001January sure yeah I'm tried councilmember Eden Commissioner hukum your Commissioner Lenski Commissioner murski your Commissioner Cleve II hear chair Appleyard Commissioner 11:00 yep and we now have a new Commissioner Commissioner somewhere near I'd like to talk about the updating the projections for solar in the in our so it can be under business or some please any other changes to the agenda they approved with the changes as I submitted them they were just moved tweaks yeah ii favor hi we now come to the portion of our meeting where we can have public input we do have a few people in the audience so if anyone would like to get up and say anything about energy you have three minutes seeing no movement we'll call that closed and move on to the energy report all right so
002per usual we have kind of some internal and external news I'll start with the internal news we do have a meeting to look at turbines for pipes at the water treatment plant so we're at the point we're actually looking at possible applications for that these also been working a lot on it so we have a I think tomorrow we'll be going out there and seeing if they're a viable option for for our water treatment plant so to begin I think it's probably gonna be more of a pilot to see how applicable it is and then there's a chance if it goes well to build it out this isn't discharge water right what's that the discharge water I'm sorry the discharge water yes I also I'm currently looking at the landfill gas system and saying what
003it would take to to basically power wheeler with it we're looking at some of the numbers as far as usage in the area also conduit costs and other things that go involved with maintenance and operations there's something else that we're exploring is an option and then finally some really good news we've been looking at fire stations for basically installing solar and we're currently working with our attorneys to see if there's a way to get volunteer labor similar to what's tren ski has done in Ypsilanti for the sleeve in Arbor and things are looking promising so yeah as far as external news there's some not so good I've come as far as the solar tax exemption basically in December the Legislature passed an exemption it was a package of two bills one had to do with
004commercial and the other had to do with residential and they were tied together and our former governor Snyder decided that there was something wrong with one of the bills as far as dealing with new equipment but not existing equipment I believe and so he vetoed that so we thought we were through having tax solar in Michigan but now we're gonna have to go through the process again everybody it came as a big surprise to everybody big nobody expected that and we're not really sure how long it will take but it seems everybody seems to be fairly certain that they'll fix what was wrong with it and run it through fairly quickly but we shall see so I have a few observations on that from the I'm on the board director the great like Chernobyl Energy
005Association and they've taken some umbrage over the way this that was done there are some lawyers now involved to see whether or not that you can veto a piece of legislation based on faulty information this is one of the issues as being the other question is having led the tax fight on this in the first place and kind of looked at how to get this done as John then many of you know that not all the communities in Michigan taxol or in fact a small number do which means that it's a non-issue for most other communities so changing the law that was really difficult because we couldn't get enough people representatives senators and congressmen whose constituents who are concerned about this to get enough of a wave of people to build a coalition and to
006get this past it languished in the house under senator representative erlan for eight years in fact I couldn't even get it out of that Finance Committee to get to move it forward the the genius and I say this in the highest regard and respect for the Republicans that love this charge that they they push this issue of solar taxation in a bipartisan way and took leadership on because it made sense to everybody and they built a win-win coalition among Republicans and Democrats and in the house only two people voted against it and in the Senate it was unanimous consent to do this so the question going forward is does a Republican House and Senate want to hand a new Democratic governor of wind and solar taxation when hardly any of their constituents are mad about
007it and pushing them so I have to I think that Republicans in the state displayed extremely wise leadership and building this it's going to be hard to know whether that coalition and those good bipartisan feelings will will hold forward representative erewan is already trying to build a new coalition Republicans and Democrats to put this forward again and there's a lot of hope that he and and Senator Barrett will take the lead on this and and get this done but it's not it's not a slam dunk that well we'll just fix this one thing and put it back in the politics of solar taxation has changed significantly and dramatically thanks to our previous governor's decision to veto renewable energy legislation in the state that had the highest support of both parties of any renewable of legislation
008dating all the way back to the solar tax stuff under governor Blanchard so so if you see him and you will because he's coming to back to you however you remind him of this thank you other energy news it was reported that our us is greenhouse gas emissions are up again this year they had been dropping but they are up between three and four percent so we've got more work to do below and that's with all the significant changes getting away from coal so that's unfortunately other energy news okay we'll move on to recycling presentation about you're in denial or was it I'll just provide like one minute of conferences I invited Stephen to join us here this evening after consulting with our illustrious chair here I serve on the board of the Center for
009sustainable systems at U of M and Stephen presented this research that he's been doing to that board and I thought it would be of interest to this commission so lots of environmental impacts of which energy is one and it's I think it's a fascinating topic and kind of outside what we have discussed typically as a commission but you know one of the things we sometimes find ourselves to do is to find opportunities that are really in municipal scope so much of what's happening is controlled or largely controlled outside of what a municipality can do so this was of interest to me because of that so thanks so much for having me all right so as she mentioned my name is Stephen Hilton I'm a master's student at the school for environment sustainability and the College
010of civil and environmental engineering I am part of a group that is looking at urine diversion and recycling otherwise known as pee cycling and what I've been looking at is the environmental impact of doing this to see if it will actually reduce environmental impacts I'm part of a bigger team with Bo and Jo doctors Cillian Geiger scurrilous and love so when I tell people I am working on a thesis looking at here in the first question is usually why would you do that and the REE there are some major inefficiencies in our systems so we use a lot of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers to grow our food to get these we need to extract considerable amounts of natural gas we need to do phosphate mining which is a destructive process and there are concerns about
011the longevity of phosphate rock so then we apply this to our food and then when this gets to our wastewater treatment plant we use a lot of energy and nutrients to get rid of these nitrogen and phosphorus that we need so much what we'd like to do instead is to return these to the field doing so would reduce the amount of mining and energy we would need to get nitrogen and phosphorus and it could reduce the energy and chemicals we need to get rid of the nitrogen phosphorous at the wastewater treatment plant itself so some of the special things about urine which is a phrase that's not uttered at most public meetings is that it's only about 1% of the volume of wastewater but it has about 70 to 80 percent of the nitrogen and
012about 50 to 60 percent of the phosphorus so if you could collect this small amount of urine you could have a long terms renewable supply of phosphorus and nitrogen fertilizers so we're looking to do here and have been working on is see if this has lower environmental impacts than what we currently do for wastewater treatment and fertilizer making and to do this we have been using lifecycle assessment where we're looking at all of the imp inputs like electricity chemicals all the mining or having to doing and all the outputs all the emissions to see if this is better for the environment in what ways lifecycle assessment is commonly used to do things like seeing if something is better for the environment to see ways you can improve something's environmental performance and is often used in
013some policies so to compare these we're looking at the flush water we're making for toilets we're looking collecting this wastewater treating wastewater and then making fertilizer whether it's from urine or if it's from mineral sources we are currently looking at the operations basis and we haven't assessed putting in the infrastructure required to do this yet the way we're comparing these cysts because they are kind of different is we're looking we're making sure all scenarios we run have this same amount of wastewater treated and the same amount of nitrogen and phosphorus treated so each scenario will have the same amount of people having their wastewater treated and the same amount of fertilizer overall and the way we're trying to see if this is better for the environment is looking at a couple things so we're looking
014at the greenhouse gases from all these activities the energy being consumed water consumed potential for acidification and nutrifix or potential algae blooms so what we the conventional system starts by putting a lot of effort into making a lot of very clean flush water this is then taken to the waste water treatment plant with all the other waste water and mixed we then use a lot of energy and chemicals to clean this week's water to make it safe for other sources we then separately again make those synthetic fertilizers using energy natural gas phosphate rock we have looked at two different urine diversion scenarios so in these we make less total flush water we then collect most of this year and we looked at 70% just see what it would look like on a large scale after
015we collect it we stabilize the urine we produce a fertilizer from it and then ship that out and then we also are modeling wastewater treatment out here to see how much energy and chemicals you would save by reducing all the nitrogen and phosphorus inside wastewater itself so all of that has been looked at as well because there are many different factors that could change how well you're in diversion does in different places so we looked at things like the types of wastewater treatment plants in different locations so we looked in Vermont Michigan and Virginia some just looked at one wastewater treatment plant some looked at like waste water treatments throughout the entire state so some of them are restrictive than the others for example the Virginia treatment plant is on the Chesapeake Bay which has
