Ann Arbor Energy Commission Meeting 3/9/21

001by the way i got vaccinated last week and hopefully the rest of you all of you will soon so um maybe someday we can get together and uh and do this in person again that would be great and then go out for uh for our favorite beverage afterwards in celebration so we intend to conduct this meeting similar to in-person meetings commissioners please remain on camera just as you would be visible during in-person meetings also mute your microphone when not speaking public comment will be via telephone to speak during any of the public comment opportunities please call one of the following toll-free numbers 888-788-0099 or 877-853-5247 and enter the meeting id 913-5783-4502 and by the way these numbers will remain the same for the entire year for energy commission meetings so this information along with two

002local dial-in numbers is also available on the published agenda in the public notice section of the city website and on the broadcast of this meeting on ctn channel 16 at d channel 9 and online at www.a2gov.org backslash watch ctn so um opening up or going into our agenda the first thing on the agenda is the land acknowledgement missy will you um please recite the language acknowledgement yeah thank you chamerski 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 botawatomi and wyandotte peoples i further acknowledge that our city stands like almost all property in the united states on lands obtained generally in unconscionable ways from indigenous peoples the taking of this land was formalized by the treaty of detroit

003in 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 missy by the way i just listened to a podcast today from vancouver washington or vancouver british columbia and they read a similar land acknowledgment at the beginning of their podcast which i thought was very cool so um could you lead us through the roll call absolutely let me pull that up here great uh commissioner hook him he's here yes commissioner mccomber i'm here if you're here great mr schreiberg here commissioner cleavy here commissioner colvin garcia here councilmember briggs here council member radina here commissioner zacker commissioner hatcher here commissioner

004mccoy here commissioner jordan here commissioner singleton commissioner kerber you have a beautiful quorum excellent so um next on the agenda is approval of the agenda um i hope everybody's had a chance to look at it um do we have a motion to prove the agenda as published so moved do we have a second second any discussion okay so all in favor say aye or raise your hand i i i can't see everybody so um if any opposed i'll go on the opposed no opposed so it um the next is um approval of the minutes um hopefully everybody's had a chance to take a look at the minutes um again they're always posted with the last meeting so um does anybody have um or would anybody be willing to uh make a motion to approve the

005minutes commissioner and the second executive all in favor then say aye hi hi hi any opposed so we are off to the races public input is the next session or the next section on the agenda and i will go into the details of that again um so this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes if you are watching on ctn you're going to need to call one of the toll fee numbers that i mentioned before and i'll read them again it is one is 888 788-0099 or eight seven seven eight five three five two four seven and enter the meeting id nine one three five five seven eight three four five zero two and this information again is also displayed on the meeting agenda and the video feed city staff

006will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone and you will hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area mute any television or background sounds so that we can hear you clearly and finally please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments so missy i think we had one person waiting to give public comment we do we have a few folks uh caller uh with the last three digits five one nine hi my name is ian mark i'm an ann arbor resident my address is 1811 independence boulevard i was

007calling in in support of the local municipalization campaign for our energy grid i think there's a lot of great reasons to support that uh the least of which being making sure we actually meet our a20 goals um and decarbonize the energy grid gain more democratic control over it um but just speaking from my own experiences one way that i can identify it would have a very direct impact in my life would be um a more reliable energy grid you know i can think of uh just one time this last summer i was up i was without power for over 24 hours um and i you know that was obviously very frustrating um and i looked into it more and i found that even though dte charges us i want to say 32 higher than the

008national average per kilowatt hour um we actually have oh let me look up a statistic but it's um we're actually uh it's actually one of the least reliable grids in the country um you know metro times analysis revealed that a lot of the grid is actually as many as 40 years beyond its functional life um so just as an ann arbor resident i find that very frustrating that we're paying a premium for a grid that we can't rely on you know as the recent emergency in texas has shown uh losing power it's not just an inconvenience it can be a matter of life and death for uh some of our most vulnerable residents so yeah that's uh that's my spiel on municipalization um i definitely support it thank you for giving me the opportunity to

009share my two cents thanks thank you ian appreciate you calling in missy do we have a couple of others we do yeah so uh caller with the last digits eight two zero i can hear me i can hi my name is phil bianco i am a resident of ann arbor in ward 1. i'm calling similar to the previous caller in support of public power in ann arbor of municipalizing the energy grid the energy utility in ann arbor i think there are many reasons to support this to increase local control to make it more affordable reliable and to invest in our community here in ann arbor and also to do the enviro environmentally responsible uh thing so yeah i mean i think those are all really good reasons to support public power in our city um

010i also i mean i would also just like to highlight that you know and i hope that the commissioners and i'm confident that they will you know in thinking about this issue uh will you know strive to make a decision based on what is the right thing to do here because i think the opposition um to it will likely try to sow a lot of fear about lawsuits and other kind of things that could go wrong with a public energy grid but i really do think that in ann arbor we're a community that takes climate change and environmental responsibility very very seriously obviously and i think we have a really good opportunity here to really lead on this issue by advancing uh public power in our community and so i just really urge and i

011hope that you know as the commissioners are thinking about you know this issue and thinking about what it's going to take to make it work that you really think about what is what is the thing that's going to be best for you know future generations of people one or two generations down the line um because i think again we have a really big opportunity here in ann arbor uh to to make a difference and to show communities across this country that there's a lot more we can do to stop climate change if we're willing to take on uh private capital and large corporations like dte um so thank you for your time and yeah thanks thank you for calling in we have a couple more missy we do yeah caller ending in seven seven two

012hello my name is rowan tucker meyer and i live on shattered road so we as a community have to keep our eye on the ball we are rapidly running out of time to transition our energy infrastructure away from fossil fuels so you all as energy commissioners are in a unique position to help our community transform our energy system and reduce our carbon emissions now the path to achieving this is municipalization starting with the feasibility study and frankly we should have de-privatized our energy system a long time ago when climate change was still off on the horizon it's outrageous that the public service of energy is controlled by a private monopoly but this problem is more urgent now than ever before we cannot continue to wait and hope that bte will transform their energy infrastructure for

013us because it's pretty clear to anyone paying attention that that's not going to happen now in spite of their green watching pr campaign the truth is this they have no intention of preventing this crisis because they're an investor owned utility so if they invested in solar panels for instance instead of natural gas that might give their shareholders a little less money at the end of the day so their hideously disingenuous carbon zero pledge is actually in stark contrast with reality they're in fact continuing to invest in new horrendously dangerous fossil fuel infrastructure like this new one billion dollar natural gas plant in sinclair so dte isn't going to save us so if we're truly committed to stopping the climate crisis our best option is to take the power into our own hands pun intended so

014we can't wait for a cta either because first of all that plan would have to pass through the michigan legislature and it's personally very difficult for me to imagine that ever happening and even if it somehow got passed we would still be reliant on dpe's infrastructure municipalization would be both more feasible and more effective than cca we simply cannot waste any more time if you want to you all have the ability to help ann arbor do its part in the fight against the fight against climate change and so to do this we need to municipalize our energy thank you do we have any more yeah call our ending and four four five um hello can you hear me yes we can okay so my name is virginia i reside in east ann arbor and i'm

015here like the rest of my fellow public commenters to demand that the city transition to a public power utility um last time i called in i mentioned that millions of young people's futures are on the line due to climate change and global warming and i'd like to reiterate that fact and stress that continued inaction is unacceptable we saw it in the california wildfires that devastated millions of lives and burned acres upon acres of land we saw in the recent texas snowstorms that left millions without power in the freezing cold and we see it today where people in this very state in this very city are suffering due to extreme temperatures extreme precipitation and continued destruction of our ecosystem you might recall that over half of dte's energy comes from burning coal while a small feeble

016amount comes from wind and solar power you have heard stories of your own constituents suffering because of the disastrous consequences of climate change and you have to understand that with a public power utility you can finally transition away from dirty fossil fuel energy and towards energy that is clean and sustainable taking steps to halt the climate crisis and pave the path for future generations not taking this step is a failure to the community and it's an impending disaster of a climate crisis isn't enough municipalization benefits us in other ways it's more reliable affordable and equitable than privatized energy it allows us to have a say and a decision in making these decisions that is not owned by powerful for-profit fossil fuel corporations like dte it's time to follow through on our promises and municipalize energy

017here in ann arbor continued inaction is unacceptable thank you and thank you for your perspective virginia missy do we have any more yep caller ending in 218. two one eight you're unmuted two and eight you want us press star um is it star nine missy or star nine is just to talk i think star six is too unmute they're unmuted they are okay thank you uh maybe we'll circle back maybe yes let's do that okay we'll be back uh caller ending in two two eight caller entering in 2-2-8 hi sorry about that can you hear me yes we can hi uh this is greg woodring calling in uh i presented last time with ann arbor for public power and i wanted to call in once again to give my perspective on municipalization and specifically talk

018about how i really do believe that we have an opportunity here in front of us you know i'm a pretty young guy i'm 25 years old and to be honest growing up i haven't seen a lot of hope for the future the climate christ is impending and it seems that every powerful person in the world is dead set against doing anything about it our institutions are failing all around us and frankly it's a pretty disillusioning time to grow up but i really do think that we are in a time of crisis and in times of crisis real change is possible you really we really can change the way that our society is structured we really can take back power into the hands of the people create a more equitable just society a society that isn't

019built off of the rules that a few cruel and greedy people set and i believe that municipalization is a step towards that future it is taking back what should have always been in the public's hands electricity is a fundamental part of our lives it is as ubiquitous as water or heat or shelter we are we we cannot maintain our standard of living in any sort of way without electricity and we saw this we saw this just recently down in texas as other commenters have mentioned when we put such a necessary resource into the hands of a small group of people who are selected due to their ability to maximize profit for people who are not affected by their decisions we are creating situations where what happened in texas will happen again and again and again

020and we should not replicate that system into the future we have to rebuild our entire energy grid we are not going to be able to continue on with fossil fuels if we are to survive and so when we look forward towards how are we going to rebuild our energy grid we should think about how do we want to structure our society around that new grid how do we want to make changes because this is the time we can do it when we when we need to rebuild is the time we can do things better let's not repeat the mistakes of the past let's put power back into the hands of the people i believe in municipalization because it is going to be a cheaper more reliable solution that will get us to carbon neutrality but

021i also believe that we need to break the stranglehold that these large companies have on the state's politics we cannot continue to live under the dominion of dte into the future we need municipalization we need to lead on this issue ann arbor can do it and arbor should do it and if we do it others will follow thank you for your time thank you greg for calling in thanks for your perspective caller ending in 172. hi yeah my name is daniel smolkin i'm a native annabrid as i've lived here well over half of my life and i live in ward 4 and yeah i'm calling in support of this push for energy municipalization you know my reasons why scorpios are twofold um first of all i think we have a strong ethical imperative to make

022this change um as we call it just before me mentioned um nowadays you really do need access to electricity in order to meaningfully participate in society in fact many vulnerable people such as people on oxygen or ventilators need access to electricity just to stay alive and so i think it's unconscionable that we have this system in place where there's people profiting off of vulnerable poor people's needs just to stay alive um aside from that you know the the ipcc release for this report a couple years ago saying we have just until we just have 10 more years to reach carbon neutrality until we we have environmental devastation due to climate change we're going to have mass flooding we're going to have food shortages we're going to have water scarcity and you know if if we

023have electricity then power companies uh operating under profit motive they don't have a reason to change things you know ceo jerry anderson he's not gonna suffer from food shortages he's going to be okay and so why should he do anything to to move to carbon neutrality i think if we want to have a power company that um serves everyone instead of just serving the shareholders um then then we really need to have municipal energy um another part of this this athletical imperative is again as people mentioned look at what happened in texas um during power outages during their blackouts um the cost of electricity skyrocketed up to nine dollars a kilowatt hour um and in fact this was done artificially the market you know went up to maybe five or six dollars and then they

024decided to lift it up to the the government's uh mandated a limit of nine dollars um and then it stayed there and so you know this is what happens when you have again a power company operating under the profit motive is they're they're just going to take advantage of desperate people and you know as again as climate change gets worse and worse we're going to see more and more of these freak weather uh sequential situations um and you know this this year happened to texas but next year it could happen here um you know it happened uh uh uh in quebec for instance uh in 1989 with a big power outage um and so there's this there's an ethical imperative to switch to municipal energy um aside from that it's just simply cheaper um you

025know on the one hand uh again dt ceo jordan or cia he makes seven million dollars a year uh i don't see why we should pay his salary just to be able to participate in society to stay alive um so you know and then the data is there as well the energy information administration um their studies showed that municipal energy tends to be about 14 cheaper than um for-profit energy companies um and so yeah i just want to emphasize that this is a thing we need to do um this is a thing we can do with them elsewhere uh los angeles has municipal energy austin has invisible energy we can have municipal energy in ann arbor and we have to do it soon or else things are going to get much worse thanks thank you

026for calling in uh caller ending in 218. oops sorry 218. hey there can you hear me we can okay great hi um so my name is david christensen i live in ward 3 of ann arbor and like a lot of my fellow callers here in fact all my fellow callers i am calling in to support uh or to voice my support for the municipalization of our like energy grid um i'm concerned about the effects of climate change and i think that municipalization is the only way uh forward reliably to protect our community um you know from climate change and so through their actions dte does not seem realistically concerned about this crisis and this is a crisis which you know um people have already spoken on at length but i'll just say that we can

027already see it like yearly in other parts of the country um the um effects of climate change and so 59 of gte's energy comes from burning coal and this is uh compared to an average of 23.4 elsewhere and then dce like has already been mentioned um continues to invest uh like excuse me billions of dollars in the uh shale gas infrastructure and so this is money that could be invested in renewables but you know isn't because of uh the you know profit motive and so i know that the h20 plan aims to get ann arbor to carbon neutrality by 2030 but i don't see how that's possible while we're relying on dte but i do see how we could do that if we had a locally controlled nonprofit not profit excuse me not profit not

028profit motivated um public power okay that's all i have to say thank you for your time and thanks for sharing your thoughts with us uh caller ending in zero two two hello uh am i on yes uh hi my name is madison zimbrick i live in ward one in the park point apartment complex i'm a person with multiple medical issues including very severe sleep apnea and i rely on electric power to my cpap machine to keep me breathing at night due to the frequent power outages that have affected both ann arbor neighborhoods where i've lived i've missed multiple days of work over the past several years after not being able to sleep at all during overnight power outages a backup battery to keep my machine running costs several hundred dollars and it's not covered by

029my insurance i and other people who rely on electrically powered medical devices should not have to pay an excessive price to keep breathing while our power company diverts their income to paying shareholders instead of towards maintenance and infrastructure development in the summer of 2019 an extended power outage forced me to flee with my pets to a friend's home in chelsea when power loss rendered our apartment unlivable and unsafe with indoor temperatures reaching the high 80s i recently discovered that because chelsea has municipalized power this friend not only has many times more reliable electrical service than i do but also pays over 30 percent less than i do for the privilege i urge the energy commission to take affirmative steps towards municipalization so that ann arbor residents can enjoy less costly more reliable and greener power

