endorse that project and and uh we continue to be really happy with the way that it's unfolding and the work that missy's doing on this thing so the best of all worlds we're getting now be great if utilities would change their business model to be more in line with ann arbor but whatever thanks missy great job others i have a
176question while other people mull over whether they have a question in an email exchange with another commissioner actually commissioner kerber i was wondering if there's anybody that can um advise us as a group or also maybe acting individually how we can positively impact legislation that is being considered at the state level to address the cap on distributed generation any thoughts um that anybody wants to share on that there's been letters been sent out by glrea i'm recommending writing members of the house committee um beyond that anybody else want to comment chuck so i i can't talk on behalf of the utility but i will say something that i think is pretty important i've mentioned this probably in the past that the one percent cap was there it was put in place so that we avoided
177a land a an avalanche of applications and it took about a year and a half to two years for maybe what more than that more like three years for the actual applications to approach that that percentage it took so long that bumping it by a hundred percent more seem to make logical sense and then we'll see what the tren what that trajectory looks like to get to two percent i don't think in talking with my brethren if there's any barrier to keep going the barrier is really based on the infrastructure that exists the missy mentioned that the injection of the landfill solar one of the dte i think 46 kv circuits is at the maximum limit we have these infrastructural issues that if we if we slam circuits with solar the circuits become impacted negatively
178so we have to go in pieces and this is part of the planning process just to avoid overload if you will i'll just say it at a high level i could get into some really deep weeds if you want me to talk bars and react to power and capacitors and things like that but i'll stop uh i'll open it up again again for general news and updates or comments from commissioners one thing quickly i did want to share and i apologize for not bringing this up before is that there is another bill that we're watching pretty closely and it um very candidly is targeted at us which is the ban on the ban so there's a proposal to ban municipalities from banning natural gas infrastructure which as you know is not something that we have
179explicitly called out an a20 but um we're watching that really closely and there was supposed to be a vote on it today but it got pulled for some reason and there are a number of different opportunities for folks to sign on and share support however you support or don't support that resolution thank you anyone else otherwise we'll go to working group updates okay working group updates um the only one i think that is still really functioning is transportation electrification carlene can i ask you to give us a brief update on that we've been in discussion um this month about figuring out how we can support multi-unit dwellings um to have electrification for ev charging um we're just exploring what the biggest challenges are right now and what we can do to as a city to
180help help folks um to make those transitions just add one other thing to that um the working group had uh presentation from may mobility back in april and may mobility is a ann arbor based company that is developing and launching autonomous with autonomous vehicles in several cases um ev vehicles and they just announced and are launching a program in downtown ann arbor in conjunction with a number of other entities to run a pilot essentially in ann arbor they've run pilots in grand rapids and in columbus ohio so we're happy that they're doing that here and i encourage you to check out their website and to have a ride with them and see what it's like to uh run on a autonomous ev vehicle so it's a it's a shuttle actually um anything else uh carlene
181or missy otherwise i'll give an update okay i'll give an update on the environmental commission so as usual uh look to legistar if anything i tell you sounds interesting we had an update from the city on uh the gis tools that the city has four natural features it's actually a really cool website where you're able to look at all different kinds of natural features from trees to forest fragments to wetlands topography there are photographs that you can look at dating back to 1947 essentially through the present that you can overlay on those to see how tree cover has changed and so on and so forth so if you're interested in anything related to natural features um the city offers that and also washington county does as well so if that's that's a tool that could
182be of interest to you we had a presentation from a seas group that is working with the natural features working group of the environmental commission and the city on a project to enhance that data they are going into selected plots and identifying uh tree species and they're matching that with remote sensor data lidar data and some other data to be able to do a much more complete mapping of the tree canopy in ann arbor that would allow even the identification of individual species that's particularly helpful for example if we want to attack invasive species um and also you know have a good good sense of what where where we have particularly important specimens that are not um lining the streets and where we have information maintained by the city the other thing that we did
183is we handled a number of issues related to the gelman plume had a report on some issues perceived by the city and others uh related to the monitoring program that gelman has proposed there was a resolution that was considered in past and then finally let's see what was the last thing oh yeah there was some just quick discussion about uh how the new adu uh ordinance might affect natural features um and that was just discussed that was tabled and we didn't take any any action on that so those are things that were discussed in the environmental commission um i think that's it unless anybody has any questions for any of us otherwise we'll move to public comment so i have to read my spiel here this is the second last opportunity for persons to speak
184for up to three minutes and provide public comment if you're watching on ctn call 888-7 or 877-853-5247 and enter the meeting id eight 913-5783 four five zero two this information is also displayed in the meeting agenda and on the video feed um 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 and indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone and you will hear an automated message that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area movie any background noise on televisions so that we can hear you clearly and then finally please state your name and where your address is at the beginning of your comments