016some of the strictest nutrient removal standards so that's a place that could really benefit from something like you're in diversion and we also looked at plants throughout Michigan in Virginia at Vermont we also use the electricity grids from those states so over Vermont has the clean electricity United States and there are some differences between Vermont and the other states since we already made this model we did a little quick simulation a place similar to Ann Arbor we can call it an Harbor for the purpose of this presentation so we use the electricity grid that's supplying this area we looked at what we how we treat drinking water and how we treat wastewater here to make something again similar but not exactly the same as Ann Arbor just as a quick little comparison so if we
017look when looking at the total environment impacts you can see there's these gray bars editor the conventional system and beneath that are the orange and blue bars which are urine diversion systems what this is showing is that the environmental impacts in the vast majority of categories are much lower for these here in diversion systems so you can see somewhere from 25 to 35 percent reduction of greenhouse gases from these specific activities you can see a large reduction in energy water and unification the big exception here is you may see one blue bar that's taller than all the rest to make one of the in one of our scenarios we make a fertilizer that requires sulfuric acid so in that one there are some side effects of extra acidification potential that could happen this graph is
018looking at Virginia which is that poster child of that treatment plant that's extra incredibly strict if we look at the quickly run and harbors in that simulation we still see some very significant benefits they may not be as large because we are not treating to Chesapeake Bay standards but we're still seeing reductions of greenhouse gases in those activities somewhere from 20% a large reduction and energy and other impacts so we're gonna take a little look at what's changing in the actual system itself so we're benefiting by producing less flush water by changing how we treat wastewater and we are benefiting largely by offsetting synthetic fertilizers but to do this we do have to collect stabilized urine and then turn a new fertilizer and send that out does have an impact with associated with it some
019of the big pros changing how much flush water we use this significantly reduces how much we need for flushing your in diverting toilets use about half as much water as low-flow toilets which are better than what many people have currently so one very solve finding is a good way to save water is by using less water you can quote us on that one looking at wastewater treatment you can kind of tell as you have stricter effluent standards those plans will start to benefit more from urine diversion so you can see this boxed bar that is a plant similar to Ann Arbor's where they have pretty substantial reductions in greenhouse gases from things like having less electricity or needing less or doing less things to remove phosphorus it's not benefiting as much as that Virginia plant
020- it's right but it is still benefiting quite a bit and the biggest Pro is not having to make as much synthetic fertilizers from natural gas and phosphate rock so if nitrogen nitrogen fertilizers come from natural gas there's a big carbon footprint associated with those there are many environmental impacts with phosphate fertilizers as well in most scenarios we looked at for you needed to offset fertilizers for total environmental benefits so as long as I was happening you were reducing total greenhouse gases some of the downsides you do have to stabilize urine so we add a lot of vinegar to urine to stop it from clogging up our pipes and we also modeled collecting urine you may be aware there are not many large scale collection systems of urine so this is one part of our
021model that was a little more uncertain than the others because we didn't have as much to base it off of in addition while these making these fertilizers has much lower impacts than making regular fertilizers there are still definitely impacts associated with doing that so some of the major takeaways implementing your diversion is something that could be very difficult but it was done on a large scale you would have significant environmental benefits in all the locations we looked at there were seeing that there are large decreases in total environmental impacts so we reduce greenhouse gases by pretty wide range reduced how much water we used reduces the potential for algae blooms we either slightly decrease the acidification or increase it a lot depending on how we made our urine fertilizers we're benefiting a lot from reducing
022our flush water changing how we treat wastewater and offsetting synthetic fertilizers but to do that we can have to collect stabilize gear and turn it into a fertilizer and ship that out so some of the biggest factors here are the electricity grid being used if you save a lot of electricity in a place that's supplied by solar energy that's not as big of a deal as if you save electricity in a plate place supplied by coal how you treat your wastewater so for your place with very strict standards you would lower the impacts of just treating wastewater but if it was a place that was a less strict you may change how much nitrogen or phosphorus would go into the waste water since the less is coming into the treatment plant itself and then you
023also depends how we're collecting urine and how we're turning it into fertilizers if we're looking at this and harvest scenario we see that it could be a municipal strategy that would lower some energy and greenhouse gas emissions again this was not everything about Ann Arbor this was just a place pretty close to Ann Arbor so it reduces energy in a lot of areas such as secondary treatment and wastewater treatment plants that's where the most of it that's where the majority of the energy is consumed there and has mostly large the largest impacts and something you kind of seen quite a few life cycle assessments is that a lot of the benefits happen in the supply chain so if you looked within the bounds of Ann Arbor you may see greenhouse gas emissions or energy consumption
024that's pretty close to where we started but when you look in the supply chain you have significant benefits because you're not making chemicals to remove phosphorus you're not making fertilizers from natural gas so far we've published report and made an excel tool which we used for the Ann Harbor in Aereo we are currently working on a journal article there is quite a bit of work that could be done there are some groups looking kind of into the economics of this and some of the best places to implement it but there's a lot more we can look into how we make our fertilisers how to make them better and as you may have noticed you're in diversion isn't a common thing so actual more field trials in places other than the second-floor bathroom in the Gigi
025Brown building on University of Michigan could be implemented it does anybody have any questions and if you would like to contact me my email is below eerie yes I like your presentation I think it's great yeah just an observation yes in the mid nineties a congressman Nolan Berg who's southeast Michigan he had a campaign slogan to keep the government out of our bathrooms he led the legislative effort that blocked low-flow toilets his legislation was co-sponsored with Newt Gingrich and congressman Bob Walker from Pennsylvania collectively known as the Three Stooges but I guess I would say you know no good idea goes unpunished and probably to be worthwhile to take a look at the industries or those interests that you know would not want to see this happen and begin to figure out how to co-opt
026them early on when we got into the opposition from congressman Nolan Berg why he hated low-flow toilets so much it was because he got major campaign contributions from the plumbers so I don't know if this uses less piping but um well you've got all the good ideas down there I would advise you to take a look at who loses when you do this and co-op them early we may have the plumbers on our sides because this would be a lot of piping that would need to be installed so we may have that one very specific demographic covered yes very important demographic apparently there's actually another part of it that's kind of looking at people's reception of this kind of idea and they have been interviewing various stakeholders so there is a group kind of trying
027to see who might not like this what the support level would be which is very important because if you can show this has great environmental benefits but then nobody wants to do it right it's more of just a publication so excellent so I assume that you're in your calculations you figured in how much energy it takes and everything to grow whatever you make the vinegar out of so yeah we actually um so we used a database called SEMA Pro this is something commonly used in life cycle assessments and they have looked at the impacts of making vinegar pretty much we we did we got a source I was pretty much around the United States so we had the environmental impact of making the vinegar itself on there and that was one that was one of
028the bigger factors it was not like the biggest factor which might be things like making sulfuric acid for your some of your not fertilizers and some of the collection aspects but so there are things called composting toilets yes and they maintain that they get high grades liquid fertilizer out of it mm-hmm directly and that you can actually use it on plants there's an out any of this intensive treatments yeah there's actually actually have all this on the Dana building it sees the kind of benefit to this the I guess composting toilets have been a lot more common more in like rural areas or further outs this is something that could potentially be like implemented in a large building so you could put this in a school building in an apartment building you could put this
029in new developments or make renovations so this is something that it would definitely take effort but could kind of work within the existing system whereas composting toilets are still a great option and there are some places that that work very well the ideal is this would be one option in addition to those there to out at Leslie Science Center all right just actually see about 30,000 kids a year oh well okay and they've been there for what on the other thing that comes up is actually getting this approved yes and I personally have tried to actually get composting toilets approved in Washtenaw County and have had significant issue problems for the most part the county doesn't want to see him although other parts of Michigan including the state plumbing Review Board have no problem with