030thank you thanks for calling in i'll give you a few more uh chair mercy uh caller ending in one three four thanks um thank you dr staltz and chair mursky this is ken garber 28 haverhill court i'm really glad that valerie braider is with us tonight to speak on the foot act it's very generous of her to share her legal expertise last month in my public comment i was wrong in saying that the foot act had not been tested in court against the 30-year franchise limit set by the michigan constitution my apologies it has been so tested and case law solidly favors the utilities although i think the key state supreme court rulings date back more than half a century i expect that ms brader tonight will provide some guidance on how we might navigate

031the minefield set by the foot act in order to achieve our 820 goals but just as important from my point of view would be guidance as to how we might establish new case law through litigation to nullify the foot act altogether because the foot act is an anachronism i'm guessing that when the law was written in 1905 it was intended to provide electric utilities unimpeded access to public rights right-of-ways to construct transmission lines that makes sense but not as an absolute right because today the foot act allows utilities to operate without local franchise agreements with the communities they serve depriving towns and cities of franchise fees or any control over the quality of their of their electricity as we belatedly electrify our buildings and vehicles in response to the climate emergency we want to power

032them with clean electrons the food act removes all levers the communities have over their electric electric utilities so homeless braeder can address any opportunities we may have to establish new case law through litigation that would help us and other municipalities directly challenge the foot act the act in its affirming cases are so old and anachronistic that i have to believe such opportunities exist i'm also looking forward to paul fenn's presentation on cca i'll just point out two things first there's a lot of uncertainty in michigan around both municipalization and cca so it's prudent to keep moving forward on both at this early stage anyway and second i hope that there will be a community discussion around wrecks and other types of offsets offsets are controversial and maybe energy commission can schedule a debate about them

033as part of this education series thank you and thank you thank you ken and by the way we're going to be talking about future topics and one of the potential agenda items is specifically wrecks offsets and sinks and um so we'll be deciding um hopefully your priorities in terms of what those are and when they would be scheduled later on in the meeting missy do we have anybody else on the line we do we have three more uh caller ending in 438 hi can you hear me yes we do hi my name is joe lalonde i'm a resident of ward 1 in ann arbor at 580 kellogg street i'm calling in to speak in support of municipalization seems to be the only realistic path to reach our carbon neutrality goal of the 820 plan i

034you know we really don't have the luxury of time here with climate change uh to wait for community choice aggregation to be passed in lansing or for a dte to be weaned off of to wean off of carbon-based energy we know especially because i mean we know they're going to open a natural gas plant in 2022 so that's their plans for the future um it's up to us as ann arborites decide does that align with our our goals you know the fact that municipalization can help us reach our environmental goals reduce our rates and create stable union jobs makes this an easy choice for ann arbor thank you and we thank you a caller ending in zero three seven hello can you guys hear me yes for you wonderful my name is aiden terhune uh

035i live on 412 hamilton street here in ann arbor um i much like everyone else on this uh call would like to voice my support for uh municipalization of uh power here in ann arbor um this is actually my first year as a renter uh in ann arbor uh like a proper renter and boy howdy was i getting skewered with electricity bills our house was having a really tough time staying warm over this winter um you know we had our like maintenance people come in to try and like work with the heating we were trying like insulating our windows but nothing really seemed to work and these maintenance guys came like a couple times and nothing was keeping our house warm and we were just getting skewered with these really high energy bills and one

036of my friends who i live with who was a fellow grad student at the university of michigan recently lost his job and goodness knows rent in ann arbor is high enough and so you know with these energy bills you know the feasibility of being able to like stay here and live here is starting to become almost like uncertain which is really a bummer and goodness knows it's probably not going to get any better as the climate gets worse you know you know we saw the energy price spikes in texas when they were kind of in crisis and goodness knows that if something like that happened in ann arbor i really do not trust dte to not do the exact same thing um you know i i everyone's already made much better and much more well

037brought up points than i have as far as like the you know actual effects of municipalization so i won't be the dead horse all that much um but you know this you i i think everyone on the city council can see how passionate and you know invested the community is towards pursuing this goal and you know as members of the city council i mean i would hope that it is also in your best interest to serve the interests and protect the people who you represent and serve we are a community and we are all in this together and this is i think overwhelmingly by just the show of support this is the best way forward and i really hope that you know the interests of the community are reflected in the decisions by the uh

038by all of you guys so that's all i have to say thank you for giving my time appreciate it and we thank you thanks for your passion and your thoughts yeah one more ending in 661 great hello can you hear me okay thank you um hi my name is gus teske i live at 313 montgomery in ward 5. thanks for this opportunity to talk with you i'm a member of ann arbor indivisible and we recently voted to support a resolution given to us by ann arbor for public power for the energy commission to support ann arbor for public powers exploration of municipal solar power for ann arbor we did that because municipal power has many advantages for example power from a municipal solar plant would be cheaper more reliable and under ireland control as well

039as zero carbon and it doesn't have to be approved by the state legislature another concern is that though dte says its plan is to be carbon nuclear by 2050 it has no real plan and now president biden has set a goal for us to be zero carbon what u.s electricity to be zero carbon by 2035 will that end up sticking ann arbor rate payers with useless stranded assets that we have to pay off municipal power avoids that problem and enables ann arbor to do its part to avoid looming climate breakdown um so i urge you to quickly move to support f usability study for municipal solar power in ann arbor thank you very much thank you gus thanks for calling in uh it looks like one more caller ending in hello can you hear me

040wii u excellent thank you very much for the opportunity my name is casey patnode i live at 820 fuller street in ann arbor i'm also a medical and public health student at the university of michigan and i'm calling to speak out in favor of municipalization and the context i wanted to speak through it is through my expertise in terms of human health and the intersection of climate change as well as fossil fuel generation municipalization has been shown to be more efficacious in terms of reducing emissions both in terms of carbon dioxide for generating towards climate change as well as the other co pollutants that are produced from fossil fuel generation these pollutants have been shown to disproportionately affect marginalized populations though it's a an environmental justice issue really and these pollutants result in things like

041pulmonary and cardiovascular diseases that especially affect the vulnerable populations among us this includes children the elderly and those who are already struggling with medical conditions so i believe it's our responsibility as stewards of our environment and people who care about our communities to explore the initiatives that are going to help us protect them and protect our environment and protect each other and i believe that municipalization has shown that it has the greatest chance of success in that regard um in addition to all of the other benefits that have been brought up in terms of reliability and democratic representation of our constituents so i i would just urge looking at this through a health lens and thinking about what you care about and who you care about because municipalization is a chance to protect them thank

042you very much thank you casey missy is at it so i'd like to thank all the callers for sharing their thoughts and for your engagement and i would like to also encourage all of you for staying on in the meeting i think there's going to be some interesting presentations um coming up and um [Music] yeah so again thanks for sharing your thoughts with us the next point on the agenda is the energy report um john can i make a comment yeah sure absolutely um i just wanted to uh point out that you know rental housing is notoriously energy inefficient and what i i share the concern of the the gentleman who's renting i had two daughters rent houses in ann arbor as well and you know we have one green landlord in ann arbor who

043who rents energy efficient houses and you know if we if we take dte's energy and waste it with uninsulated walls uninsulated ceilings leaky windows and doors just replacing dte's energy with ann arbor's energy through municipality and wasting that is not going to achieve anything except the same amount of pollution where whether you generate with with you know and ever owned solar panels or dte's frat gas either way if you throw that energy out the doors windows walls and ceiling it's not going to solve the problem so you know one of the issues of a municipal initialization perhaps the people who are supporting it so much and looking at it may want to also want to look at how we're going to use that energy efficiently and maybe if we move to that now and uh

044got the landlords in town to actually make their buildings energy efficient we'd be a long way closer towards any green option municipalization or anything else so hopefully put that on their agenda too and turn to the landlords and ask them about you know why there's no insulation in the attic thanks thank you mark thanks for sharing those thoughts with us and i might just add to that and say um the a20 plan has seven strategies um the first of which is getting 100 clean and renewable energy and as you point out there are other strategies um including energy efficiency related strategies and electrifying everything so we have a number of different fronts that we have to be working on does anybody else have any other comments before we i mean we we will be um

045have news from commissioners as well but does anybody have any specific comments that they want to share in response to public comment just very uh i want to thank all of the commissioners uh all the individuals who got on again today uh it was another good 45 minutes of hearing from the public which is great to hear i also want to thank ken garber uh for emailing me back on a couple of uh questions i had from the last uh energy commission meeting um and again um you know as things develop uh we really want to maintain that level of civic activism and engagement with the commission so please uh continue to phone in and communicate we love to hear from you [Music] thanks robert anybody else i can't see you also unless i uh

046somebody speaks up um we'll go to missy and missy can give us an update from um staff and the office of um sustainability innovations thank you chair mursky i have a lot but i'm gonna go rapid fire because we have two wonderful speakers who are donating their time to us tonight so i'll put something together in writing and send it out to the commission to further elaborate on these but in rapid succession here we go our uh rooftop rfp is out responses are due on the 25th that's for somewhere between 1.2 and 1.5 megawatts of rooftop solar at 13 city facilities uh we're working on standing up a parallel rfp for all the affordable housing sites as well uh so we expect a doubling of distributed generation and municipal facilities very exciting um our work

047with uh intervention in the voluntary green power program continues to emerge and is looking promising so stay tuned for more uh we're working on our energy strategy and we're we're nearly we're nearly done and very excitingly the energy education group of this commission will be meeting shortly but we have been in conversations with rocky mountain institute and the world resources institute to help design uh some of the training around the different programs that we're talking about here so that we have different ways for the public to access you know recognizing there are actually a lot of levers that we can pull so we want to move that forward and are pretty excited to see that emerge we to that point have talked to the rocky mountain institute about doing a joint session between the energy

048commission and the planning commission for our may 11th meeting focused on beneficial electrification with a special emphasis we'll talk about the whole market but really thinking about commercial and multi-family because the planning commission is bumping up against us a lot as they're looking to uh you know encourage smart investments so uh chairmanship i'll be following up to see if that's of interest to folk but rmi has offered that they offered it i think on friday so that's um i'm pretty i'm excited to learn uh about what's going on in that space and then we are launching a to zero week to celebrate the one year anniversary of the adoption of a20 that will be june 1st through june 6. more details coming uh everything is designed to be decentralized uh kind of it's self-paced and

049every day there'll be a few activities that come across that whole week but every day there'll be an opportunity to learn to do and to have a little fun so we're working on launching all of those uh different elements so stay tuned and if you happen to be listening and want to join in with either helping us teach have a little fun or kind of celebrate uh please please circle up with me that'd be great um earth day as well we're doing a completely virtual earth day all of our keynotes are youth so we're partnering with ann arbor public schools to host that it'll be the 25th of april more details coming shortly uh they'll be on the a20 website which is just a2gov.org sustainability but i'll circulate that to everyone really excited to partner

050with public schools in that space and then just wanted to elevate our benchmarking ordinance has gotten some really good public feedback this is for disclosure of commercial and multi-family energy and water usage and then the time of marketing is close on its heels this is for single-family homes to disclose usage and then we continue to investigate where the levers are for us to do uh more requirements more encouragement etc of rental per uh commissioner cleavy's comment a really important area of of work and so we've got a few opportunities on the horizon working with some council members to kind of think about how we may be able to incentivize landlords doing more faster in that landscape and some other possible levers there are about a dozen other things but i'm going to stop there a

051little busy in the office but delightfully so so thank you for the opportunity to give an update that's great so i'd like to open up two updates from other commissioners news and any updates that they might want to share from us from the organizations that they're involved with or familiar with you're just going to have to speak up again because i cannot see all of you at the same time i guess i can change my view but john i'll go ahead mark i'll go second okay i was just safe uh for anyone who missed uh chuck's really good presentation on energy one energy systems 101 uh at the last meeting he's going to repeat that and probably repeat it with more of an emphasis on solar on thursday night at the great lakes renewable energy

052association's clean energy seminar series i believe all of you have received invitations um and so chuck's going to be there on on thursday and that's when julie baldwin from the public service commission is going to be next month thanks great thanks mark for um organizing the series and thanks chuck for presenting um yeah if you really need a cure for insomnia just tune in on thursday i'll put you to sleep for sure um just some really good news to present everybody is that after two years of working on this um asce is now issued a ansi standard on sustainable infrastructure so it's a standard that basically allows owners to deal with how do we invest in technologies infrastructure systems that are the best in terms of sustainability that has passed ansi standards it's going to

053get published here this summer i'm pleased to announce i was part of the writing team as was dr stultz so this is a major effort took a lot of ordeals to work through and it's amazing that it's now getting published and we're already being criticized that we weren't overly um pressing for carbon reduction we are already it's a it's a pretty significant requirement in the standard that a project uh demonstrate its ability to reduce carbon um but it's already under attack for being even more aggressive so it's kind of interesting to see where that's excuse me it's all headed so just that's it for tonight thanks great chuck could you um share that with us maybe in an email afterwards or in chat either way or both yep soon yep yep great thank you um

054carlene in the number i have a quick update uh for about the past year i've been going back and forth with folks at the underwriters laboratory to reboot their training program for electric vehicle charging station installation and um they finally have taken it up they're working on the redesign the update they did it back in 2009 and so much has changed since then and so they're going to be um launching their new training program and um it's electricians and certified electricians will be able to um just basically advertise and promote themselves as being evsc certified through the underwriters laboratory and that'll be something that they can use to you know advertise additional specialties that they provide for their services and and um you know the city can maybe include information about that on its 820

055website and folks are looking things up thanks for your relentless advocacy carly so ember and then teresa yeah just a quick event announcement tomorrow um naomi klein's giving the school for environment and sustainability's weekly lecture um i heard her speak a few years ago she was really incredible um definitely recommend going you have to register ahead of time to get the zoom link so i can also send um the link out to the energy commissioners but if you google it you can find it too thanks amber i'm going to attend theresa um for those that are interested in things that are happening at the federal and multi-state level the federal energy regulatory commission has launched a commissioner-led technical conference on resource adequacy in the evolving electric markets and so that is on march 23rd and

05624th of this month and so i can send that link out to the commissioners who are interested um and then also know that the mid-continent independent system operator is also in the middle of a series of technical work groups and the task force on distributed energy resources and how they would implement ferc order 2222 on aggregation of dei resources and so that calendar is up on the mid-continent too um so if you need to link to that let me know but those are just some of the other things that are going on kind of at the mid-continent and the federal level great great developments i mean anyone else have something to share um if nobody else has anything to share i'd have just um maybe two things to share um first is um that i

057worked with um jan culbertson and a gentleman who works for um or works yeah for the co2 the global co2 um global co2 initiative at the university of michigan looking at embodied energy um that resolution draft resolution is currently with staff and being evaluated by staff we're supposed to get feedback by um the end of this month and so it's a possibility hopefully that i'll be able to um present that in one of our upcoming meetings maybe in our next meeting and we were present i want to remind everyone on the commission that there are just five basically different working groups that missy presented as opportunities for us to get involved and i believe most of those are now up and running and so if any of you want to latch on to any one

058of those a poll just went out today for working on conshare services which is basically technical service for support for homeowners as well well for any property owners basically um so um if you haven't had a chance to get involved and then you want to to do that um get with either missy me or carlene i mean then missy i have one request and we'll hold it for the end um you sent out an email um and you talked about concerns about what constitutes or that were potentially via email conducting um business and deliberations um outside of meetings um with some of our communication and maybe at the end um we can take a minute or two to talk about that to um share i may be one of the uh the guilty parties um