185nobody okay we'll wait 30 seconds and leslie while we're waiting that 30 seconds i thought i would just mention um i talked at the beginning of the meeting we had a number of people stepping off the commission um we're in the process of reviewing applications the mayor ultimately makes nominations and those are voted on by city council but missy josh arlene and i are looking at applications we met once to look at those we had a really big and excellent slate of candidates and so we're working on filling those positions and hopefully we'll have action and on that soon and have some new members of the of the commission you see anybody okay so items for the next uh meeting uh agenda any proposals uh amber you have your hand up yeah i have two
186but i have a question first it says on the agenda that the next meeting is in august so is next month the working meeting or is our next meeting for july um actually we we talked about meeting agendas going forward um august typically um we haven't had meetings um just because there's a lot of people that are traveling or vacation or you know summer break kind of stuff so um we we haven't finalized um either of those we also typically have working sessions um missy or carlene did we actually we didn't um we added it as a discussion to say should we meet in august because i think we weren't sure so we wanted the body to decide that's why it was on there yeah yep so what where what are people's thoughts um let's
187see i i had a piece of paper with a bunch of different ideas that we talked about i don't know missy do you have them in front of you by chance let's see here so um july we talked about as missy mentioned earlier the home energy disclosure ordinance and we also talked about getting an update from matt groskoff on what's going on at viridian at county farm they have some interesting developments there with a microgrid and solar and things like that so that was um one of the things that we talked about doing um and then yeah so that was those are some possibilities for a july meeting are people up for a july meeting anybody else propose other topics i mean one topic is is clearly um reconsidering the or the resolution that we
188talked about this evening as well on low embodied carbon and construction and benchmarking if possible yeah yeah those things i had two other things that i was going to propose for topics for next month or whenever it's in the future one is that i would like to request that we invite the ann arbor for public power group back um for follow-up conversation since there were some lingering questions from commissioners continued issuance in the public comments and then follow up from hall of fame presentation that ken mentioned um i'd also like to propose a resolution around this and the other thing is to be interested in follow-up um to the rmi beneficial electrification presentation we heard last month with some conversations around next steps i'm not sure if this is being talked about in a in
189a working group or electrification but um i had a conversation recently with a homeowner who is trying to electrify and they identified several barriers even though they're interested in taking the next steps on their home and i can i can send a detailed list of what they told me um for whenever we discuss this but basically they were saying that there's a dearth of heat pumps available in the area and there's more interest than there are pumps available right now partially because of the presentation around heat pumps that have happened and there's also a need for contractors who are able to do this work and then of course there's huge issues with costs just parodies and billing issues um the standard systems um so i just i thought that you know these all seem to
190be ones that can't be beared by individual homeowners or business owners and that we should be you know working collectively to to try to make it so that these aren't things that would impede someone who's interested from doing these on their home um and i also just wanted to add that i really appreciated that both presentations today were both really informative but also came paired with ordinances so i just really like the model of learning and then being able to discuss and take action on what we've learned um or maybe what we've already known but got reviewed so thanks excellent points missy amber to that point if you could send anything that you have from the resident to us too this is one of the things that is the priority for the second year of
191a20 for staff so we are actively working on massive electrification work and support services contractor training manufacturer discounts homeowner uh incentives so please please please we'd love the commission to take it up too but don't wait um if there's something we can do where we stand ready on that's in that sense yeah actually there's something that i failed to mention too as far as working group updates there is a working group that is focused on concierge services um we're in the information gathering phase um chuck is on it wayne appleyard josh um a couple other people i'm sure i'm forgetting and we've divided that up and we're in in the process of soliciting information from other cities on their programs so that will also hopefully address some of these issues that you're referring to ember
192but yeah there's also supply chain issues and training technician issues and a whole bunch of things like that that all impact us um so i noted your comments um i think it sounds like we're up for a july meeting anybody have a problem with that and then um in our july meeting we can talk about the august meeting and generally missy joss carlene and i have a meeting a week before that where we're talking about agenda ideas so hopefully we'll be able to bring a proposal about august um to the meeting in july how does that sound okay so um i think i'm the one that's fading the most and almost you're losing me so it's an appropriate time to adjourn this meeting and uh thank everybody for your attention i enjoyed the meeting mark
193go ahead you have to raise your hand thing at the end um missy and paul are are going to be presenting the glra's clean energy seminar this thursday talking about community choice aggregation within the context of michigan's current electric choice law so that's going to happen and then um ember we're also having a a c detroit clean energy seminar on municipalitization later this uh in august as well so both of these things are i think are important so yeah you're all invited as usual to uh tap into that presentation on thursday thank you mark great it is 8 54. thanks everybody for hanging with us including the sun and i hope you all have a great rescue evening thanks thank you you