030urine diversion might have a similar educational issue with local yes a couple of comments okay first of all this might also be of interest to the environmental Commission okay so I don't know maybe you repeat performance they're also really backing on marks and Wayne's comments Commissioner clealy and chair Boyard I think what you're hearing from us is that there are other non technical related issues to this and it might be worthwhile in partnering with the Ford School of Public Policy to look at you know the issues on the political side on the lobbying side who's gonna you know there's probably not a P Lobby there's a fertilizer and a natural gas Lavin II know so those kinds of if you get to a certain point then working on the policy side kamini makes make sense
031and just the last comment is is this done at scale anywhere else in the world like in a developed country in Europe or in Asia so most of the implementations have been they have them like up to neighborhood sizes so far so a lot of those have been a little like more decentralized so you'd have a collection center in the middle of the neighborhood or in the middle of a couple different apartment complexes other than that there are a couple like University and Institute's that have them in put in large scales South Africa summer in South Africa they have a decently large installation this is not yet been done on an entire town scale yet this was kind of just to get a feel for if this were done on the town scale what might
032be the environment acts might get expected and I can come in and then yes and one of my earlier day consulting projects which now is coming to fruition surprisingly in places like Phoenix and in Texas they've actually implemented this and now in Phoenix I've told this year we're gonna see rules where they can direct inject wastewater from wastewater treatment plant into drinking water mmm so yeah it'll be unique we've been fighting this for a long time and imagine the public pushback on that where's your water coming from really they do that the thing that I see overall you might want to look into Phoenix cuz there's not a ton of work done on that ever Texas to has some some work done but we did the lifecycle review this because there was energy and greenhouse
033gas issues so we act even a number of years ago we looked into this I think the thing with Michigan it draws a little bit of parallel here is as our source water becomes contaminated are there gonna be some other drivers externally to this whole solution that might make sense so I'm not sure our waters gotten to that state yet but there are places in this world where the drinking water is quite bad maybe there is some logic to putting something like this in situational areas like that yeah I think it'll be a tough sell in Ann Arbor maybe gradual but I think there's opportunities now we have pee fast in our water so Phoenix is doing this and in fact rate wait that wastewater reuse process other than putting it in drinking water they
034use it on golf courses and everywhere else on the ocean yeah use pretty common yeah I think there are other issues but I think California had a failed implementation earlier on and I think they've started trying to redo that but yeah there have been some significant political barriers in the past so other questions comments mr. Pearson I just wanted that quickly thank you the presentation and also really reiterated John's point I have been in conversations with the environmental condition if you are willing to do a presentation I think okay that sounds great thank you thanks for taking thank you let me take your time to talk about urine most people don't do that so okay thank so much thank you very great presentation moving right along we're gonna get a tubing in to menuing germany
035sure I mean just I should go to the podium to do that right yeah is it loaded so good evening fellow commissioners and the audience and others may be on closed-circuit TV I offered to present this presentation that was actually presented by representatives from Tubingen in Ann Arbor when they visited in late October and early November so very briefly tubing in is a sister city it's the first sister city Ann Arbor has I believe six sister cities and to begin it was the first sister city of the city of Ann Arbor and there's been regular exchanges between the two communities and last year there were there was a contingent of 15 people from to begin that came to the United States spent some time in Washington DC and then here in Ann Arbor to sort
036of observe and become informed about the election process in the United States and there were a number of different activities in Ann Arbor including an event at SPARC where there were three council people from Ann Arbor and three also from Tubingen that talked about some environmental type issues related to both communities as well as some other issues that were sort of prevalent in in both of the two sister cities so I'm gonna present what was shown at that meeting and this is about to be ins climate change related activities their motto is to begin goes blue and that doesn't have anything to do with the University of Michigan and going blue actually the the German term is to begin matte blue which means basically tubing in makes blue I don't know why the color blue
037but that's their motto and it's a program that was implemented by their mayor in 2008 and there's some statistics in here that I thought you might be interested in but also some information about tubing and as a sister city so tubing in is a university town like the United States it's situated on a river it was also grown up around a number of Mills just like Ann Arbor did so there's a lot of similarities between the town you can see in terms of the size of the city about the same size as Ann Arbor with roughly the same size of students a little bit less town is a little bit older founded in where the university is a little bit older founded in 1477 and you can see that like Ann Arbor the University and
038the hospital clinics there are the largest employer in the town and since 1993 it's been a member of the European climate alliance and they they see that the same kinds of things that we're seeing in Ann Arbor growth and population and then also a growth from growing industry and employment mostly clean type of industry but nonetheless there's consumption of energy related to that Energon growth so tubing in in 2003 had a implemented a guideline called sustainable city city development with targets set for 2030 and included some traffic planning and also looked at the activities related transportation and mobility within the city and development also within the city bounds again these are kinds of topics that are challenging us in Ann Arbor and potentially could be of interest if we wanted to do some additional sharing
039of experiences and solutions so this has been a focal as I said since 2007 this campaign was kicked off in 2008 other things that they're looking at in addition to the ones that I mentioned before are things like child care municipal finances and climate protection in general so in terms of policy goals they implemented a set of policy goals related to climate act in November of 2015 the goal was to achieve a 25% reduction in the energy use and related to carbon dioxide compared to 2014 reducing that by 25 percent by 2022 they have already achieved that goal achieving and 30% reduction already by and we'll get to some of the reasons why why that is the municipality and subsidiary companies and what they mean by that is they have a municipal utility there so
040that's a big advantage they wanted to set an example for climate protection they wanted to build infrastructure that provides options for energy savings and for climate protection and they wanted to inform the community about environmental protection and how climate plays a role in that as well as energy savings and how to motivate citizens to participate in the goal achievement so one of the things that they're doing is funding of photovoltaic systems there's incentives and in place for solar in on both residential and commercial properties the local provider as I mentioned is a municipal utility it installs photofit Hague systems and funds the photovoltaic construction of both residential and corporate installations and there's an obligation to install photovoltaic systems as a part of property purchase contract so it's somewhat similar to what was recently enacted in
041California where there has to be solar installations with canoe construction so this is pretty dramatic this is shows the number of systems that they had in 2007 when the campaign was kicked off at that time they had 1177 systems and by 2018 they had 12,500 systems in place so there was a tenfold increase over that period of time in terms of systems I don't know what the growth was in the number of kilowatt hours generated or in the ratings of the systems presumably it was something similar to the same level of increase but that's really pretty dramatic especially compared to what we've seen here in Ann Arbor so the the utility provider they have already converted to 100% green electricity for all municipal operations so what essentially that is equivalent to is the target that
042we've set for Ann Arbor that we are cleaning hundred percent clean and renewable and on the electric side in Tubingen they are already 100% clean and renewable so other public institutions have followed I don't know exactly what that means I assume these are other kinds of public entities that are within the bounds of Tubingen they have also moved to a hundred percent green electricity as you can see here citizens receive a hundred euros for buying what they call a pedelec but that's an e-bike for using green energy and they also get some other incentives for example they get an incentive like has offered in Michigan by utilities and elsewhere for for example switching out an old refrigerator for a new refrigerator that can be up to 100 euros they also can finance improvements on for
043example upgrading their envelope so if a home owner is doing a major renovation they can actually get additional up to five hundred euros for doing that and they can also it's how do you say basically like a mortgage for doing the work and the pay payback of that mortgage is handled through the utility bill where they basically then pay the the loan back to the municipal utility so they have some interesting mechanisms in place to be able to promote their program and as you can see here if you're looking across the entire city the goal of reaching 50% reduction from excuse me 50% from renewables the target was to achieve that by 2020 and that was reached by 2017 so again in summary terms of municipal operations they're 100% renewable already and in terms of
044citywide community wide they're already at 50% renewables this is also pretty significant the scale is not going to zero so don't let this the the y-axis for you a little bit but nevertheless they've had a significant reduction in power consumption per inhabitant it's down 13 percent over that time period and it would be interesting jazz I sent you an email don't know if you can provide that to us later but I asked for what our power consumption is per inhabitant it might be also a metric that we may want to track here in Ann Arbor in fact I think we even talked about that when we had the metric subcommittee that we would consider looking at that or we also looked at some other things in terms of power consumption per square foot of building