059and anything that you can do to keep us on the straight and narrow would be good but we'll do that after valerie and and paul sign off so i think we're ready to um go into um our first presentation um and we've got actually two i think that valerie is going to uh present to us but i think missy maybe do you want to briefly introduce valerie for us or valerie do you want to do that yourself well i'm happy to completely embarrass valerie if i could even try to valerie braider is an exceptional energy attorney she's a rhodes scholar worked at the state has now her own practice and is someone who we've been working with at the city to really navigate the energy landscape and i will say one of the things that

060i really personally appreciate about well there's lots of things i appreciate about uh val but the thing i want to elevate right now is that often times when we talk to attorneys with uh and we present something we get a yes or no answer and valerie has been incredibly helpful as a thought partner in finding the gray and how we kind of navigate that landscape and so i just want to elevate that that creativity i think is exactly what we're hearing is necessary and we all know is really deeply necessary in this space so i just want to say thank you and valerie over to you i'll get this going for you great well thank you for having me and um what i just want to kind of give everybody a tour on is sort

061of how people got permission in the first place to sort of serve a community with energy and kind of all the different sort of court cases as we heard from folks commenting tonight there's a lot of interest in sort of how this evolved so i'm gonna go obviously because of the presentation format i can't see if folks are asking questions but i would hope that you'll jump in if there are questions um although obviously i'm happy to answer them at the end too but happy as we go along if things come up so um this is a picture of when ann arbor granted its first electric franchise in 1895 um so you can see we were literally still in the horse in the cart um with the horse before the cart that was good uh

062the franchise was granted to the washington light and power company which later was bought by eastern michigan edison company so essentially why people ever gave franchises which is essentially the right to serve customers and under what conditions you can use public right-of-way to install those power lines which i've you can see the one i've circled there and you'll run the wires etc is that you know it's a pretty big investment right to to bring anybody to bring the electricity to anyone and there was a lot of uh concern that you couldn't get funding if there were more than one person kind of going to the capital markets so you saw a mix of uh basically municipalities and and other governmental entities trying to stand up some service and then often private companies coming in and

063arguing for franchises to be granted locally and the different cities had different ways of doing it some cities let women vote um on whether or not a franchise would be granted if they were taxpayers and owners some didn't uh some had you know elected officials do it so it was it was sort of back in 1895 was a new thing franchises were actually a somewhat new thing too and so folks were really feeling it out so missy can you go to the next one so in 1905 the legislature gets involved and it passes the foot act which um basically said if you were a private company and you were serving in an area you got a perpetual right to continue serving that area um and it was supposed to be irrevocable um was the word

064used in the legislation and so since ann arbor had granted a franchise for light heat and power it in theory applied to that right that was one of the things it's important to note that that franchise is not exclusive and and all this is skipping ahead a bit but in 1949 this is again affirmed in a court case um without the utilities arguing otherwise so although it's sort of a right for that one private company to serve uh it was not a ban on a complimentary or dual public power franchises so for instance there are still cities today where while there is a municipal utility that serves part of the city um an investor owned utility serves another part so lansing is a great example consumers serve some of the msu campus lansing board of

065power and light serves other parts of the msu campus would be just like one example um the france so what does that franchise include it does include the right to place electrical infrastructure on the right-of-ways and also that customers right you can't just go hook up customers um if you were like a different private company and you want to come in and start hooking people up you could not do that because the franchise in that sense is exclusive so it's not exclusive for public power but it would be exclusive for other private uh developers so everyone hated the foot act basically as soon as it got past people were very angry about it and you see that because in 1907 1908 michigan had a constitutional convention and new provisions get added to the constitution that

066are clearly a response to the foot act right it says look you cannot if there's any uh franchise that's granted voters have to approve it now ironically um some places had identified voters to be a little bit more broad than the state did at the time so there were a few people that argued that this deprived women from the right to vote on the franchises that got corrected uh 10 years later right when michigan affirms the right of women to vote but um so they do say voters have to approve the franchise and they also made a big point of noting that local governments retained the use of city streets um and you had to have local approval to do that so clearly a response and a very strong one to the foot act now

067making essentially big provisions of the foot act unconstitutional just as a note that constitutional convention also reaffirmed or in that case affirmed the rights of municipalities to provide um water utilities you know electric utilities all those kind of things and gave some restrictions to their ability to do so outside of their territorial limits versus inside so that's that goes into the constitution yeah let me see you can go forward so of course then the first thing that happens is people begin to sue to say the new constitution invalidates the foot act and the city that really leads the way on this is the city of lansing and by 1914 that reaches the um michigan supreme court and the the court issued a pretty strong opinion against the city of lansing it said that the michigan

068constitution could not retroactively terminate the foot act franchises because it said the foot act franchises had basically were property rights that were granted to private companies and that under the u.s constitution the contract clause prevents governments from negating that so if you enter it's there's a u.s constitutional provision essentially says you can't interfere with contracts and the michigan supreme court says this is a property right and so you can't have the constitution come in and take away a right that was granted because it would be unconstitutional under the federal constitution um that proposition was sort of re-uh argued in 1994 in the city of marshall case um and the michigan court of appeals cited that proposition basically cited that city of lansing is still good law uh the other big thing that the lansing city

069of lansing case found is that if the city had not issued a local franchise um that you know if they if they were refusing to grant one that did not invalidate a foot act um franchise there was an argument that essentially okay they were serving but they weren't they don't we don't have a local government permission for franchises and that the court said no the foot act uh was broad enough to reach that and did not require that the local government did a foot act so basically the local government couldn't just revoke a franchise and have that invalidate the foot act franchise that was granted and that also kind of was re-argued in 2001 by west bloomfield township and the michigan court of appeals again kind of cites that city of lansing case to reaffirm

070that nope you can't just say well we don't have we're revoking our franchise so your footage franchise doesn't work anymore so that's kind of what happened in 1914 um so then the people were people still hated the foot act a lot so there was a new kind of line of attack that came and i'll say a little bit more about this because it's a little confusing on corporate history in michigan so when they passed the 1905 foot act there was actually a constitutional provision in the prior constitution that said no corporation could have a longer life than 30 years so you have you could renew your your corporation but if you like started a company when you on your company's 30th anniversary that company went away and you had to create a new company and

071like transfer all your stuff to it so that is no longer michigan law but that was the law when the foot act was passed so after everyone loses in 1914 they wait 30 years until you know okay now if it was granted the corporation it was granted to shouldn't still exist and they so they bring this new line of attack that's based on this idea so they say essentially we're beyond the 30 years so the the act has expired and the supreme court in village of constantine who was the one that brought this initial challenge said nope if the corporation was allowed to renew its life back in the 1890s and as long as it's kept renewing it that foot act is still good essentially the contract allows that transferability so um people had other

072ideas though about maybe there was a different way we could use that 30-year corporate life idea and they and they said essentially these aren't the same companies anymore like you know the this was granted to the washington light and power corporation right so would be the uh corollary ann arbor didn't bring this um but we granted it to them now it's somebody with edison in their name like not the same company not the same franchise not the same corporate life right so it goes out and in a case brought by traverse city they said no the the michigan supreme court ruled that foot franchises are transferable and recognize that this made them essentially perpetual so you know the idea that essentially wash not power and light could transfer it to an edison which could transfer

073it to a different edison which could transfer it like that none of those transfers invalidated the rights that were there so those remain so those were yeah and as i as you've seen there have been some court cases since that sort of retest some of these but everything i just said at this point remains good law that being said it is again important to remember that there are limitations to the foot act franchise the first as i mentioned is that they are not exclusive so a municipality is not prohibited from serving just because there is a foot act franchise you essentially can have competition between a municipal utility and a um you know an iou or other utility with a franchise iou being investor owned utility uh something that's often used to describe like the

074dts and consumers that kind of thing so um so again it's just important to note that that has been recognized for a long time in these court decisions the other thing is that while there are property rights there are also abilities for governments to take property rights from private uh companies and individuals um so you know this is sort of the condemnation or the taking like it in the same way if you know the city needed to build a road and your house was in the middle there are procedures under which even if you don't want to sell it right the the city can take it they have to pay you fair compensation for it right and it has to be for a public purpose so it can't be to give it to another private

075individual that has changed under michigan law um and beta firm so for instance like uh you like a city couldn't take a foot act franchise away from dte to give it to consumers right or a different private company um it can only be taken for a public purpose and not for a private right um and i've given the um mcl on that but that would also be a constitutional principle based on some michigan supreme court decisions in the semi-recent past so don't you have valerie yeah could you speak to that i think there's somebody else that has the same question maybe that i do um does that mean that um taking would be allowed in the case of forming a municipal utility yeah so there are different ways that could be done one would be

076to sort of form it and do a sort of alongside utility um another might be to actually like try you know do a taking of all the wires all the polls all that right um obviously the there is value in just having the right to serve right that would be um potentially taken in in that context um but you but also obviously the more physical stuff you take right the more valuable that is so there to my knowledge has not been a major city that has completed an analysis of what it would cost to take uh the closest example i'm aware of would be boulder in colorado um they spent i think i'd have to go back and check with something over 20 million dollars and they got to almost the point at which the

077utility was going to have to give them a number when they decided to withdraw their attempts to municipalize i think they got the closest to figuring out the number most places that have municipalized are much much smaller um and have not to my knowledge done it through a taking um but but i could be educated in that i'm just not aware that any has done it i think we had somebody else who wanted to comment on this mark does yeah go ahead mark um you said the the condemnation for public purpose is is climate change or achieving reduced emissions a a public so if it's if we've heard the dte is going to be meet their you know their goal in 2050 the bride administration wants to do it in 230 1035 and we want

078to do it in 2025 if if a building or is being run by fossil fuels and and that'd be willing to be run by renewable energy can we condemn that that that account or condemn some part of bte that's the fossil fuel part and say only deliver green power right well i mean the courts have recognized that the right to serve is itself a valuable property right um so so it isn't just that like you the wires have value um but that like essentially the value of everything they might make off that profi of that account is potentially also a value that would have to be paid um so i i would also just say on timelines you know i think again the city of boulder spent at least eight years on the attempt it

079might be longer so i would not want to um you know make a guess on exactly how long it would take but i can tell you 2025 does not sound to me like it would be likely because i think you know that just to understand in general the process of the taking right and i'll use a much simpler just physical is like you know first the government has to identify a public purpose which by the way provision of heat power and light are recognized by the constitution as public purposes right there are lots of municipal utilities in michigan that do that so you don't necessarily have to do a big reach to say climate change is our purpose you could just be like we want to provide light hidden power as we're titled to do

080under article 7 of the mission constitution right so um so the public purpose isn't necessarily the hard part so to speak um the hard part would be to actually then determine the value right and uh there would be you know experts on both sides right that would argue about what it is you know this they would first have to do evaluation provide that there's a chance to challenge that in court that can be appealed that can be appealed again you know up to the michigan supreme court so so you know just as you sort of saw that like the the constitution gets changed in 1908 but the city of lansing gets a ruling on the foot act in 1914 like i would not say that our courts have grown incredibly speedier right there's electronic filing

081but but i would not expect a much much faster legal path um beyond all the other you know considerations of how long it might take you to value it etc amber might know more about this but i my recollection is boulder took exactly like you said eight years and spent 28 million but i think um the legal framework was different and some of that back and forth was based on those different legal um questions can i just respond to that though so the city of boulder actually didn't have what we have like with the footage franchise their franchise was actually up um so in some ways theirs was easier because they weren't trying to buy out an existing franchise but they did want to buy some of the equipment so they could actually operate the

082utility internally right so just for what's worth that they didn't have this same complication that we have under michigan law and boulder thank you sure jane go ahead um my question i guess gets into when they're trying to determine the value can they take into account the social cost of carbon and we've got and now a number set at the federal level we don't have a number set at the michigan level and there and we also don't have a number set at the ann arbor city level is there any way that either the federal level number could be taken in account or we could create our own number even if michigan doesn't have one that could be taken into account for the value yeah so from a legal history perspective i can't tell you because

083no one's ever tried that um so i i couldn't say it would not be a traditional way to do it so i suspect it would be subject to challenge on nope you're just supposed to say what would someone pay for it today or here's how much i would make off it um but again no one's tried it so i couldn't i i'm not gonna say no would never work right because you we just do not know legally whether that could be done but it would definitely be a departure from ways that had been done earlier which you know it's always harder to do something that's never been done before and you don't know whether it's going to work than it would be to do kind of the traditional way to do it right valerie go

084ahead i don't see any other hands okay so i just wanted to to kind of finish up with a sense of where municipalization is generally um so in the u.s according to the american public power association in the last two decades um there are 12 communities across the united states that have municipalized most of those are very small like i i don't think you'd recognize the names of any unless you were like really into who mean a supplies power or something um so it really has not been done all that often um but it's not to say it's never been done right 12 have in the last 20 years um in michigan there is a community in the upper peninsula that has just refused to renew its franchise it does not have a food act

085franchise there's actually a deadline on it uh their franchise is with upco which has the highest rates in the state it's or the central um upper peninsula and that case is before the michigan supreme court now their sort of briefing on whether or not the supreme court will take it the court of appeals decision was very strong in favor of the uh of the community um being allowed to terminate their franchise however um the real question is like would the utility be required to remove all their stuff uh if they left it would the city have to pay for it right and all of those questions um you know are are still you know to my knowledge still being kind of you know argued through um i know that the city believes that the it

086would like the light poles i think removed is from what i've heard um because they want to put in newer stuff but the cost of removal is actually high enough that the utility might just be like no it's yours now you know and then and potentially leaving the environmental liability for that um with the city as well so um while that like it's an interesting development i don't think that we've kind of seen the end of it because again this is a pretty unusual thing to have happen that a franchise would be rejected and so there isn't like a whole body of oh yeah so once you do it like this happens then this hap you know that sort of checkbox isn't there but again that's um that's something that is is different from ann

087arbor situation because that city did not have electric service in 1905 and so their franchises were granted under the new constitutional provisions not the 1905 foot act so i'm going to ask a question that i have i know has been po posed by others i think not on the commission at least not anymore and that is do you have a rough idea of how many pre-foot act franchises there are in michigan and do you can you name off from a handful if if they're significant well i mean everybody you saw who in my previous slides had a foot act franchise so um pretty much you know huge chunks of oakland county chunks of macomb county washington traverse city lansing um you know places people lived and had electricity in 18 you know in in 1905

088essentially so um you know there are definitely places in michigan that developed well after that um but a ton of places in michigan that had it before wayne county was exempted um so you know there's you can cross out those but um there are footage franchises all over the state okay thank you anybody else if you do raise your hand um and i'll see you while i'm waiting for people to do that okay good we have um full view of everybody now um robert go ahead uh so you just you just mentioned that wayne county was exempted uh from the law could you say why no i i don't unfortunately like the foot act um legislative history does not explain like why wayne county doesn't have to do it when everybody else did i so

089no i don't know why but but it's it is specifically called out gotcha and i had one other quick follow-up question uh kind of more of a speculative question um given this issue um and your experience dealing with uh the judicial system do you feel like it's an issue that could be broken down cleanly along partisan lines or do you think this is something that has pretty a very solid judicial um you know foundation that even uh changing uh court makeups might uh you know not have any sort of impact on a ruling on that on ruling on that no um there are u.s supreme court presidents that the michigan supreme court relied on um and there have been similar cases uh brought on some of these questions in north carolina and others uh that

090the u.s supreme court has issued decisions that are pretty much in favor of utilities on um so the any time you've got like a long history of both the michigan supreme court and the us supreme court kind of ruling one way on an issue um it's not to say they've never ever changed their minds but i wouldn't say you know justice here or there is going to make a difference um again courts do change their minds sometimes about big things that there are um precedents on but there is just a long history here and in general the folks arguing against the utility franchises have not done particularly well um again not it's not a universal loss it's not that they've never won anything or there aren't like parts of it but but it is just

091an uphill slog if you're trying to invalidate um a property right that was granted because in general the courts you know have that that has big implications right so they're often reluctant to overturn those decisions remember go ahead yeah i just wanted to offer some explanation for boulder because i think that we get compared to it a lot and i don't think the legal context is the same and even what how you described they in 2011 um had to amend their city charter to authorize a municipality they they weren't allowed to have it in their state or local legal context in the same way that we were we are um and then in 2014 they excel there investor owned utility um sued them saying that they basically they had to prove that they could offer

092costs at a lower rate than the utility could and then excel sued them over saying they wouldn't be able to do that and they had kind of some shady practices in order to do that so i still don't think the legal context is quite the same or that it's necessarily easier or more complicated than it is in ann arbor but i just would caution against comparing us to them because i think the legal contacts are very different it's totally fair that the legal contacts are different like they i what i just met on the franchise issue alone like they had an easier thing and that they could turn down the franchise they did not necessarily have it easier in other ways and i'm sorry if i implied that it would be like easier for us

093than that i i think it would be it was difficult for them as it obviously was proved and had lots of elections on various issues um i i'm just saying on the franchise issue alone they had an easier path than a mission than michigan uh communities that had power before 1905 would mark go ahead so a valley i don't know i'm going to opine on this and that but it's it seems that the if the courts aren't the way to do this and the legislature doesn't seem open to it the public service commission has already signed up on both uh you know dtes and consumers um plans and so we're we're in a quandary as a community that if we're going to achieve net zero um we have to we've got to figure out some

094either get the utilities to to do something there that don't want to do or find some other alternative and i guess to me the alternative is the city has tools they have property taxes they have things and they have incentives to do distributed solar on as many buildings as possible like in arbor's doing its government buildings and to get serious about energy efficiency um reduce the load as much as possible and do as much on-site solar as we can and hope that the utilities will make up the difference at some point but it it it moves the dial for us as opposed to you know these other options that don't seem to the options getting dte changes it's a it's a irp or getting the courts to somehow magically change you know 100 years of

095case law i don't i don't i don't see that i don't see a path so do you i mean do you agree decentralized solar and energy efficiency or is there you know of another option um so i think you know as you know mark i'm a big fan of energy efficiency it's also the only energy investment you can make that works when the power is off to help you out as well as when the power's on right um and i i just want to note that like i've really enjoyed working with missy i really love working for my city um because it is trying to be creative on this and um she mentioned briefly the vgp case you know i'm counsel to the city on that one of the things that we've been arguing for

096and in testimony dte has indicated they're open to is designing um both a community solar offering um where people who can't put it on their property could actually participate you know if they wanted to on the same kind of footing that ann arbor would get and also that they're interested in talking with us about one thing we can do under michigan law that a lot of states can't which is um get credit for off-site energy efficiency um instead of you know instead of or with paint you know building a solar ray or wind you could also you know insulate a low-income housing or um you know advance environmental justice goals by going to a community that's really suffered from your past energy and like making all their schools a lot more energy efficient or something

097like that there are only four states where you can get a renewable energy credit for having done that kind of work which we know reduces carbon directly by pulling demand off the system um dte has in their testimony said that they would be interested in working on a voluntary product like that which would be innovative now obviously we are still in settlement discussion so all i all we have right now that we can share is what they said in testimony in response to ann arbor's arguments about why this would be a good product um but i i do give the city a lot of credit because it was really coming up with more creative ways and and raising them in important forums where hopefully you know if the utility isn't going to do it on

098their required programs they could at least offer options for individuals that want to get greener valerie is that essentially a virtual um power reduction agreement is that essentially what it is it is it is okay exactly okay you're paying someone else to reduce their use by helping them insulate or buy a boiler that kind of thing yes power reduction agreement okay great thanks for the clarification um erica go ahead thanks so i just want to make sure i summarize correctly what i've learned this evening which is that municipalization is it's not that it's impossible for us it's just that it's a um a very long process in terms of identifying what those costs would be for our community and that ultimately um it would be very expensive because it's it would be considered in takings

099and just just the right to serve in itself is a as is it particularly likely to be a particularly expensive cost to have to compensate dte for that um for that piece and then i have a follow-up question on that yeah i i think if you want to go the takings route it's fair to say that's going to be a long and expensive path you know regardless of what your exact sign posts are i think cities that have tried it could tell you that okay and then um you mentioned that this is not um it's not an exclusive um contract so that um it is entirely possible to set up a municipal um company here in terms of thinking about something like that that might happen in terms of who those new customers might be

100um i assume it couldn't take customers away from those who are already currently being serviced it would pretty much be is that correct it would be new new folks or is it competition there definitely that you could do new folks there's just no question about that um but there would actually be a pretty big debate that you could um you are allowed to compete internally now i can say this what i would also encourage you to think about is um what it is you why you want a utility right um the goals that you have that a utility might get you and think about is this the best way to get them are there other ways to get them right if your goal is just we want to build more renewables you know maybe a

101utilities a way to do that maybe there are other ways to that if it's that we want to do energy efficiency you may be able to do programs that way too now i'm not i'm not trying to say you couldn't do a utility right and and do these things or that it's a wrong answer but you know to the extent people are interested in exploring this i would just encourage them to kind of say if there are particular outcomes they want um you know kind of aside from a philosophical preference um which obviously if you have the philosophical preference presence that's the way to do it but if there are certain outcomes you're going for it may be worth sort of kind of making your list and thinking about how you achieve them um and

102what's your most cost effective and fastest way to do that and it may be that when you do that exercise you think a utility is the faster cheaper way but there may be other ways to get to those same outcomes that don't raise the same um legal costs or you know let you get there so i again i'm not trying to advocate either way tonight i'm just sort of trying to give information about how you might think about it um because the one thing i do know is that if like municipalization is going to be if it were to be pursued is going to be legally contentious right yeah and then thank you that's i'm very helpful and then in terms of uh in the uh scenario where there was competition happening how does uh

103existing infrastruc hypothetically how does existing infrastructure play into that into that um this is where the theory that you could compete and the reality of competition like you have to think it through so to the extent you want to offer your own street lighting system then you're laying your own wires you're putting up your own poles right um it to the extent you want to serve a house or a business you need to run underground wires to them the same way dte does right and and let them hook up um or you need to take dt's line right so if you're really trying to avoid that whole takings argument then you're talking about laying parallel infrastructure and trying to bond for that and getting financing for that without a guarantee that that customer will stick

104with you right if you think about why we ever had franchises it was because you had trouble getting money if there was even one competitor because the cost of laying all that wire and kind of setting up all that infrastructure was so high that in 1895 you couldn't get financing unless you could kind of guarantee that you had a monopoly right going in and i'm not saying that it would be impossible to get financing or that that wouldn't be worth exploring i'm not again i'm not trying to say that it's closed but it to the extent that you want to lay parallel right you're going to need money for that and and what you know the financing for that if it's if the homeowner then is upset with ann arbor and switches back right which

105they would have the or the business does or whatever someone gives them a better deal and now they're over there right you've still got that infrastructure you still have to maintain it right which is which just gets us back to why franchises ever existed you know thank you anyone else have any questions robert uh thank you uh thank you uh mr chairman uh just a quick question to piggyback off of councilmember briggs's questions um along the same lines of you have to uh and i this is probably a very easy yes answer but i just wanted to confirm uh that along the lines of you have to lay your own wires you have to build your own poles you also have to hire all of your own people and then do all of your own

106maintenance and basically gain all of this knowledge of how to run a munici a municipal grid um that you know no one in the city has that type of knowledge or expertise necessarily that they've done at scale at scale um of that size um okay maybe chuck does maybe chuck does but um i just just it's it's also just thinking about that the human resources and the human costs in addition to the physical and material costs yeah if you look at municipalities in michigan that have their own utilities um they do have higher per you know kind of per resident payrolls usually just because they're providing a whole service that others aren't right um in the same way that those who don't have municipal water right have fewer people who tend to work for them

107because they that there's that whole like billing department maintenance guys you know the folks who do the contracting for the off work you know all that kind of internal staffing that it takes to run a utility business is gone right so um most cities that do in fact i don't i can't think if there's a single example of a municipal utility that doesn't also have water and sewer i think they all do and they tend to share billing um when they do like again there might be like i don't know exactly what the city of norway has i don't know exactly but you know a lot of the big cities do that so you know and that ann arbor does bill people for utilities like you could probably piggyback on the billing but a whole

108lot of other things are very unique to an electrical utility um so you would definitely need personnel who don't currently work for the city you would need to hire people to do that thank you thanks for all the great questions um we have another presentation so i'm going to encourage us to move on um and if anybody has um valerie are you going to stick around um for the next presentation guys bedtime at eight o'clock and i'm getting the things that may become more frantic so if i go it's not because i wouldn't have enjoyed staying but i have okay locations thank you absolutely thanks thanks very much for your presentation and there's another point in the agenda which i don't think is a separate presentation it's just a document that's um linked for everybody's

109edification and that's the the actual foot act itself is that correct so you didn't want to have any comments specifically to that is that correct no i think someone would pulled it it is the accurate copy of the foot act yep very good so thank you i think um speaking on behalf of all of us tonight we really appreciate your support of osi as well as your comments this evening thank you i'm talking to you all great thank you um so next we have a presentation from paul finn um about community choice aggregation and i'd like to remind everyone um that that is actually the option that is um currently included in the a20 plan um and we all know it's a living plan so that could change um but um paul um i'm gonna

110turn things over to you and i assume missy is um once she's she's done there with her bedtime duties um but this is probably gonna also gonna be at the controls too okay all right sorry about that thanks everyone paul do you want me to make you a co-host and run slides or would you like me to run your slides for you sure if yeah if i could do my slides i i did add a couple while we're talking just to be jermaine you bet all right i'm gonna make you a ghost so everyone while i do that um it's my great pleasure to introduce paul fenn and just for the sake of time i'll i'll drop a link to his bio but paul has been instrumental uh since the initiation of the cca he

111was one of the original creators of community choice aggregation and helped see it evolve over time so we have what you'll hear about today is that community choice aggregation looks different in different states and there's even a really great report that i'll send out i think we've circulated before talking about cca 3.0 which really looks at kind of first iteration second generation third generation and to make it explicit we are really interested in the third generation concept of community choice aggregation and i think paul is going to give you a little bit of a preview of what that means walking us through some of the history so paul um i am really appreciative of your time and your expertise he's someone i talked to and really respect so uh with that i'm gonna kick it

112over thank you so much missy it's totally mutual i'm i'm so excited about ann arbor and and just the the unique clarity of vision about the situation that i see coming from you and i see now from this whole community of people that are you know it's it's one of those things that occurs in a fairly small number of communities across the country now it is going on but it's not that common and uh so very pleased to be here and uh glad to meet you all uh just to quickly introduce myself i did develop uh cca starting the early 1990s and in massachusetts right now i'm based and again went back to california where i'm from originally and developed cca there uh in the late 1990s and then helped develop policies and laws in

113different states around the country mostly i've been focused on um working with communities that are super focused on on climate action and trying to get cca to be that for them right to design it so that it can deliver that outcome in a big way and so that's involved several iterations of work from cities like san francisco actually boulder i worked for boulder when they were making the decision to go for municipalization uh in 2010 and um there's a whole story there because they asked should we do cca i said no to municipalization uh because they didn't have any chance of passing a bill in the legislature it was very obvious that they had no support and they had an expiring franchise agreement they said well that's a wonderful situation it is uh as valerie

114said i i love your presentation about that it was a wonderful presentation on the legal background visibilization and just the the which has a lot of debt requires a lot of depth to to to even understand because it is so arcane and complex and the the anyway so i worked on this with municipal utilities as well i'm not just doing cca stuff really focused on decarbonization um the kind of critical pathways to really getting changes to occur cca is how i came up with dealing with it and but i also came up with green bonds in 2001 and i combined the green bonds with aggregation the idea of combining a procurement aggregated procurement with municipal bonds to leverage investment in decarbonization specifically uh localization or re-concentrating development behind meters into buildings into urban areas rather

115than central grid-based investment uh i do think that's where the whole valley's recommendation about focusing on your goals is so critical because if you don't you assume that all the things you want are somehow associated with the pathway that you have in mind but they aren't and so if you don't raise or sharp focus on the goal you will not reach the goal this is one of the main lessons for me of working with municipalities and energy is that the means does not get you to the end there are available means there are different kinds of points of leverage that can get you to where you want to go but if you only focus on the means in an ideological way it will harm your progress to the goal um and so i've worked for

116all these entities in the last 10 years or so my company's a small company we consult for municipalities sometimes for state governments most recently i'm doing a lot of work in new york there's a lot of back to activity center around decarbonization and and resilience because of all the weather events so i said don't do cca to boulder but now in 2020 they just dropped their case 20 million dollars later that's the downside of the critical pathway of municipalization that you are getting into a multi-electoral cycle process when you do so those who vote for it will get candidates who run against them the longer it takes you to litigate the harder it will be for you to be reelected and several cycles down the road you could get extremely vulnerable to the opposition from

117the utility they hold all the cards the electoral laws protect them and they restrict you uh and so it's very difficult to run political campaigns and i say that as someone who has run political campaigns against the utilities and beat them in in several cases but particularly in proposition 16 and 20 uh uh uh in sorry in two same year 2010 that actually the reason why boulder invited me there because i was fighting pg e in proposition 16 in california uh where they tried to beat us and we beat them but we beat them because we have the upper hand that we we were ahead of them with cca they were trying to stop us when you try to litigate against them they have the upper hand they own the system the system is designed

118to protect them by comparison i now work with the city of cambridge massachusetts uh who became a cca in the past 10 years and now they're focused on building the kind of things that were mentioned earlier building decarbonization uh development of microgrids in the neighborhoods of the city intensive energy transformation within the urban core this is a very different strategy behind the meter inside of buildings not the same as taking over the grid in order to build wind farms and solar farms which i consider to be essentially an outmoded idea and so are you going to buy the old infrastructure to get to utopia or are you going to build utopia the the strategy that i strongly recommend to communities is focus investment on climate action decarbonization if you buy the wires you're buying a

119freeway you're buying an old system you're buying uh power plants you're buying legal obligations of an entity that has direct conflict revenue conflicts of interest against decarbonization they're not just big bad corporations they are that in many cases but they're entities that hold debt in order to pay the debt they must sell power this rule applies to public power entities equally to investor owned utilities and that's why municipal utilities while there are some leaders among these plutoniums in decarbonization they are not as a rule leaders in decarbonization and i say that with great humility because i work for them but i don't pretend that they're doing something they're not doing the issue is what do you own and what does it cause you to need and so decarbonization is de-growth it has to do with