045space or something like that a building energy can some intensity can metric but you can see they've reduced in roughly and this is 10 years this show only shows through 2015 I don't know why they ended it there but they achieved a 13% reduction over that time path or time frame with the actions that they've implemented and in terms of co2 emissions per capita they have also during the same timeframe 2006 to 2015 reduced those by 30% again I don't know what happened since then I know that there has been some flatlining in terms of Germany in total in terms of their co2 reductions because they have been shutting down their nuclear power plants and basically in terms of Germany across the entire country they have not reduced their greenhouse gas reductions but their last
046nuclear power plant will be taken offline by either 2021 or 2022 and so that may have also some influence on individual communities like Tubingen so I've actually looked at their website they have a website for this initiative tubing and goes blue and you can see it here the problem is it's all in German as you might expect so looking at it really probably doesn't get you a whole lot a couple of other things that they're doing that was not in the presentation I talked with the councilmen afterwards and one of the things that the city does or potentially it's the municipal utility is the German government provides retraining for unemployed people in in in Germany and that's done it that both the federal and the state level and what Tubingen is done is they are
047providing training for unemployed individuals to become energy consultants and auditors so people within the city limits in Tuebingen are being trained to do this they're gaining new skills they have to go through let's see I made a note here 12 full days of training too become certified and those people then are going out into the city and conducting energy audits and consultations for the benefits of the residents it's not clear to me and I couldn't find it on the website and I didn't have time I didn't look into that this earlier but I I don't know how those individuals are compensated whether they're compensated by the utility or by other measures another thing that the municipality is doing is they provide training for people in entities that are responsible for building energy management so people
048that are doing building management and they're paying the utility bills and they're switching out the light bulbs and things like that they train those people in energy efficiency measures and they have some type of revenue or savings sharing plan in place where 50 percent of the savings through the measures taken flow to the entity or stay with the entity and fifty percent somehow flow back into the community that may pay for the training that may pay for these people that are being retrained that are unemployed but they're obviously looking at this holistically and using savings from energy reduction activities and in the expenses to be able to plow those back into the utility and just a few other things the mayor of Tuebingen who kicked this off in 2007 2008 he was recently awarded the
049European climate star for 2018 and as you can see here I'm Watson eager when he was the Governor of California was also recognized with the climate star award so to begin is quite proud of of their activities and tubing and wants to know if we're going blue too so I don't think we have to answer that tonight but I thought that it might be interesting to see what our sister city is doing in Germany and you get a sense that not only what we hear sort of generally but specifically many European cities are way ahead of us in terms of what they're doing and the kind of reductions that they've already achieved and by the way it would be if interesting if we got the statistics from from Josh typically the Europeans are starting already
050at levels much much lower than ours in terms of their greenhouse gas emissions in terms of their energy consumption per individual and yet they were still able to make significant improvements both in consumption per individual as well as total greenhouse gas reductions so they're doing a good job any questions yeah I think we can't understate the role of the municipal utility in in this for sure so they're in a position actually to do a lot I would encourage you to share this report with two places in Michigan first was the Michigan Municipal Association which is MMA which is down the street you know they're the cities and townships and others are their members and also more importantly the Michigan Municipal Utility Association it's 42 cities in Michigan that are municipal utilities who have the you
051know the legal structure to do what these guys are doing they may not have the wherewithal but you know there are Lansing's of municipal City yep right so I think they might be interested in this and get something moving duly noted any other questions yes okay and if you can speak to the role of regulations and building standards hmm like either locally or naturally I don't know how they compare to u.s. standards I know generally speaking Wayne might have some insight from his background but generally speaking the energy standards in Europe are you know tremendously higher than what they are here but that's been the case for a long time in a lot of for example the Passivhaus design standards those originated I'm in Germany and I there's just a handful of those kinds of
052buildings in place in in the United States and Canada also - and actually there's even a hospital in Frankfurt that is being designed and built - passive house standards so it's this is not just residential scale they're applying this at a larger scale and it's also then frankly an indication for the University of Michigan that's now looking at making a commitment of carbon neutrality that when they say well this is very difficult to do for the medical system if an entire hospital is being built to pass up our standards in Germany you know that some of the expansions that university hospital system is looking at could be done there but I know I have personal friends in Germany I worked for a German company for 37 years they renovated a house and this was a
053stone house was that what had insulation on the inside when they renovated it and redid the envelope they replaced all the windows they added something like 7 inches of insulation on the outside of the house and then re stuccoed the outside of the house so they're really much much more aware than we are but honestly they're also incentive fide for doing it because the utility costs are quite a bit higher there so the - the energy standards are a lot higher but also the utility costs are higher so the payback is better I think also for a long time and I'm not sure exactly where it sits now they had a law that said that if you installed solar and fed it into the grid at all that you got paid basically for I mean
054it guaranteed to return on your investment they did they gave you an incentive way above what the cost of the electricity was correct right it was I'm pretty sure we didn't those have expired that was the case in Germany also in Spain and particularly like in Spain where they had budget issues they let those kinds of incentives expire but yeah if you drive around Europe whether it's Germany or elsewhere particularly in Germany you see solar installations all over the place I mean this is you know this is a thousand of eighty eight thousand people remember that that's a town of in multiple people are living per dwelling and there were twelve thousand five hundred solar installations in the town of eighty eight thousand people John I think that slide said it was peak kilowatts yeah
055wasn't it wasn't number of installation yeah let's see photovoltaic systems peak yep you're right okay yeah that so that was nothing not row and a half so that's still still a significant yet so chill watch peak yep thanks you for catching that so John yes do you know what the relationship between local and the state government is there you know so much of what we would like to do or prohibited from doing by our state government right that's it's not an issue in Germany as far as I know because the federal government and the state government have been big promoters of greenhouse gas reductions and so I don't think you see the kinds of issues that you see here in Ann Arbor where energy building standards are much lower than what we would like to
056see practice here in Ann Arbor and enacted and we're obviously prevented from having higher standards here the standards are already hive at the federal level and at the state level so I don't think they have those kinds of issues as well so clearly the regulatory environment has a big impact on what the city can do the fact that it has a municipal utility also has a big impact as well I mean they're they're taking revenue from that municipal utility and plowing that back into energy efficiency measures to training of people those kinds of people going out into the community and doing audits it just speaks for you know what what that kind of benefit could be for cities like you're talking about for Lansing and Traverse City and other municipal utilities or an arbor or
057Ann Arbor someday never know couple steps away right any other questions thank you yeah thank you I just leave this up or get out or it's okay thanks well that was enlightening next on the agenda solar access draft resolution so Josh passed out a update of what I presented in December in our workshop there were a few changes made I can point those out before a before we carry it forward maybe on line with what we're looking at in essence we got I get some feedback regarding why are we doing this and I guess one of the big drivers is I have not personally had this happen but it could easily happen and where I'm living but I have had friends who put in solar systems they're called SES is in this document and the
058investments that inexpensive and the taxes you have to pay on it adds even more lifecycle dollars to what you're investing and to have you build one a landowner build one and then have their next-door neighbor decided to build an extension to their building that's higher and block all access to the solar system maybe even as part of the shading is added but I know in one instance it's pretty much a significant component of the annual solar irradiation is blocked now it doesn't seem fair you've spent all these dollars to do something smart and renewable and then you've gotten walked by somebody next door without any pretense so the idea here with this proposed ordinance and it's not something unique it's been done in many other communities is it brought out through research um a couple
059things though they're not one size fits all depending on where you're at what kind of a what kind of a city you're in what kind of land you have available what the spacing are in different businesses things like that these kinds of ordinances can look differently so that's kind of down into the resolved piece here but in effect the premise of this whole ordinance was we need to be a little bit smarter about land-use planning with respect to renewables if we expect people to invest monies and not have any protections at all so that's the premise behind it um I think Shoshanna one ski Commission Alette ski brought up a good point last December which is we need to balance overly restricting development in the city because we do have limited space and so we