120reducing the need for the use of the grid which means the production and revenues that will repay the debt on the debt holders of the grid the same applies to decarbonizing heat which is you wouldn't want to own the gas pipelines either as a means to somehow green the heat that in fact you want to strength financially strand the pipelines financially strand the transmission assets on any kind of a rapid decarbonization uh pathway and so we focus on how to use cca or other approaches but cca being the most powerful i know about to leverage finance of building decarbonization and resilience uh so think about i would encourage those because i know you have a and i i encourage and support this strong push from your community of all the callers on the phone about

121municipalization that's passion and passion is the essential ingredient political change so i'm not trying to discourage that in any way i'm just saying when you think about public power think of it strategically not politically and strategically is what leverage do you have to drive the process i would say one major leverage you have that valerie rays that's super important is that you have you can compete against the franchise holder and that's vulnerability for the franchise holder apart from whether or not you actually seek to compete with a franchise holder on a retail service basis you can compete against the that's leverage very important leverage so the threat to do that is valuable threat and the procedure to initiate the valuable threat is important in order to demonstrate that you're serious about it so i would

122encourage you to pursue all of your legal pathways to municipalization in order to get the attention of the utility so that they might be willing to negotiate around cca and in fact in colorado because of boulder's municipalization efforts the utilities there are in part suggesting that they will create an opening for cca so it's leverage it's about using that leverage and but the other leverage you have the third boiler sub-bullet here is local renewable energy finance and this was managed message partly was mentioned by the gentleman earlier about financing rooftop solar behind the meter kind of energy efficiency this is critical because you could bundle a retail service competitive retail service without cca in conjunction with the local renewable energy finance program based an existing law that would leverage your competitive position against the utility

123and cause a threatening competitive option they don't offer public financing for customer ownership of on-site solar do they i don't think so and i don't think they would want to either so if you were to offer that that's very intriguing at a minimum if not menacing but profoundly to to the strategy groups inside the corporation you get their their cooperation they'll help you do cca they'll try to find a way to work with you leverage is key to the game not just which legal pathway you take in some monolithic way so this is the path of cca development in the past um 20 years most of it in the past five years because we started massachusetts in the mid 90s it took until 2000 to get california passed and then in the meantime several states

124adopted cca now it's a half of the united states that has it in terms of the energy market uh so that's whatever that is um uh 10 million uh americans live inside of cca's today so the replication of the model is highly rapid certainly compared to municipalization which is yeah 20 small towns we have 1500 cities 10 uh 30 sorry 30 million americans served 150 million americans may legally implement it today not including michigan obviously uh all you need is an ordinance to adopt it it takes you three months to adopt it it takes you six to nine months to launch it it takes you a year to start building local renewables so the the real appeal of it is you're not going to court for 20 years like boulder or 10 years at this

125point uh you're you you go straight to launch and you go straight to climate action you're not you're not acquiring the wires for 10 or 20 years in order to build wind facilities in 20 or 30 years right which is really a loser strategy if you're on a 2050 uh schedule the un schedule that doesn't work and so here is a 2030 schedule that's how we present it to cch this is a 2030 schedule for climate action where you could get to energy transformation at year 10 which means you demonstrate a pathway for other municipalities by 2050 we view that as the definition of leadership not just compliance not just complying with a carbon target or paris accord or something anyway you could form them regionally based on joint powers agreements you can form them

126locally uh you file a plan with the state and that's it they approve you within a year you you change over service to new entity using the polls and wires of the old utility so 1500 cities today the opportunity of the savings that they've demonstrated which they have consistently and nobody denies this in any of the states that have including conservative states like ohio they save consumers energy money on their bills but many ccas in the past 10 years are reinvesting that money in local renewables they take the margins from the market savings and they apply them to local investment this is a business model for decarbonization not an abstract acquisition of infrastructure to later potentially invest what funds into renewable energy or or decarbonizing the grid that's just been purchased which will actually reduce

127revenue on that grid this is a positive virtual cycle to invest in d growth behind the grid which indeed strands the grids and pipelines reduces the debt service on those pipelines and re rededicates them to new local investments ccas are persuasive to a broad array of policy makers because they fix energy markets they not only allow innovation within communities like ann arbor that want to innovate that want to lead and demonstrate pathways but they also place competitive pressure on the utilities to play a cleaner game which right now in almost all states in the us is very very dirty they play pretty much uh low ball shark in the pool poker with everybody including regulators municipalities everyone and so it creates pressure that's just not there normally in the marketplace and causes companies like pg

128e to do community solar local investment micro grids batteries uh all kinds of stuff they were not doing that until cca formed in california uh which took as it basically has taken over california so you have a local democratic process very simple with an ordinance you have a one-year launch process and you have opt-out notices so consumers know they're being switched over if they don't like it they can opt out so there's no force of the consumer 85 to 90 on average customers do uh consent to enrollment so it's very successful enrollment system there are no problems with with 30 million uh consumers served with that process even though some politicians will claim that it's controversial it's not controversial consumers given their other real options and you can start financing within one year that's the

129main issue that investment that actually causes carbon reductions to occur can happen quickly it just requires the local political decisions to use the cca that way so that it happens um so uh you're looking at you know making new investments rather than acquiring old investments uh you get compliance from the regulator you have some oversight but not approval of what you're doing you manage your energy procurement you manage your your data and you manage yourselves fiscally as local enterprises uh you manage local finance customer service and accounts and a a customer web account that's how you mostly relate to consumers is through a web account so the money to pay for programs could come from cca revenue the most for most ccas in america the amount of revenue in the cca exceeds the discretionary portion

130of your general fund it's a very large economic development fund that's captured from uh from being a cca just from the electricity if you also are a cca for other things like heat for example which many are you triple quadruple that amount you're now into four five times your discretionary general funds that are under management just by becoming a cca uh you have the ability to place adders bill adders that pay for your local municipal programs your cca programs pay for projects pay for voluntary customer participation in projects like the uh on-site solar that mark clevy mentioned local micro grids community micro grids uh you're able to to organize these things on the platform of the cca otherwise it's just a matter of you using that public power traditional public power public finance power that

131you already have under separate organic local law to finance these so you have to control the revenue and the rates that the cca gives you then you get or frankly a direct competition with utilities provided you acknowledge the issue that customers can leave you tomorrow the need to commit the customer the cca helps you kind of get more sticky with the customer for a more long-term relationship but otherwise you have options here to to use local authority the cca just gives you the kind of nuke button where you control the whole game now right and you control it through a statutory process not through a litigation process um so you know it could either just be your town alone it can be a regional entity it could be run by one town but participated in

132by re regional town so if one town like ann arbor wants to take on the responsibility of doing all the work and sort of leading the process and uh then the other suburban towns can go along with it and sign on to it and that's about a common pattern the model has evolved i started this in 1993 wrote the first version in massachusetts 95 i wrote a second version in california actually in 20 2004 2010 is when we really formally introduced it and it started spreading there and then since the last five years working on a 3.0 model uh that um that missy mentioned so 1.0 is real stripped down version legally greener cheaper you're just buying power from the grid you buy renewable energy certificates maybe you source from a wind farm or solar

133farm but you're not building anything you're just buying power it's greener and so you're legally greener you didn't actually change anything you didn't add any new resources under the grid you didn't subtract any demand from within buildings but you're sourcing from green supply so there's a marginal benefit that's like 1995 to 2000. this is massachusetts today uh where i am actually it's bigger now it's half the state it's 150 out of 300 cities including boston uh worcester and springfield's about to launch uh 150 cities but so there's increasing focus on renewable energy illinois has had cca for five years they have had significant real energy activity but all centered around renewable energy certificates so again nothing real all kind of legal but lots of of record setters on green power so this was the equivalent

134of over a million vehicles off the road just from these purchases ohio over half the state is a cca a lot of the new activity there is also focused on green energy but it was really for me disappointing so we started focusing on how to really get carbon more carbon benefit in the late 1990s developed 2.0 moving from a a mitigation model of the kind of what you get today in the market based on credits to it's really changing over to new assets building solar farms building wind farms building local batter building local renewable energy and so today california really has produced this big move and the reason you really know about cca because it was obscured before california is that almost all the 100 renewable energy cities in america are california cca 2.0 programs

13567 out of 72. that's the whole movement right and it was opened up by the fact that this is in california uh focused on building local renewable energy using the power of cca to build uh so big success they're expecting actually the numbers up from 35 percent of all california except it's up to 40 above 40 so it's like 12 13 million people in california under cca under 180 municipalities inside of 20 regional ccas they um and so they're forecasted to grow to 85 percent of the state so that'll be like whatever 25 million people they've driven on the right side here um seven or five sorry five gigawatts of new in-state renewable development the past three years so that's billions of dollars of development by those entities they've driven renewable energy levels above state

136requirements they've driven carbon reductions far beyond state requirements it's really kind of revolutionized the state and i'm not saying it's a model because it's not uh it's the old model this is from 2004 but it happened right and it had a big impact uh physically greener power and but we we've taken in the past seven years to what we call 3.0 and that's focused really on what mark clevy said on on its radical decarbonization it isn't greening the grid which for a variety of ways i could explain to you later is really ineffective at decarbonization to it's what we call that's an addition at what they call additionality model we're adding wind farms adding solar parts onto the grid building new grid to those solar farms building the grid well new carbon comes with a

137new grid and when you build new grid with new carbon new new fossil plants back fill the capacity on those power lines so you get more carbon and because of the 20 to 30 percent capacity factor efficiency of renewables as they only work 20 to 30 of the time in best conditions you have 70 to 80 percent unused lines when they build a new life so you have this problem with centralized green grid solutions where you never really get out of a carbon intensive energy mix when you build onto the grid when you build into into buildings into urban core and you decarbonize and you integrate energy and distribute energy resources which i call here ders i hope you know that term that's a different game everything every dollar you invest invest is is deleting

138demand from the grid and the pipeline every penny that you invest deletes demand that investment is decarbonization acquiring a grid is not and i again i'm not trying to discourage the public power people cca is public power american public power association calls it public power it's just a more modernized approach to how you use public power to change the game to transform energy not just take it over so here's the kind of program complexity that is involved in that process it has to do with engaging people in their homes and their businesses not just building big government assets it has to do with changing homes and businesses 95 of the energy load in ann arbor is private sector load so you've got to get into buildings you have to enlist customer investment if you look

139at these categories this is from california cca association this is a year ago okay this is slide one you see there are 15 or 20 different programs outlined here along the right left side on the right side here's slide two we're 30 40 different program elements that are involved in decarbonization in a community so the cca opens up this highly diversified services market for the local community that's administered by the community uh and controlled by it directly but it's not taking over the polls and wires and power plants to get there it's just reaching into the authority that has with the cca to make that happen and again i think you could do a lot of this without cca just using your non-exclusive franchise provision so the cca would open it up so you cover

140everybody i think you have a potential two-level strategy here to just go down that highway of we're gonna blow you up and have a second off ramp that says if you let us we won't kill you uh and so here's upstate new york or new jersey starting up cca i'm gonna try to go faster and that's new york a weird orientation to capture the major ccas in new york and new jersey uh i'll just i'll click through here so you don't have to wait new york recognized cca as a distributed energy resource development platform seven years ago that's probably why i moved back to the east coast and worked on this toolkit to do that for the state of new york ohio is now looking at some really innovative aggregations ohio are doing local decarbonization

141including local carbon taxes municipal building retrofits we completed this 3.0 program about a year ago and it's our version three and we've been working with city of cambridge and some other towns around the country that really are super focused on decarbonization as a critical pathway and just seeing the lever for what it is so the issue is again the green grid's not good enough i'm going to move quickly through this stuff you have to move to decentralized decentralized energy to building automation to building storage to uh community uh micro districts to to things that are really off grid where you don't want to be taking over that old those assets you're trying to basically strand them and reduce the use of them because they are inherently carbon intensive so you know you're looking at distributed

142energy resources ders that has by a exponential factor a greater carbon impact than any centralized investment this is a work that we did for for cca san francisco cca looking at based on big data very detailed data how much decarbonization localization this is the each slice that you see on the left there is a day and a year for the city of san francisco combined low to the whole community it's about a megawatt it's it um and the right side is 5000 developments of uh on building renewables that we identified through the data a billion dollars of investment and that's what happens to that daily load in that community that that is a picture of decarbonization that's what it looks like not some kind of abstraction through the grid not some kind of political strategy

143that gets there somehow in 20 years it's by getting at that target just attacking it so these are the three models from mitigation to donation which is the 2.0 you invest money into local development 3.0 is based on equity it's about literally giving the system to the customers using their monthly bills rededicating their monthly bills to things that they are going to own in their buildings or if it can't be in their building based on location on their block in their neighborhood extremely local activities it uses not just the cca as a structure but the local government the blue the light blue the municipality which as valerie said has the billing system it has resources it has communication systems things that actually market players energy companies do not have connection to the end users the

144trust of the end users to engage them things like your your curbside recycling program where people volunteer to separate their plastic and their paper they don't do it because it's a product they don't do it because the government owns it or some government scheme they do it because the community initiative that is being managed in a trustworthy way by the city and so to use customers and we use cooperatives in the model and a share system based on the community solar system to engage the community in an effective way the active elements of the community but also the whole community to engage also the local private sector and the jobs and and in the contracts to build the stuff to develop the stuff to get mobilize the whole community not just the government and litigation

145again just to make that point and drive it home not just to litigate until you win but to engage broadly the whole community to to to enlist them in an investment a voluntary investment in part um so i'm going to try to wrap up i think i'm taking too much time um and but again this is the kind of paradigm comparison um and i'm going to slip through it here it's revenue stream that you're grabbing when you do a cca right and i mentioned larger than the discretionary general fund uh the the the importance there is that the the missing component in the in in the the renewable energy industry is long-term contracts the entire industry is rich in credit you can go out and get go to goldman sachs they'll give you a billion

146dollars to build whatever you want you have to give them a 20-year contract if you have a 20-year contract you can do whatever you want cca gives you the 20-year contract and you then you don't need goldman sachs anymore now you can go to local banks you can issue green bonds you can go to the local co-op or to the credit union better more progressive financiers because you don't need the banks to do everything in the current environment you always need the banks to do everything and therefore they control everything so this basically brings that control local so you have more leverage to go to the other counterparties whether it's the utility or a bank or an energy company and not just be begging which is basically what municipalities usually do they beg with no

147leverage no ideas no setup no preparation uh and here's the development process it uses the local municipal relationship with with the cca the cca gets the is able to get all the customer data when it's a cca from the utility formerly only held by the utility that enables you to figure out analytically based on a database what kinds of facilities could be built in any given building in the entire community and then to contact the owners of those buildings and the residents of those buildings and ask them if they're interested in participating this kind of approach what we call throwing the net wide approach nets the whole community and therefore even if you only enlist five percent of the community you will have yourself a multi 10 million dollar or 100 million dollar build out

148from that compared to what you can get today based on voluntary programs or utility sourcing the access to data and the ability to find the customers and communicate with them in a trusted way as a municipality which no utility can do even the cca itself as an agency can't do but each town can do does routinely do that's the pathway uh and so you have this circular economy that you set up between the cc municipality the user and local businesses to redevelop your neighborhoods that's essentially what this is it's a redevelopment model uh through a partly in-sourced uh development process and so you're engaging people in in microgrid development and this is where you don't need the grid and you don't need to acquire the grid anymore because of the technological innovation of microgrids but

149also the cheapness of photovoltaics which is now extreme uh shocking and the cheapness of storage media which are already cheap in the form of of of lithium batteries if they are inside of electric vehicles which they should be and we incorporate into storage models not so much the stationary batteries which are very expensive and don't have much energy capacity in them but the ability to integrate storage into buildings which involves integrated integration of heat and hot water other resources in those buildings not just electricity so you have ccas that provide heating services not just electricity services with the advent of the electric vehicle and hydrogen energy is broken open the siloing of energy between electricity and other sources is obsolete and so the ability to to develop microgrids that include all of these energy sources

150is is currently commercially viable there's nothing preventing you from developing the resource they are cost effective uh and so here's a quick toy image of what i'm talking about appliance automation micro grids uh air conditioning heating systems on-site renewable energy hot water systems this is essentially a single system and uh the 3.0 model is totally razor focused on this outcome but again a local program that uses your competitive franchise option with financing can do this as well it's just a matter of local program design and effective community engagement to make to make that happen the cca is the advantage of an opt-out enrollment that can capture everybody uh which you don't get from a single customer approach but here's the targeting of the asset you know you look at the community as a bunch of

151energy-consuming organisms there's clusters of demand clusters you know whether it's uh multi-use neighborhoods high-energy intensity buildings critical energy facilities like uh schools and city hall and uh private sector critical energy facilities like grocery stores and places that use lots of energy that need it and you target you focus on those areas you engage people based on their need for those resources again using the data not not just a bland marketing program but data what you put in front of them is the opportunity to develop all these resources in their buildings that is you're not just offering power or green power you're not just offering solar panels you're not just offering batteries you're not just offering appliance new appliances that can be automated to work with those systems you're offering a whole platform of technology that

152works interoperably that essentially strategically removes demand from the grid and by doing so radically decarbonizes the grid is does not export back onto the grid but is load avoiding it's essentially minimizing the need for whole city blocks uh to go down to 80 90 percent off grid and this is commercially viable today economically viable today it has to be adapted to the market but to the extent that you are able to incorporate heating systems the heating costs are can be very high the automobile fuel costs are also very high compared to power so when you integrate these different energy resources into a financial asset like a microgrid uh the price points move the targets move and so you gain all these competitive advantages by integrating these resources uh here's just that i'm almost finished here

153this is like the crazy idea we came up for for michigan for you to think about just conceptually i'll just have you let you look at it for a second you have capacity in your town based on political will intellectual capital and some general funds funding you know ngos that pay attention to you and support you other communities around you and all across america and the world have nothing they didn't have anything when the economy is doing well so that's why we focus on towns like you you actually are the most positioned to lead this kind of initiative in the united states and in the world you actually have some bandwidth and some desire and some passion in the community so you can partner with commuters around you that would follow if they just had

154a path but they don't have the money they don't have the time and it's about using that leverage that intellectual capacity to make it happen thank you so much paul thank you very very much um we've got several people with questions um but i want to ask one first and um that was a great slide deck it's on our city website for all of us to be able to dig into i'm just wondering if there is a two-hour three-hour version of what you gave us tonight with all of the details on youtube for example that we could access yes uh there is if you go to uh localgreendo newdeal.org is our project website local green to do we're calling this a local green to do because that's essentially what it is yeah um and then

155localpower.com there is there are other uh powerpoints there and webinars i give webinars for free at at request as a part of our project so i'm available to give a more detailed webinars to to all of you or any of you individually to local groups that are interested or curious uh so it's part of our project to do that and be happy to do that great so um i think zoom feeds me um hands up according to um when they were raised i think jay goes first and then mark and then ember go ahead jay i may have been less but i'll go first anyway um so just i guess speaking of leverage i mean i'm definitely all in on the idea of distributed generation but i believe in michigan we i don't know the

156details of it we've got a one percent cap on distributed generation at the state level and where where if we can't remove that one percent cap we can go gangbusters till we hit one percent but where how does how does that fit together i mean how how do those two things fit great question it's it's a key factor across the country because you have different levels of cap across the country across the world uh and that's where we got into some slides i had to skip through quickly but this microgrid design that i mentioned earlier uh actually i'll just share it just so you can see it while i'm talking um is specifically designed to overcome that problem uh because the the key issue with the reason that there are caps on these systems is

157that uh the systems cause impacts on the grid and the reason they cause impacts on the grid is that they export power onto the grid um no dear so the the issue is power export and when you export the transformer often has to be upgraded the local distribution feeders have to be upgraded and the result is uh ultimately that the utility has to uh pay for uh for those upgrades and they trans transfer them on to uh all customers and their rate base they go to the state regulator and say look we're having to charge all the low-income rate payers to pay for these uh affluent people putting uh solar or micro in their buildings and of course the regulators agree to cap it it's a logical thing that they would cap it because the

158costs have to be borne by the other ratepayers to export the energy so this this micro grid design that we did that we have developed for cca 3.0 we developed commercially this is not just a conceptual design this is a commercial design this is a non-exporting system not one watt will ever go back on the grid in fact we did not apply for permits for exporting under the grid this facility is powering itself it's using the grid for backup only it's not net metering it's not using a feed and tariff virtual net metering or any other transactive tariff offered by the utility under the public service commission for that reason the utility has no ability to block or limit the proliferation of this microgrid that's why it's designed this way this can penetrate to 100

159percent of the grit and there's nothing the utility can do about it perfect that's why it's designed this way yep and i think i'll just add that i think the one percent cap is actually for each utility so right so consumers increase theirs to two percent volunteer volunteer related yeah it's a voluntary one percent and so consumers increase theirs the up utility increase theirs and so just it's not only or it's not exclusively one percent um but what i was going to say is that um yeah i appreciated you know specifically your points about how um you know there's value in still pursuing like a feasibility study and municipalization in tandem with this i think a big thing that i've been saying for a while now is that we have to like stop perpetuating the

160false academy between these two things especially as we um seek to pursue energy democracy as a value um and that we should especially at this stage be pursuing um both options um and i guess my question was i mean you mentioned don't do politics but i wish we could say that to dte our investor own utilities because my understanding is that in michigan in order to get cca this has to be passed by our state legislature and i think that's my biggest concern with it is that you know our very own our very own reps um state rep and state senator have said that they have very little faith in this passing in the state legislator because um even if the house flips to democrat dte has their pockets so deep in people across the

161aisles and so it seemed to me earlier in the presentation you were proposing that this could be done through a city ordinance which was completely new to me so i'm just wondering like if i understood that correctly and if you could clarify if that's the legal context in the state um in michigan because my understanding is that that's the challenge there and i think we were really clear about the challenges faced by municipalization today and it seemed like the presentation kind of glossed over the big challenges that are faced by cca as well so i think we need to acknowledge the challenges in achieving both of those different strategies yes no you do you have to pass a law to the legislature um and that's where you would have to have some leverage i would

162encourage you to actually what i would encourage you to do is is not to fund a feasibility study but actually to implement a local competitive service don't study it just implement it the most persuasive case to the utility to get them to cooperate and cooperation would be to allow you to have a cca law would be initiate a service to compete directly against them and then request legislation request their support for legislation in the legislature if you do feasibility say they know that as a kicking of the can down the road they know that that's a three-year process leading to ten years of litigation if you start a local service to compete directly with them and start going picking off their high value customers their large commercial customers institutional the university anybody you can pick

163off of of commercial service that's a large high value customer they will talk regarding your legislation if you do a feasibility study they'll just laugh and uh so they know where that leads they know what that is you know what i mean it's nothing and the point is is that you don't need to take over the grid the feasibility study is all about evaluating the grid this is what held up boulder good friends of mine 10 years later they've quit their jobs they gave up they left because it went nowhere 10 years later they won the political vote 10 years ago they won at the box office all the voters approved this then they got a second vote approving the use of financing to take it over they still lost in litigation you have to

164look at the actual history that valerie was talking about it's very bleak and so your option is not to study your options to implement you have the legal right to compete against them on a retail service basis don't study it do it and just by creating the legal fact of that action even without starting service you just announced that you're creating the service you announce to local businesses that you are that you wish to organize a service based on competitive options those options don't need supply through their grid based on the microgrid that i just showed you you don't need the grid to serve them so you don't need to acquire it you can provide service without using their grid do you understand what i'm saying and so i'm not here to say do cca

165not municipal utilities i'm here to say go for the juggler and that is the juggler the juggler is retail service and if if they at that point they will either say this is war we're going to kill you or they'll say all right let's talk about the cca bill let's like let's partialize this let's put this in a box and that's what cca would at that point represent to them they're not you're not going to kill them you're just going to take over their retail electric service inside the city and you're going to build distributed assets inside the community inside of buildings uh so i've been probably over overstuffed answered a question i'm agreeing with what you're saying and i do want to support the municipalization trajectory but i also think feasibility study is a

166very stodgy old idea for what to do this is like 1937 and no one's done it since 1937. cca is the 10th of the united states microgrids are just hitting the market right now i mean there are hundreds of them online but they're about to destroy the electric utility industry unless the electric italian street can manage to somehow rest control of it and maintain ownership and control of of that phenomenon but as a technology localization is here it's just a matter of being able to set up a stable contracting environment to finance it and so that's all you need to focus on doing is setting up that and that is cca that is direct service for retail customers and that is municipal revenue bonds green bonds chairmanship if i can jump into i just thought

167i would share that we're working with senator irwin and we actually have our first piece of cca legislation as well so we're gonna i think similarly the strategy of the office is to pull on all of these strings at the same time and see where we can get leverage to paul's point so i just wanted to share that that's moving thanks for jumping in mark oh i'm like i'm gonna take you up on the webinar so you'll be hearing from me hey okay i look forward to it you bet um so my question is as the relationship between cca and electric choice so michigan started doing electric choices in the 90s and we've capped it but you know all of our major gm4 price all our big companies all have electric choice now so is

168it is to simplify this is cca 2.0 simply an electric choice for green power or is there some fundamental difference between electric choice and cca i guess i want to lead to is there a way that we can leverage our our electric choice program in michigan and shove ccaa into it or use that as leverage to get this thing through the legislature because i think there's we've got solar taxation passed and by linking up with the mission conservative energy forum which is a really interesting group of people a lot of their friends and friends and neighbors are militia people but either way they got they got taxation done so i think there's this this is not as hard of a lift as we think it is from the legislate point that didn't bother me you

169know cca got through ohio mark uh that was republican right and we've i think it's electric choice we have electricity is that these two different animals or or is there an incompatibility they're sort of like half cousins uh it is it is legally a form of electric choice so it falls under the same laws that carved out that basically removed monopoly protection for energy sourcing uh revenue requirements for the utilities okay kept their revenue requirements for transmission right but but not for for generation you could say it sort of uh definanced their transmission and are there 2.0 model the 2.0 model was basically electric charging well 1.0 is electric choice one part is lucky chase okay that was 1995. 2.0 was like 2004. that was use electric choice to build uh you know to build

170local renewable generators and so those agencies aren't just buying power they are actually going straight to developers and getting them to develop new assets and commit those assets to that community for 20 years into the future and so they're setting up that what valerie was talking about the original basis of the franchise which is a kind of monopoly but the cca takes on control of that from flexible instrument which is the opt-out enrollment so it's not a monopoly but it's a very sticky choice it's a sticky choice enrollment platform where if unless you object actively you will be enrolled and so the city council decides in an ordinance the the customers are notif notified vigorously in three consecutive electric bill inserts and then they're enrolled and so unless they've sent back a checked envelope and

171so um it's sort of in between it's like a half cousin you know it's not it's not like republican pure choice where only the sharks survive but instead it's a community choice where everybody benefits uh but it's it's not choice in that pure sense of each consumer gets to decide what he's going to choose it's sort of like post-modern choice where you realize that you don't actually have choices and so you're creating a choice in a world without choices and which is an alternative to the monopoly and people can opt out but they're just going to stay with a monopoly right why would they do that and that's what we have in california i just want to remind people that that we have an expert on elect aggregation and microgrids and stuff like that in

172chuck and three years ago chuck invited the members of this council to drop down to uh jackson and tour the microgrid facility down there and be get the briefing and we have yet to do that so um we've got two people that work for consumers energy that is really interested and work first with consumer energy and teresa works for them and they're doing micro grades in michigan right now it's just dte's territory that is not drink microbrews i think it's it really is the future it could get you around this the need to fight over the grid you don't need to fire the grid can you can you put together the other pieces based on this law behind the grid can you use the special relationship that a municipality has to each building occupant that

173no one else has a trusted non-commercial relationship that is golden and so it's just about using that and then to logistically organize the microgrids and i think i'd love to hear chuck's um strategy maybe we can if if he's interested he can participate in the webinar or whatever we could get into it because i really think it's if you don't understand microgrids which includes by the way not just the microgrid per se as a circuit behind the the interconnect but it also includes building automation storage other things appliance automation um heating automation fuel switching electric vehicles hydrogen there's a lot of angles in inside of that it's a whole kind of new universe of technologies that are opened up by the the initiative where every dollar you spend is going to be on those essentially

174megawatt hour producing mega therm producing you know negative carbon causing uh investments as opposed to this abstract pathway you want to jump in love it thank you cheers cheers cheers mark go ahead chuck well i don't know how to respond because it's going to take me a couple hours and i think everybody would be in bed by the time i'm done one way or another um i could speak on the subject for a long time um we do have operating microgrids i have lots of friends brownsville and chicago i could talk about that one um paul you mentioned you have one that's commercially available so i'm just gonna offer a question which is could you advise on the name of that facility and then we can talk about this later sometime when we off some

175more beneficial time i don't have a facility uh all i have is a a specification for my career that includes commercial components we developed the cc three-point microgrid the diagram i showed you last year and we organized the consortium last last late last year and so now we're basically um advising ccas on how to develop those assets programmatically because the main challenge is programmatic uh which is how do you provide not just power but heat hot water vehicles how do you engage everyone in a building how do you engage most people in a city block uh how do you build put it on the bill how do you effectively transact uh investments between multiple parties you know how do you um incorporate public finance so it's it's very much a uh a model in development

176not a product that's on the market today that i'm talking about but then the non-exporting microgrid though but i said it's commercially viable it's a it's a commercial business model it's not a conceptual um business model that's what i meant by that not that it's that it's out there operating that we have microgrids in operation we don't yeah by the way now would be a great time to visit our microgrid in jackson because the people in the building can't go to work with kovid so we could all kind of trudge around there and probably get away with it um but someday we'll get there it's it's a pretty cool facility i'll share more anybody has questions on how they operate yeah i'd love to see that some other time we'll talk more any other questions

177i have a quick one my understanding is that microgrids are also not allowed in the state of michigan they can't cross a property line but i think legislation has been introduced to change that can somebody else confirm that looks like mark shaking his head yeah okay yeah now that's true in california that's that's true in most states um and this micro ridge is not cross property lines right so we've designed uh program designs for bike grids uh in california as well as in in new york which is where we focus today in all cases that's that's where the data comes in john that essentially the the approach to development is again not marketing based where you say who wants a microgrid and sign up and get a microgrid uh instead it's look at the customer