060have seen a lot of vertical growth in our downtown we're gonna see more of that and not all of that can be planned in advance so we need to be careful about eliminating the option of going vertical we just need to make sure that we've thought about it holistically so the premise here is not in this resolution is not to solve this tonight but simply to have folks involved in looking at what we can do to add some some resolution behind it so the proposal and I'd rather not read this I'll probably put people to sleep but what I can do is provide a synopsis in is that okay yeah so in effect the state of Michigan National cow and city of Ann Arbor don't really have any kind of ordinance preventing somebody adjacent to
061your property building something that would block your solar access and whereas we've the city decided that renewable energy is important and having individual landowners build renewable energy on their facilities predominantly involving solar do we need to have some kind of ordinance driven idea that prevents just without consequence somebody doing that so the last whereas I've added just to make sure it's clear that what we're after here is to avoid shading in the resolution what I'm proposing is that the City Council direct city administrators City Planning Manager to work with Energy Commission this body to put our best thoughts forward on what a solar ordinance could look like to protect existing land owners with scss other facilities or to avoid having blocking very valuable potential for solar development on their land that they own and that
062this be done in a fairly quick way I didn't put a timeline on this but I think it could be done this year where we meet decide maybe at a subcommittee level working with Planning Commission and others to formulate what this might look like at the back on the last page of this interesting in front of you I've added a cautionary statement along the lines of what I stated earlier which is making sure we involve a more holistic approach that we don't simply put in barriers to development put in put in smart ideas that might protect somebody investing at the same time not limit that vertical development and that can be done in a lot of ways maybe this looks at enabling a building next door to go higher but putting moving the solar PV
063that that if I'm the landowner that I built on my roof up on the top of the roof so it's got full access into solar radiation so there's there's a lot of ways this can be handled and treated just to avoid the loss of investment so that's the premise here and again I'm proposing this be done through City Council to support just a path forward there's no cost here I think it's fairly innocuous and I think we can't come up with something that's forward-thinking to avoid a landowner losing out on renewable energy so that's where questions issues concerns problems I like that a lot I really do this is this is the kind of thing that we should be doing we do have staff working with this Commission and so perhaps we want to also
064include the offices think sustainability it's in the city attorney if we're gonna consul to weigh in on this we should include everybody pertinent I think that um including planning is really going to get you the balance that you're talking about between not impeding vertical development at the same time that you're trying to protect you know solar installations um so I think that this is a well-thought-out I like yeah I think back to when they built one of the buildings up here on here on and there was a whole big problem with people's yards being shade and and all really landmark trees being shaded to the point that they thought they were gonna die they did and so looking at the ability to create what amounts to a limit on the north side well for example
065there's some discussion about what's gonna be build on the wide lot and it could be 19 stories which will cast a shadow all the way to Liberty Street now that's just the Federal Building in the bus station now but in another location downtown you can imagine that that would have a significant impact and of the people's property and there are properties like the current library the old credit union and the apartment complex that William and Division Millions all of those are are quite likely to be redeveloped and and if they're built the maximum that our zoning allows everything to the north will just be shadow so it really is going to take some some good discussion as to how you balance these visa interests and I think that this is is a thoughtful approach to
066getting the right people at the table to try to balance those interests [Music] yes that's absolutely right we should be right I'll entertain a motion to for this resolution I guess that should make that motion yes it's something okay discussion I support I have a couple of minor suggestions in terms of text so council councilman evening suggested adding the office of sustainability and innovation probably makes sense but I think also in terms of commissions in addition to the Energy Commission we should add Planning Commission so the energy and Planning Commission's and my experience very limited in dealing with the Planning Commission so I'm on a working group that's developing a lighting ordinance the Planning Commission defines its priorities every year and then they dedicate their resources to those top priorities and that's why the lighting
067ordinance is not a subcommittee of the Planning Commission because they had already defined their priorities and we were able to recruit some people and develop sort of a working group that's working on it in parallel but if we want the Planning Commission to work on this they need to be named in here and we need to get on their priority list the other thing that I would suggest we do and I don't know what the appropriate time frame would be but thinking in terms of SMART goals the T at the end means time bound and I think it would make sense that we include something in here in terms of timing you know this could happen in one year as you suggested it could happen in five years it could happen in a hundred years
068the know this resolution doesn't say anything about what our expectation is or our hope is in terms of the timeframe for doing this and so I recommend that we include at least some kind of time frame that then could once enacted by council could be then reflecting there and Planning Commission's priorities but at least have a statement in here that says something about timing can I respond to that please in terms of adding more entities to address this my thought was keep the group smaller and then expand it and socialize that amongst all the commissioners departments and folks and particularly not to say that this is wrong but the city attorney may be too early at this stage other than maybe is it totally out of bounds or is it realistic to go this road
069ice I assume that eventually an ordinance goes through everybody anyway but if we're gonna if the council is gonna direct action we should be kind of comprehensive doesn't mean everybody has to be at the table at the first meeting okay it just means that when the planning and the Energy Commission call on the City Attorney's office to assist that you'd have this resolution they might use the safe and see you know this is rough culture wants you to do I'm the timing front I was gonna also suggest maybe we recommend this activity take place and since it doesn't have an official body at this juncture that it would sunset after one year if nothing gets done but I don't have a real time constraint right now so I don't have a idea of what that
070might look like at May I personally was thinking in in terms of like 12 to 18 months and that could be modified by council you know once they consider this what we what we put in here is not going to be binding for council but at least then there's a statement in here that bounds the activity with time or at least sets a goal and then they could modify whether 12 or 18 months is reasonable or whether it should be 36 months or whether it should be six months but just to leave it out doesn't really give a sense of priority and what kind of time frame we're looking at and in terms of the lighting ordinance in working on it the experience that we have is that it's taking us about 10 months to
071basically get one in place and we were like this case I'm able to draw on some existing ordinances from other cities and other immunised entities so I think it wouldn't be a Pavley a whole lot different year and this does become complicated especially with Planning Commission in terms of the kinds of things councilman Eaton talked about because it overlaps with zoning laws and a bunch of other things is not something simple where we just say here's an ordinance from someplace else and it should therefore if it worked there it'll work in Ann Arbor it's not going to be quite that simple so as far as tiny I think that you just make up a couple numbers and council will amend it according to his vice they get from staff right but I would actually suggest
072when I say a couple of numbers I mean some milestones along the way so like say four months out we get a report back on the feasibility for example or on the status of it and and a timeline from that point going forward or something you know but having nap put any thought into that I don't know about the language you want to work on but if we pass this and then some of you make some suggestions to me when when I draw up the Council resolution I would just put put that language in that's that's a good idea because I I believe a you want to direct somebody to do something maybe you want to give them a time frame Cindy and I prefer to press them on the time so that they they
073push back if it's too restrictive but um if it's nothing then you get something sooner so other comments so then my ask is I hope to pass this tonight but my ask is that that you'll then foul somebody will draft some language on last time so bringing up last time so it could be voted on this time I think in the future they're trying to get us to have these ordinances enough ahead of time that they can be on let you star and beyond the agenda and connected I'm going to talk about that after we talk about these things okay so for the board on this there's the paragraph first paragraph hissing it's a lot of disconnects here so I'm suggesting that we just change a couple of words here Chuck and say yes whereas
074neither of the state of Michigan Warner County or city of Ann Arbor have adopted any and so whereas did Michigan Washington County nor the ants I'm going to have neither down to this yeah this way we'll strap that the first time but some stenographer overruled and you should agree with it yeah I didn't it's friendly enough good yeah the stenographers right so I have some you know I just want to share some comments that's similar to what I shared last time in Chuck I appreciate you know that you acknowledge those concerns I think you tried to address them in that last paragraph but I just as I read this I remain concerned that as the Energy Commission bringing this forward we are not bounding this and obviously anybody can't go start working on this ordinance