178usage data the ccn law will allow you to get that data that's the one thing you won't have trying to offer retail service it makes it very difficult to offer retail service too competitively because then you have to go to their door and ask them for a copy of the bill and do the serve draconian slow approach well the cca law you get a data dump of the whole utility record for every customer and so we've been modeling that data for the city of san francisco for sonoma county uh other jurisdictions um for quite a few years now in order to identify clusters of buildings which are both contiguous and not crossing a public right of way and uh have an ownership structure that could accommodate an integrated microgrid so it's really about targeting to

179avoid rights of way and again that relationship with building owners and building occupants to enlist them because it's those are the processes that really get in the way of commercial development microgrids that they'll tend to start with the building where somebody knows someone who wants a microgrid you already picked a bad building because only one in maybe a half or quarter of buildings are really going to be good sites for microgrids uh and ultimately the optimal sites are 10 to 20 percent uh that would really scream with a microgrid this has to do with the energy intensity in the building the amount of revenue going through the meter so therefore the return on investment the paybacks in the meter uh the uh energy critical energy critical factors that add value to having the presence of

180a microgrid these have to be identified by data not by who knows somebody who likes microgrids uh and so it's really about a municipal redevelopment process that's data rich privileged not market-based but privileged government-based that leads market development uh and focuses it and engages people who participate in it and therefore is not limited by the what's called the over the fence transaction rule that's applied in many states where you can't cross the public right-of-way um and there are lots of other other kind of details some details within that but that's i guess the general answer to that good application of the old 80 20 rule right yeah right the benefit is 20 of the the cases yep jay go ahead i guess i just have a corollary or complimentary to it i i like the

181idea of them going for the biggest customers the biggest bang going for the for the jugular that also you know requires some amount of legislation and data and big you know things like that so the opposite side of the equation is the death by a thousand cuts that we could promote legally right now putting solar and backup battery non-grid tied on every single single family residence or something and taking it off behind every little meter um so it seems like we could come at it from multiple attacks that seems like something that's that's legal and there's nothing against that right right now it's just a matter of promoting it i agree i i really think that's the most persuasive case it focuses the focus that city council on constructive activity uh it would confront the

182utility and compel cooperation um you know it's a critical path thing it gets you down it gets you going down the road versus a feasibility state which is weight for a year wait for another year it's three years now half your city council's gone do they still have the votes for this if the utility got pissed off did they run candidates against your city council it's not unthinkable that they will and so then you will get that happened in boulder part of the reason it fell apart in boulder is that you got new members who were against municipalization and guess who supported them it's really hard to track that stuff too because of the election laws and so and the utilities play dirtier than anyone other than maybe the oil industry they're filthy and they

183will just do whatever to get rid of you and stall you out and so focusing on the positive also it helps the public because the public is easily distracted and if you get into this public power now kind of ideological communist revolution rhetoric it goes far with with people like me but it doesn't really last that well in the public forum and after a while they just get sick of it particularly after there's five or ten years of litigation and nothing happened and they're like screw this and that's what happened in boulder so you have this kind of excitement for burst of political activity followed by nothing followed by disillusionment and loss of support and that's the pattern it isn't that people haven't tried it's that it's not really a great path the great path

184is in your case is that you have a non-exclusive franchise that is a license to punch somebody and you should the but the but the other side is to be reasonable and actually the cca approach becomes the reasonable option i'm a reasonable person why don't you support my bill in the legislature and if they can support your bill it will pass in one year okay just quickly uh commissioner zucker to your point i think that the idea of massive decentralization right is the solarize program is one mechanism that's doing that and we are uh closing in julie if she's listening is going to lose her mind when i say this out loud because she's nervous about it but we're almost at a megawatt in the first year of the program you know of rooftop solar

185being installed in a single year through a you know complete voluntary program and so let's just hammer that too because those to me become assets that we have and then we can start sort of moving forward so i think the death by a thousand slices or thousand putts is also part of the strategy so i just wanted to draw attention to that too wow that's impressive that's impressive and if you can do you have that capacity now then think what you could do if you decided to do citywide universal service he said we're going to offer service to anyone and you know call us and we'll figure out a solution for you and that way you don't have to prefab it and you wait you build up a list of subscribers and you go to

186dt and say look i i don't know i got 6 000 people want to subscribe systems here i think we're going to eat a hole in you why don't you let us do cca otherwise you're just going to disappear uh it's just it's very constructive just keep on the offense and the the feasibility study approach puts you you on the defense because then you have to you put a study and the study says oh it'll only cost 20 30 40 million dollars to acquire the system i don't know the numbers there dte lawyer comes back and says actually it's 10 times that that's what happened in boulder actually it's 10 times that in the newspaper it says ann arbor says 20 million dte says 300 million who do you believe dt that then does a

187male campaign do you trust your government 10 million later they don't trust you anymore and so it's just you get into this nasty fight where it puts you on the defensive to prove that the litigation court will decide that you were right and that it's 20 million dollars not 200. total speculation no one knows the answer it's bad politics but if you say look we're decarbonizing we'll offer service to anyone we'll finance you call us and we'll set up the details i mean there you go you're there it's all positive people are engaged in action the utility can try to block you but then they look like they're in the defensive they're they're the jerks now not you they have to prove what you're doing will somehow harm someone not you you just do what

188you're doing based on what everyone wants to have happen so it's just much better energy and better politics and more sustainable and again this is not just cca i'm talking about it's just going for the jungler it's going for what you can do now and that's the this unlimited this non-exclusive franchise the cc option then being the the box that in which everyone can peacefully relate and so now you're just saying i'm i'm feeling crazy here i'm gonna punch somebody and just you know put me in the box i'll be nice paul i think i think we're gonna end on that note because we have a couple of other agenda items including including what are our future meetings going to be and and maybe that will include paul finn um round two i would love

189that i would love it i will leave you here it's been a sincere pleasure to meet you all i'm i i i hope i wasn't too bombast thanks very much we really appreciate your time and like like i said uh or like mark said i'm sure you're gonna get another phone call or two from from uh from people listening in tonight or participating tonight so thanks again i hope so thank you john thanks everybody all right great so um thanks everybody for um your time this evening it's we're we're going to compete with a short council meeting tonight i think so um we have um another thing on the agenda um important one and i'll turn things over to missy to guide us through that did i see her there she is right in the

190middle right on the screen below me go ahead yeah absolutely thank you everyone who voted so we have 12 commissioner votes in out of 15 commissioners so just want to want to name that um and so far what i did is basically a line of 50 if six or more commissioners voted for a topic that was sort of the initial like we definitely have to cover this and then that we can obviously add more in so uh the last commissioner voted during this commission meeting so this is real-time uh analysis here you know who you are uh here are the topics that have six or more votes in no particular order they just hit that cut um they're in alphabetical order not in scoring order community choice aggregation community solar dt's voluntary green pricing program

191energy efficiency and energy grid series understanding how a grid works geothermal energy on-site solar state-level energy-related legislation and regulation and virtual power purchase agreements so those are the topics that's nine uh that emerged from discussion and so i think perhaps what might be best is if i know who voted and who didn't i can follow up with the three other commissioners just to make sure their votes are counted in that system and then we'll do uh i think we'll try to work through as many as we can work through we'll we'll prioritize where we got a nine we the highest code is a nine uh out of twelve so we'll work through nine eight seven six to make sure that those topics um barring of course other people's schedules so thanks everyone um reactions anything

192you want to share i have a question of everybody i mean we just had um fairly detailed presentations on the legislative framework that we're operating in by valerie and now cca by paul do people feel at least at this point that another round of that is necessary or that we want to move on to the other topics does anybody feel strongly about about additional information um with regards to either one of those topics voice because she recommended the state level legislation and i think it's bigger than the foot act okay yeah go ahead bridgette and that's true it's there's a lot more going on than just a foot act that's true go ahead bridgette yeah so um the presentations are great and there's you know there's no limit to how much we can learn or

193talk about or have presentations on in the energy area um i think i'm having the last couple of meetings presentations and i've attended some outside webinars that i know a bunch of you have as well um i guess i'm also wondering what next steps are so we're getting presentations but judge you know we've had so many people call in interested in seeing something happen and change i'm as much as presentations are very interesting i would be interested in putting aside time to talk about so what are we going to do next to move forward on something does anybody want to add to that um mark i i agree you know we're and if we're an advisory body we're not here to be you know i love the briefings and i want to continue them but

194i think we should be doing some things in parallel i guess missy my question to you is paul said that you know you begin the cca process with some sort of resolution that leads to an ordinance so are is the energy commission the source of that resolution or you know should we draft an ordinance we've done two ordinances we're um that that look pretty good is this something we can we start this moving this ball forward yeah so we would have to have enabling legislation from the state uh to move forward so what we certainly could do is i mean it's up to the body in terms of where you want to go but if uh you know we are going to work with senator irwin on the legislation i imagine like a ordinance of

195support for that going forward would certainly be warranted i don't know what the timeline is for introduction of that legislation but we can't uh let me just back this up mark are you asking about pure cca or what he was saying about the parallel operating space i guess again i'm not sure what he said was here's the here's the steps and you need a resolution and an ordinance so i'm not sure if we need an ordinance but we we if we think this the ann arbor should pursue this um we don't need the state legislature for us to pass a resolution and for the city to say you know you know it's spending approval of legislation you know we're gonna we're ready to move can if we we can start moving our side i don't

196i don't need to a legislation be passed before we start yeah putting together an ordinance or a resolution we can we can start looking at this now i think that's that's right too and to your your question about sort of why the series is that we need to understand how best to operate in some of these different landscapes and so that's no yeah but really understanding like what does that look like so then we can hold up parallel you know pathways so that that was sort of the intent when and i shouldn't speak for commissioner uh merski but like that's what we sort of talked about is well i don't want to stop the the briefing stuff i'm just saying bridgette has said you know is there something we can do in parallel with this

197can we start the cca process if not then i'll i'll kick this ball back bridge and say yeah i agree with you let's do something well it sounds to me and i'll recognize you in a second um that um we have at least you know two possibilities in front of us right now and to missy's point maybe more could emerge but one is a resolution supporting um further investigation of municipalization maybe we've heard a lot of voices from the community proposing that the other thing is that doesn't require any type of legislation is pursuing this um non-exclusive um franchise that we could advance that would then lead to you know essentially some elements of of cca um and there's potentially others and you know what missy said is exactly right one of the things that

198we didn't want want to do is just vote based on um the first idea that came out there um with in in in a sense to i'll speak for myself with you know a certain amount of ignorance about what the other options are um but you know certainly to bridge's point um we don't want to be in a deliberative mode um for months and months and months um you know i'll frankly draw a payroll example maybe it's unfair but you know president schlissel announced in 2018 in october that he wanted to have a path to carbon neutrality and we still don't know what the plan is and you know we don't want to burn three years to getting to a plan on the other hand we do not want to enact the plan that's destined

199for failure um so you know we've got both of these um i see jay had his hand up and then bridgette also i think wanted to comment something again so go ahead first jay yep and i'll just say i i don't the next steps for getting things done i think are truly in the subcommittees i don't think we're gonna get things done at at these meetings once a month i think if people are are passionate about individual things they need to start up subcommittees on their own if they need to and maybe we need to get a small subcommittee ongoing to look at these different options but that's that's where the real work's going to get done so i think that's where we need to take this information in and then we need to go

200out and we need to figure out what we're going to do with it off offline from these meetings and then bring it back to this group right in a in an 80 draft form so to speak um bridget did you want to comment again two things um which subcommittee would be dealing with this cca municipality legislation issue that's one question and then the other one is um that i think uh paul then was saying that um his recommendation was to move forward on this franchise because that would put pressure we're not we're not going to get a cca passed at the state level right now because the the two utilities would fight it but if if we can um move forward on a franchise that would put pressure on them so that's just my second

201point i mean that was my understanding as well mike did you i'm just reflecting back what was said mike did you want to say something go ahead and then try it i i just wanted to support that because i think to me the legislative bucket is not something we should spend a lot of time on because and arbor has very very limited influence i think it's great if we provide some uh input and we help help direct the city's lobbyists but let's be realistic here i would much rather spend our time like like paul talked about actually getting some of the action steps on that now i would prioritize those pieces and also i i want to reinforce the point that paul made our best step to actually legislative action is to start taking some

202action ourselves that puts some pressure on it so really just trying to reinforce that point that paul and bridget made and i think that's 100 our best strategy and use of time in my understanding of what paul said and certainly somebody else raise your hand and disagree with this but anything that he suggested that we do is not something that would run contrary to something that we would want to see in terms of a vision for ann arbor you know five ten or more years down the road um it's not like we would be laying the groundwork for something that we have to tear up as i understood um travis go ahead yeah thank you chamberski um so i i guess i i'm hearing uh kind of a lot of conversations tonight about what next

203steps are in terms of action items and i guess i maybe this is a question for missy but or the the commission as a whole as i'm relatively new to this group as is commissioner councilmember briggs um i i look at the the 820 plan that was passed you know just last june as a really big action step and there's a lot of work that has to be done to go into implementing that and i just pulled it back up to make sure um that i was right as well in that while i think there's a lot of concern and um hesitancy around the likelihood of cca passing through the legislature immediately the timeline actually doesn't have us expecting cca to pass until 2025. and so i also so i know that there there is

204urgency and i certainly am am supportive of that urgency i think there's a lot of work that needs to be done for us to accomplish our goals but i also want to caution us to have faith in the proposal that we put forward as well and also look to missy for some guidance in terms of where we can provide the best support in order for our staff to do the work in accomplishing the really detailed and ambitious plan that we put forward and so this isn't necessarily a call to action for against any particular proposal but i also you know i i think that this commission of all the commissions i serve on is probably the most um i would say action oriented and really willing to like dig into the details and get you

205know knee deep in the work and i really appreciate that about this group but i also want to remind us as a body that you know we have enacted a really ambitious plan and have staff working on some of that and so i i don't want us to go down too far down a path of necessarily undercutting some of the work that our staff might be doing or distracting them from that work if we can instead be doing supportive or parallel work at the same time and so um that is not necessarily to discourage any particular course of action but i i just want to caution that as well because this is a long timeline that we've laid out and we're not necessarily behind on the goal posts yet um and so obviously we don't

206want to fall behind but um but let's just keep that into perspective as we have the conversation as well missy do you want to close things out on this topic because we've had some offline discussions about this there's also been some offline discussions with ana republic power and everything like that and i'm wondering if maybe you might um wrap things up in in terms of how you would sort of leave us um as to how to think about this and then maybe um so just for everybody else's understanding missy josh carlene and i um meet um for a week ahead of time to um sort of finalize the agenda and plan out um in future agendas and so um missy you want to try to leave us with some some food for thought sure so

207the three commissioners who haven't voted i'll be in touch with you to get your votes and then can circulate the voting back and then i think john carlin and i can kind of work on a schedule and also i would say when we get the ideas back if you have recommendations on speakers we would welcome that too because of course we'll be working with third-party um people with their time to the point about this particular space i'm going to just kind of use before very quick to say uh i really appreciated that framing councilman rodina too you know we are working at the state level on this legislation there's legislation that's being introduced to open up choice just for commercial entities not for residential payers we are figuring out how we make that play and