075right so it's not it's it's not like we can direct what happens but I would like to see us bound this with what we believe to be the right principles going into how we address this because you know if we I think a little bit of I'm gonna give the analogy of Germany which had these principles how they wanted to go after energy issues as being pro renewables and anti nuclear and they went after both of those and ended up with zero impact on their greenhouse gas emissions I think we could go into this and have the energy Commission's perspective on this be Pro renewables so protecting solar rights and you could have planning and you know other other committees or public input that is looking to maintain some of the character of Ann Arbor
076which we know there is opposition to some large growth and in the end you would balance those two out and you would actually see that we might really be hurting ourselves by enacting this in terms of our community's greenhouse gas emissions and I think as a we have talked in the past about ultimately what we're trying to do our number one goal the unifying theme is we're trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector and and and I guess I I would just feel so much more comfortable with this because I support the idea completely in theory but I would feel so much more comfortable if we put that as as like the defining principle otherwise I'm just afraid we could end up helping renewables and and actually seeing our greenhouse gases and
077our community worsened by limiting development that is probably the single most critical factor to our it's undoubtedly the single most critical factor to our community is greenhouse gas emissions you know we could build solar offsite in big open fields where these shading issues aren't an issue we can't build a 17-story housing outside of Ann Arbor and get the benefits of having people who can work and live and commute via walking or biking or bus and so I just worry about the the potential risks from that well and you know me I'm 100% behind large scale scope solar that's work cost efficiencies of scale and everything else sir realized I'm I'm in this ordinance protecting people that invest in the market Kluber you put solar on his roof that's somebody like comes along and puts an
078apartment building next then frankly that's not a tree that's gonna get wrote it in order to whatever feet perhaps that's fine from the co2 perspective but it certainly isn't gonna look very good from the person who invested $20,000 on a row so so there's an easy solution to that then the easy solution is you want to do the apartment building you have to do something to help out the guy who and that's what we're trying to do yeah and I completely support that as an ideas in a solution I think as this is written I worry that it doesn't provide the right level of guidance about making sure that the coordinates that comes out of this ordinance would need to not inadvertently be causing greenhouse gas emissions by trying to solve this renewable access issue
079I think that's the importance of including so many different points of view here most likely you know if you had a two-story house downtown and putting a solar installation and then someone wanted to build a taller building that would shade your house under whatever scheme we end up with they would just have to pair you up maybe even include the solar on top of their building to displace you know the energy that you are or to replace the energy you were producing that they're now gonna block it I think that's the importance of having Planning Commission at the table for this and not have too many preconceived ideas is because we're gonna balance those those issues they are very pro against development and so they're not gonna let something come out of our cooperation that
080that precludes develop we're just not gonna do that on the other hand we can still protect somebody let's say you have a 15 story building and you put solar panels on top of it and somebody comes along and builds 19 stories and blocks it they may owe you something if you if you applied for solar access when you build when you installed yours so you know that's the kind of balance that we're probably going to discuss and I I don't have a preconceived notion as to what that will look like at the end but I think that we have the right actors at the table to talk about because I don't think that we're gonna agree to anything that is you know too lopsided in favor of the next development and planning is not going
081to accept anything that's too lopsided in favor of preventing development and that's gonna come to a balance Thank You attorneys office because I think that there's some taking that happens when you preclude them to build to what the zoning allows well they they limit all building to six storeys there they amounts to look at my personal opinion is I agree with councilmember Eaton this isn't prescriptive right now it says only that we will consider the following in best practices so it's not yet bounding the the proposed ordinance and saying a is a priority over B and we're not even gonna mention de and F that's where I had a sense for what you're doing is trying to found this already in trust or a window around it in terms of saying these are these are
082our goals and these others are not our goals I think it's all it says is consider these these things work with these key stakeholders there will be other stakeholders that will have to be involved with the process but these are the key stakeholders the administrator the planning manager the City Attorney's Office the office sustainability and innovation I think was mentioned and then the Energy Commission in the Planning Commission and I think your concerns need to be and will be brought up during the drafting process the rare legitimate and good concerns yes I think we all agree that we we don't want it we don't want the same idea here I just this will be my last comments point I I feel like since this is coming from the Energy Commission like most of our resolutions
083we we explain what we are trying to accomplish with them and I fear that what this says it's trying to accomplish is that it's trying to accomplish preserving solar access as opposed to what I think all of our goals is is to accomplish solar access while preserving or improving greenhouse gas emissions and because I think there's so much of a potential conflict in this that's where I feel like it's maybe worth spelling that well you have the second cup the second whereas statement which says that you know this why are we doing this and it says we have a climate action plan which is committed to reducing community-wide greenhouse gas emissions so in a sense that is saying this activity of developing a solar access ordinance should be something in support of the climate action
084plan and reducing greenhouse gas emissions it doesn't say it exactly the way I did but the fact that it's mentioned in a whereas clause I think says that that should be something that is considered in the drafting of the ordinance is that somewhat address your concern I think we've already conceded that that we might go through this process and get to 12 to 18 months out and and not have an ordinance at all yeah I mean yeah that's maybe and in hospital gasps yeah but I really think that the biggest impact this will have is in in residential neighborhood yeah not precluding high-rises because it's next owned for that but but just simply trying to get neighbors to get along with each other once you well in there there has been a tendency for people
085to build larger and larger houses on smaller and smaller Lots and the neighbors to the north quite often end up in their shadow and I think that's something that needs to be addressed I think you've heard me say this this is really get makes me mad why I want to do this is because one of the nice solar PV plus thermal designs that I worked on it is no longer functional because we didn't have something protecting so the owner is suffering from that mm-hmm I don't think it's right now I think there could have been an easy solution that would have benefited both part yeah any other comments or questions before we put this to a vote if not all in favor aye opposed passes unanimously so I think the action that is all I
086got marks comments I took a few of my own I think they're all friendly amendments I'll redraft this if you want me to recirculate it out with the notes yes I think I think the intent was the next animal is listen this thing I'm handing out now I don't know whether to call this over this is a resolution for adaption later or mostly is it's just advice and I'm looking I think is a sense of the Commission in support of the idea for the office of the energy officer in the offices of sustainability I don't think we need to cycle this through the City Commission but if necessary we would do it that way so let me just if we could bypass the resolution part and just say yeah we agree with this in hand
087over to Josh tonight I'd be satisfied so here's here's the issue as we're looking at doing solar and stuff like that we keep coming back to the same thing that the only definitive document we have about solar potential in Ann Arbor was that 2016 7 development writing community before that we did John risky we're selling this a lot of you recall and we came up with 8% of their goal the solar goal by 2015 25% reduction by 225 and 90% by 250 relative to the 2000 baseline carbon dioxide equivalent when we run those numbers we get 24 megawatts of solar 2025 at a rate of 2.4 2.5 megawatts a year in Ann Arbor we are woefully behind in that and there's been some other things that have changed since this report came out josh updated
088the emissions report and we have a better assessment now on the potential for energy efficiency yeah impacts on the emissions reductions in which is about half of what was in the in the climate action plan so I think it's this purpose of this thing is to update our solar targets and to refine them down we say there's 78 megawatts of solar potential in Ann Arbor to me if that's the potential we need to to figure that out to be a little bit closer and start looking in best so what I'm suggesting is is just read it it's pretty straightforward and we're advising the Ann Arbor Energy Office not sustainability to undertake the following Solar Harding and planning activities in 2019 one based on the new emissions and energy efficient data update the solar energy targets
089that were put forth in the energy Commission's solar development run community report to Council so use the current solar energy potential information from sources such as PV Watts etc to update our the geo stellar solar potential the thing that we did that mr. 2016 it may not be need to be updated at all but we should look to see if there is a need to update the solar potential either up or down and that solar potential analysis is there listed there the lidar based analysis of an harvest assessment durable addressable solar market this is the only thing that we have that identifies the total potential and gives us any sense of how much we're talking about first for a site class three that they then conduct a feasibility study on each of these set classes