208then build up momentum for residential choice like we are we really do have um a detailed strategy that we are working on and we're working lots of different levers in this landscape so it is not all balls in one court that looks like this it is very adaptive and kind of moving as we see opportunities and fissures that are opening and one of the things if if people really do want to start getting into this topic like what paul was talking about i am i mean i have a like a brain trust of people that we turn to to talk and kind of think through like people in the industry like paul like what would that look like and so i think if you're interested in getting into those kinds of weeds doing the work

209as jay said in that way that would be a subcommittee where we would kind of dive in and say like what does it actually look like to challenge the franchise and how would we legally do that and how would we finance that and where do we pilot it what's the data look like so if that is something that really excites you that is work that has to happen in a different forum i don't think that's appropriate for the full body to be taken on so we're doing we are doing that work let me let me just name that that is our job and that is what we are doing day in and day out um my suggestion is um that we close this agenda item on that um we do come back at the very

210end with agenda items for our next meeting so we'll have a chance to weigh in on this again but just to keep things moving um the next thing is um working group updates um maybe we can keep those brief um so um we have on the agenda really um just um from the transportation electrification working group and then i'll give a very very brief one on the environmental commission and then if there's anybody else that's um got feedback from any of the other working groups um we'll recognize you um carl um carlene you want to first give us a brief update on transportation electrification yes sure the the transportation electrification team has um currently been delving into the prioritization of action items that we will be taking on and that's very much getting into the

211weeds of the different value um outcomes of of a dozen or so potential tasks or actions that we'll be actually um recommending and and taking on moving forward and that's that's pretty much where we are right now okay very briefly from the environmental commission um just two really points of interest um we uh um a resolution commending dan bicknell of card and even pre-card for all of his work that he's been doing on the dioxane plume the gelman plume that's been going on for multiple decades and the other thing we had a first reading of a resolution draft that is asking if it passes it would ask the city to evaluate the impacts and feasibility of going to um every other week trash collection so you know there's been a number of different actions over

212the years um that have um allowed us to divert waste from going into landfill into trash you know whether it's the bottle bill or whether it's composting recycling if you just take all these things all together um and the question is are we at a point where potentially we could move to every other weak trash collection um so um that's those are the main things um that's going on there there's work being done in the committees but i don't think it's necessary to go into any um additional detail at this time john can i just name that if anyone would like to join at 10 o'clock on thursday the energy education subcommittee is going to meet for the first time and then at noon the lmi solar access subcommittee is needed right and and as

213i mentioned earlier the country or services there's a poll that went out to those who indicated interest and if someone is um now interested in that topic that didn't register that interest before you could let um missy johnson and and me know i'm i'm going to be on that um i think wayne appleyard is so yeah we're starting to get some of these working groups now really up and going um public input is next so this is a repeat and i'll have to read through this i guess but so this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes if you're watching on ctn call eight eight eight seven eight eight zero zero nine nine or eight seven seven and enter the meeting id 913-5783-4502 um this information is on the meeting

214agenda and the video feed staff meaning missy will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number in order to raise your hand and to indicate your desire to speak press star nine on your phone and you will fill an automated an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak um please move to a quiet area and please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments missy do we have anyone we do we have one uh caller with digit 327 caller 327. you've hung with us this long hello there we are good we hear you hello um thank you thank you for calling on me um this is tegwin john my address is 920 catherine street um ann arbor michigan

215i live in ward one um thank you paul for that presentation i don't know if he's still on i'm on my phone um the presentation around cca certainly was illuminating about the history of that idea um i would like to point out that a lot of it was addressed in the second person um seeming to make it extremely easy as though it is a matter of city ordinance i know this is just touched on a little bit in the conversation it's not a matter of city ordinance it is a matter of state law and if as paul suggested a municipalization effort would be part of a strategy to scare dde into giving us what we want and it needs to be an effort that is cohesive and actually effortful so i would just like to

216bring that to the attention of the commission um and also to point out the fact that public ownership is not a philosophy or an ideology it's a value and it's a value that's deeply rooted in community and in localization and in resilience and indeed growth and that you know this we this isn't the anti-public power is not um not a bunch of communists i didn't appreciate the red scare there um it is a bunch of citizens who truly believe that that taking the the power that we provide to our own communities and our neighbors into our hands is something that has value that includes decarbonization and also includes serving our communities in so many other ways and i hope that that is the conversation that we can continue to have as we look to the

217future of how we will be providing power for our community in the future thank you very much thank you and through your attendance and comments tonight you are definitely part of this conversation so thanks very much uh caller ending in two to eight hello can you hear me yes hi yeah i'd like to also call in regarding paul's presentation i found it rather troubling that he was brought in as an expert on cca yet seemed to misunderstand a lot of the fundamental uh stumbling blocks in the state of michigan regarding the legal situation here um as has already been touched on uh enough it is not a city ordinance uh it would require a change in state law and furthermore um the caps on distributed generation uh at least as far as i can understand

218and i don't believe that this presentation gave any uh argument against the cca would not inherently remove those what would remove caps on distributed generation is a municipal utility could choose to raise those caps um i thought that his point on not wanting to buy electrical infrastructure was interesting i definitely agree that it would be ideal if we were able to bypass the need for investing large amounts of money into old decaying infrastructure that sounds like a great opportunity that cca has to benefit municipalization effort allowing us to share those lines it also seems like it would probably address a lot of the legal challenges that valerie brought up so i definitely fully support cca as a process but i do really think it's important for the city to fully and meaningfully uh move towards

219municipalization it's it sounds like it's going to be an extremely useful tool in allowing us to achieve those carbon reduction targets by allowing us to lift bands on distributed generation and or caps on it while also allowing us to um move towards the public ownership model that is a deeply important value and is not something that is just politics or communism like paul pointed out which i also found deeply offensive that that type of rhetoric was being brought into this discussion um i really hope that the city will explore a feasibility study what would be the best legal way for a municipal utility to provide power to the most amount of residents that sounds like something that would be within the balance of a feasibility to study to do and would be extremely useful data

220to know so that we aren't guessing or hearing from experts who don't seem to really have the full legal understanding uh so thank you for your time and i hope that we can move forward towards a publicly owned future together thank you very much call our ending in 920. hi can you hear me yes excellent hi everyone my name is sam limerick i'm a graduate student here at um i live in ward 3 near staton hill alrighty so we can talk in circles for hours about how expensive or difficult or inconvenient establishing a musical child you might be we can claim it's just not the right time um like some previous callers i echo that this the crisis we face is too dire to put all our eggs in one basket we really need to

221pursue both cca and municipalization i don't view them as an odds at all but however we are being really dishonest in this conversation if we do not also discuss in detail the human costs of mismanaging our collective energy feature we i also echo the points about public ownership we need to take back the control of our critical infrastructure we really cannot abide the shoddy infrastructure of an investor in utility whose interests really lie in planning for capacity and selling as much electricity as possible no matter where it comes from rather than the resilience and well-being of our community it's just it just doesn't i just can't i just can't even think about it it makes me so angry um dc has made it abundantly clear to their actions at where their values lie but i

222want to kind of shift and use my comment in time to kind of speak a little bit further to that human cost um as a native texan who's really new to ann arbor i moved here just last august i have a lot of deep ties to many individuals communities and organizations that have been directly impacted in texas and also working on the ground as part of the response and given this i really just want to talk to the commission a little bit more about that we we really need to consider that in the austin area alone 82 people uh died of hypothermia mostly older people in their home and i oh gosh i'm sorry if i break up a little bit um um largely in their homes um alone uh and hundreds more were avoided

223only by the collective community efforts of mutual aid that housed fed and kept people warm throughout the whole of this crisis i just i won't i want to commission to seriously consider what a similar event might look like here here in ann arbor it's really troubling that we're leaving that that case however however unlikely it may be although it's increasingly likely with climate change that we we leave even just a little bit of that chance to have that to have this horrible human cost come um when news broke of this power crisis in texas my life here in michigan came to a halt i experienced a great deal of anxiety as i checked in on friends checking on family not always able to get in contact immediately i'm i'll be frank i come from a

224a privileged background and my my parents and grandmother they're that they they lost never heard uh i i'm just gonna uh yeah i'll i'll see the rest of my time i just just please consider the human cost there's this is this is too serious and too severe to think just about money thank you and we thank you is that all missing that's all too risky very good so um that leaves us um coming back to as i mentioned um items for the next agenda um actually i i had made myself a note that i wanted to mention something earlier and i'm gonna um insert it right now um and that is um and i think it would be interesting to have um we we talked um in the potential agenda items of having dte come

225and present it'd be interesting to have their perspective as well um and and um one thing that i noted recently is that the sierra club released a study called the dirty truth they evaluated the 50 largest carbon emitting utilities in the united states and looked at their goals versus their um their resource plans and scored them on how well their actual plans aligned with their goals i encourage you to take a look at that um dte scored 22 out of 100 um the average was 17. um one of the reasons why the average was so low is because there were a lot of end utilities that actually scored zero um the highest i think was an 87. so you know these these things i think all enter into the conversation that we're having and um

226it would be interesting to um get dte's perspective on some of these things as well at some point so um that said um that editorial comment uh i'd like to enter maintain anybody else's input on future agenda items obviously we've got a lot is there anything else that uh people want to see covered um yes mark i just like this i get gte's perspective once a month in my mailbox so i'm not really interested listening to them come massage us okay amber yes i was just gonna say the same i think dte has a lot of air space in a lot of places that they shouldn't be and we don't need to give them more by hearing their perspective here i agree my blood pressure is high enough i don't need it don't need it

227okay so um any other comments before we close the uh before we close the meeting at once go ahead yes sorry yeah um so i think you asked a while ago did we need more information on community choice aggregation or you know anything like that and it seems like that there were still maybe some questions um around from within the commission um about the specifics it feels like there's maybe a little bit more of a conversation to be had there and maybe specifically how that ties into some of the suggestions that paul made tonight around on that path forward and so i think having some sort of conversation that helps connect the information that we've we've we've heard tonight um and takes it to that next step would be helpful agreed um and um you

228know some some of the callers pointed out some topics that maybe we want to delve more deeply into i see hands from both ember and mark i don't just don't know if those have been taken down or if you had anything to say still oh i promised a backup i don't know um i was yeah i was just gonna say i think the ann arbor public power group had at one point suggested that they wanted to come back and continue some of the conversation and there were a lot of questions that people on the commission and the council had asked and so i think it would be good to give an opportunity to respond to some of the research that was done on those questions um and you know to come back with a resolution

229or some of these next steps that we talked about tonight very good and mark i i've just um basically endorsed what commissioner briggs has said like to add one caveat i'd be interested in chuck's input into what what questions we should be asking and what things we you know we're going to look into these areas again and have paul or the municipal group come back in you know what kinds of things we should be asking and where how should we be framing and thinking about this issue going forward so if chuck if you'd be willing to sort of guide us because i i i feel the same way we need more more discussion and probably some more input and my sense was both those presentations they left a lot unsaid so so that's that truly

230noted um any other go ahead carlene missy uh shared with us that that osi is working um with experts in in this arena you know to like flesh out all the questions that are um you know there's all kinds of exploration that's occurring right now and would we be duplicating their efforts by by uh furthering our exploration of this um or could we get updates maybe from you missy or a little bit more information from what you are learning and how it applies specifically to ann arbor yes and both accounts i think there's opportunity to to go further well what is this saying you go faster by yourself you go further together and the intent is right to go pretty far on this journey so i think that there's opportunities to elevate any questions that

231commissioners have as we're having these discussions and we can come back to the commission for sure and then if there's like a general consensus that we're wanting to go deeper further you know for example around municipalization i'd like to bring in i'd like to bring in some municipalities that have done it and i'd like to bring in some municipalities that haven't been successful so we can also hear their stories so i'd like to really broaden kind of the conversation that we're having that but i don't know if that's interesting interest to the commission to have so i think getting your questions will really help us understand like when when do we need to bring this to the whole commission versus when does a subcommittee really want to keep like dive into specifics so um that

232probably can't was more conflating of the situation but i think having your questions is really helpful because it's you're a really educated body and so if you have those questions other people have these questions too so we need we need to know them any other comments i think it's time for a workshop we need a face to face now the kovitz over right or close to it over um getting closer maybe we can socialize at six foot over at u of m arena or something and talk about this with this zoom calls are difficult to really communicate and to move in the right direction i advocate i think bridget mentioned that it's brought up by mark we need to have a path forward that makes sense yeah we could do that in a working session

233potentially i think that's something we need to start planning for um okay if there's no further comments um i'll adjourn this meeting it's 9 23. thanks everybody for your engagement and i'd just like to close by um encouraging um everyone you know occasionally or missy is there anything that you want to do in terms of providing us guidance on what constitutes business and the kind of let's say discussions and deliberations that we shouldn't be having um i mean i i think it's okay if people suggest topics i guess the big question thing that we don't well here i'll just turn it over to you rather than me i will put my council uh members on alert two for this because i think you know better this is kind of a wide statement a cast net

234cast amongst all of our commissions we're tired of zoom you know we're doing things electronically and so being very careful like don't feel singled out like this is a reminder to all of our commissions uh we can't do double deliberations online we can't make decisions in that sort of format and so you know if you want to raise a topic for discussion and just let the commission know you're interested great but we shouldn't be going back and forth in those discussions and saying like 50 of the commission agrees with this topic you know we shouldn't we shouldn't be workshopping resolutions and not saying that we are but like those are the kinds of things that would be a violation of the open meetings act which is why we would take a sub-committee we would take

235a smaller group to work on something and then bring it forward um council member brexit radina do you want to add any additional i would i would just add um you know as council members we're told you know we get emails obviously to come out to us we can send things out there's always please don't respond um you know so it's great to share information out and resources and links and different things like that but just uh as um just avoid the conversational piece of it even though we're all desperately craving that and this is it's an issue in every uh commission that is i'm a part of there's just this desire to be friendly back and sort of say oh yeah what about this you know and then it starts kind of going down

236a tricky tricky path um real quickly um if if it's less than a quorum um those kinds of back and forth are are those okay or not so if there were three three people that are carrying on a conversation about an idea via email or for that matter in person that's not a problem is it no that i mean it's basically the subcommittee structure right right that we have we get in trouble when we have 12 of the 15 you know on that chain doing that work or co-producing right if there's an email to the entire commission and it's a back and forth and back and forth right and similarly um and i think uh council member briggs offered something that was helpful and that we try to do as a council whenever we share

237something out is just remembering to lead with like everyone is on this so please do not respond to all um but also uh similarly you can you can kind of do the subcommittee work you can get in smaller sub quorum groups by email um but what you also need to just be wary of is you know if if you cherimerski for example were kind of leading a group of five people and then moved on to another group of five people that in itself is also a violation and so um making sure that making sure that that work is done sub quorum and that the broader conversation is had at this table great so let's all hold each other accountable and keep ourselves within the guide rails and i think we'll be okay so it is

2389 27 i really appreciate the great presentations and the great engagement um including the community engagement that we had um and um i think um all this is certainly advancing our understanding and moving eight to zero forward so thanks again for your your service um as commissioners and as council members we really appreciate it