090determine estimates for an options for how and how much the solar potential can be reached with either distributed generation or the purchase of either with third-party solar own to our on-site stuff or through a purchase agreement with DDOT solar power for our large solar arrays that are outside of city minutes for established solar outreach education assistance programs for each of the non DTE utility portion of the solar potential for each site class for example we have a solar faithful program that is working on the assumption that one megawatt of solar potential en8 harder lies in the faith community we also have numbers for the city buildings so to some place we ought to be able to refine the site class targets here and say you know how close we were going to get to a
091twenty nine point seven megawatts of solar within a period of time but once we max out the the programs that we have and lastly if the office present their solar neutral plans have provide solar plan you know regular out solar plan to outcomes to John SMART goals we started looking at what we're doing in relation to needs outcome by sectors instead of you know saying we're gonna get twenty five megawatts of twenty five megawatts when we really don't know if that's even technically possible to do so we come up with a plan and that they report that back to us so when we talk about resolutions and stuff we have something to to target to shoot at other than this geo still are 25 24 megawatts target and that they report backers on regular basis
092about how they're doing them so that's the idea here is to we did this before because we didn't have the capacity inside the energy office to do this work we did that so instead of us having to go back through this and grab him John and we're trying him up in a room and be doing all these numbers we'd like to encourage this the Josh in his office to take the silence so that it helps us be more targeted in our advisory function going forward so I don't know if we need this in a resolution its update the report requiring the report come up with some better understanding of how much of this we can actually do with distributed generation versus having to work with DTE and established some programs accordingly and figure out what
093plan is tell us what the plan is and then I'm a little confused by some of us okay yeah number one you start talking about percentages there that are actually the percentages of greenhouse gas so probably take that out of thing and then there's there's this chart that you have down below if then ninety seven thousand six hundred megawatt hours is produced by an output of seventy eight point five megawatts of solar then twenty five percent of that is nine point six megawatts not thirty five so this is again this is the report we got back from Geo stellar well okay so that means when you want to go through all your points you want me to to just go ahead and jump in on this who's that dear a second pointer that's my second
094point and I have some other things to say about it but go ahead well let me address this at 30,000 feet and then your specific comments so first of all I support marks general thrust but I'm wondering if this is best handled in the meeting with Miss E so a couple of concerns that I have and I'll piggyback on Wayne's in terms of some of the specifics here first of all I'm not sure that the Energy Office actually has the capacity to handle this right now so you know we have Josh and Emily Emily I understand is got some time off in terms of family leave kind of issues so we have relative limited capacity and my understanding and Josh maybe you can speak to this that there is a plan to hire another individual
095but that's not really going to be an energy expert it's going to be a community outreach and communications type of person so we I don't know if we're going to have additional capacity in the area that we need in terms of really analyzing these numbers and therefore I think it may make sense that we talk and deal with this with Missy as far as Wayne's comments just to to piggyback on those and explain those a little bit first of all as Wayne said the in the first point those numbers are from the cap and what we did to generate the target that you talked about mark which is the 24 megawatts between 2015 and 2025 is we made the assumption that 80% of the reductions in greenhouse gases would come from energy efficiency and 20%
096would come from renewables we know in Ann Arbor renewables basically means solar and so from that we derived the target 24 megawatts which is the 2.4 megawatts per year tower that we've been talking about I agree with you that as we learn more we it make sense to reevaluate that whole equation is 80% realistic and 20% realistic should it be ninety ten should it be fifty fifty and I think we also need to consider if we want to reach our targets you know should we be putting as much focus on solar excuse me on energy efficiency as we add our on solar because we know energy efficiency cost less per per watt than solar so the whole topic I think needs to be discussed we need to discuss it in the context of capacity in
097the context of expertise in the context of whether or not we can draw on resources outside the city Missy might be able to help us with that so she might say well I don't but I can use these resources or something else interns to get this done so I think in the meeting we could have that kind of catch ball that we can't necessarily have here as far as the the middle of the page under point two geo stellar provided this analysis when we were in the early days of discussing the the program that we had within them the the what was it called again the Ann Arbor solar what was it knowing that solar for all in any case the program that we have so loosely the solar Club in 2017 and they gave
098us the this breakdown by Ward and then also by sector or sight class and as far as some of the conversions and things like that I have to go back and look at those wane that those are some of your comments about how these were translated but I think the point is you again going back up to 30,000 feet it makes sense to reevaluate all this in terms of what are the right numbers how should it be split what capacity do we have and which the priorities be and I think that's your main thrust and that I agree with I do too I think especially with the fact that we're Missy's now on board and she's gonna be looking for ways to justify our budgets and stuff and Jack has been very clear that you
099know programs and ideas and things that we bring forward should be have metrics and have as much specificity as possible so if we're going to do right now we are throwing all our limited penance or eggs in the residential solar basket without you know an idea that you know other ways that we could be how we do that we could is take the sense of this thing and I could simply turn this over to Missy assume we'd like to talk to you about this I'm happy to do that in fact that's what I'm trying to do this I brought how do we we should probably like we did do a little bit of an analysis on this yeah we looked at Google sunroof pvwatts and kind of a comparison of all that Google sunroof was
100the stadium was lit up for solar potential so it wasn't very accurate this was kind of the thinking of all them and we did a quick analysis any probably closest a year ago now on pvwatts to see how close we could get to this number and it came out relatively close yeah so as far as that I think this was actually and I wasn't part of the group but I think it was lidar data yes yeah so I think as of right now this is probably the most accurate numbers that we do have I don't know if that means 78 megawatts should be the target trying to get everything in the city and that's something that I talk to a lot more right versus is 24 I know that also 80% for energy efficiency is
101quite high on the breakdown I mean we've seen maximum 30% and even with advancements I can't see that going more than maybe 40 150 is the highest so they maybe in that sense we could kind of do a recalculation on this yeah I don't know I mean that that's something where perhaps it would be just a pointing yeah a point of clarification the 24 megawatts was only between 2015 and 2025 so if you look out to the 90% by 2050 that's a much higher number than 24 25 megawatts and the 78 is the total potential assuming you know the city boundaries don't grow or the the roof surfaces and things like that and that's not going to change all that much between now and 2050 probably if not it may change somewhat but you know
102we're not if we replace a a one-story building with a flat roof with a 17-story building with a flat roof the solar potential of that flat roof hasn't really changed and that's that's in this Saturday consumption of that building they've changed the C energy consumption has changed dramatically true correct we have been looking currently at you know things like wheeler things like landfill the airport all those areas so this is worried it's it's complicated by the fact that we don't really know the full potential for looking outside of the boundaries especially from you know as it says here even looking for a third party own systems so I think we need to question these numbers to be looking at him again with some new knowledge that I think I and others have the fact that
103the university only was 3% of the potential and I think the University Jack you probably know owns something like 30 40 percent of the property area in the city of Weber person it was only 11% really a university yeah all of the public land in Indiana ever made okay okay but still it's still 3% compared to whatever it is 11% so it still gets back to this whole thing of reevaluating this holistically so I think you also just comment that to your point that we don't have an answer for how we're gonna reduce the emissions we kind of agree that there's a emissions greenhouse public plan which is a problem that there is this missions thing the climate action plan gives us some jumping holes and we can't answer the question how is renewables going
104to do this in Ann Arbor other than this chart and so I think we need to get down to yeah we need 50 megawatts and we can only put get 20 out of a distributed generation inside of the city and so we got to get 33 someplace else where we're going to get it from either a Township or we're gonna buy it from saline who's going to put up through the planets with consumers energies we're gonna negotiate some some thing with DTE but some answer after updating this I think is least gets us to the right questions the engineered me hates this because there's no units what's a megawatt ac/dc yeah we got to get into that book so we gotta tighten that up the 3% and you 2.9% you of them that's net I've
105done my own studies okay the solar potential recognized to that it's such as the matter going on PV Watson saying oh there's a rough area and it can generate X number of kilowatt hours there's lots of other parameters that commend at what's it intentionally viable and that my takeaway on this is we're in the right space we need to take it to the next level we don't have resources at the Office of Sustainability level do we have resources at the Commission level and if not then the only other answer is going outside and hiring a third party which I absolutely there's that even though it was a consultant and loved to do the work when I was a consultant but anyway so the point is does it make sense for this commission to take taking
106this to another level working with the Office of Sustainability and were the gatekeepers and or the secondary piece of this is I've worked on a number of different studies with U of M as a graduate advisor there's all kinds of students wanted to do this kind of work so there's opportunities here Adam French would be one person I wouldn't reach out together others that would take the Sun and I think that could be discussed in a meeting where it'll be more interactive as opposed to trying to do it sort of formally here in amongst the commissioners so do you think there should be a work session where we invite our sustainability manager for example yes yeah I guess Sonia on the other end of things with the resources that we have in the progression that
107we're making I wouldn't spend too much time trying to determine what these maximum czar in some respects creating programs that work us in that direction is more important than figuring out what the maximum czar but I guess if the Office of Sustainability came to the City Commission where City Council with a budget request to put together a new program and this was the justification I'm not sure that that would be adequate for Jack's purposes to say yes let's go develop the commercial solar plan in your budget request so that's tighter well I guess when I was getting at was if we're working on at the level we're working at now we're working at getting very small percentages understanding what the total possible could be in especially in 2050 is just pencil exercise I'm fooling with
108you Wayne I think asking our our limited resources to do additional studies when we know that we just need more know whether it's on rooftops or whether it's third party owned and it's outside city limits we need more I'd rather they be working on the strategy for how we're gonna get the money to do it because we know what we need to do you know as our next incremental step do you have a claim that happens over over time is how much we're actually using in energy is gonna change either up or down fairly significantly probably and the efficiency of equipment I mean just in the two years since this data was produced the average install PV panel as go on from probably 275 watts to 300 watts I think the efficiency now is up
109to 19% to ever again although there are limits to that yeah we'll go up someone and that's my point up potential because they just did a study for a major manufacturer and we did that exact thing we instead of going solar first we did energy efficiency first where can we drive his load down to yeah that's right now what being what we need to do made a lot of sense from us co2 pointed a few hundred lots of other perspective well I'll then take that as a ringing endorsement of the 2016 solar developer a community report as it stands now and invite people to come to the meeting and Friday if you'd like to talk about volunteer labor putting solar on those on the fire stations and hopefully in the next two years we'll get
110sore on a bunch of them and let's get out there and start so I'll be there it's good stuff committee updates today I'm sure waiting on December 3rd City Council passed resolution asking all boards and commissions to follow up procedures done agendas and minutes and basically it says commissions and committees will consistently publicize agendas in advance of their meetings consistent with the practices of the City Council so colorful typically posts its agenda but Thursday evening before a Monday meeting we in the past have talked about our bylaws but we still haven't sent anything to Council and January 7th yesterday City Council adapted the environmental commission's bylaws and in their bylaws they required in all the materials they'll be used in a meeting be posted 48 hours before immediately I would just point out that if
111you go to let's just start right this moment and download the agenda it's a previous version it's not the version that we had on the desk today and you have to download the agenda and use the the links in the agenda rather than finding things on register in order to download the presentation system so I hope that will pass by lawsuit I hope that we will push the genders and materials in advance of meetings so that if anybody is interested in the topics that we're going to discuss that they can see it on ledge a star in attending meetings and it's generally available to all of us I think that it would be great if we could just make a rule that we give everything to Josh a week in advance by the way I
112agree 100% good meeting practices take time and they're gonna take mostly your time but they're gonna save everybody's time you know Moulton you know in multiples of time but I want to emphasize with Josh just said yeah which is that we owe him absolutely the obligation of giving the human the stuff far enough in advance now even city council add stuff after the initial posting of an agenda whichever I would discourage you from adapting our practices but um at least an initial version of a read solution is available at the same time as the agenda and things like that and and that really is going to require that we all be very considered at this time because it does take time to do all this on earth oh yeah many updates I don't believe most
113of these committees have been a meeting since the last Energy Commission meeting but there may be few things that might be updated I know there's been some input from the people on the DB ordinance about Darlene or the fast-charging oh well I just wanted thank you for you you went to Lansing and parked oak oh I'm meeting up there dealing with the fast-charging yes it's coming down the pike with the Volkswagen the ordinance committee or no in another manner oh yes that Ann Arbor is one of the cities that is being considered to be cbats Chargers installed in the highway along the highways better than Arbor going around in Arbor yeah so the other thing that I would highly recommend people to do if you haven't signed up to be on committees I said plural
114strongly recommend that you do so so we can have as much combined effort I'm getting these things done this year as we can't just remind me were these subcommittee meetings will be held here for the most part yeah the calendars have asterisks where the work room was taken so that will be usually basement and outside of that for the most part are you gonna issue meaning invitations via outlook for all of them or have you done that already I don't think I yes yeah I'll go ahead and do the Yellin area by so you guys don't have those SEBI great yeah and I've heard from a bunch of you guys so I appreciate it which ones you want to be great moving right along so I think I just generally every all of these are
115meeting on Tuesdays now yeah right so every Tuesday of the month there is a circle on commission related meeting at six o'clock yeah correct yeah there's a request off of parking and some other things to do it at 6:00 right the one exception is the lighting ordinance where there's a separate working group where we have our own meeting scheduled public input we still have some public out there so one more thing before we move it the environmental Commission did pass the resolution declaring a climate emergency huh I'm I'll be bringing forward a resolution for Energy Commission I hope to adapt at the next meeting it uses all of those whereas clauses that's a pretty good history of everything that we've expressed our intent to do it with some resolve clauses that actually direct the city
116administrator to do some things I'll circulate that before the next meeting I I do want to give direction and I do I I would appreciate some input I think that beyond doing what we can as a entity to reduce our carbon emissions we we really have to encourage the residents of our town to look at their consumer activities and they're their own carbon footprint you know we're two percent of the emissions and so if we're gonna make any real headway we it's gonna be an outreach program it's not gonna just the solar panels but it's really going to be to get people to understand the consequences of consumer society so I hope that we can address both our our own energy use but also our what we need to do looking outward the energy efficiency
117teams sometimes futures how how is that out of a champ there was an it was an experiment you get to try them practice comparing individuals comparing their house to their neighbors is their writing that data is that a good idea how did Jack's point you know what what can be done maybe enough data what's happened you guys finding Sammy's it work all right yeah great I know I get things ready within moments amazing I had the worst performing house we also have a presentation from Howard next meeting as well budget yeah of coming budget oh good good should be other things for next agenda but what tracking pretty closely on what's going on the solar tax list so I mean I could probably go get more that was happening okay wherever the meeting of this
118tomorrow and I know I'm working with Jeff Irwin's office he's already okay well people have things that they think of after we've closed out this meeting just you mail them along so that we can include them in next agenda and I will call this meeting to adjournment Y&C anybody get up sighs oh okay microphones oh no but we can hear at home don't be bashful I just came to learn more about what you all are doing here and I've been impressed it's nice to do that and I would respond to what you're saying about getting the public involved that's why I'm here I mean I'd love to do an electric car and I'd love to do solar panels but I don't really know how to go about it and you know so I'm trying to
119get information about that and so I'm really just here to learn okay I think we did well good there's a lot of good ideas but I do understand that we're really not making as much progress said we had hoped like on the plan that's been put the action plan is put in place and so there's got to be some way or our specifically I remember going to meetings about the solar Club and it doesn't seem to fall apart or something and you know so I think there's interest out there in the public but somehow our there's needs to be more direction or something to get people to actually take active steps so but thank you thank you and thank you for coming that sounds like we need to get going on our listening tour yes
120because that's exactly the kind of comments that we want to get and be able to interact with and provide advice to what is the status of that if I didn't ask informally oh you you talked about it in the last couple of meetings and I haven't heard anything since early December so I'm having a meeting Missy was it's a bunch of things and things over the light they end up the last year we're now in front of the new year that's one of the meetings were having describe she's on the same track to get these listening meetings going hopefully before so the idea for those out of the public realm here is we're planning on going to various places around the community and listening to people and finding out what they think they need as
121far as energy in the environment basically into that point um as you wander out into the various wards I would encourage you to can take the councilmembers in that ward before you plan a date or a place yes captured in the minutes yes yes that's that quarter that specifically to missus okay well if there are no other comments or input for the next agenda I will now call this meeting adjourned at exactly you